Psychology Discussion

Essay on perception | psychology.

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After reading this essay you will learn about:- 1. Introduction to Perception 2. Phenomenological and Gestalt View on Perception 3. Perceptual Organisation 4. Transactional Approach 5. Depth Perception 6. Constancy 7. Perception of Movement 8. Development 9. Errors 10. Studies.

  • Essay on the Studies on Perception

Essay # 1. Introduction to Perception:

Perception involves arriving at meanings often leading to action. In addition to the nature of the stimuli, and past knowledge, perception is influenced by many other factors. In this article, an attempt is made to present to the student a discussion of the various factors involved in attention and perception.

How exactly are we able to relate to discrete sensory experiences in order to see them as meaningful? In other words, how exactly does perception occur? At any time we are attending to a number of stimuli. For example even when we are listening to the teacher we are conscious of his voice, his movement, his appearance etc., but at the same time we respond to him as a single person. This shows that our response is integrated and organised to become meaningful. This process of organising and integrating discrete stimuli and responding to them meaningfully is known as perception.

In the early part of this century the structuralist view of perception was dominant. It held that just as consciousness could be neatly dissected into its component parts, so also could perceptual experiences. Thus, the phenomenon of perception was, for the structuralists, the sum of mere sensations and the meaning associated with it through experience.

Without the benefits of experience there can be no meaning attached to stimuli or to sensations, and thus, there can be no ‘perception’. The infant, therefore, is able only to receive sensory input; it is not able to ‘perceive’ anything meaningful. William James described the infant’s perceptual world as a “booming, buzzing confusion.”

However, what does this actually mean in terms of the process of perception? It means that the infant has to learn to differentiate between different sensory experiences. It has to learn to construct perceptual categories through which it can perceive the differences between various sights, sounds, smells and feelings.

The infant’s visual world is formless, shapeless and chaotic. The real physical categories that exist in the world like forms, sounds and colours have to be repeated a sufficient number of times to be perceived as distinct and separate impressions by the infant. In this way the infant learns to perceive forms and objects and associates them with various meanings in their context.

Essay # 2. Phenomenological and Gestalt View on Perception :

A view totally different from the one given above emerged from the writings of phenomenologists. Even in the earlier days, German writers and philosophers had differed on the concept of perception as resulting from a combination of discrete sensory stimulations compounded by experience. They had tended to take the view that perception is a total act not necessarily bearing total resemblance to external stimulus characteristics.

The process of perception is not totally logical but it is, to a large extent, phenomenological. The German philosophers made a distinction between physical reality and experienced reality or phenomenal reality. One’ fact of experience is that perceived objects are always perceived as one and not as assemblages or discrete pieces of sensory information.

The phenomenological writers tended to lay emphasis on the inner processes rather than just experience and stimulus characteristics. The phenomenological view gained popularity through the writings of Husserel Brentano and Carl Stumpf. The real landmark in phenomenology was the work of Ehrenfels on tonal qualities.

He emphasised the totality of experience in melodies. The total experience is something more than some of the individual elements and he gave the name Gestalt Qualitat to this. An example of the phenomenological process in perception can be clearly seen in our experience of illusions. This line of explanation and experimentation was further developed by gestalt psychologists.

The ‘gestalt psychologists’ experiments on animals and birds showed that even at birth there are certain perceptual categories and abilities already present. Riesen showed that chicks brought up in total darkness could immediately distinguish the shape of a grain on the floor when brought into the light.

More recently, experiments by Lipsitt and Siquel have shown that even- a few hours old human infants can distinguish between the sound of a buzzer and that of a bell. Thus the infant’s world is neither a confusion nor a chaos as it was earlier made out to be.

Of course, the infant cannot perceive all objects with the same depth of meaning and understanding as adults can. But certain fundamental perceptual and discriminatory abilities – called perceptual organisations-are built into animals and human beings from birth.

Furthermore, the gestaltists challenged the view that perceptions can be divided into component elements. According to the structuralists, perceiving a chair means dissecting it into the elements of shape, size and angles of the parts of the chair, bound together by meanings from previous experience.

To the gestaltists, this molecular view of the subject destroyed one’s understanding of the phenomenon of perception as a whole. They demonstrated how perceptual phenomena often could not be reduced to elements. The experience of watching a movie on a screen cannot be explained by analysing the series of still pictures that go to make it up.

Listening to a tune- or a particular tune- in one key still gives the experience of the same tune when listening to it in another key, although the elements in both cases are entirely different. This lead to their famous dictum that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts – Gestalt Qualitat. – a unique quality of wholeness.

Essay # 3. Perceptual Organisation :

Animals and human beings are endowed with the capacity to organise and group stimuli which are ambiguous, confusing and novel, thus making them meaningful or sensible. Gestalt psychologists have demonstrated the principles which affect and direct the organisation in order to make the stimulus a meaningful whole within the perceptual field.

Some of the well recognised principles which contribute to perceptual organisation are as follows:

Figure and Ground Relationship :

The basic principle behind perceptual organisation is known as figure and ground organisation. This phenomenon was originally demonstrated by Rubin. One of the most fundamental principles of organisation in the field of perception is distinguishing between the figure and the ground, i.e. the figure which appears against a background.

Gestalt psychologists claim that even in the simplest form of perception, the figure and ground factor operates. For instance, when one is reading these sentences the black letters are perceived against the white background. A flying aero plane, for example, stands out as a figure against the sky or the clouds around it which form its background.

Stimuli which are outstanding and striking in terms of colour, shape etc. come to the foreground to form the figure and the less important or less significant ones recede to the background. However, when there are several objects in the general field of awareness which have equally balancing qualities there may be a conflict and two or more figures may be formed. In such a case there will be a shifting of ground and figure. One part may become the figure at one moment and at the next moment the same may become the ground (see Fig.7.1).

Essay # 4. Transactional Approach to Perception:

The traditional watertight distinctions among different kinds of behaviour like learning perception, motivation are also being given up resulting in a tendency to look at human actions as involving an entire organism totally integrated and directed towards adjusting or adopting to certain environmental requirements.

This emerging view has led to a perspective called the transactional perspective or transactional approach. One of the pioneers in promoting this approach was Ames whose experiments on perception and perceptual illusions are well known.

The transactional approach to perception basically holds that any act of perception at any time is influenced by the past learning experience of the individual and looks at any perception as a transaction or an act of dealing with the environment and other stimulus situations and tries to structure one’s perception in a manner that is maximally approximate to the world of reality.

Some of the basic postulates of the transactional approach to perception are:

(A) Basically those who support this view hold that perception involves an active interaction between the perceiver and the environment, and in this, the past experience and learning of the individual plays a crucial role. Further they also hold that every new perception results in new learning.

(B) The final perception results from a process of active interaction, in which the individual operates on the environment. Thus interaction serves our adaptive function and in view of this they often use the term transactional functionalism.

(C) Such interactions are often unconscious and unknown to the individual resulting in sudden and spontaneous inferences – the role of the conscious process being insignificant.

(D) Transactions not only reflect the past and help us in drawing inferences about the past of the persons, but are also future orientations and the overall life orientations of people. Thus, it may be seen that the past .influence and the present, both are integrated and oriented towards the future.

Ames says that people perceive things, objects, persons and the environment not always as the latter are, but in such a way as to make them compatible with one’s own assumptions and beliefs already acquired, thus very often necessitating distortion of objective reality.

Ames designed a number of experiments using a variety of perceptual situations designed by him like the well-known rotating trapezoid and also what are well known as Ames room experiments. Some of the other postulates of this approach are, that perception follows a certain trend of development during childhood.

It is further claimed that perceptual illusions can be overcome through learning. Though far from being advocates of the typical learning theory approach, those who support the transactional view express the view that even space perception and depth perception are very much products of learning. Thus, they do not support a mechanical view.

What happens in perception is a projection of the perceiver’s own constructs about the stimulus situation with the intention of achieving one’s purpose in action. Thus there is a give and take relationship between perceiver and the perceived situation involving a compromise with the actual reality and one’s own propensity or desire to keep certain assumptions and beliefs constant. The transactional approach is still a loosely formulated approach on the basis of a variety of experiments carried out by different investigators.

One can clearly see the impact of other earlier views on human behaviour like psychodynamics, influences of past experiences, tendency to maintain equilibrium and constancy (dynamic-homeostasis) and phenomenology. The transactional approach in a way makes use of all these assumptions and integrates them. One may not call it a theory, but it certainly is an approach.

Essay # 5. Depth Perception:

One important aspect in perception is the perception of depth, the third dimension or distance we are able to perceive objects as being near or far off. The basic psychological mechanism cannot explain this. The question has been a perplexing one. One view holds that this ability is innate while the other holds that this is an acquired ability. We perceive one rupee coin as one with a depth. This is called the third dimension.

Empiricistic and Nativistic Views :

To have a better understanding of the phenomenon of depth one ought to consider the philosophies of empiricism and nativism. Their views emerged as a consequence of the certainties and uncertainties about human nature. Their key concepts regarding the mind contradict each other and yet remain as the supporting pillars of these views to this day. Empiricism claims that the mind at birth is like a ‘blank slate’ while nativism claims that it is like a ‘veined marble’.

John Locke was the first philosopher who suggested that the mind was initially a ‘tabula rasa’,i.e. it is like a smooth wax table upon which impressions of external events print themselves. This is the crux of empiricism.

Processes like perception and thought reflect the particular structure and dynamics of the world in which we happen to live. However, the basic mechanism through which printing or imprinting operates is by the principles of association, similarity, contiguity, etc. According to the empiricists impressions arrange and rearrange themselves to form the core of our perceptions.

We can see that this idea has shaped many modem systems of psychology. Wundt’s theory of introspectionism is bolstered by empiricism. Pavlov’s work on conditioning, Guthrie’s theory of contiguity, and Broadbent’s account of mental functioning in terms of information processing are all built on the philosophy of empiricism.

Other theorists like Leibnitz proclaimed that the mind is like a slab of marble with veins or streaks. His theory of knowledge was aimed against sensualism and empiricism. To Locke’s postulate “there is nothing in the mind which has not been in the senses” Leibnitz added except the intellect itself.

According to him intellect is present at birth and only gets shaped by experiences. It becomes obvious that nativism as a doctrine boldly proclaims the importance of innate factors in the development of an organism rather than the environmental or experiential ones. A lot of research findings of recent years are heading towards nativism.

Andrey’s books “The African Genesis” “The Territorial Imperative” have popularized a nativistic interpretation of man’s aggression and of his alleged tendency to defend his territory. Audrey believes that many of the modem man’s aggressive tendencies can be traced back to his meat-eating, weapon using ancestors.

Jung’s concept of archetypes leans heavily on nativism. Ethnologists like Lorenz and Tinbergen have shown a strong evidence for innate determination of species-specific behaviour. Another piece of nativistic evidence comes from the field of perception. T.G.R. Bower has found a striking evidence that form constancy, through the visual cliff experiment, is innate in human infants.

A circle seen at an angle is responded to as a circle and not as an ellipse. Gibson and others have provided evidence indicating that depth perception is innate in many species. Immense support to this doctrine is lent from oriental philosophy which has recently been invading the western scientific world. The oriental philosophers support nativism to the core. In the following discussion we see a clear swing towards nativism.

In Gibson’s experiment, the visual cliff consists of a wide sheet of transparent glass placed over a drop on the floor. Gibson and Walk showed that by the time infants could crawl, they would not crawl over the deep side of a visual cliff under any circumstances (see Fig.7.7). This is also true of most new-born animals, which refuse to cross over the cliff.

By the time they start crawling, however, human infants have had ample time to learn depth cues. White tested infant perception of depth prior to the crawling stage by noting eye-blink responses to a falling object in a transparent cylinder positioned over the infant’s face.

If the infants blinked it was assumed that they were responding to the change in distance rather than just the change in retinal size of the falling object which did not otherwise elicit a blink. White also observed that the eye-blink response and, therefore, distance perception-occurred only after eight weeks in the human infant.

Bower put even younger infants in an upright position in a chair and found that infants even as young as two-week old adopted defensive behaviour when seeing an object approach their faces. Eye-blinking, which in this case would not have served to protect them, did not occur, but there was clear eye widening, head retraction and the interposition of the hands between the face and the object.

Bower, thus, demonstrated a clear functional response to visual cues of distance alone, which, in a one-week old infant can be assumed to be unlearned.

Feature Analysis :

Our analysis of the perceptual process has indicated that in any instance the act of perception is influenced by two types of processes. On the one hand we have high level central and also psychological factors like expectations and motivations which do not originate from lower order sense impressions, even though they may be triggered off by them.This type of involvement of high level process is known as top-down processing.

On the other hand processes which originate from lower level physiological and stimulation information are known as bottom-up processing. In this context, psychologists refer to a term called ‘feature analysis’, explaining how these two types of processes operate.

Some psychologists hold the view that perceptual recognition is made possible because a particular set of neurons in the brain are activated, as and when they find an appropriate matter in the field of perception. This is like the phenomenon where only one tuning fork from among a row goes into vibration, when its corroborating match is set in motion.

This is the hierarchical feature detection model. But the difficulty with this model is that this would require a specific set of neurons or feature detection in our brain .Every corresponding sound or light stimulus should have such detectors.

Though it is now known that there are specific set of neurons for certain specific stimulus characteristics, the possibility of having an endless number of specific detectors is yet to be proved. Thus the correctness of this view depends on further achievements in neurology regarding the neuronal functions.

A different and perhaps more widely accepted view is that there occurs what may be called feature analysis. According to this view, the specific detection neurons are of such a type that they can operate in different combinations. For example, they may be recognised as a pair of vertical lines which are parallel with a horizontal line connecting the two in the middle.

Feature analysis involves the brain analysing experiences or perceptual contents into such sets and whenever such set or combination, is available for retrieval from neurons, then recognition occurs. This concept of feature analysis explains how people recognise stimuli and in addition, also provides a clue as to how different stimuli can be given a common interpretation.

For example, when we see different flowers, though we see them as different, we see them all as flowers. But what happens when a. combination of such detections stored in memory do not match with what is actually present? For example, it is very difficult for us or at least some of us to recognise cauliflower as a flower, though many stimulus characteristics resemble that of many other flowers.

It is here that the concept of feature analysis cannot explain, what happens, when the stimuli are ambiguous and are both similar and dissimilar to stored up combinations. It is here that one sees the limitations of bottom up processing theory. It is in this context that the top down processing comes into operation.

Top down processing is influenced by the context of stimuli which creates certain expectations or “expectancies.” We expect certain things to occur, under certain situations or contexts. These expectations based on past experiences and contextual factors, set in motion certain perceptual sets.

The role of expectancy in perceptual recognition was clearly demonstrated in an experiment by Palmer. Palmer showed his subject a scene of a kitchen. Then they were given a very brief exposure to two objects, one resembling a loaf of bread (context relevant) and another a mail box (context irrelevant). The two objects were of the same size and shape. But the subject recognised the loaf of bread more than the mail box, thus showing the influence of centrally aroused expectancy.

Motivation is another factor. The importance of needs in influencing process of perceptions has already been examined. The classical experiments of Brownes and others have already demonstrated the role of motivational factors and needs in the process of perception.

Normally in most acts of perception both top down and bottom up processes work together, each supplementing and complementing the other. Top down processing plays a more crucial role where the stimulus situations are ambiguous, or relatively unfamiliar.

The importance of top down processing will become clearer to the reader later when we discuss the role of “personality factors in perception”. A number of experiments have shown that our perception is very much influenced by the totality of our personality, and personalities have been classified even on the basis of perceptual styles or modes.

Essay # 6. Constancy in Perception:

When we think about perceptual experiences they seem to be incredibly paradoxical. We realise that we see mobility in stationary objects, immobility in moving objects, and see things which are incomplete as complete. The cues which are said to facilitate perception of distance can, at times, corrupt and distort the same.

Similarly, we are able to respond to a stimulus appropriately even with a distorted, wrong or absent retinal image. This contradicts the view that the retinal image is a true reproduction of the object being sensed and considered as a basic mechanism which provokes an appropriate action or reaction. All these make us wonder if we are in a world of illusions or whether perception, by itself, is a big illusion.

One such paradoxical phenomenon discussed here is perceptual constancy. The phenomenon of constancy refers to our perceptual experiences wherein perception remains constant, in spite of the fact that stimulating conditions stipulate a change. Thus, the human being is perceived to be of the same height whether he is seen from a distance of two feet, five feet or fifteen feet.

The phenomenon of constancy is seen in relation to several attributes of the objects like shape and size. To a certain extent the phenomenon of constancy also results in errors of perception, though its advantages far outweigh its disadvantages.

If we accept that the infant does not have to learn entirely to distinguish between forms, shapes and sounds in his environment, but possesses a congenital capacity to do so, there is yet another problem which has aroused a lot of controversy. When we talk of visual perception in particular, how do infants – or even adults – actually make sense of visual objects? The obvious answer seems to be that objects in the external world appear as images on the retina and the individual then responds to these images as objects.

However, the answer is not quite so simple. The retina receives images which vary drastically depending on the particular lighting conditions, the viewing angle and the distance of the object at any given time. If one were to perceive objects merely on the basis of retinal images, one would see a different object at each angle and at each distance from which the same object was viewed. This obviously, does not happen.

When we see a plate at an angle its retinal image is an ellipse. If we see it head on then the retinal image is a complete circle. Yet, we know that both the greatly differing images are of the same object. When we see a chair from a foot away, the retinal image we receive is much larger than that received when the chair is two yards away from us. Yet we know that it is the same object. How do we come to know this?

The controversy that has surrounded the answer to this question has been again one of the opposition between the view that the child is born with the complete ability to see the world as the adult sees it, and the view that the child has to learn to see stable objects. For a long time the latter view held sway-namely, that the individual has to learn to compensate for the differences in angle, colour and distance presented by the same objects.

