Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Is Low-Level Visual Experience Cognitively Penetrable?, Dávid Bitter

Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication

Philosophers and psychologists alike have argued recently that relatively abstract beliefs or cognitive categories like those regarding race can influence the perceptual experience of relatively low-level visual features like color or lightness. Some of the proposed best empirical evidence for this claim comes from a series of experiments in which White faces were consistently judged as lighter than equiluminant Black faces, even for racially ambiguous faces that were labeled ‘White’ as opposed to ‘Black’ (Levin and Banaji 2006). The latter result is considered especially indicative of cognitive penetration, based on the reasoning that the relevant distortions were a function of …