Contemporary behavioral and brain scientists consider the existence of so-called basic emotions in a similar way to the one described by Erickson for so-called basic tastes. Commenting on this analogy, I argue that similar basic problems are encountered in both perspectives, and I suggest a potential nonbasic solution that is tested in emotion research (i.e., the appraisal model of emotion).

In the 1930s Otto Selz developed a novel approach to the psychology of perception which he called “synthetic psychology of wholes”. This “synthetic psychology” is based on a phenomenological description of the structural relationships between elementary items building up integral wholes. The present article deals with Selz’s account of spatial cognition within this general framework. Selz Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 114, 351–362 argues that his approach to spatial cognition delivers answers to the long-discussed question of the epistemological status of the laws (...) of geometry. More specifically he tries to derive the Euclidean axioms from the structural laws valid for phenomenal space. After a brief description of the discussion of the status of geometry in the 1920s/1930, the present article explains Selz’s understanding of “phenomenology”. Section 4 then deals with Selz’s attempt to derive the Euclidean laws from the structural phenomenological laws of space. Selz’s attempted derivation suffers from some formal shortcomings, which however can be repaired. The question arises, though, whether the necessary improvements do not rely upon more intricate geometric intuitions and thus render Selz’s attempt to base geometry upon the phenomenology of spatial cognition circular. (shrink)

The paper examines the notion, widespread in the contemporary color science, that there are certain hues, specifically focal red, yellow, green and blue, that are unique or privileged in human prelinguistic color perception, all other chromatic hues being perceptually composed of these. I successively consider and reject all motivations that have been provided for this opinion; namely the linguistic, “phenomenological”, and some minor or historical motivations. I conclude that, contrary to the standard opinion, there is no solid reason to claim (...) that the RYGB hues are unique among colors in a sense that would allow for direct neurophysiological explanation. The notion also has no relevance for the construction of perceptual color spaces and is not defensible as an explanatory principle with respect to the existing crosslinguistic patterns of color categorization. (shrink)

A version of the inverted spectrum thought experiment that disconfirms functionalism for the case of humans’ color experiences has typically been thought to require a certain kind of balancing act. What one needs, it has typically been thought, is a mapping of color experiences onto other color experiences that preserves the similarity and difference relationships among those experiences and the aspects of perceived colors underlying those similarities and differences. However, there are good reasons for being suspicious about whether that is (...) possible when the palette of color experiences is that available to humans with normal vision. The new version of the thought experiment constructed here doesn’t depend on preserving those relationships. I argue that there is a coherent, metaphysically possible scenario in which two human color experiences—any two—can be seen to be functionally equivalent. The upshot is that functionalism fails for all human color experiences. (shrink)

Psychophysical scaling models of the form R = f, with R the response and I some intensity of an attribute, all assume that people judge the amounts of an attribute. With simple biases excepted, most also assume that judgments are independent of space, time, and features of the situation other than the one being judged. Many data support these ideas: Magnitude estimations of brightness increase with luminance. Nevertheless, I argue that the general model is wrong. The stabilized retinal image literature (...) shows that nothing is seen if light does not change over time. The classification literature shows that dimensions often combine to produce emergent properties that cannot be described by the elements in the stimulus. These and other effects cannot be adjusted for by simply adding variables to the general model because some factors do not combine linearly. The proposed alternative is that people initially judge the entire stimulus – the object in terms of its environment. This agrees with the constancy literature that shows that objects and their attributes are identified through their relations to other aspects of the scene. That the environment determines judgments is masked in scaling studies where the standard procedure is to hold context constant. In a typical brightness study the essential stimulus might be the intensity of the light or a difference between the light and the background. The two are perfectly confounded. This issue is examined in the case of audition. Judgments of the loudness of a tone depend on how much that tone differs from the previous tone in both pitch and loudness. To judge loudness people first seem to process the stimulus object in terms of differences between it and other aspects in the situation; only then do they assess the feature of interest. Psychophysical judgments will therefore be better interpreted by theories of attention that are based in biology or psychology than those that are based in classical physics. (shrink)

Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the country who asks to gain entry into the law. But the gatekeeper says that he cannot grant him entry at the moment. The man thinks about it and then asks if he will be allowed to come in sometime later on. “It is possible,” says the gatekeeper, “but not now.”—Franz Kafka..