Recently, however, this view has been challenged and it has been shown that infants of six to eight weeks possess the ability to compensate for changes in the size and shape of retinal images. T.G.S. Bower’s experiments suggest that this ability is innate. Very young infants were conditioned to a cube of a certain size shown at a distance of one metre. Different-size cubes were then shown at a distance of three metres from the infant.

The conditioned response was always given, not to the larger cube which would have presented the same size of retinal image as did the correct cube at one metre, but to the correct cube despite its smaller retinal image size. Size constancy, however, does not occur in the absence of information or cues regarding the distance of the object. Holway and Boring showed that the judged size of cardboard disks became more and more inaccurate as more distance cues were eliminated.

Similar constancies occur regarding colour. A familiar object is always perceived as having the same colour even under different lighting conditions. For example, a piece of white paper is perceived as white whether seen under the yellowish glow of candle light, the stark whiteness of a tube light or under any other coloured lights.

Perceptual constancy, then, seems to be partly due to some innate mechanism and partly due to the influence of past experience and knowledge. The role of past experience in perception and the human being’s tendency to perceive on the basis of assumptions constructed from this past experience was clearly brought out by Ames.

In his famous ‘distorted room’ experiment Ames presented to his subjects an apparent perceptual contradiction between a specially constructed room (which looked normal from the subjects viewing angle when the room alone was seen) and known normal-sized objects seen in windows of the room.

Ames showed that whether the room or the object was suddenly seen as distorted, depended on the subject’s assumptions, i.e. whether the subject ‘assumed’ the room to be truly rectangular. He believed that our perceptions of the objects and people in our environment are subjective. In other words, they are based upon the assumptions we have built up about various objects and people. The organism, therefore, creates its phenomenal world.

Essay # 7. Perception of Movement :

Perception of movement is essential not only to human beings but also to animals. Movement is closely linked to the instinct of self-preservation because moving objects sometimes mean danger. However, the perception of movement involves both the visual messages from the eye as an image moves across the retina and the kinesthetic messages from the muscles around the eye as they shift the eye to follow a moving object.

But at times our perceptual processes play tricks on us and we think we perceive movement when the objects we are looking at are actually not moving at all. Thus, perceived movements can be divided into two types: real movement and illusory movement.

Real movement means the actual physical displacement of an object from one position to another. When we see a car being driven we perceive only the car in motion and the other things around it like trees, buildings etc. are stationary.

Illusory movement is that when an individual perceives objects as moving although they are stationary as is shown in Fig.7.12. One perceives this figure as moving black waves. Another example to illustrate this phenomena is an experience that you must have often felt while sitting in a stationary train; if another train moves by you feel that your own train is moving.

Another form of illusory movement is stroboscopic motion-the apparent motion created by a rapid movement of a series of images of stationary objects. A motion picture, for example, is not actually in motion at all. The film consists of a series of still pictures each one showing persons or objects in slightly different positions.

When these separate images are projected in a sequence on to the screen at a specified speed, the persons or objects seem to be moving because of the rapid change from one still picture to the next. The same illusion occurs when two lights are set apart at a suitable distance from each other and when they are switched on and off at an interval of one sixteenth of a second.

As a consequence the perceptual effect created is that of one light moving back and forth. This phenomenon of apparent motion is called the phi-phenomenon. Wertheiner’s experiments on phi- phenomenon formed the foundation for gestalt psychology.

Essay # 8. Development of Perception :

The infant’s perceptual world is different from the adult’s. Perception develops gradually as the individual grows and develops. It has also been shown that it is influenced to a great extent by the biological needs, maturation, learning, culture etc. Thus, qualitative and quantitative changes in perception take place in the course of an individual’s development.

The experiments of Gibson and Bowers show that depth and object perceptions are inborn, i.e. they are not dependent on learning, although they develop and shape at different rates. Goldstein emphasised the gradual development of perception from concrete to abstract.

However, Goldstein does not make a direct reference to perception but refers to it as the development of thinking or attitude. Witkin emphasises that perception which in the early years is field dependent gradually transforms itself into field independent.

Thus, stability and abstraction become possible as the individual develops. Von Senden presented a very interesting data regarding the patients who were born blind but have gained their vision as the result of operations. Their perceptual processes were studied carefully because their situation was considered analogous to a new-born infant’s who sees the world for the first time. Von Senden found that these patients did not experience normal perception immediately after they gained vision.

When an object was shown to them they could see something against a background but could not identify it, its shape and its distance from them. Colour discriminations were learned immediately. However learning to identify forms and objects in different contexts was a long and difficult process.

One patient learned to identify an egg, a potato and sugar in normal light on a table after many repetitions although he failed to recognise the same objects in colour light or when they were suspended by a thread with a change of background.

He could point correctly to the source of a sound but could not say from which direction it was coming. One can know from the above studies that perception does not develop overnight; perceptual capacity may be inborn but the ability develops gradually along with the development of other processes.

Essay # 9. Errors of Perception:

The perceptual processes enable an individual to perceive things around him accurately and facilitate his smooth functioning. However, some errors creep into this process, under certain circumstances, leading to wrong or impaired perceptions.

Two well-documented errors of perceptions are illusions and hallucinations:

1. Illusions :

A mistaken perception or distortion in perception is called an illusion. Generally perception involves the integration of sensory experiences and present psychological and organismic conditions. When the interpretation of a particular stimulus goes wrong, it gives rise to a wrong perception. For example, a rope in the dark is perceived as a snake; a dry leaf moving along the ground in the dark is perceived as a moving insect. Similarly, in the phi-phenomenon, although there is no physical movement of the lights, they are still perceived as moving.

Some illusions which occur commonly in the perception of geometrical figures are discussed in this article. These illusions are popularly known as ‘geometrical optical illusions’ a term coined by Oppel, a German scientist. He used this term to explain the over-estimation of an interrupted spatial extent compared to an uninterrupted one. Later, the term was used for any illusion seen in line drawings.

a. Mueller – Lyer Illusion:

In Figure 7.13 one line is bounded by ‘arrowheads’ and the other by ‘shaft heads’. Though these two lines are equal in length, invariably the line with closed heads is perceived as shorter than the line with open heads. Similarly, lines bounded by closed curves or brackets and circles are underestimated with respect to their length and vice versa.

b. Horizontal-Vertical Illusion:

In Fig.7.14 one line is horizontal and the other is vertical. Though both are equal in length, the vertical line is perceived as longer than the horizontal line. To test this you can make someone stand straight stretching both arms out to their full length.

Ask your friend whether the height of this person is the same as the length of his arms, i.e. the length from the right fingertips to the left fingertips. If your friend is not aware that these two lengths are equal, then he will invariably report that the height is greater than the length of the arms.

c. Poggendorff’s Illusion:

In Fig.7.15 a straight line appears to become slightly displaced as it passes through two parallel rectangles. Poggendorffs’ illusion is demonstrated in this figure.

d. Zollner’s Illusion:

In Fig.7.16 when two parallel lines are intersected by numerous short diagonal lines slanting in the opposite direction then the parallel lines are perceived as diverging, i, e. slanting backwards slightly instead of being straight.

The Mueller-Lyer Illusion, the Poggendorff’s Illusion and the Zollner’s Illusion are named after the scientists who discovered these phenomena. Illusions are not totally caused by subjective conditions. Sometimes the environment or the context within which a particular stimulus is perceived is responsible for illusions. For instance, the perception of a rope as a snake or a leaf as an insect, may have occurred due to darkness which is an environmental condition.

It has been suggested by scientists that geometrical illusions like the ones mentioned above are the natural outcome of a certain kind of nerve structure, functioning under a given set of physical conditions. The reader may raise the question as to why only visual illusions are elaborated in this article.

This is because so far scientists have been attracted by the problem of vision and consequently the maximum amount of research has been done in this particular area. However, researchers today are busy exploring and experimenting with illusions arising out of other sensory experiences like audition, gustation and so on.

2. Hallucinations :

Hallucinations are identified as one of the major errors of perception. While an illusion is considered as an inaccuracy, a distorted perception of existing stimuli, hallucinations are considered as false perceptions. Hallucinations are sensory perceptions in the absence of any corresponding external sensory stimuli.

For example, if a person claims that he has seen a ghost or a goddess when there is practically no stimulus either in the form of a human skeleton or a live human figure or at least anything resembling it, this will be conceived by scientific minds as a hallucination.

Strictly speaking, dreams are hallucinations since the persons and things perceived while one is asleep have no factual basis. But for all practical purposes the use of the term hallucination is restricted to imaginary perceptions experienced in the waking state. Thus, when a person hallucinates he hears, sees and feels non-existent objects or stimuli.

Like illusions, hallucinations sometimes depend on needs, mental states like fear, anxiety, culture, etc. Hallucinations are not necessarily indicative of abnormality. For example, normal individuals reared in certain cultures are encouraged to hallucinate as part of their religious experiences. They may claim to have seen or heard from their deity and this is considered a normal phenomenon.

Similarly, in our present society, it is not an uncommon sight, if a lover waiting anxiously says he heard the telephone ringing or a knock on the door and other such experiences in the absence of stimuli. These experiences which occur specially in moments of anxiety or fear or keen expectation are taken as natural and normal phenomena.

However, hallucinations verge on abnormality when they become chronic, intense and problematic to the perceiver and others around him and begin to hamper the normal and smooth functioning of his day-to-day activities.

Auditory Hallucination :

Mr. S, an agricultural worker, around 30 years of age, complained to his psychiatrist that voices bother him day and night. He can hear them cursing his mother and father Sometimes they command him to hit himself; sometimes they say obscene things. These voices are feminine and sometimes masculine; at times he hears his own voice commanding him.

Hallucinations are caused by psychological factors like conflict, guilt, fear, anxiety etc. They can also occur due to cerebral injuries, intake of alcohol, drugs like L.S.D. or heroin and the presence of certain toxic substances in the body.

Figural After – Effects :

The term figural after-effect is used to denote certain phenomena observed by Gibson in a series of interesting experiments. In one of his experiments subjects saw a distorted line passing through a prism. After 10 minutes, the apparent ‘curvature’ of the line was perceived as very much decreased.

The line tended to straighten out and when the prism was removed, the line was perceived as being curved in the opposite direction. In another experiment, by Kohler & Wallach, one figure (known as l or inspection figure) is observed for several minutes with total fixation.

Then this figure is replaced by a Test stimuls card T1 and the subjects are required to report its characteristics. It may be seen that objectively the two figures, the one inside T1 and T2 are identical in size, brightness and the distance from P. But both are smaller than the 1 square.

The square T1 falls in line with the contours of the inspection square and a little nearer its right hand contours. The phenomenal reports indicated that T1 was perceived as smaller and more distant from point P and further, its margins appeared paler. It is not necessary that all these characteristics should appear in the case of a given person at any time.

Kohler & Wallach offer an explanation for this, based on certain electrical field processes in the brain. According to them, there are some unspecified regions, of the central visual area through which current keeps on flowing. The currents flow according to the principle of least resistance.

When the 1 figure is presented, this flow is interrupted and the current flow is set up along the contours of this figure. The flow of the current however, increases the resistance in the tissues, thus forcing the current to flow into the neighbouring regions which in turn results in a gradient of resistance satiation about the contour of fig. Satiation present after the – removal of the 1 figure, lead to distortions in the T figures. There has been a lot of criticism against this view, particularly from the neurophysiological angle. It is also argued that the phenomenon of figural after-effect can be explained without having to take recourse to ‘electrical fields.’

Essay # 10. Studies on Perception:

Findings arrived at by studies of perception are not as dramatic as the findings of experiments in learning. Nevertheless their value has been recognised increasingly to serve mankind in many significant ways. An understanding of the subtleties and complexities of perception as a process gives an impression that human behaviour can be reduced to an interplay of the perceptions of self, the world, people, objects and events. As a matter of fact, various activities like science, art, religion etc., are nothing more than the outcome of human perceptions.

Turning to more concrete contributions, one of the major areas of investigation is in the field of colour perception. This brought out interesting findings as to why and how certain psychological factors determine colour perception. The impact of these findings can be seen on the walls of living rooms, bedrooms, showrooms, in the market for selling automobiles, textiles and even fruits and flowers.

Colour technologists involved in manufacturing dyes, textiles, and those who are involved in agencies of mass media like the cinema, television, magazines, photography and interior decorators invest large amounts of money to find out, create, and impress human perception, captivate their interests, moods and money through colours. They try to demonstrate how different and pleasant it is living and working with certain colours around you, rather than being in colourless, or lifeless surroundings.

Another area in which the findings of perception studies are being used is communication. Communication devices ranging from satellites to telephones are devised to facilitate the audio-visual perceptions of human beings. The utmost care has to be taken in designing transmission devices and equipping them to counter­balance phenomena like illusions, constancies etc. which arise in perception especially regarding sounds and figures.

They take care to make the communication of the speaker and the listener clear and intelligible, eliminate non-essential stimuli and aim at presenting synchronized and simultaneous transmission. Transport system such as airways, seaways and roadways have realised the importance of perception because the individuals who steer these vehicles make use of processes like sensation, attention and perception to the maximum extent.

If these processes fail or do not function adequately for one reason or the other, the consequence is human error or accident. Scientists working in the area of prevention of accidents, especially on highways, realised that accidents occur due to certain visual and auditory illusions.

Over-estimation or under-estimation of curves, distortion of cues due to excess of light, fog, or snow, and illusions of sound created by moving stimuli, all these sometimes can produce disasters. Thus, measures are being taken to provide information, instructions and clues which are specially devised and placed at convenient heights, angles and directions so that the driver can perceive from his fast-moving vehicle and avert disasters. The importance of such findings can be well understood by this illustration.

On December 4, 1965, a TWA Boeing 707 and an Eastern Airline Lockheed 1049 were enroute to John F. Kennedy International Airport and to Newark Airport, respectively. Both were converging on the New York area, the Boeing 707 at its assigned altitude of 11,000 feet and the Lockheed at its assigned altitude of 10,000 feet.

At the time, the area was overcast and the cloud tops protruded above a height of 10,000 feet. The clouds were generally higher in the north than in the south and seemed to form an upward, sloping bar of white against the blue background of the sky. Within a few moments of each other, the crew of both the aircraft perceived what appeared to be an imminent collision between the two planes.

They rapidly began evasive manoeuvres. The Lockheed aircraft pulled up and the Boeing rolled first to the right then to the left. The two aircrafts collided at approximately 11,000 feet. The structural damage to the Lockheed was sufficient to force it to land in an open field, where it was destroyed by impact and friction.

There were four fatalities and forty-nine non-fatal injuries. The U.S. Civil Aeronautics Board attributed the collision to misjudgment of altitude separation by the crew of the Lockheed aircraft because of an ‘optical illusion’ created by the upward sloping contours of the cloud tops.

Four persons died and 49 were injured through the operation of the simple effect that we mimic on paper with simple lines and call the ‘Poggendorff illusion’. Perhaps, the idea that visual illusions are interesting but relatively unimportant oddities of perceptions itself is merely another illusion, which can prove costly.

Similar precautions are being taken in certain accident-prone heavy industries, like mining and manufacturing of volatile substances like explosives, chemicals and “so on where individuals have to attend to and comprehend several stimuli accurately within a short time.

Contributions to clinical psychology of the findings on hallucinations are immense. It has become one of the most important tools in diagnosing psychotic disorders. The seriousness of a psychosis is determined to a great extent by the degree, intensity and number of hallucinations experienced by the individual.

Researchers working on the problem of subliminal perception are trying to contribute their share of findings through work done on advertisements, unconscious processes etc. The advertising agencies are realising that they can capture their audience and customers by making their messages less obvious and more subtle. This is one way to induce curiosity and attract them to their products and thus, increase their sales.

The role of the unconscious in the area of subliminal perception is quite significant. Unconscious processes and their allied phenomena, for all practical purposes, can be considered synonymous with subliminal perceptions, because they operate from a level of consciousness which is less than normal.

One may wonder whether findings on ESP have any value to the present computer world which is capable of anything right from brushing one’s teeth to singing a lullaby. But ESP seems to offer so much that the world is beginning to develop an impression that parapsychology is no more a mere intellectual adventure. If individuals could be taught and made to develop this capacity we could go to the moon and other planets, eat and live comfortably and chat with friends across the seas and continents for hours together.

Imagine, all this could be done without spending a paisa and then money would lose its importance. However, to achieve this stage, sciences have to travel a long and difficult way like Christian in ‘A Pilgrim’s Progress’. Today, such fantastic activities may appear to be distant probabilities but we may soon see them as distinct possibilities.

The one area where research findings on perception and the perceptual processes have been found extremely useful is in advertising. Very innovative advertisements are designed today based on their knowledge of the perceptual processes.

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APS

Perception and Play: How Children View the World

  • Child Development
  • Cognitive Processes
  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Developmental Psychology

perception of development essay

Smith, an Indiana University Bloomington (IU) psychological scientist renowned for her studies on the development of language and object recognition in infants and young children, was a keynote speaker at the 2017 International Convention of Psychological Science in Vienna. Her speech, “How Infants Break Into Language,” focused on the intersection of object identification and linguistic learning in children between the ages of 3 weeks and 24 months.

Smith has steadily pursued new ways of examining the infant brain and body, especially as they relate to learning both language acquisition and object cognition. Her current line of research explores the role of environment in young children’s growth processes, with special focus on pivotal developmental time periods and the mechanisms of change that play crucial roles during those periods.

“We do not yet have a theory or a computational understanding of the implications of the ordered sequence of experiences that babies create for themselves,” Smith said, noting that babies have simultaneously evolving developmental systems. “What the brain does determines what the body does, and what the body does changes the environment … these changes that we make in the world come back to the brain through the body.”

