A Conceptual Playground Between Perception and Cognition: Introduction to the Special Issue on Amodal Completion

Less is More: Perception as a fun way to Rich Minimalism

Perceptual science is important to understand how humans and other animals perceive and experience scenes, objects and events. So, it is the essential science to predict how we construct reality and our Umwelt. We learn from perceptual phenomena that we only need a minimal amount of information to create rich worlds of imagination and perception. As such, perception is the perfect analogue to what we would like to call “Rich Minimalism” – the way to save resources while having even more fun as our brains complete the missing parts in a creative way. Here, we briefly mention three little examples from basic research to demonstrate the power of perception for creating efficiency, effectiveness, and economy while having great fun with the resulting minimalism.

Fooling System 1 in the field of perception: Failure to intuitively detect attribute substitution in the flushtration count illusion

To facilitate our interactions with the surroundings, the human brain sometimes reshapes the situations that it faces to simplify them. This phenomenon has been widely studied in the context of reasoning, especially through the attribute substitution error. It has however been given much less attention in the field of perception. Recent research on the bat-and-ball problem suggests that reasoners are able to intuitively detect attribute substitution errors. Using a perceptual illusion drawn from the field of magic, we investigate the extent to which a perceptual form of attribute substitution depends on executive resources and can be detected. We also investigate the relationship between susceptibility to attribute substitution error in the flushtration count illusion and in a French adaptation of the bat-and-ball problem. Finally, we investigate the link between the intuitive cognitive style (assessed by the cognitive reflection test) and the susceptibility to the flushtration count illusion. Our results suggest that participants do not detect perceptual attribute substitution error, that this phenomenon could be independent of the executive resources allocated to the task, and could rest on mechanisms distinct from those that produce errors in reasoning. We discuss differences between these two phenomena, and factors that may explain them.