A widely held view on color cognition is that it is structured by a set of color fundamentals. Three sorts of evidence may be invoked in favor of such a ‘foundational’ approach to color cognition: physiological, phenomenal and lexical. This paper focuses on the lexical evidence, which draws from a predominant view in color categorization, the Basic color terms theory (BCTT). It argues that the BCTT does not consist in a foundational approach to color cognition and does not provide such (...) evidence. (shrink)

Why do we draw the boundaries between “blue” and “green”, where we do? One proposed answer to this question is that we categorize color the way we do because we perceive color categorically. Starting in the 1950’s, the phenomenon of “categorical perception” (CP) encouraged such a response. CP refers to the fact that adjacent color patches are more easily discriminated when they straddle a category boundary than when they belong to the same category. In this paper, I make three related (...) claims. (1) Although what seems to guide discrimination performances seems to indeed be categorical information, the evidence in favor of the fact that categorical perception infl uences the way we perceive color is not convincing. (2) That CP offers a useful account of categorization is not obvious.While aiming at accounting for categorization, CP itself requires an account of categories. This being said, CP remains an interesting phenomenon. Why and how is our discrimination behavior linked to our categories? It is suggested that linguistic labels determine CP through a naming strategy to which participants resort while discriminating colors. This paper’s fi nal point is (3) that the naming strategy account is not enough. Beyond category labels, what seems to guide discrimination performance is category structure. (shrink)

What makes it the case that we draw the boundary between “blue” and “green” where we draw it? Do we draw this boundary where we draw it because our perceptual system is biologically determined in this way? Or is it culture and language that guide the way we categorize colors? These two possible answers have shaped the historical discussion opposing so-called universalists to relativists. Yet, the most recent theoretical developments on color categorization reveal the limits of such a polarization.

For over a century, the question of the relation of language to thought has been extensively discussed in the case of color categorization, where two main views prevail. The relativist view claims that color categories are relative while the universalistic view argues that color categories are universal. Relativists also argue that color categories are linguistically determined, and universalists that they are perceptually determined. Recently, the argument for the perceptual determination of color categorization has been undermined, and the relativist view has (...) regained some ground. This paper argues that although the universalistic account of color categorization has been called into question, this is not enough to establish relativism. Color categories can still be said to be universal or particular, independent of the accounts of their universality or relativity. Because of its polarization, the debate has disregarded some issues that are key in our understanding of color categorization: the question of what a color category is and how to identify it. (shrink)

In "Does the Basic Color Terms discussion suffer from the Stimulus Error?" Rolf Kuehni describes a research stumbling block known as the "stimulus error," and hints at the difficulties it causes for mainstream color naming research. Among the issues intrinsic to Kuehni's "stimulus error" description is the important question of what can generally be inferred from color naming behaviors based on bounded samples of empirical stimuli. Here we examine some specifics of the color naming research issues that Kuehni raises. While (...) we share Kuehni's view regarding potential problems caused by the "stimulus error" and his concern regarding its prevalence, Kuehni's commentary seems primarily aimed at stimulating a general discussion of color naming research implications, because the articles he critiques do not actually commit the "stimulus error" in any serious sense. Based on Kuehni's comments, we further examine some of the relevant empirical and theoretical implications for cross-cultural color naming research. (shrink)

It is a common assumption among philosophers of perception that phenomenal colors are exhaustively characterized by the three phenomenal dimensions of the color solid: hue, saturation and lightness. The hue of a color is its redness, blueness or yellowness, etc. The saturation of a color refers to the strength of its hue in relation to gray. The lightness of a color determines its relation to black and white. In this paper, I argue that the phenomenology of shadows forces us to (...) consider illumination as an additional dimension of phenomenal colors. For this purpose, I will first introduce two different interpretations of shadow-experiences, which Chalmers has called the simple and the complex interpretations, and show that they both fail to account for important phenomenal facts about shadow-experiences. I will then introduce my own alternative interpretation based on the idea that illumination is a dimension of phenomenal colors and explain how it can account for these facts. (shrink)