Smith has made it a priority to analyze the dynamics of the interactions between a child’s brain, body, and surrounding environment. These interactions, she says, can have tremendous effects on how kids learn to speak and to identify specific items in their fields of view, thereby shedding light on the developmental pathways of both linguistic development and object learning. To achieve this goal, she has conducted several studies examining babies wearing head cameras. The Home-View Project, an initiative developed with support from the National Science Foundation, thus far has gathered data from 75 children ranging in age from 3 weeks to 24 months, with 4 to 6 hours of head-camera video recordings for each child.

The Eyes Have It

A general rule of thumb when studying sensorimotor systems, Smith said, is that “when you have people moving in the world — be they babies or be they adults — they tend to view the world with heads and eyes aligned.” That is, when we see something we truly want to focus on (rather than just glance at), we turn our entire head in the direction of the object; this movement, Smith explained, takes approximately 500 ms. However, children at different ages go about this process in different ways. Three-week-old infants can see only what is held in front of them and therefore focus their gaze directly ahead, while 1-year-old toddlers are “driving new kinds of flow and optic information, and when that movement starts … that actually is driving very important changes in the visual system.”

A baby’s increased ability to move its head (and subsequently its entire body) results in a correspondingly increased visual field, Smith noted. Data from head cameras attached to infants showed that they viewed faces 15 minutes out of every hour — an extremely high proportion of the time they were awake. They also saw those faces at close ranges of approximately 2 ft., likely because parents were leaning in quite closely to look at their children at that age.

One-year-old children, however, saw faces only 6 minutes per hour and also viewed them from farther away, instead focusing more of their attention on hands and objects.

“It’s faces that decline with age, not people in view,” she explained. “When a 2-year-old is looking at somebody’s body in the natural viewing, it’s unlikely to be a face, but when a 3-month-old has a body in the view, it’s likely to be a face.”

This creates a systematic shift for which body part is most salient to a child’s physical learning experience because of the way kids perceive hand function at that age: Whether a child is an infant or a toddler, 70% of the time they spend looking at hands, those hands are holding objects.

Playing With Perception

To zoom in on this critical developmental period, Smith, in collaboration with her colleague APS Fellow Chen Yu, conducted a multisensory project that used head cameras (or head-mounted eye trackers for infants), motion sensors, audio recordings, and multiple room cameras. In the larger project, they have now recruited nearly 200 children from 9 to 36 months of age, as well as one parent of each child. By closely examining the interactions that arose during parent–infant play, specifically as it related to objects, Smith hoped to glean insights into the ways kids learned about language and object identification at different ages.

They found that in the first 2 years of a child’s life, objects came into and out of view rapidly and that one object usually was much closer to the child’s eyes than were others (suggesting that the parent had perhaps held it in front of the child’s face). Equally as important, the parent often named the object that was largest in the child’s view. For Smith, this begged the question: “Is this type of play an optimal moment for learning object names?”

Smith and Yu gave the parents six objects with specific names to use while playing with their children. They were not told to teach the children the names of the items; nor were they told the children would be tested after play (this assured the parents would not intentionally try to turn the session into a lesson). After the 1.5-minute session, the researchers measured the children’s knowledge of each object twice by presenting the child with three options and asking them to choose one. If a child chose the right object, Smith and her colleagues reexamined the dynamics of the play session, reviewing material from 10 seconds prior to the naming event to 10 seconds after the naming event.

They found that successful object recognition occurred when an object was physically close to, and centered on, a baby’s face. “Toddlers learn objects names when the referent is visually salient, bigger in the view, [and] more centered than the competitors,” Smith explained. “This is a direct consequence … of how toddlers’ bodies work.”

In addition, the experimenters discovered that naming moments were likely to happen when babies were holding the object themselves and when their heads were stable (i.e., focused on the object). “What all this means is that in the toddler, visual attention and learning involves the whole sensorimotor system,” Smith said. “It emerges in the real-time coupling and self-organization of head, eyes, and hands. At this point, learning object names is about the coordinated focus of eye, head, and hands, the stabilized visual attention that brings about, and the reduction of visual competition that holding an object brings about.”

Smith is encouraged by these consistent findings and believes they could be relevant for researchers seeking to delve more deeply into the intersection of language learning and object cognition of young children. She explained that each age provides novel insights into this process: When children are 18 months old, they learn things completely differently than they did when they were younger (e.g., they are coordinated enough to grasp and hold objects, thereby encouraging encourages parents to name them).

“Development also brings the accomplishments of the past forward,” Smith concluded. “What happened earlier will shape what happens later.”

perception of development essay

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Perception and its Development in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology

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Kirsten Jacobson and John Russon (eds.), Perception and its Development in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology , University of Toronto Press, 2017, 373pp., $75.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781487501280.

Reviewed by Dimitris Apostolopoulos, University of Notre Dame

In the words of its editors, this volume aims to “illuminate, defend, and expand on the insights developed in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception ” (‘A Note on Citations’). It has four parts: ‘Passivity and Intersubjectivity’ (I); ‘Generality and Objectivity’ (II); ‘Meaning and Ambiguity’ ( III ); and ‘Expression’ (IV). To give a sense of the range of topics covered, and their philosophical and textual scope, I will review contributions from each of its parts, before making some broader observations.

The volume opens with a contribution from John Russon on the relations among attention, freedom, and passivity (themes that the ‘Introduction’ claimed were intimately connected, in the guise of “openness” and “creativity”). Having considered examples suggesting that attending is a context-dependent practice that responds to objects, rather than a free-floating or independent power of the will, Russon claims that it is also a commitment which takes up givens that (following Sartre) could have been otherwise (26-28). This open structure is made possible by the fact that situations “afford” possibilities for focusing our attention, which are given by intentional objects. For example, when we see a calendar, this inevitably elicits thoughts about upcoming tasks or deadlines, which show up as an “imperative.” Gradually, subjects develop an ability to engage with objects (and with responses of this sort) through habituation, which testifies to the developmental possibilities of perceptual capacities (31).

Where, then, does freedom fit in this picture? For Russon, freedom “is just determinacy” (32). That is, constraints (like those of the calendar-imperative) circumscribe definite modes of behavior that can be transformed and redefined (the examples of work and communication are invoked in support of this claim). Communication is especially relevant because the constraints imposed by the world may be modified by others (35). Russon concludes that freedom is ultimately more akin to a “question,” and requires “answerability to others” (37).

Kym Maclaren argues that emotions are “institutions.” After explicating the concept of ‘institution’ (a topic considered in lectures from the mid-1950s), she maintains that it can already be found in the Phenomenology . In that text, Merleau-Ponty is already opposed to ‘constitution’: expression and perception require a different mode of meaning-formation, which is less the work of an autonomous agent, and more akin to embodied transformation of possibilities. Even if the explicit contrast with constitution is made in later lectures, the account of meaning formation in the Phenomenology can be “retrospectively” identified as a version of institution (53; 55). This helps to sharpen some important contrasts between the two concepts. But even if one takes heed of the relevant differences that Maclaren nicely outlines (56-58), one might still wonder if ‘institution’ could also be seen as a development of some features of constitution that Merleau-Ponty seeks to retain (especially given his non-negligible positive references to it in some later writings). With a look at the emotion of love, the rest of the essay nicely illustrates what this difference could mean in practice (62-63). Loving another allows us to realize a “new way of seeing the world,” which institutes a new dimension of experience. But this unfolds only if we do not impose our own image or construal onto the beloved ( qua constitutive agent). Emotions like love rely on a ‘between’ structure, an observation that helpfully clarifies the concept of institution (65).

Part II opens with an essay by Kirsten Jacobson on the phenomenon of ‘spatial neglect,’ in which subjects are unaware of or miss an object (or event) on one side of their body. According to Jacobson, our ability to neglect spaces is possible thanks to the body’s capacity to produce space (101). The body is “virtual,” in that it can adapt to a range of situations, and finds a home whenever it can coordinate with its environment (103). She entertains and rejects two putative explanations of spatial neglect: a neurological view, on which damage to the right lobe accounts for discrepancies in action; and a psychological or rationalistic view, which puts an emphasis on subjects’ need to repress their lost abilities. The first fails to account for cases in which patients can notice objects on their left side (despite physiological damage), and for cases of damage to the left lobe, e.g. among stroke victims who experience spatial neglect in right hemisphere (106). The second ignores how the body adapts to disturbances by shaping a new mode of existence, and neglects the complexity of the phenomenon in question.

Jacobson’s solution takes direction from Merleau-Ponty’s account of motor-disorders ( e.g. the phantom limb or the Schneider case), and creatively develops his insights. Studies show that spatial-neglect patients experience space somewhat like Schneider (109). Accordingly, we may conclude that they no longer live out a world that is “actualizable” for them (111). Such cases are better understood in terms of subjects’ modifications of prior embodied capacities, which open or impede possible movements in space (114). Jacobson ends with the constructive suggestion that clinical treatments for these subjects ought to focus on how they might acquire and develop new embodied capacities (116).

David Ciavatta argues that Merleau-Ponty’s account of temporality provides an “indirect phenomenology of natural time” (162). Ciavatta observes that cycles like day and night, or inhaling and exhaling, “constitute the general horizons that contextualize and thus inform all of our experience in advance of our having this or that particular experience,” without, however, becoming an object of experience (161). We are indifferent to this kind of ‘generalized’ time, and treat it as a recurring cycle. For Ciavatta, subjectivity is supported by structures that are “derived from” the cyclicality of natural time.

After describing in more detail the impersonal repetitions or rhythms that we are largely indifferent to (168-169), Ciavatta notes that our experience of temporal continuity unfolds thanks to a differentiation of these experiences from more discontinuous, episodic, or passing moments (171). Here again, we are largely indifferent to events of this sort, even if we cannot but acknowledge some degree of individuation. As he reads Merleau-Ponty, subjects must also be able to identify layers of temporality that are “indifferent to all inaugural events that ground historical narratives through which I typically make sense of world” (176). In other words, we may recognize a distinctively natural time of cyclical repetitions.

This piece helpfully clarifies the relation between natural and human time. It suggests that despite his subject-centric focus, Merleau-Ponty may still be committed to a view of natural time, the structure of which is nevertheless quite proximate to that of subjective temporal experience. Even if “Merleau-Ponty works towards the idea that the natural world as a whole is itself historical,” Ciavatta notes that he also claims that there is a past that was ‘never present,’ or a “past of all pasts” that we cannot access. Together with “time’s historical a priori, ” this makes up “time’s natural a priori ” (177). These considerations complicate a straightforward identify between human and natural time, and offer an opportunity to rethink this relation. But, given some of Merleau-Ponty’s remarks ( e.g. PhP 413-414/453-454; 87/114), one might worry that the “past of all pasts” is still personal, rather than natural or akin to a phenomenal form of the world, and recalcitrant to grounding in (or explanation in terms of) nature.

In the first essay of Part III , David Morris explores the temporal character of meaning. For Morris, “meaning is not so much in time as made ‘of’ temporality — meaning is temporality” (194). To show this, instead of focusing on the latter sections of the Phenomenology (which establish an identity between subjectivity, sense, and time), Morris appeals to ‘institution.’ He first argues for a (seemingly general) view of meaning on which meanings depend on differences, and get their content from them ( e.g . ‘love is not hate’). These differences contain more than what might at first seem to be given in them (197). This view is unpacked in the remainder of the paper.

Morris claims that Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of meaning can be clarified by the concept of a ‘level’: sense-making requires that we situate entities in terms of others, according to a norm, guide, or level (perhaps akin to a Gestalt) (198-199). Levels or norms are not descriptive, but “transcendental” requirements. The role of temporality comes out in Morris’s example of balancing: only by diverging (moving back and forth) from points in space, a process unfolding over time, can we find the norm that allow us to balance ourselves. A similar logic can be found in Merleau-Ponty’s remarks on expression: new expressive possibilities emerge thanks to differentiations from existing conventions (203-204).

Morris turns to institution to clarify how sense can have direction while transforming given meanings. Merleau-Ponty’s remarks on maturation and puberty from the Institution lectures show that sexual maturity emerges through a ‘gradual operation,’ which allows current behavior to appear as decidedly sexual, rather than merely “playful,” a possibility that did not exist before (209). Morris then returns to Structure, and argues that the concept of ‘structure’ anticipates that of ‘institution’ and ‘level.’ The account offered here “undoes” divisions between a priori and a posteriori, a result evidenced by Structure ‘s account of the soul-body relation (210). Despite Merleau-Ponty’s claim that this relation can be accounted for by constitution, Morris asserts that by this he really means ‘institution’, for Merleau-Ponty’s view of temporality presupposes a non-constitutive account. In Structure , temporality is not just a subjective condition, but also an ontological one, i.e . it is part of the physical order: the “flow of events generate something new by carrying past over present towards future” (212). This piece draws important connections between structure and institution, and clarifies how the latter might flow from the former.

In a subtle essay, Scott Marratto responds to Levinas’s challenge that (1) Merleau-Ponty reduces otherness to a function of knowledge or consciousness (his visual focus might suggest as much); and (2) he defines expression as an “incestuous disturbance,” instead of a genuine address to the other. For Marratto, Merleau-Ponty’s “mature” account of artistic expression can adequately respond to these points (243). In a discussion of painting, Marratto concedes that Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the importance of vision (as Levinas claims). But this is not an endorsement of Western “ocularcentrism” (244). For Merleau-Ponty, vision is on a continuum with other behaviors, and is a mixture of active and passive elements. Vision admits of a depth and distance that does not rule out a deeper proximity or complicity with objects and subjects (245).

To respond to Levinas’s first point, Marratto turns to aesthetic traditions. For Merleau-Ponty, the call to make something new should be seen as an ethical demand of responsibility to alterity (in this case, to a painter or painters), “by a kind of kenosis in favour of the otherness that the painter already encounters within herself” (246). That we depend on traditions means that otherness is already in us, and becomes a condition for “openness” to the world. But this also reveals something about perception. Textual evidence shows that vision is no “modality of knowledge”: perception opens onto conditions (others, objects, the tradition, etc . ) that question the subject’s self-sufficiency (247). There can be no fusion of self with other in perceptual experience, because relations like reversibility (which characterize it) are incomplete by necessity. For Merleau-Ponty, there can be difference between self and other without need for identification (248). Marratto meets Levinas’s second challenge by first noting that for Merleau-Ponty, artworks create unfamiliar worlds. A work is incomplete, and calls for an audience to complete it. But this audience is not “already extant.” Paintings create an expressive dialogue in which subjects do not “shut themselves up” but genuinely live with one another, which allows for a non-reductive relation to others (250).

In the final part (IV), Stefan Kristensen suggests that performance artist Ana Mendieta’s work can help us better understand Merleau-Ponty’s view of phenomenal space. After considering remarks about spatiality in Merleau-Ponty’s later work, he concludes that there are two notions of space at work here: one rests on a distinction between consciousness and world; and another, more fundamental view holds that space is depth (or what he calls “phenomenal space”). On the latter, space and time are indiscernible and unified through movement (272-273).

Mendieta’s work (known as ‘Earth Body Art’) can help us understand the latter, which is Kristensen’s focus. She creates embodied figures that convey a sense of “immemorial space,” which serves as an “object of mourning and as power of creation” (275). The sense of mourning in question pertains to the experience of attempting to retrieve the subject of perception: our body remains in the background, but when we realize what we are doing (e.g . while seeing a particular object), the perceptual subject vanishes. For Kristensen, we are in danger of losing the subject of perception: the body is “constantly mourning itself,” and reflections on Mendieta’s work serve to clarify this experience (277).

Peter Costello explores political themes — in particular, how Merleau-Ponty’s work can inform democratic citizenship. After describing the later concept of ‘flesh’, which Costello claims supports experiences of anonymity and visibility (286), he then interprets it in a collective vein. Flesh imposes a requirement of political “stewardship” (288). The latter entails that we must attend to and are responsible for one another. After developing an extended analogy between painting and politics (both allow us to see the world in a certain way; 290, 292), Costello turns to Cézanne. Like a “good democrat,” Cézanne puts his body in the service of others, in response to a tradition, and “with those who are its citizens” (294). Costello suggest that democracy would be more successful if, like painting, it embodied ‘silent’ modes of expression more frequently, which would increase the likelihood that citizens become open to one another (299-300).

This volume covers important themes in Merleau-Ponty’s work, and one can learn a lot by reading it (the limits of this review do not allow for a consideration of the insights contained in other essays). For example, the guiding theme of perceptual development (understood as the development of a subject’s perceptual capacities) is nicely elucidated. A number of essays also clarify the stakes of key concerns in Merleau-Ponty’s work, including his reflections on expression, institution, space, temporality, philosophical reflection, and art.

One may wonder, however, to what extent this collection meets its goal of serving as a “companion” volume that “runs roughly parallel” to Phenomenology of Perception (18). As their titles suggest, Parts I-IV do not track the text’s structure (e.g., in this volume, treatments of freedom and time can be found in its first two parts, whereas they are located in the latter sections of the Phenomenology ). What is more, many contributions discuss themes that do not arise in the Phenomenology, and some essays focus on later writings, or on figures that Merleau-Ponty did not engage with. A reader looking for close textual commentary on the Phenomenology might therefore be left wanting. The editors note that the volume’s contributions are “oriented less toward commentaries on [Merleau-Ponty’s] texts than towards descriptions and analyses of the phenomena themselves” (8). While this is an admirable goal, the book’s title suggests a slightly different focus (to their credit, some contributors explicitly flag sections of their papers that are not offered in the spirit of direct commentary). In light of the insights the volume contains, however, these considerations are minor: this collection will be of benefit to students of phenomenology and of Merleau-Ponty alike.

