Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience

Professor Fiona Macpherson has been awarded an AHRC Fellowship worth £68,375 for 2012-13 to work on a project entitled Perception, Imagination, and the Structure of Consciousness.

        Project outline: I will investigate the nature of perception and perceptual experience. The research focuses around two main questions. First, whether perceptual experiences, involved in seeing, hearing, smelling, touching and tasting the world, can be affected by cognitive states such as beliefs, desires and expectations. This question is whether 'cognitive penetration' can occur and if it occurs I will examine in what conditions it does so. The existence of cognitive penetration is highly disputed. My distinctive and original contribution will be to argue that cognitive penetration can take place, however, I will claim that one needs more substantial argument to show this than is usually given.

        The second question is: What is the nature of perceptual experience, such that it can be so influenced by beliefs, desires and expectations? I will explore mechanisms by which cognition may affect experience. I will argue that one mechanism that can explain many cases of cognitive penetration involves perceptual imagination affecting perceptual experience. I will also argue that imagination's influence on experience can account for many features of perceptual experience that have resisted explanation, in particular, types of experience of absence.

        Thus my research will cast light on the nature of perceptual experience. Insight will be gained about the nature of the structure of experience and its representational and conscious aspects. The implications of the existence of cognitive penetration for epistemology and ethics will also be made vivid.

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First published: 31 October 2011