Aftereffects induced by invisible stimuli constitute a powerful tool to investigate what type of neural information processing can occur in the absence of visual awareness. This approach has been successfully used to demonstrate that awareness of oriented gratings or translating stimuli is not necessary to obtain a robust orientation-specific or motion-specific aftereffect. We exploit motion-induced blindness to investigate the related question of the influence of visual awareness on the formation of negative afterimages. Our results show that MIB does not affect (...) the persistence and intensity of afterimages. Thus, there is no significant contribution to the formation of afterimages beyond the sites mediating MIB. (shrink)

Perceptual learning involves an improvement in perceptual judgment with practice, which is often specific to stimulus or task factors. Perceptual learning has been shown on a range of visual tasks but very little research has explored chromatic perceptual learning. Here, we use two low level perceptual threshold tasks and a supra-threshold target detection task to assess chromatic perceptual learning and category effects. Experiment 1 investigates whether chromatic thresholds reduce as a result of training and at what level of analysis learning (...) effects occur. Experiment 2 explores the effect of category training on chromatic thresholds, whether training of this nature is category specific and whether it can induce categorical responding. Experiment 3 investigates the effect of category training on a higher level, lateralized target detection task, previously found to be sensitive to category effects. The findings indicate that performance on a perceptual threshold task improves following training but improvements do not transfer across retinal location or hue. Therefore, chromatic perceptual learning is category specific and can occur at relatively early stages of visual analysis. Additionally, category training does not induce category effects on a low level perceptual threshold task, as indicated by comparable discrimination thresholds at the newly learned hue boundary and adjacent test points. However, category training does induce category effects on a supra-threshold target detection task. Whilst chromatic perceptual learning is possible, learnt category effects appear to be a product of left hemisphere processing, and may require the input of higher level linguistic coding processes in order to manifest. (shrink)

Summary Since at least the time of Helmholtz, the process of visual perception has been regarded as a two-stage affair consisting of an initial sensory stage corresponding to the proximal stimulus and a subsequent cognitive stage corresponding to the distal object. This construction amounts to an awkward mind body dualism wherein part of perception is done by the body and the other part is done by the mind. Gestalt theory rejected both raw sensations and their cognitive interpretation, offering a single (...) unified perceptual process that responds to an extended pattern of stimulation. They proposed organizational rules that describe how objects arise from the indifferent retinal mosaic. The same grouping principles by which objects are segmented also function to segregate regions of uniform illumination. Lightness values can then be computed by comparing luminance values within each such framework of illumination, with no need for the mystical concept of taking the illumination into account. (shrink)

Studies show that there are widespread intrasubjective and intersubjective color variations among normal perceivers. These variations have serious ramifications in the debate about the nature and ontology of color. It is typical to think of the debate about color as a dispute between objectivists and subjectivists. Objectivists hold that colors are perceiver-independent physical properties of objects while subjectivists hold that they are either projections onto external objects or dispositions objects have to look colored. I argue that individual color variations present (...) difficulties, albeit not the same kind, for both objectivism and subjectivism. Lastly, I propose an alternative account that handles such variations nicely. (shrink)

Cognition can influence action. Your belief that it is raining outside, for example, may cause you to reach for the umbrella. Perception can also influence cognition. Seeing that no raindrops are falling, for example, may cause you to think that you don’t need to reach for an umbrella. The question that has fascinated philosophers and cognitive scientists for the past few decades, however, is whether cognition can influence perception. Can, for example, your desire for a rainy day cause you to (...) see, hear, or feel raindrops when you walk outside? More generally, can our cognitive states influence the way we see the external world? In this paper, I discuss three experiments on memory colour effects. In these experiments, subjects systematically made different colour matches or adjustments for object-patches representing objects that have prototypical colours and neutral object-patches. I argue that these differences are not merely differences in judgments but are best explained in terms of phenomenology. However, I show that these differences in phenomenology can be explained without reference to cognitive states such as colour concepts or beliefs. (shrink)

In "How to Speak of the Colors", Mark Johnston’s claims that eliminativism would require us to jettison colour discourse. In this paper, I challenge Johnston’s claim. I argue that a particular version of eliminativism, i.e., prescriptive colour fictionalism, allows us to continue employing colour discourse as we have thus far in the absence of colours. In doing so, it employs statistical models in its base discourse to derive high-level statistical constructs that can be linked to the fiction via bridge principles.