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Theories of Child Development and Their Impact on Early Childhood Education and Care

  • Published: 29 October 2021
  • Volume 51 , pages 15–30, ( 2023 )

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  • Olivia N. Saracho   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4108-7790 1  

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Developmental theorists use their research to generate philosophies on children’s development. They organize and interpret data based on a scheme to develop their theory. A theory refers to a systematic statement of principles related to observed phenomena and their relationship to each other. A theory of child development looks at the children's growth and behavior and interprets it. It suggests elements in the child's genetic makeup and the environmental conditions that influence development and behavior and how these elements are related. Many developmental theories offer insights about how the performance of individuals is stimulated, sustained, directed, and encouraged. Psychologists have established several developmental theories. Many different competing theories exist, some dealing with only limited domains of development, and are continuously revised. This article describes the developmental theories and their founders who have had the greatest influence on the fields of child development, early childhood education, and care. The following sections discuss some influences on the individuals’ development, such as theories, theorists, theoretical conceptions, and specific principles. It focuses on five theories that have had the most impact: maturationist, constructivist, behavioral, psychoanalytic, and ecological. Each theory offers interpretations on the meaning of children's development and behavior. Although the theories are clustered collectively into schools of thought, they differ within each school.

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The author is grateful to Mary Jalongo for her expert editing and her keen eye for the smallest details.

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Oxford Handbook of Face Perception

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Oxford Handbook of Face Perception

1 Face Perception: a Developmental Perspective

Mark H. Johnson is a Medical Research Council Scientific Programme Leader and Director of the Centre for Brain & Cognitive Development at Birkbeck, University of London, UK.

  • Published: 21 November 2012
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This article views face perception as the ideal case study example for understanding the deeper principles underlying human neurodevelopment. It illustrates how face perception has been one of oldest battlegrounds for resolving key issues in human development. It argues that taking a developmental approach to face perception can resolve some of the major current debates in the adult face perception and cognitive neuroscience literature. Thus, face perception and development continue to be mutually informative domains of study. The work on newborns designed to test the “innate knowledge” of faces, studying the development of face perception skills during infancy and childhood, has proved to be fertile ground for domain-general theories of perceptual and cognitive development. The study reviews recent literature on the factors that contribute to the specialization of certain cortical areas for face processing. It suggests an intriguing alternative middle-ground view in this polarized debate.

I have little interest in face perception for its own sake. This may seem like a shocking statement coming from someone who has devoted much of his career to the topic, but it reflects the fact that I have always viewed face perception as the ideal case study example for understanding the deeper principles underlying human neurodevelopment. In this chapter I will illustrate how face perception has been one of oldest battlegrounds for resolving key issues in human development. Conversely, I will argue that taking a developmental approach to face perception can resolve some of the major current debates in the adult face perception and cognitive neuroscience literature. Thus, face perception and development have been, and continue to be, mutually informative domains of study.

Ever since Darwin’s ( 1872 ) book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals the issue of whether the exquisite face perception skills we have as adults is due primarily to phylogeny (species adaptations) or ontogeny (individual development fuelled by experience) has motivated much research. Indeed, evidence from studies of face perception abilities at different ages has provided pillars to support domain-general nature or nurture arguments in human development. For example, in one of the very first scientific studies of human infants, Fantz ( 1963 ) showed that when given a choice of looking at a schematic face or a bull’s-eye pattern, newborn babies generally preferred to look at the face. A decade or so later, Goren, Sarty, and Wu ( 1975 ) systematically tested human newborns—often within the first 10 minutes after birth—on their tendency to track slowly moving patterns. They observed that human newborns would turn their head and eyes further in order to keep a simple schematic face in view, than they would for equally complex “scrambled face” patterns. Viewed from the perspective of today’s scientific standards, this study raised more questions than it answered, but at the very least it has generated a whole mini-field of scientific research (some of which will be discussed later).

In addition to the work on newborns designed to test what, if any, “innate knowledge” of faces we have, studying the development of face perception skills during infancy and childhood has proved to be fertile ground for domain-general theories of perceptual and cognitive development. Basic theories about mechanisms of learning (Nelson, 2003 ), pubertal dips in performance (Carey et al., 1980 ), the longitudinal stability of childhood performance, and the functional specialization of cortical regions (Johnson, 2001 ; Cohen-Kadosh and Johnson, 2007 ), have all been at least partly based on evidence from face perception studies.

Over the past decade an increasing number of cognitive neuroscientists who study aspects of face perception in adults have realized the importance of developmental data for addressing their key issues. In a later section I will review recent literature on the factors that contribute to the specialization of certain cortical areas for face processing. For example, the debate of whether the fusiform face area is specialized for face processing due to experience and training, or due to some kind of innate specification, remains unresolved and controversial based on the sometimes conflicting data from adults. Data from infants and children not only allows this question to be addressed more directly, but also suggests an intriguing alternative middle-ground view in this polarized debate.

The two-process theory

Up until the late 1980s, the development of face perception was an actively researched field, but it was mainly dominated by issues in the nature versus nurture debate and related questions about the ages at which different face perception abilities might appear. After replicating the results with newborns of Goren et al. ( 1975 ), Johnson et al. ( 1991 ), and several of the key results supporting more gradual development of face processing abilities, John Morton and I proposed the “two-process” model of the development of face perception in 1991 (Johnson and Morton, 1991 ; Morton and Johnson, 1991 ; see also de Schonen and Mathivet, 1990 for a related view). The original two-process theory sought to reconcile the apparently conflicting lines of evidence about the development of face processing by postulating the existence of two systems: a tendency for newborns to orient to faces (CONSPEC), and an acquired specialization of cortical circuits for other aspects of face processing (CONLERN). This two-systems theory was partly based on my earlier animal work (e.g. Johnson et al., 1985 ). We hypothesized that CONSPEC serves to bias the input to developing cortical circuitry over the first weeks and months of life, thus ensuring that appropriate cortical specialization occurred in response to the social and survival-relevant stimulus of faces.

To this day the putative CONSPEC mechanism occupies the middle ground between those who argue that face preferences in newborns are due to low-level psychophysical biases, and others who propose that infants’ representations of faces are richer and more complex. From birth, human infants preferentially attend to some face-like patterns suggesting a powerful mechanism to bias the input that is processed by the newborn’s brain. Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the two-process theory was the proposal that “infants possess some information about the structural characteristics of faces from birth” (Morton and Johnson, 1991 , p. 164). Although this committed us to the view that the general configuration that composes a face was important, we did not commit to a specific representation. Nevertheless, our empirical observation from the early experiments with newborns, and evidence from other species, indicated that a stimulus with three high-contrast blobs corresponding to the approximate location of the eyes and mouth might be sufficient (Figure 1.1 ). In 1991 the idea that infants were born with face-sensitive information had been rejected by most in the field, largely on the basis of experiments with 1- and 2-month-old infants that failed to show any preference for static face images (see Johnson and Morton, 1991 for review). Because infants shortly beyond the newborn stage did not prefer schematic face patterns over scrambled faces, it was generally assumed that newborns could not discriminate faces from other stimuli.

Over the ensuing years, more than 20 papers on newborns responses to faces and face-like patterns have been published (see Johnson, 2005 for review). All of these studies bar one found some evidence of discrimination of face-like patterns. Several types of explanation have now been advanced for newborn face preferences that have been observed in at least five different laboratories and in the vast majority of studies conducted.

The sensory hypothesis  A number of authors have advanced the view that newborn visual preferences, including those for face-related stimuli, can be accounted for simply in terms of the relative visibility of the stimuli. Different versions of this account and a detailed discussion of their merits are reviewed in an article by Johnson et al. ( 2008 ). After more than a decade of debate and empirical investigation about psychophysics, the upshot is that while some infant preferences for visual patterns can be predicted by the visibility of a stimulus as filtered through the limited visual system of infants, face patterns are nearly always more preferred over other psychophysically matched stimuli. That is, while the psychophysical properties of a stimulus do influence infants’ looking preferences, when stimuli are carefully matched face patterns determine preference.

Non-face structural preferences  This view is that newborn preference for faces can be explained by domain-general perceptual biases, such as those based on known adult Gestalt principles (see Simion et al., 2003 ). Simion and colleagues argue that “newborns’ preference for faces may simply result from a number of non-specific attentional biases that cause the human face to be a frequent focus of newborns’ visual attention” (Simion et al., 2003 , p. 15). These authors still believe that the purpose of these biases is to direct attention to faces in the natural environment of the newborn, so that they are debating the nature of the representation(s) that underlie this bias, not the existence of the mechanism itself. At this point it is useful to differentiate between face- specific and face- sensitive mechanisms. The notion of CONSPEC was never claimed to be face-specific (tuned only and exclusively to faces), but merely sufficient in the natural environment of the newborn to pick out faces from other objects and stimuli (face-sensitive). Indeed, we (Johnson and Morton, 1991 ) speculated that it may be possible to create “super-normal” stimuli (such as high-contrast face patterns) that would actually be preferred over a realistic human face. While the arguments advanced about non-face structural preferences accept that newborns have face-sensitive mechanisms, they argue that these biases are not adapted for that purpose, but are general biases in visual processing that, in combination, just happen to pick out faces in most natural environments. In contrast, CONSPEC is assumed to be specifically adapted for detecting conspecifics in the environment. Therefore, CONSPEC would be more consistent with evidence that the biases are related (act in concert) and respond to the natural conditions in which faces are typically observed (such as the contrast patterns caused by being illuminated from above). The non-face structural preferences view has spawned much empirical research. The upshot of some of this research is that only a complex combination of different biases can explain the results (see Johnson et al., 2008 ). For example, a most preferred stimulus for a newborn would involve an up–down asymmetrical pattern with more elements or features in the upper half, but only when it is within a congruently shaped bounded object or area such as an oval. Related recent research indicates that this near optimal stimulus is improved further with the addition of the appropriate phase-contrast relations for a top-lit face (see Farroni et al., 2005 , Figure 1 ). Further, these supposed different biases interact together in ways likely to be the product of one system or representation rather than being independent “non-specific” biases. Another line of research that casts doubt on non-specific structural preferences hypo-theses is evidence supporting the existence of complex face processing abilities in newborns, discussed next.

Newborns have complex face representations  Some empirical results have led to the hypothesis that newborns already have complex processing of faces (for review see Quinn and Slater, 2003 ). These findings, usually obtained with naturalistic face images, include a preference for attractive faces (Slater et al., 1998 , 2000 ), a preference for face patterns with the appropriate phase-contrast relations (Farroni et al., 2005 ), a sensitivity to the presence of eyes in a face (Batki et al., 2000 ), and a preference to look at faces with direct gaze that engage them in eye contact (Farroni et al., 2002 ). Such findings have led some authors to conclude that “…face recognition abilities are well developed at birth” (Quinn and Slater, 2003 , p. 4). A fuller consideration of the details of these effects reveal that while some of them can be accounted for by the original CONSPEC notion, other experiments force the conclusion that the bias is more specific than originally hypothesized. In Figure 1.2 you will see realistic face images filtered through the appropriate spatial frequency filters to simulate newborn vision. From these images it is evident that a mechanism sensitive to the arrangement of high-contrast, low-spatial frequency components of a face would be preferentially activated by (i) the typical configural arrangement of eye and mouth regions, (ii) the presence (or absence) of open eyes, and (iii) direct versus averted gaze (see Farroni et al., 2002 ).

Schematic illustration of the stimuli that might be optimal for eliciting a face-related preference in newborns. These hypothetical representations were created by putting together the results of several experiments on newborns’ face-related preferences. Conclusions were combined from experiments showing the importance of the number of elements in the upper half of a bounded area or surface, the importance of a face-relevant pattern of phase contrast, and the importance of the basic face configuration as viewed at low spatial frequencies. Reprinted by permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd: Nature Reviews Neuroscience , Subcortical face processing, Mark H. Johnson, 6 , 766–774, copyright 2005.

Thus, the notion of CONSPEC as a mechanism that biases newborns to attend to faces has, in my view, stood the test of time fairly well. More recent conceptions, however, suggest the mechanism is further tuned to detect potential communicative partners, such as faces that engage them with direct gaze (Farroni et al., 2002 ) accompanied by a smile (Farroni et al., 2007 ). Thus, the function originally attributed to CONSPEC now needs to be expanded: it is not just for detecting and orienting to any faces, but also prioritizes faces likely to seek social interaction with the infant. In this way, it may provide a developmental basis, not just for face perception, but also for social cognition in the brain in general.

I should note that an important caveat to many, but not all, of the above studies is that they are conducted with newborns more than 1 day old. While age (in days) is commonly reported not to have an effect on the results obtained, studies of very early learning over the first few hours of face-to-face contact need to be a priority for the future.

While evidence for CONSPEC continues to strengthen and expand, there is no doubt that the notion of CONLERN was underspecified when we first proposed it in 1991. At that time CONLERN was described as “a device that acquires and retains specific information about the visual characteristics of individual conspecifics” (Johnson and Morton, 1991 , p. 90). A large part of the reason for the lack of specificity in our original proposal, and why I did not go on to do much further research on the topic for another 4 or 5 years, was the lack of methods then available for child-friendly imaging of brain functions. My view was that without these methods we could never fully explore the mechanism(s) that underlie CONLERN. In the mid 1990s it became feasible to record high-density event-related potentials (ERPs), and, principally with Michelle de Haan, we began to exploit this method to provide evidence for the specialization of cortical processing of faces (see de Haan, Chapter 38, this volume). Some of the principles we discovered have now proved useful for functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of the neurodevelopment of face processing in children (see later section). Most recently, we have helped to pioneer near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) as a method for studying cortical activation to faces and other social stimuli in infants and young children (Blasi et al., 2007 ; Grossman et al., 2008 ). Thus, the investigation of CONLERN illustrates the importance of available methods in the advancement of an area of scientific inquiry. Sometimes it is better to leave a burning question until the right methods become available for addressing it. Having said this, other researchers have made significant advances in understanding the development of the cognitive and perceptual aspects of face processing with behavioral studies alone (see Lee et al., Chapter 39, this volume).

 How newborns see faces. (a) Realistic images of faces as viewed through the visual system of newborns at a typical distance for face-to-face interaction (∼50 cm). A neutral face with direct gaze, averted gaze, and eyes closed, as well as a fearful face, are shown. These images support the view that, at close viewing distances, information around the eyes could activate the subcortical route. (b) The same realistic images of faces as viewed through the visual system of newborns, but from ∼2 m. When viewed from a greater distance than in (a), or in the periphery, the configuration of shadowed areas that is characteristic of a naturally (top-) lit face could also activate the subcortical route. Reprinted by permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd: Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Subcortical face processing, Mark H. Johnson, 6, 766–774, copyright 2005.

How newborns see faces. (a) Realistic images of faces as viewed through the visual system of newborns at a typical distance for face-to-face interaction (∼50 cm). A neutral face with direct gaze, averted gaze, and eyes closed, as well as a fearful face, are shown. These images support the view that, at close viewing distances, information around the eyes could activate the subcortical route. (b) The same realistic images of faces as viewed through the visual system of newborns, but from ∼2 m. When viewed from a greater distance than in (a), or in the periphery, the configuration of shadowed areas that is characteristic of a naturally (top-) lit face could also activate the subcortical route. Reprinted by permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd: Nature Reviews Neuroscience , Subcortical face processing, Mark H. Johnson, 6 , 766–774, copyright 2005.

A subcortical route?

In Johnson and Morton’s original ( 1991 ) proposals we argued that subcortical processing was responsible for guiding the behavior of newborns toward face-like patterns. Although it was very controversial at the time, we made this proposal for a couple of reasons. First, evidence from other species indicated that inborn preferences for conspecifics are mediated by more primitive subcortical neural routes. This stands in contrast to early visual learning that is mediated by forebrain or cortical systems. Second, evidence on the maturation of the human visual system suggests that there is slower development of the cortical visual routes than the subcortical during postnatal development (e.g. Johnson, 1990 ). Subsequently to this and related proposals (e.g. Le Doux, 1996 ), neuroimaging, electrophysiological, and neuropsychological studies with adults have provided evidence for a rapid, low spatial frequency, subcortical face detection system in adults that involves the superior colliculus, pulvinar, and amygdala (see Johnson, 2005 for review). This route is hypothesized to be fast, operates on low spatial frequency visual information, and modulates cortical face processing, which led Le Doux ( 1996 ) to describe it as the “quick & dirty” pathway.

Evidence that the route is fast comes from ERP and magnetoencephalographic (MEG) studies showing that components associated with a “fast pathway” for face processing can occur at much shorter latencies than those generally associated with the “structural encoding” stage of cortical face processing (such as the N170 and M170) (Bailey et al., 2005 ).

Evidence that the route processes low spatial frequencies comes from fMRI studies in which the pulvinar, amygdala, and superior colliculus respond to low spatial frequency information about faces, and particularly fearful faces (Winston et al., 2003 ). This subcortical route was insensitive to the high spatial frequency information about faces that can activate the fusiform cortex. Finally, evidence consistent with the idea that the subcortical route modulates cortical processing comes from several functional imaging studies indicating that the degree of activation of structures in the subcortical route (amygdala, superior colliculus, and pulvinar) predicts or correlates with the activation of cortical face processing areas (George et al., 2001 ; Kleinhans et al., 2008 ). However, the causal direction of this correlation remains unknown.

What is the purpose of this putative subcortical route? The proposal that follows on from the two-process model is that it serves as a developmental basis for the emerging social brain network (see Johnson, 2005 ). This view assumes that newborns have widespread projections from the subcortical route to cortical structures, and as a consequence face detection initially activates widespread cortical activation of regions that will become incorporated into the adult social brain. Through the constraints imposed by architectural biases within different cortical regions, and through the process of interactive specialization discussed later, particular cortical regions become increasingly tuned for social stimulus processing. Thus, CONSPEC and the subcortical route is a critical foundation stone for each individual child to construct their cortical social brain network (Johnson, 2005 ).

Even if you grant that CONSPEC and the subcortical route are important for the ontogeny of face perception and the social brain, does this route have any relevance or importance for those who study face processing in adults? We have investigated this question recently (Tomalski et al., 2009a ). Contrary to most cognitive and functional imaging paradigms in adults that involve foveal presentation of faces, we presented schematic face patterns similar to those used with newborns, but as briefly flashed peripheral stimuli. We observed more rapid saccadic orienting to flashed face-like configurations than similar patterns. Further, consistent with a subcortical basis, this effect is only evident with temporal (the visual hemifields away from the nose) rather than nasal (the visual hemifields next to the nose) visual field input (Tomalski et al., 2009b ). The effect also seems be a product of fast oculomotor routes since it is not observed with manual key press responses.

While we may be able to detect subtle hallmarks of the subcortical route in laboratory experimental contexts in adults, is there any substantive consequence of this processing in the real world? Senju and Johnson ( 2009 ) marshal evidence that this route is engaged by eye contact in adults (as well as infants), and have proposed that it is one source of selective activation of cortical structures that contribute to the “eye contact effect.” The eye contact effect is defined by these authors as the phenomenon that perceived eye contact modulates the concurrent and/or immediately following cognitive processing and/or behavioral response. If this hypothesis is correct, it means that the subcortical route continues to have a vital role in social perception and cognition in adults.

How do cortical regions come to be involved in face perception?

As discussed earlier, research on the mechanisms underlying CONLERN was delayed for several years due to a lack of necessary methods for progressing empirical research. While the use of ERPs has informed the neurodevelopment of face processing for some time now (see De Haan, Chapter 38, this volume), only in the past 5 years has fMRI been used with children on a regular basis.

Some of the hottest debates in adult cognitive neuroscience in recent years have focused on the degree to which face-sensitive markers of cortical function, such as the N170 ERP component, and activation of the fusiform face area (FFA) are selective for face processing, and how this degree of functional specificity arises in the first place (see Eimer, Chapter 17, this volume). In particular, for the FFA two opposing positions have emerged in accounting for the multitude of functional imaging data from adults. First, the “domain-specificity hypothesis” (Kanwisher et al., 1997 ) assumes that faces are processed in a modular and category specific fashion in the FFA. In opposition to this view is the “expertise hypothesis” that suggests that rather than being a dedicated face module, the FFA is a neural area involved in processing objects of expertise (Gauthier and Nelson, 2001 ). By the latter view, faces are the objects with which most adults have considerable expertise. While this debate has generated much further research with adults (see Kanwisher and Barton, Chapter 7; McKone and Robbins, Chapter 9; Scott, Chapter 11, this volume), the general question of the origin of functional specialization in human cortex is primarily a developmental issue. Specifically, the developmental question is what are the factors both intrinsic and extrinsic to the cortex that ensure that (1) we develop particular types of specialized cognitive functions relevant for our survival, such as face and language processing, and (2) these specialized functions usually end up located in approximately the same parts of cortex? The most obvious answer to these questions is that specific genes are expressed in particular parts of cortex and then “code for” patterns of wiring particular to certain computational functions. While this type of explanation appears to be valid for specialized computations within subcortical structures, a variety of genetic, neurobiological, and cognitive neuroscience evidence indicates that it is, at best, only part of the story for many human cognitive functions dependent on cerebral cortex.

I have previously outlined three viewpoints on human functional brain development (e.g. Johnson, 2001 ). According to a “maturational” perspective, functional brain development involves the sequential coming “on line” of a number of modular cortical regions. The maturation of a given region is thought to allow or enable advances in the perceptual, cognitive, or motor abilities of the child. As applied to the neurodevelopment of face perception, this implies that more complex aspects (such as “theory of mind” computations) will depend on the sequential maturation of associated cortical regions (possibly within the prefrontal cortex). This view fits best with the domain specificity hypothesis in the adult literature.

The second perspective on human functional brain development, “skill learning,” argues for parallels between the dynamic brain events associated with the acquisition of complex perceptual and motor skills in adults, and the changes in brain function seen as infants and children come to successfully perform simpler tasks. From this perspective, it has been argued that some cortical regions become recruited for processing face stimulus information because typical humans become perceptual experts in this domain (Gauthier and Nelson, 2001 ). This view, then, clearly fits with the expertise hypothesis in the adult literature.

A third perspective, “interactive specialization,” posits that functional brain development, at least in cerebral cortex, involves a process of specialization in which regions go from initially having very broadly-tuned functions, to having increasingly finely-tuned (more specialized) functions (Johnson 2001 , 2002). A consequence of increased specialization of cortical regions is the increasingly focal patterns of cortical activation resulting from a given task demand or stimulus. By this view, some regions of cortex gradually become increasingly specialized for processing social stimuli and thus become recruited to face perception computations.

How does the empirical evidence from the neurodevelopment of face perception fit these views? The evidence available from positron emission tomography and electroencephalography/ERP studies suggests that most of the brain areas and mechanisms implicated in adult face processing can be activated relatively early in postnatal life. However, there are some additional effects, such as the activation of the inferior frontal and superior temporal gyrus in response to faces in 2-month-olds (Tzourio-Mazoyer et al., 2002 ), and the superior temporal sulcus generator of the face inversion effect found in 3- and 12-month-olds (Johnson et al., 2005 ), that do not directly map onto the mature face processing system. In addition to the extra regions involved while infants perceive faces, another important observation in the infant ERP work is that the infant face processing system possesses much broader response properties which are not yet as finely tuned to upright human faces (see de Haan, Chapter 38, this volume). This suggests that despite the gradual cortical specialization seen throughout the first year of life, the system continues to specialize well beyond infancy and into childhood.

More direct evidence for or against these models can be gained from fMRI developmental neuroimaging studies with children while they are engaged in face processing. The interactive specialization view predicts that with development there will be increased selectivity (fine tuning) in the activation of cortical areas for specific functions such as face processing. A consequence of this more selective activation of cortical areas is that the extent of cortical tissue activated in a given task context, or in response to a particular stimulus, will decrease and become more focal as the child gets older. This contrasts with the view that such cortical functional specializations are present from birth, or that they mature in a way relatively uninfluenced by experience.

We (Cohen-Kadosh and Johnson, 2007 ; Johnson et al., 2009 ) examined the currently available developmental fMRI literature on faces with regard to two hypotheses generated by the interactive specialization approach: 1) Does cortical activation in response to viewing faces become more focal and localized during development? 2) Does the degree of functional specialization (as measured by the degree of tuning to faces) increase in specificity during development? Encouragingly, we found some consistency across the seven developmental fMRI studies conducted to date. Collectively, these studies show that while faces activate specific areas of cortex in children, these areas may occupy more extensive or slightly different regions from those seen in adults. Further, the three most recent studies show evidence of increasing tuning of face-sensitive areas of cortex (Golarai et al., 2007 ; Passarotti et al., 2003 ; Scherf et al., 2007 ) accompanied in some cases by more focal patterns of activation in older children. In general, these dynamic developmental changes in cortical activation were consistent with the predictions of the interactive specialization view. Future studies will no doubt focus more on the emergence of specialized face processing networks during development using functional and structural connectivity measures. To date, the study of face perception during childhood provides perhaps the richest data source for comparing theories of functional specialization in human cortex, illustrating once again the two-way interaction between face perception studies and developmental science.

Summary and conclusions

In this chapter, I have illustrated that face perception has been one of the most important domains of study for our understanding of perceptual, cognitive, and neurocognitive aspects of human development. Additionally, the domain of face perception is one of the oldest battlegrounds for resolving key issues in the nature–nurture debate going back to Darwin and then to the origins of empirical work on human infants in the 1960s. This viewpoint on the history of the field has, of course, reflected my personal perspective and biases. Specifically, I highlighted Johnson and Morton’s ( 1991 ) two-process theory of the development of face perception, and reviewed aspects of the theory that have stood the test of time, as well as other parts that have required modification in the light of additional empirical data.

In the next two sections of the chapter I examined how developmental thinking has influenced current research and issues on adult face perception. First, evidence for a putative subcortical route for face processing in adults has been bolstered by data from newborns where evidence suggests that cortical functioning is poor. Second, I suggested that debates about the role of expertise/experience in the activation of the “fusiform face area” could be resolved by theory and recent data from developmental fMRI studies supporting a gradual increase in functional specialization of the region.

Returning to the issue raised at the beginning of this chapter, we can now reconsider the factors, both intrinsic and extrinsic to the human cortex, that ensure that we both develop specialized processing of faces, and that this specialized function usually becomes located in the same parts of cortex in adults. With regard to developing a cortex specialized for face processing, I briefly reviewed evidence that newborns preferentially look toward faces. A number of lines of evidence suggested that this newborn preference is not mediated by the same cortical structures involved in face processing in adults, and may be due to a subcortical route for face detection. One purpose of this early tendency to fixate on faces may be to elicit bonding from adult caregivers. However, I suggest that an equally important purpose is to bias the visual input to plastic cortical circuits. This biased sampling of the visual environment over the first days and weeks of life may ensure the appropriate specialization of later developing cortical circuitry (Morton and Johnson, 1991 ). In addition to these findings, recent work has shown that newborns prefer to look at faces that engage them in direct (mutual) eye gaze (Farroni et al., 2002 ). Maintaining mutual gaze with another’s face ensures foveation of that stimulus, a fact that may be relevant to the eventual location of “face areas” within the cortex (see Malach et al., 2004 ). Thus, I suggest, this newborn bias effectively “tutors” the developing cortex and early foveation of faces may, in part, determine the location of face-sensitive areas within cortex. In terms of the nature versus nurture issue, the research on faces has helped us understand the complex interplay between intrinsic and extrinsic factors in which each individual child’s brain constructs its own specialized face-processing network. In my view headline claims about “innate face processing” (Sugita, 2009 ) or perceptual expertise (Gauthier and Nelson, 2001 ) do the field no justice in that they harp back to polarized debates from over 20 years ago. Usually, when we look more closely at the empirical details the subtle interweaving of nature and nurture is evident (see Maurer and Mondloch, Chapter 40, this volume). For example, the recent work of Sugita ( 2008 , 2009 ) on monkeys reared without exposure to faces shows that they have abilities similar to those that have already been reported for human newborns, and that they subsequently show a process of perceptual tuning or specialization that is also very reminiscent of reports from human development (see Lee et al., Chapter 39, this volume). Sugita ( 2009 ) also speculates that the infant’s proprioception or tactile contact with its own face may be important for establishing visual face perception skills, a suggestion that merits investigation with humans also.

What of the future? I believe that face perception will continue to be an important domain for our understanding of general issues in developmental science and vice versa. The application of theories based on typical development to developmental disorders with known atypicality in face processing such as autism, Williams syndrome, and developmental prosopagnosia (Webb et al., Chapter 43; Behrmann et al., Chapter 41; Duchaine, Chapter 42, respectively, this volume), will be a critical application of our basic research. Multimodal imaging offering good temporal and spatial resolution will be critical for discriminating between different theories of the emergence of cortical specialization for face perception (Grossman et al., 2008 ). Computational and neural network modeling of the emergence of specialization for face perception will be an essential bridge between brain and cognition (see Cottrell and Hsiao, Chapter 21, this volume). Moving from static and schematic to realistic and dynamic face images, presented in both foveal and peripheral visual fields, will be important to ensure that we are not just studying the brain responses to pictures of faces, rather than the real thing. Finally, studying how specific neural circuitry becomes tuned to face perception within the richer context of social cognition and interaction will help us unravel the complex dynamics between babies’ experience of interaction with others, and their abilities to detect and analyze the signals from their faces.

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The Problem of Perception

The Problem of Perception is a pervasive and traditional problem about our ordinary conception of perceptual experience. The problem is created by the phenomena of perceptual illusion and hallucination: if these kinds of error are possible, how can perceptual experience be what we ordinarily understand it to be: something that enables direct perception of the world? These possibilities of error challenge the intelligibility of our ordinary conception of perceptual experience; the major theories of experience are responses to this challenge.

1.1 Starting Points

1.2 ordinary objects, 1.3 presentation, 1.4 direct realism, 1.5 the character of experience, 1.6 the common kind claim, 2.1 the argument from illusion.

  • 2.2 The Argument from Hallucination

3.1.1 The Sense-Datum Theory in Outline

3.1.2 the sense-datum theory and the problem of perception.

  • 3.1.3 The Sense-Datum Theory and our Ordinary Conception of Perceptual Experience

3.1.4 The Sense-Datum Theory and Perception of the World

3.1.5 objections to the sense-datum theory, 3.2.1 adverbialism in outline.

  • 3.2.2 The Adverbialism and Qualia

3.2.3 Objections to Adverbialism

3.2.4 adverbialism and the problem of perception.

  • 3.2.5 Adverbialism and Our Ordinary Conception of Perceptual Experience

3.2.6 Adverbialism and Perception of the World

3.3.1 intentionalism in outline, 3.3.2 sources of intentionalism, 3.3.3 the intentional content of perceptual experience, 3.3.4 intentionalism and the problem of perception, 3.3.5 intentionalism and perception of the world, 3.3.6 intentionalism and our ordinary conception of perceptual experience, 3.4.1 naive realism in outline, 3.4.2 naive realism and the problem of perception, 3.4.3 the development of naive realist disjunctivism.

  • 3.4.4 Naive Realism Disjunctivism and our Ordinary Conception of Perceptual Experience

4. Conclusion

Further reading, other internet resources, related entries, 1. our ordinary conception of perceptual experience.

A.D. Smith claims that what most authors have in mind in talking about the Problem of Perception is the “question of whether we can ever directly perceive the physical world”, where “the physical world” is understood in a realist way: as having “an existence that is not in any way dependent upon its being... perceived or thought about” (2002: 1). The arguments at the heart of the Problem of Perception challenge this direct realist perspective on perceptual experience. But since this perspective is embedded within our ordinary conception of perceptual experience, the problem gets to the heart of our ordinary ways of thinking.

So, what is our ordinary conception of perceptual experience? And how does it embed a direct realist perspective?

We conceive of perceptual experiences as occurrences with phenomenal character. The phenomenal character of an experience is what it is like for a subject to undergo it (Nagel (1974)). Our ordinary conception of perceptual experience emerges from first-personal reflection on its character, rather than from scientific investigation; it is a conception of experience from a “purely phenomenological point of view” (Broad 1952: 3–4). We’ll present this conception by outlining what phenomenological reflection suggests first about the objects ( §1.2 ), structure ( §1.3 ), and character ( §1.5 ) of experience, and then about the relation between veridical, illusory, and hallucinatory experiences, and in particular whether these cases form a common kind ( §1.6 ).

Let’s begin with P.F. Strawson’s idea that “mature sensible experience (in general) presents itself as, in Kantian phrase, an immediate consciousness of the existence of things outside us” (1979: 97), and similarly McDowell’s idea that perceptual experience appears to be an “openness to the world” (1994: 111), conceived of as openness to mind-independent reality (1994: 25–26).

These ideas reflect the basic phenomenological observation that perceptual experiences have objects, and more specifically direct objects: objects that are simply perceived or experienced, but not in virtue of the perception or experience of distinct, more “immediate”, objects.

Various authors appeal to a notion of directness in outlining our ordinary conception of perceptual experience, and the Problem of Perception. A dissenting voice is Austin (1962), and for recent critical discussion see Martin (2017). For further discussion of how to understand notions of direct and indirect perception, see Jackson (1977), Snowdon (1992), Foster (2000), Smith (2002), and Martin (2005).

This starting point gives rise to the following questions (cf. Martin 1998: 176):

  • The Objects Question: what is the nature of the direct objects of experience?
  • The Structure Question: in what sense are experiences directly of their objects?

Let’s turn to the answers to these questions suggested by Strawson and McDowell’s remarks (for a more critical stance on these remarks see Mackie (2020)).

Strawson begins his argument by asking how someone might typically respond to a request for a description of their current visual experience. He says that it is natural to give the following kind of answer: “I see the red light of the setting sun filtering through the black and thickly clustered branches of the elms; I see the dappled deer grazing in groups on the vivid green grass…” (1979: 97). There are two ideas implicit in this answer. First, the description talks about objects which are things distinct from experience. Second, the description is “rich”, describing the nature of the experience not merely in terms of simple shapes and colours; but in terms of the familiar things we encounter in the “lived world” in all their complexity (see also Heidegger (1977: 156)).

So, we can highlight the following answer to the Objects Question:

  • Ordinary Objects : perceptual experiences are directly of ordinary mind-independent objects .

There are three things to clarify about this. First, it incorporates realism in that it appeals to the notion of a mind-independent object of experience: one that doesn’t depend for its existence upon experience. Second, it concerns familiar or ordinary objects, things that we admit as part of common-sense ontology. Third, “object of experience” is understood broadly to encompass perceptible entities in mind-independent reality including ordinary material objects, but also features and other entities (e.g., events, quantities of stuff). When we talk of “ordinary objects”, “the world” etc, we take this as shorthand for: familiar or ordinary mind-independent perceptible entities.

Some writers have defended a thesis known as the transparency of experience (see Harman (1990); Speaks (2009); Tye (1992, 1995, 2000); Thau (2002); and for critical discussions, Martin (2002a), Smith (2008), Stoljar (2004) and Soteriou (2013)). Transparency is normally defined as the thesis that introspecting what it is like for a subject to have an experience does not reveal awareness of experiences themselves, but only of their mind-independent objects. There are two claims here: (i) introspection reveals the mind-independent objects of experience, and (ii) introspection does not reveal any features of anything else.

Transparency is similar to Ordinary Objects . The latter claim does involve something like (i). But it does not involve (ii). And it is not obvious that (ii) is part of our ordinary conception of perceptual experience. After all, we readily admit that an ordinary scene (e.g., a snow-covered churchyard) can look very different when one removes one’s glasses: one’s visual experience then becomes blurred. But this phenomenal difference does not seem to derive from any apparent difference in the objects of experience. Rather, it seems to be a difference in the way in which those objects are experienced. (See Tye (2000) and Gow (2019) for different responses. For further discussion, see Crane (2000), Smith (2008), Allen (2013), and French (2014). For a different challenge to (ii) and its ilk see Richardson (2010) and Soteriou (2013: Chapter 5), and French (2018)).

What, then, about the Structure Question? Strawson speaks of the manner in which we directly experience objects as a matter of “immediate consciousness”, and McDowell talks of our “openness” to objects. Other notions commonly invoked here include the idea that we are directly “acquainted” with objects, we directly “apprehend” them, they are “given” to us, or directly “present to the mind”. What these notions all aim to capture is the intuitive idea that perceptual experience of an object involves a special intimate perceptual relation to an object, a relation which differentiates perceptual experiences from non-perceptual states of mind which are similarly directed on the world (e.g., non-sensory, non-perceptual thoughts).

One function of this relation is to make objects present in such a way that they can shape or mould the character of one’s experience. In virtue of this, perceptions of the world are unlike (non-perceptual) thoughts about the world: they are constrained by the objects actually given. One’s perception of a snow-covered churchyard is responsive to how the churchyard is now, as one is perceiving it. But one’s (non-perceptual) thought need not be: in the middle of winter, one can imagine the churchyard as it is in spring, and one can think of it in all sorts of ways which are not the ways it presently is.

In what follows we will use the notion of perceptual presentation to capture this perceptual relation. We can thus highlight the following answer to the structure question:

  • Presentation : perceptual experiences are direct perceptual presentations of their objects.

In what follows, we use “direct presentation” for short.

Putting the pieces together, our ordinary conception of perceptual experience involves:

  • Direct Realist Presentation : perceptual experiences are direct perceptual presentations of ordinary objects .

If direct perceptual presentation of an ordinary object is a way of directly perceiving it, then this gives us:

  • Direct Realism : we can directly perceive ordinary objects.

We can now shed light on the phenomenal character of perceptual experience. Consider, then, the following question:

  • The Character Question: what determines the phenomenal character of experience?

We began with the basic phenomenological observation that perceptual experiences are directly of things. A similarly basic observation is that what it is like for us to experience is at least partly a matter of such things appearing certain ways to us. When we reflect upon what determines what it is like to have an experience, we naturally begin with what is presented to us, and how it is presented. This is why it is so natural for Strawson to describe his experience in terms of what he perceives, and for Martin to say that “our awareness of what an experience is like is inextricably bound up with knowledge of what is presented to one in having such experience” (1998: 173).

Further, when we reflect upon what determines what it is like for us to experience, we naturally begin with the ordinary objects that are presented to us, and how they are presented or appear. This is why it is so natural for Strawson to describe his experience in terms of such objects, and why many find (at least component (i) of) Transparency intuitive.

So, we can highlight the following answer to the Character Question:

  • Direct Realist Character: the phenomenal character of experience is determined, at least partly, by the direct presentation of ordinary objects.

Perceptual experiences are not just veridical experiences: there are illusions and hallucinations too. What does phenomenological reflection say about how these cases relate to each other? More specifically:

  • The Common Kind Question: are veridical, illusory, and hallucinatory experiences fundamentally the same, do they form of a common kind ?

In the context of the Problem of Perception, these cases are usually distinguished as follows: a veridical experience is an experience in which an ordinary object is perceived, and where the object appears as it is; an illusory experience is an experience in which an ordinary object is perceived, and where the object appears other than it is; a hallucination is an experience which seems to the subject exactly like a veridical perception of an ordinary object but where there is no such perceived or presented object. (For illusions and hallucinations which don’t fit these forms, see Johnston (2011), and Batty and Macpherson (2016)).

Clearly, there are differences between these categories, but from a phenomenological point of view, these experiences seem the same in at least this sense: for any veridical perception of an ordinary object, we can imagine a corresponding illusion or hallucination which cannot be told apart or distinguished, by introspection, from the veridical perception. This suggests the following answer to the Common Kind Question:

  • Common Kind Claim: veridical, illusory, and hallucinatory experiences (as) of an F are fundamentally the same; they form a common kind .

Thus, a veridical, illusory, and hallucinatory experience, all alike in being experiences (as) of a churchyard covered in white snow, are not merely superficially similar, they are fundamentally the same: these experiences have the same nature, fundamentally the same kind of experiential event is occurring in each case. Any differences between them are external to their nature as experiences (e.g., to do with how they are caused).

2. The Problem of Perception

The Problem of Perception is that if illusions and hallucinations are possible, then perceptual experience, as we ordinarily understand it, is impossible. The Problem is animated by two central arguments: the argument from illusion (§2.1) and the argument from hallucination (§2.2). (A similar problem arises with reference to other perceptual phenomena such as perspectival variation or conflicting appearances: see Burnyeat (1979) and the entry on sense-data). For some classic readings on these arguments, see Moore (1905, 1910); Russell (1912); Price (1932); Broad (1965); and Ayer (1940), see Swartz (1965) for a good collection of readings. And for more recent expositions see Snowdon (1992), Valberg (1992), Robinson (1994: Chapter 2), Smith (2002: Chapters 1 and 7), Martin (2006), Fish (2009: Chapter 2), Brewer (2011: Chapter 1) and Pautz (2021).

The two central arguments have a similar structure which we can capture as follows:

  • In an illusory/hallucinatory experience, a subject is not directly presented with an ordinary object.
  • The same account of experience must apply to veridical experiences as applies to illusory/hallucinatory experiences.
  • Subjects are never directly presented with ordinary objects.

(C) contradicts Direct Realist Presentation, and thus our ordinary conception of perceptual experience. And since Direct Realism seems to follow from Direct Realist Presentation, the argument challenges Direct Realism too (for more on this see §3.2.6 ).

Representing the arguments in this basic form enables us to highlight their two major movements; what Paul Snowdon calls the base case, and the spreading step (1992, 2005). In the base case a conclusion about just illusory/hallucinatory experiences is sought: (A). In the spreading step, (B), this result is generalised so as to get (C). This generalising move works on these background assumptions: (a1) that (B) yields the claim that one is not directly presented with ordinary objects in veridical experiences (given (A)), and (a2) if one is not directly presented with such objects in even veridical experiences, one never is.

We’ll look at more complex versions of the argument shortly. As we’ll see, the main burden on the arguer from illusion is in supporting the relevant version of (A), whereas the main burden on the arguer from hallucination is in defending the relevant version of (B).

Now, the argument here is purely negative. But many philosophers have moved from this to the further conclusion that since we are always directly presented with something in perceptual experience, what we are presented with is a “non-ordinary” object (see §3.1.2 ).

Applying the above structure, the argument from illusion is:

  • In illusory experiences, we are not directly presented with ordinary objects.
  • The same account of experience must apply to veridical experiences as applies to illusory experiences.
  • We are never directly presented with ordinary objects.

Moving beyond the simple formulation, the argument is typically presented as involving these steps, for an arbitrary subject S:

  • In an illusion, it seems to S that something has a sensible quality, F, which the ordinary object supposedly being perceived does not have.
  • When it seems to S that something has a sensible quality, F, then there is something directly presented to S which does have this quality.
  • Since the ordinary object in question is, by hypothesis, not-F, then it follows that in an illusion, S is not directly presented with the ordinary object supposedly being perceived.
  • The same account of experience must apply to both veridical and illusory experiences.
  • In veridical experience, S is not directly presented with the ordinary object supposedly being perceived.
  • If S is not directly presented with the ordinary object supposedly being perceived in veridical experience, S is never directly presented with an ordinary object.

The most controversial premise here is premise (ii). The others reflect intuitive ways of thinking about perceptual experience, or plausible assumptions. This is clear enough with (i) and (iv). Premise (i) articulates the operative conception of illusions. An example to illustrate is a case where a white wall looks yellow to you, in peculiar lighting (Smith (2002: 25)). And premise (vi) reflects the intuitive idea that if we aren’t directly presented with the ordinary objects we seem to perceive in veridical experiences, then we aren’t directly presented with ordinary objects at all. For it would be implausible to relinquish the idea that we are directly presented with the ordinary objects we seem to perceive in veridical experience, yet maintain that we can still somehow else be directly presented with ordinary objects, e.g., with the idea that hallucinations are direct presentations of ordinary objects, or with the idea that veridical experiences are direct presentations of ordinary objects just not those we seem to perceive.

But what about (iv)? On one way of interpreting this, it reflects the Common Kind Claim applied to veridical experiences and illusions. Furthermore, various authors hold that (iv) is supported by the continuity between veridical experiences and illusory experience (Price (1932: 32), Ayer (1940: 8–9), Broad (1952: 9), Robinson (1994: 57), Smith (2002: 26–28): the fact that they may form a “continuous series” in which they “shade into one another” (Ayer (1940: 8–9)). This, it is held, supports the idea that experiential differences between illusions and veridical perceptions are differences of “degree and not of kind” (Ayer (1940: 8)).

Premise (ii) is a version of what Robinson calls the Phenomenal Principle:

If there sensibly appears to a subject to be something which possesses a particular sensible quality then there is something of which the subject is aware which does possess that sensible quality (1994: 32).

C.D. Broad motivates this principle on explanatory grounds. In cases of perceptual experience things appear some ways rather than others to us. We need to explain this. Why does the penny look elliptical to you as opposed to some other shape? One answer is that there is something directly presented to you which is in fact elliptical. Thus, as Broad says “If, in fact, nothing elliptical is before my mind, it is very hard to understand why the penny should seem elliptical rather than of any other shape.” (1923: 240). Other philosophers have simply taken the principle to be obvious. H.H. Price, for example, says that “When I say ‘this table appears brown to me’ it is quite plain that I am acquainted with an actual instance of brownness” (1932: 63).

So much for the argument’s main premises. How is it supposed to work? Here we find the suggestion that it hinges on an application of Leibniz’s Law of the Indiscernibility of Identicals (Robinson (1994: 32); Smith (2002: 25)). The point is that (i) and (ii) tell us that in an illusory experience you are directly presented with an F thing, but the ordinary object supposedly being perceived is not F, thus the F thing and the ordinary object are not identical, by Leibniz’s Law. On these grounds, the conclusion of the base case is supposed to follow. And then the ultimate conclusion of the argument can be derived from its further premises.

But as French and Walters (2018) argue, this is invalid. (i), (ii) and Leibniz’s Law entail that in an illusory experience you are directly presented with an F thing which is non-identical to the ordinary object supposedly being perceived. However, this doesn’t entail that in the illusion you are not directly presented with the ordinary object. You might be directly presented with the ordinary object as well as the F thing. We should be careful to distinguish not being directly presented with the ordinary object from being directly presented with something which is not the ordinary object (e.g., between not being directly presented with the white wall, and being directly presented with something that is not the white wall, e.g., a yellow entity). The argument is invalid in conflating these two ideas.

One option for fixing the argument is to introduce what French and Walters call the Exclusion Assumption (cf., Snowdon (1992: 74)): If in an illusion of an ordinary object as F, a subject is directly presented with an F thing non-identical to the ordinary object, then they are not also directly presented with the ordinary object.

This assumption bridges the gap between the conclusion actually achieved: namely, in an illusory experience S is directly presented with an F thing non-identical to the ordinary object, and the desired conclusion (iii). But whether this assumption is defensible remains to be seen. We leave this and the issue of validity aside and consider responses from different theories of experience below.

2.2 The Argument From Hallucination

The argument from hallucination relies on the possibility of hallucinations as understood above. Such hallucinations are not like real drug-induced hallucinations or hallucinations suffered by those with certain mental disorders. They are rather supposed to be merely possible events. For example, suppose you are now having a veridical perception of a snow-covered churchyard. The assumption that hallucinations are possible means that you could have an experience which is subjectively indistinguishable—that is, indistinguishable by you, “from the inside”—from a veridical perception of a snow-covered churchyard, but where there is in fact no churchyard presented or there to be perceived. The claim that such hallucinations are possible is widely accepted but not indisputable (see Austin (1962) and Masrour (2020)). For more on hallucinations, see Macpherson and Platchias (2013).

The argument from hallucination runs as follows:

  • In hallucinatory experiences, we are not directly presented with ordinary objects
  • The same account of experience must apply to veridical experiences as applies to hallucinatory experiences.

Unlike with the argument from illusion, the base case doesn’t rely on the Phenomenal Principle: (A) simply falls out of what hallucinations are supposed to be.

The spreading step can be interpreted in terms of the Common Kind Claim , applied to veridical experiences and hallucinations. Accepting (B) understood in this way puts a constraint on what can be said about the nature of veridical experience: whatever can be said had better be able to apply to hallucinations too. The argument is that, given (A), this then rules out an account of veridical experiences as direct presentations of ordinary objects. But then (C) follows (given that if we are not directly presented with ordinary objects in veridical experience, we never are).

With the argument understood in this way, we can see the power of the Problem of Perception. (A) is intuitive, and (B) is part of our ordinary conception of perceptual experience, yet what follows, (C), contradicts another aspect of our ordinary conception ( Direct Realist Presentation ). Thus, the very intelligibility of our ordinary conception of perceptual experience is threatened.

Now it might be argued that the Common Kind Claim applied to veridical perceptions and hallucinations is not as plausible as it is when applied to veridical perceptions and illusions. For veridical and illusory experiences are more naturally grouped together anyway, unlike veridical perceptions and hallucinations. For, at least before we encounter the argument from illusion, veridical perceptions and illusions are both naturally thought of as direct presentations of ordinary objects (it’s just that in illusory cases the presented objects appear other than they are). However, as noted above, from a phenomenological point of view, hallucinations too seem as though they are direct presentations of ordinary objects: from the subject’s perspective a hallucination as of an F cannot be distinguished from a veridical experience of an F. This is why it seems so plausible to think of them as fundamentally the same.

Even so, the Common Kind Claim applied to veridical perceptions and hallucinations is controversial, and rejecting it is central to the disjunctivist response to the Problem of Perception that we will consider later ( §3.4 ).

3. Theories of Experience

A number of philosophical theories of experience have emerged as responses to the Problem of Perception, or in relation to such responses. Here we consider the sense-datum theory ( §3.1 ), adverbialism ( §3.2 ), intentionalism ( §3.3 ), and naive realist disjunctivism ( §3.4 ). In this exposition we do not consider much the possibility of hybrid views. The way these positions relate to the Problem of Perception is mapped most clearly in Martin (1995, 1998, 2000).

We present these theories as operating on two levels. On Level 1, they tell us about the nature of experience. With the exception of adverbialism (for reasons that will emerge shortly), this can be investigated by considering the stance of each theory on the nature of the objects of experience, and the structure of our experience of objects. On Level 2, they tell us how what is said at the first level bears on the explanation of the character of experience. We also consider how each theory addresses the common kind question.

In what follows, we’ll work with the example of a visual experience of a snow-covered churchyard. To simplify, we will discuss the character of this experience in terms of one aspect of it: things looking white to a subject. The question at Level 1 is: what is the nature of such an experience? Does it involve the direct presentation of objects, or not? If so, what sorts of objects? If not, how are we to understand the nature of this experience? The question at Level 2 is: what is it about the nature of this experience that explains why things look any way at all to someone, and why they look, specifically, white?

3.1 The Sense-Datum Theory

What does the sense-datum theorist say at Level 1? On this theory, whenever a subject has a sensory experience, there is something which is presented to them. This relational conception of experience is sometimes called an “act-object” conception, since it posits a distinction between the mental act of being presented with something, and the object presented. More precisely, the sense-datum theorist holds that an experience in which something appears F to S, where F is a sensible quality (e.g., whiteness), consists in S being directly presented with something which actually is F (e.g. a white thing). They thus endorse the aforementioned Phenomenal Principle . The sense-datum theorist calls these objects of perception “sense-data”.

Understood in this way, a sense-datum is just whatever it is that you are directly presented with that instantiates the sensible qualities which characterise the character of your experience. This involves no further claim about the nature of sense-data, though as we’ll see shortly, sense-datum theorists do go on to make further claims about the nature of sense-data.

What about Level 2? With respect to our example, the sense-datum theorist claims that things appearing any way at all to you consists in the fact that you are directly presented with a sense-datum, and things appearing white to you consists in the fact that you are directly presented with a white sense-datum. The character of your experience is explained by an actual instance of whiteness manifesting itself in experience.

The sense-datum theorist endorses the Common Kind Claim . So, a veridical experience in which something appears white to you consists in your being directly presented with a white sense-datum; but so do corresponding illusory and hallucinatory experiences. These experiences have the same nature.

The sense-datum theorist endorses the following negative claim:

They accept this on the basis of the arguments from illusion and hallucination. However, the intended contrast with Direct Realist Presentation usually involves a stronger claim:

  • We are only ever directly presented with sense-data , which are non-ordinary objects.

This involves a positive claim about what we are directly presented with, given that we are never directly presented with ordinary objects. And it embeds a claim about the nature of sense-data that goes beyond that outlined above: now sense-data are understood as non-ordinary objects.

Sense-datum theorists divide over exactly how to understand sense-data insofar as they are non-ordinary. Some early sense-datum theorists (such as Moore) initially took sense-data to be mind-independent, but peculiar non-physical objects. Later theorists treat sense-data as mind-dependent entities (Robinson (1994)). This is how the theory tends to be understood in literature from second half of the 20th century on.

Sense-datum theorists have developed more positive Problem of Perception style reasoning to support these additional ideas. For instance, Macpherson (2013: 12–13) outlines a more complicated version of the argument from hallucination than that above which concludes that “All perceptual experience, hallucinatory and non-hallucinatory, involves awareness of a mind-dependent, nonphysical object—a sense-datum”. And some sense-datum theorists have attempted to support non-ordinary sense-data outside of the context of the Problem of Perception (see Jackson (1977) and Lowe (1992)).

From now on when we speak of “sense-data” we will mean non-ordinary sense-data, and when we speak of the “sense-datum theory” we have in mind a theory that endorses not just (1) but (2).

3.1.3 The Sense-Datum Theory and Our Ordinary Conception of Perceptual Experience

The sense-datum theorist agrees with some aspects of our ordinary conception of perceptual experience. They endorse the Common Kind Claim . They also endorse Presentation – the idea that the direct objects of experience are perceptually presented to us. It’s just that they don’t agree that the direct objects of experience are ordinary objects – they are non-ordinary sense-data. They thus reject Ordinary Objects , and hence Direct Realist Presentation , and Direct Realist Character .

Is the sense-datum theory a theory on which we completely lose contact with the world, a theory on which we cannot perceive the world?

Though it is possible for a sense-datum theorist to accept this, a more popular position has been one on which we still have some form of perception of the world, just not direct perception. That is, the sense-datum theorist can say that we indirectly perceive ordinary objects: we perceive them by being directly presented with sense-data. A sense-datum theorist who says this is known as an indirect realist or representative realist (see the entry on epistemological problems of perception ). The task for such a sense-datum theorist is to spell out how the direct presentation of sense-data can lead to indirect perception of ordinary objects. This is something early sense-datum theorists pursued by asking how sense-data are related to ordinary objects. A theorist who denies that we perceive mind-independent objects at all, directly or indirectly, but only sense-data construed as mental entities, is known as a phenomenalist or an idealist (see Foster (2000), see Crane and Farkas (2004: Section 2) for an introduction to the subject; and the entry on idealism ).

The sense-datum theory was widely rejected in the second half of the 20th century, though it still had its occasional champions (e.g., Jackson (1977), O’Shaughnessy (2000, 2003), Lowe (1992), Robinson (1994), Foster (2000)). A number of objections have been made to the theory. Some of these are objections specifically to the indirect realist version: for example, the claim that the theory gives rise to an unacceptable “veil of perception” between mind and world. The idea is that sense-data “interpose” themselves between perceivers and ordinary objects, and therefore problematise our perceptual, cognitive, and epistemic access to the world. In response, the indirect realist can say that sense-data are the medium by which we perceive ordinary objects, and no more create a “veil of perception” than the fact that we use words to talk about things creates a “veil of words” between us and what we talk about. (For recent discussion see Silins (2011)).

A common objection is to attack the Phenomenal Principle (see Barnes (1944–5); Anscombe (1965)). The objection is that the Phenomenal Principle is fallacious. It is not built into the meaning of “something appears F to one” that “one is directly presented with an F thing”. Defenders of the sense-datum theory can respond that the Phenomenal Principle is not supposed to be a purely logical inference; it is not supposed to be true simply because of the logical form or semantic structure of “appears” and similar locutions. Rather, it is true because of specific phenomenological facts about perceptual experience. But this just means that theorists who reject the Phenomenal Principle are not disagreeing about whether the Phenomenal Principle involves a fallacy or about some semantic issue, but rather about the nature of experience itself.

Another influential objection to sense-data comes from the prevailing naturalism of contemporary philosophy. Naturalism (or physicalism) says that the world is entirely physical in its nature: everything there is supervenes on the physical, and is governed by physical law. Many sense-datum theorists are committed to the claim that non-ordinary sense-data are mind-dependent: objects whose existence depends on the existence of states of mind. Is this consistent with naturalism? If so, the challenge is to explain how an object can be brought into existence by the existence of an experience, and how this is supposed to be governed by physical law.

Many contemporary sense-datum theorists, however, will not be moved by this challenge, since they are happy to accept the rejection of naturalism as a consequence of their theory (Robinson (1994), Foster (2000)). On the other hand, one might think that there is no conflict here with naturalism, as long as experiences themselves are part of the natural order. But if sense-data are non-ordinary in being mind-independent but non-physical , then it is much less clear how naturalism can be maintained (cf., what Martin (2004, 2006) calls “experiential naturalism” which serves as a constraint on theories of experience and rules out some but not all forms of the sense-datum theory).

For other objections to the sense-datum theory, including the worry that it must admit “indeterminate” sense-data (e.g., on the basis of seeing a speckled hen, which appears to have a number of speckles but no definite number), see the entry on sense-data .

3.2 Adverbialism

Part of the point of adverbialism, as defended by Ducasse (1942) and Chisholm (1957) is to do justice to the phenomenology of experience whilst avoiding the dubious metaphysical commitments of the sense-datum theory. The only entities which the adverbialist needs to acknowledge are subjects of experience, experiences themselves, and ways these experiences are modified. Let us explain.

At Level 1, the adverbialist rejects the Phenomenal Principle and the whole idea that experience consists in being directly presented with perceptible entities. For the adverbialist, when someone has an experience of something white, something like whiteness is instantiated, but in the experience itself, not a presented thing. This is not to say that the experience is white, but rather that the experience is modified in a certain way , the way we can call “perceiving whitely”. The canonical descriptions of perceptual experiences, then, employ adverbial modifications of the perceptual verbs: instead of describing an experience as someone’s “visually sensing a white sphere”, the theory says that they are “visually sensing whitely and spherely”. This is why this theory is called the “adverbial theory”; but it is important to emphasize that it is more a theory about the nature of experience itself than it is a semantic analysis of sentences describing experience.

It is also intended as a theory of the character of experience (Level 2). The adverbialist claims that things appearing white to you consists in you sensing whitely . It is because you are sensing in some way that explains why things appear a certain way to you at all, and it is the fact that you are sensing whitely that explains why things appear white to you, rather than some other way. The character of your experience is explained by the specific “white” way in which your experience is modified.

The adverbialist endorses the Common Kind Claim . So, a veridical experience in which something appears white to you, consists in you sensing whitely, but so do corresponding illusory and hallucinatory experiences: these experiences have the same nature.

3.2.2 Adverbialism and Qualia

When used in a broad way, “qualia” picks out whatever qualities a state of mind has which constitute the state of mind’s having the phenomenal character it has. In this broad sense, any phenomenally conscious state of mind has qualia. (This is the way the term is used in, e.g., Chalmers (1996)). Used in a narrow way, however, qualia are non-intentional, intrinsic properties of experience: properties which have no intentional or representational aspects whatsoever. To use Gilbert Harman’s apt metaphor, qualia in this sense are “mental paint” properties (1990). Harman rejects mental paint, but the idea of experience as involving mental paint is defended by Block (2004)).

It is relatively uncontroversial to say that there are qualia in the broad sense. It can be misleading, however, to use the term in this way, since it can give rise to the illusion that the existence of qualia is a substantial philosophical thesis when in fact it is something which will be accepted by anyone who believes in phenomenal character. (Hence Dennett’s (1991) denial of qualia can seem bewildering if “qualia” is taken in the broad sense). It is controversial to say that there are qualia in the narrow sense, though, and those who have asserted their existence have therefore provided arguments and thought-experiments to defend this assertion (see Block (1997), Peacocke (1983: Chapter 1), Shoemaker (1990)). In what follows, “qualia” will be used exclusively in the narrow sense.

As noted, adverbialism is committed to the view that experiencing something white, for example, involves your experience being modified in a certain way: experiencing whitely. A natural way to understand this is in terms of the idea that the experience is an event, and the modification of it is a property of that event. Since this property is both intrinsic (as opposed to relational or representational) and phenomenal then this way of understanding adverbialism is committed to the existence of qualia.

An important objection to adverbialism is the “Many Property Problem” proposed by Frank Jackson (1975). Consider someone who senses a brown square and a green triangle simultaneously. The adverbialist will characterize this state of mind as “sensing brownly and squarely and greenly and triangularly”. But how can they distinguish the state of mind they are describing in this way from that of sensing a brown triangle and a green square? The characterization fits that state of mind equally well. Obviously, what is wanted is a description according to which the brownness “goes with” the squareness, and the greenness “goes with” the triangularity. But how is the adverbialist to do this without introducing objects of experience—the things which are brown and green respectively—or a visual field with a spatial structure? The challenge is whether the adverbialist can properly account for the spatial structure and complexity in what is given in visual experience. See Tye (1984), Breckenridge (2018: Chapter 10), and D’Ambrosio (2019) for adverbialist responses to this challenge. For a helpful overview, see Fish (2010: Chapter 3).

A further challenge is that adverbialism is “incapable of doing justice to the most obvious and indeed essential phenomenological fact about perceptual consciousness… namely… its object-directness” (Butchvarov (1980: 272)). Recall here the basic phenomenological observation we began with: perceptual experiences are directly of things.

As we’ve seen, at Level 1, the adverbialist denies that perceptual experiences are direct presentations of objects. And at Level 2, in explaining character, the adverbialist assigns no role to the direct presentation of things, just ways of sensing. But then if it is an aspect of the phenomenology of experience that our experiences have direct objects, then it is not clear that the adverbialist has the resources to capture this. For the adverbialist, to capture your experience of a snow-covered churchyard we invoke seeing whitely not seeing a white thin g. How, then, can we explain why phenomenologically , your experience is directly of a white thing – or even why it seems to be object-directed in this way? Butchvarov’s charge is that the adverbialist doesn’t have the resources to answer these questions. (See D’Ambrosio (2019) for a recent adverbialist attempt to capture something like object-directness).

The argument from illusion relies on the Phenomenal Principle . In rejecting this, the adverbialist thus rejects the argument. But what about the argument from hallucination? This does not rely on the Phenomenal Principle. The adverbialist accepts (A). And they also accept (B) in the form of the Common Kind Claim . (C) follows (given assumptions (a1) and (a2)). For this reason, the adverbialist must reject Direct Realist Presentation . So, like the sense-datum theorist, the adverbialist must admit that we are never directly presented with ordinary objects, not even in veridical experience.

3.2.5 Adverbialism and our Ordinary Conception of Perceptual Experience

Like the sense-datum theorist, though the adverbialist accepts some of our ordinary conception of perceptual experience (the Common Kind Claim ), they reject other aspects of it. The argument from hallucination forces them to reject Direct Realist Presentation (and therefore Direct Realist Character ). Underlying this is the adverbialist’s rejection of Presentation , and arguably Ordinary Objects too. They reject Presentation in denying that experiences have a relational structure. And given our discussion of Butchvarov’s challenge, it seems as though they must reject (or at least don’t have the resources to accept) Ordinary Objects . For it is unclear how they can validate the phenomenological claim that experiences are of objects, let alone directly of ordinary objects.

So, even though adverbialism arises as a response to the sense-datum theory, given its almost wholesale rejection of our ordinary conception of perceptual experience, it is unclear how much of an improvement the approach is in the broader dialectic of the Problem of Perception.

One response to this is that we should not suppose that the only way to articulate direct realism is through the claim we’ve labelled Direct Realist Presentation . There is another way to articulate it which, it might be suggested, enables the adverbialist to account for direct perception of the world. Consider, then:

  • Direct Realist Presentation : perceptual experiences are direct perceptual presentations of ordinary objects.

This entails Direct Realism – that we can directly perceive ordinary objects – on the assumption that being directly perceptually presented with an ordinary object is a way of directly perceiving it. On this way of thinking, direct perception of an ordinary object is built into perceptual experience itself. However, one might reject this claim about experience (as adverbialists do), and still hold that we can have direct perception of an ordinary object. How?

Instead of thinking of direct perception of the world as built into experience, we can think of direct perception of the world as built out of experience together with the satisfaction of other conditions. This idea is usually developed through a causal theory of perception (Grice 1961): where perception of an object is analysed in terms of (i) experience of an ordinary object (conceived as something which is not sufficient for perception), and (ii) the satisfaction of a causal condition which requires that the experience be caused by the object (in a non-deviant way). This is a causal theory of direct perception on the assumption that the account doesn’t involve any perceptual intermediaries.

The adverbialist might suggest that they can embrace this: by combining their theory of experience with a causal analysis of direct perception. Thus, they can hold that when you have an experience of a snow-covered churchyard, if this experience is appropriately caused by an ordinary white thing (e.g., some snow), this is what directly perceiving such an object amounts to (given that no perceptual intermediaries are involved).

However, whether the adverbialist is entitled to this way of making sense of direct perceptual contact with the world hinges on whether they can make sense of the idea of an experience of an ordinary object . But as we have seen in considering Butchvarov’s challenge, it is unclear whether the adverbialist can do this. It is thus unclear whether the adverbialist can really make sense of clause (i).

In response, the adverbialist might offer a causal analysis of experiences being of objects. They might thus attempt to fall back on the idea that an experience in which you sense whitely is an experience “of” a white thing insofar as it is causally related to a white thing (or, insofar as it is of a type, instances of which are typically caused by white things). However, as Butchvarov argues, the fact that “x is causally related to S’s sensing in a certain way can no more reasonably be described as S’s being conscious of [i.e. having a conscious experience of] x than the fact that the presence of carbon monoxide in the air is causally related to S’s having a headache can be described as S’s being conscious of [having a conscious experience of] carbon monoxide” (1980: 273).

Even if the adverbialist is able to sustain such a causal form of direct realism, it is very different from the phenomenological form of direct realism embedded in our ordinary conception of perceptual experience. It is thus unlikely to satisfy a direct realist sensitive to the phenomenological concerns which give rise to our ordinary conception of perceptual experience.

3.3 Intentionalism

The intentionalist holds that we directly experience ordinary objects. The distinguishing feature of the view is a specific conception of the manner in which experiences are directly of ordinary objects: here the intentionalist appeals to intentionality conceived of as a form of mental representation (hence it is also sometimes called the representationalist theory of experience). “Intentionality” is a term with its origins in scholastic philosophy (see Crane (1998b)), but its current use derives from Brentano (1874), who introduced the term “intentional inexistence” for the “mind’s direction upon its objects”. Intentional inexistence, or intentionality, is sometimes explained as the “aboutness” of mental states (see the entries on Franz Brentano , representational theories of consciousness and intentionality ).

At Level 1, then, the intentionalist holds that to experience a snow-covered churchyard is to directly perceptually represent such an object (i.e. to represent such an object but not in virtue of representing another more “immediate” object). At Level 2, this is put to work in explaining phenomenal character. In relation to our example, why is this a case of things appearing any way at all to you, and why is it a case of things appearing white to you? Here the intentionalist appeals to the experience’s directly representing things in a certain way, and specifically to experience’s directly representing whiteness in the environment, to account for this. The character of your experience is explained by the specific way in which your experience directly represents the world.

Critics of intentionalism have argued that it does not adequately distinguish perceptual experience from other forms of intentionality, and therefore does not manage to capture what is distinctive about experience (Robinson (1994: 164)). One objection of this kind is that the aforementioned intentionalist explanation of character is inadequate. The worry is that believing that something is the case, for example, or hoping that something is the case, are both forms of mental representation, but neither state of mind has any “feel” or phenomenal character to call its own. (Words or images may come to mind when mentally representing something in this way, but it is not obvious that these are essential to the states of mind themselves.) So, the challenge is that if there is nothing about representation as such which explains the character of an experience, how is experience supposed to be distinguished from mere thought?

There are a number of ways an intentionalist can respond. One is simply to take it as a basic fact about perceptual intentionality that it has phenomenal character (see Kriegel (2013)). After all, even those who believe in qualia have to accept that some states of mind have qualia and some do not, and that at some point the distinction between mental states which are phenomenally conscious, and those which are not, just has to be accepted as a brute fact. Another response is to say that in order to fully explain the phenomenal character of perceptual experience, we need to treat experience as involving non-intentional qualia as well as intentionality (see Peacocke (1983: Chapter 1); Shoemaker (1996); Block (1997)). There is, accordingly, a dispute between these intentionalists who accept qualia (like Block and Shoemaker) and those who don’t (like Harman (1990) or Tye (1992)). (For more on this see the entries on qualia and inverted qualia . Additional readings are: Block (2005) (2010), Egan (2006), Hilbert and Kalderon (2000), Marcus (2006), Shoemaker (1990), Speaks (2015), Spener (2003), and Tye (2000)).

Intentionalists endorse the Common Kind Claim . So, a veridical experience of churchyard covered in white snow, consists in direct representation of such a scene, but so do corresponding illusory and hallucinatory experiences: these experiences have the same nature.

Like adverbialists, the intentionalist has no need to postulate non-ordinary perceptible entities in the cases of illusion and hallucination. It is not generally true that when a representation represents something (as being F), there has to actually be something (which is F). Thus, for the intentionalist, experience is representational in a way that contrasts with it being relational/presentational. Experience does not genuinely have an act-object structure. This is in keeping with a standard tradition in the theory of intentionality which treats it as non-relational (the tradition derives from Husserl (1900/1901); for discussion see Zahavi (2003: 13–27). So, for the intentionalist, since it is not of the essence of experience or its character that it is relational, it is not of its essence that it is a relation to a sense-datum.

Some of the most influential (at least partial) intentional theories are Anscombe (1965), Armstrong (1968), Pitcher (1970), Peacocke (1983), Harman (1990), Tye (1992, 1995), Dretske (1995), Lycan (1996); for more recent accounts, see Byrne (2001), Siegel (2010), Pautz (2010) and the entry on the contents of perception .

Within analytic philosophy, intentionalism is a generalisation of an idea presented by G.E.M. Anscombe (1965), and the “belief theories” of D.M. Armstrong (1968) and George Pitcher (1970). (Within the phenomenological tradition intentionality and perception had always been discussed together: see the entry on phenomenology. ) Anscombe had drawn attention to the fact that perceptual verbs satisfy the tests for non-extensionality or intensionality (see the entry on intensional transitive verbs ). For example, just as ‘Vladimir is thinking about Pegasus’ is an intensional context, so ‘Vladimir has an experience as of a pink elephant in the room’ is an intensional context. In neither case can we infer that there exists something Vladimir is thinking about, or that there is exists something he is experiencing. This is the typical manifestation of intensionality. Anscombe regarded the error of sense-datum and naive realist theories as the failure to recognise this intensionality. (Her own example was the alleged intensionality of ‘see’, but this is controversial.)

Armstrong and Pitcher argued that perception is a form of belief. (More precisely, they argued that it is the acquisition of a belief, since an acquisition is a conscious event, as perceiving is; rather than a state or condition, as belief is.) Belief is an intentional state in the sense that it represents the world to be a certain way, and the way it represents the world to be is said to be its intentional content. Perception, it was argued, is similarly a representation of the world, and the way it represents the world to be is likewise its intentional content. The fact that someone can have a perceptual experience of something as F, without there being any thing which is F was taken as a reason for saying that perception is just a form of belief-acquisition.

Certain cases put pressure on this. For instance, consider the famous Müller-Lyer illusion in which two lines of equal length look unequal. You can experience this even if you know (and therefore believe) that the lines are the same length. If perception were simply the acquisition of belief, then this would be a case of explicitly contradictory beliefs: you believe that the lines are the same length and that they are different lengths. But this is surely not the right way to describe this situation. (Armstrong recognized this, and re-described perception as a “potential belief”; this marks a significant retreat from the original claim).

The belief theory (and related theories, like the judgement theory of Craig (1976)) is a specific version of the intentional theory. But it is not the most widely accepted version (though see Glüer (2009) for a recent defence; and Byrne (forthcoming)). Intentionalism is, however, not committed to the view that perceptual experience is belief; experience can be a sui generis kind of intentional state or event (Martin (1993)).

Intentionalists hold that what is in common between veridical experiences and indistinguishable hallucinations/illusions is their intentional content : roughly speaking, how the world is represented as being by the experiences. Many intentionalists hold that the sameness of phenomenal character in perception and hallucination/illusion is exhausted or constituted by this sameness in content (see Tye (2000), Byrne (2001)). But this latter claim is not essential to intentionalism (see the discussion of intentionalism and qualia above). What is essential is that the intentional content of perception explains (whether wholly or partly) its phenomenal character.

The intentional content of perceptual experience is sometimes called “perceptual content” (see the entry on the contents of perception ). What is perceptual content? A standard approach to intentionality treats all intentional states as propositional attitudes: states which are ascribed by sentences of the form “S ___ that p” where ‘S’ is to be replaced by a term for a subject, ‘p’ with a sentence, and the ‘___’ with a psychological verb. The distinguishing feature of the propositional attitudes is that their content—how they represent the world to be—is something which is assessable as true or false. Hence the canonical form of ascriptions of perceptual experiences is: “S perceives/experiences that p”. Perceptual experience, on this kind of intentionalist view, is a propositional attitude (see Byrne (2001), Siegel (2010)).

But intentionalism is not committed to the view that experience is a propositional attitude. For one thing, it is controversial whether all intentional states are propositional attitudes (see Crane (2001: Chapter 4)). Among the intentional phenomena there are relations like love and hate which do not have propositional content; and there are also non-relational states expressed by the so-called “intensional transitive” verbs like seek, fear, expect (see the entry on intensional transitive verbs ). All these states of mind have contents which are not, on the face of it, assessable as true or false. If I am seeking a bottle of inexpensive Burgundy, what I am seeking—the intentional content of my seeking, or the intentional object under a certain mode of presentation—is not something true or false. Some argue that these intentional relations and intentional transitives are analysable or reducible to propositional formulations (see Larson (2003) for an attempt to defend this view of intensional transitives; and Sainsbury (2010) for a less radical defence). But the matter is controversial; and it is especially controversial where experience is concerned. For we have many ways of talking about experience which do not characterize its content in propositional terms: for example, “Vladimir sees a snail on the grass”, or “Vladimir is watching a snail on the grass” can be distinguished from the propositional formulation “Vladimir sees that there is a snail on the grass” (for discussion of watching, see Crowther 2009).

There are those who follow Dretske (1969) in claiming that these semantical distinctions express an important distinction between “epistemic” and “non-epistemic” seeing. However, the view that perceptual content is non-propositional is not the same as the view that it is “non-epistemic” in Dretske’s sense. For ascriptions of non-epistemic seeing are intended to be fully extensional in their object positions, but not all non-propositional descriptions of perception need be (for example, some have argued that “Macbeth saw a dagger before him” does not entail “there is a dagger which Macbeth saw”: cf. Anscombe (1965)). The question of whether perceptual experience has a propositional content is far from being settled, even for those who think it has intentional content (see McDowell (2008); Crane (2009)).

Another debate about the content of perceptual experience is whether it is object-dependent, or object-independent (see Soteriou (2000) and Schellenberg (2018: Part II); and for a more general discussion, see Chalmers (2006)). An object-dependent content is a content which concerns a particular object, and is such that it cannot be the content of a state of mind unless that object exists (McDowell (1987) and Brewer (1999)). An object-independent content is one whose ability to be the content of any intentional state is not dependent on the existence of any particular object (Davies (1992) and McGinn (1989)).

The intentionalist holds that the content that is common to veridical experiences and subjectively indistinguishable hallucinations is object-independent: since such hallucinations occur in the absence of objects for such content to depend upon. However, as Martin (2002b) argues, drawing on (Burge 1991), the intentionalist can still appeal to the idea that particular veridical experiences have particular object-dependent contents in addition to the object-independent contents they share with subjectively indistinguishable hallucinations.

The objects of intentional states are sometimes called “intentional objects” (Crane (2001: Chapter 1)). What are the intentional objects of perceptual experience, according to intentionalists? In the case of veridical perception, the answer is simple: ordinary objects like the churchyard, the snow etc. But what should be said about the hallucinatory case? Since this case is by definition one in which there is no ordinary object being perceived, how can we even talk about something being an “object of experience” here? As noted above, intentionalists say that experiences are representations; and one can represent what does not exist (see Harman (1990), Tye (1992)). This is certainly true; but isn’t there any more to be said? For how does a representation of a non-existent churchyard differ from a representation of a non-existent cat, say, when one of those is hallucinated? The states seem to have different objects; but neither of these objects exist (see the entry nonexistent-objects ).

One proposal is that the objects of hallucinatory experience are the properties which the hallucinated object is presented as having (Johnston (2004)). Another answer is to say that these hallucinatory states of mind have intentional objects which do not exist (Smith (2002: Chapter 9)). Intentional objects in this sense are not supposed to be entities or things of any kind. When we talk about perception and its “objects” in this context, we mean the word in the way it occurs in the phrase “object of thought” or “object of attention” and not as it occurs in the phrase “physical object”. An intentional object is always an object for a subject, and this is not a way of classifying things in reality. An intentionalist need not be committed to intentional objects in this sense; but if they are not, then they owe an account of the content of hallucinatory experiences.

How does the content of perceptual experience differ from the content of other intentional states? According to some intentionalists, one main difference is that perception has “non-conceptual” content. The basic idea is that experience involves a form of mental representation which is in certain ways less sophisticated than the representation involved in (say) belief. For example, having the belief that the churchyard is covered in snow requires that you have the concept of a churchyard. This is what it means to say that belief has conceptual content: to have the belief with the content that a is F requires that you possess the concept a and the concept F. So, to say that experience has non-conceptual content is to say the following: for you to have an experience with the content that a is F does not require that you have the concept of a and the concept F. The idea is that your perceptual experience can represent the world as being a certain way—the “a is F” way—even if you do not have the concepts that would be involved in believing that a is F. (For a more detailed version of this definition, see Crane (1998a) and Cussins (1990); for a different way of understanding the idea of non-conceptual content, see Heck (2000) and Speaks (2005). The idea of non-conceptual content derives from Evans (1982); there are some similar ideas in Dretske (1981); see Gunther (2002) for a collection of articles on this subject. Other support for non-conceptual content can be found in Bermúdez (1997); Peacocke (1992); Crowther (2006); for opposition see Brewer (1999) and McDowell (1994)).

The intentionalist rejects the argument from illusion as it hinges on the Phenomenal Principle which they reject. For the intentionalist, an illusory experience in which you see a white wall as yellow is not a case in which you are directly presented with a yellow sense-datum, but a case in which a white wall is directly represented as being yellow.

However, the intentionalist must accept the argument from hallucination. They accept (A), and they also accept (B) in the form of the Common Kind Claim . (C) follows (given (a1) and (a2)). Thus, like sense-datum theorists and adverbialists, intentionalists reject Direct Realist Presentation , and admit that we are not ever directly presented with ordinary objects, not even in veridical experience.

In response to this, the intentionalist can suggest that although they reject Direct Realist Presentation , they do not reject Direct Realism . They can suggest that the former is not the only way to understand the latter. As we saw above, another way to understand Direct Realism is with a causal understanding of direct perception.

As we noted above, it is unclear whether the adverbialist is entitled to this, since it is unclear how the adverbialist can make sense of the object-directedness of experience. But the intentionalist doesn’t face this problem. The object-directedness of experience is at the heart of their approach. Even though intentionalism denies that experiences involve the direct presentation of ordinary objects, it (a) respects and is motivated by the phenomenological observation that experiences are directly of ordinary objects, and (b) offers an alternative account of the manner in which experiences are directly of ordinary objects. As we’ve seen, instead of presentation, the intentionalist appeals to representation.

Thus, the intentionalist can maintain that when you see a snow-covered churchyard for what it is you do directly perceive a snow-covered churchyard. This is not because your experience itself directly presents you with a snow-covered churchyard. It doesn’t. After all, your experience is of such a kind that it could occur in a hallucination, where it wouldn’t directly present any ordinary object. It is rather because your experience directly perceptually represents the presence of a snow-covered churchyard and is non-deviantly caused by the churchyard in question. This is what direct perception amounts to for the intentionalist

A concern about adverbialism that we raised above, from the perspective of one who wants to uphold our ordinary conception of perceptual experience, is that (a) it rejects our ordinary conception of perceptual experience almost wholesale , and (b) adverbialist causal direct realism, even if it could be made to work, doesn’t seem to compensate for that: it isn’t sensitive enough to the phenomenological concerns that motivate our ordinary conception of perceptual experience. In contrast, intentionalism seems to fare better on both scores.

First, strictly speaking, the intentionalist must reject our ordinary conception of perceptual experience. Even though they accept the Common Kind Claim , they reject Direct Realist Presentation . Underlying this is not rejection of Ordinary Objects but of Presentation . But even here, their rejection of Presentation is not too radical. For intentionalists can say that experiences are quasi -presentational. The appeal to representation enables this. For when you directly perceptually represent the snow-covered churchyard, it certainly seems to you as if a churchyard is directly present to you, even if it is not (as you are, say, hallucinating). As we noted above, it is not clear from the resources the adverbialist offers how they can account for how it even seems as if an object is present to you. How does perceiving whitely make it seem as if a white thing is present to you?

Similarly, though strictly speaking the intentionalist must reject Direct Realist Character , the departure from this is not too radical. For instead, the intentionalist holds that the character of experience is determined, at least partly, by the direct perceptual representation of ordinary objects. It is not as if ordinary objects and their apparent presence drops out of the picture on the intentionalist account of phenomenal character. The account is similar to Direct Realist Character , just stripped of the genuine relationality.

Finally, the causal direct realist story that the intentionalist offers is intelligible in the way that it arguably isn’t for the adverbialist. And although it invokes causal notions, this is not to the exclusion of a core phenomenological understanding of direct experience of an object, which the intentionalist accounts for with the notion of direct perceptual representation.

Intentionalism, then, is a Direct Realist theory which upholds some of our ordinary conception of perceptual experience, and insofar as it rejects aspects of our ordinary conception, it does so in a non-radical way, sensitive to the phenomenological concerns that motivate this conception in the first place.

3.4 Naive Realist Disjunctivism

Consider the veridical experiences involved in cases where you genuinely perceive objects as they actually are. At Level 1, naive realists hold that such experiences are, at least in part, direct presentations of ordinary objects. At Level 2, the naive realist holds that things appear a certain way to you because you are directly presented with aspects of the world, and – in the case we are focusing on – things appear white to you, because you are directly presented with some white snow. The character of your experience is explained by an actual instance of whiteness manifesting itself in experience.

Naive realists thus assign an important explanatory role to the world itself in explaining the character of veridical experiences. But this doesn’t mean that they are committed to the idea that such character is fully explained or exhausted by the presented world. Naive realists admit that even holding fixed presented aspects of the world there can be variation in the character of experience. This is worked out in different (but compatible) ways by different theorists. One approach is to note how variations in the perceiver can make for variations in the character of experience (Logue (2012a)). Another is to highlight a third-relatum (of the relation of presentation) which encapsulates various conditions of perception such as one’s spatiotemporal perspective and the operative perceptual modality, where variation in such conditions can make for variation in phenomenal character (Campbell (2009), Brewer (2011)). Finally, some suggest that there can be variation in the way or manner in which one is related to perceived objects which makes a difference to phenomenal character (Soteriou (2013), Campbell (2014), French and Phillips (2020)). For further discussion see French (2018).

For the naive realist, insofar as experience and experiential character is constituted by a direct perceptual relation to aspects of the world, it is not constituted by the representation of such aspects of the world. This is why many naive realists describe the relation at the heart of their view as a non-representational relation. This doesn’t mean that experiences must lack intentional content, but it means that (a) insofar as appeal is made to presentation to explain character, no appeal is made to intentional content for that purpose, and (b) what is fundamental to experience is something which itself cannot be explained in terms of representing the world: a primitive relation of presentation. (For further discussion of naive realism as a non-representational view, see the articles in Part Three of Brogaard (2014)).

The other theories we have considered all endorse the Common Kind Claim . We’ve noted that naive realism applies to the veridical experiences involved in genuine perception, but does it apply more widely? Though naive realists may extend their approach to illusions, they typically deny that it applies to hallucinations and so reject the Common Kind Claim . Naive realists who deny the Common Kind Claim are disjunctivists . We call such a position naive realist disjunctivism . Let’s explore these ideas now.

There are various different naive realist approaches to illusion (see e.g., Fish (2009: Chapter 6), Brewer (2008, 2011: Chapter 5), Kalderon (2011), Genone (2014), French and Phillips (2020)). When it comes to the argument from illusion, the naive realist (like the intentionalist) rejects the Phenomenal Principle . So how does naive realism differ from intentionalism about illusions? In two respects: first, naive realists can maintain that illusory experiences are fundamentally direct presentations of the world. Second, the naive realist can explain the character of such illusory experiences without appeal to intentional content, but instead by appealing to the direct presentation of ordinary objects. Consider, for example, the approach developed by Brewer:

visually relevant similarities are those that ground and explain the ways that the particular physical objects that we are acquainted with in perception look. That is to say, visually relevant similarities are similarities by the lights of visual processing of various kinds... very crudely, visually relevant similarities are identities in such things as the way in which light is reflected and transmitted from the objects in question, and the way in which the stimuli are handled by the visual system, given its evolutionary history and our shared training during development (2011: 103)... in a case of visual illusion in which a mind-independent physical object, o, looks F, although o is not actually F, o is the direct object of visual perception from a spatiotemporal point of view and in circumstances of perception relative to which o has visually relevant similarities with paradigm exemplars of F although it is not actually an instance of F (2011: 105).

So though o may not itself be F, it can exist in certain conditions, C, such that it has visually relevant similarities to paradigm F things and in that sense it will objectively look F, or look like an F thing—that is, it will itself have a property, a look or an appearance, independently of anyone actually seeing it (see also Martin (2010), Kalderon (2011), Antony (2011), and Genone (2014) on objective looks). If o is then seen in C, o itself will look F to you in perception. Brewer spells this all out in more detail, and with various examples. One is seeing a white piece of chalk as red. The chalk is seen in abnormal illumination conditions such that the white piece of chalk itself looks like a paradigm red piece of chalk—it has “visually relevant similarities with a paradigm piece of chalk, of just that size and shape” (2011: 106). Given that it is seen in those conditions, it looks red to you, even though it is not in fact red. Here, then, we have an account of illusions in which we appeal to objects and the ways those objects are, not the ways they are represented to be, in explaining character.

What about the argument from hallucination? The naive realist thinks that at least veridical experiences are direct presentations of ordinary objects. They thus reject the conclusion (C) of the argument. But typically, naive realists accept (A). They therefore block the argument by rejecting the spreading step (B), understood in terms of the Common Kind Claim applied to veridical and hallucinatory experiences.

Such a naive realist reasons as follows: suppose that when you see a snow-covered churchyard for what it is, you have an experience which is in its nature a relation between you and ordinary objects. But a subjectively indistinguishable hallucinatory experience does not have such a nature. For such a hallucination could occur in the absence of any relevant worldly items (e.g., in the lab of a scientist manipulating your brain, in a world with no white things). Instead of taking (B) and these facts about hallucination to ground the rejection of naive realism, the naive realist instead rejects (B): even though the hallucination as of a snow-covered churchyard is subjectively indistinguishable from a veridical experience of such a scene, it is not of the same fundamental kind. (For a more nuanced formulation of the naive realist reasoning here, see Martin (2004), (2006). Raleigh (2014) and Ali (2018) advocate a naïve realist position which keeps the Common Kind Claim but rejects (A) and hence the understanding of hallucinations we are operating with here. See also Masrour (2020) who argues that it is an open question whether hallucinations are possible.).

In blocking the argument from hallucination in this way the naive realist endorses disjunctivism . This theory was first proposed by Hinton (1973) and was later developed by P.F. Snowdon (1979, 1990), John McDowell (1982, 1987) and M.G.F. Martin (2002, 2004, 2006). Disjunctivism is not best construed as it is by one of its proponents, as the view “that there is nothing literally in common” in veridical perception and hallucination, “no identical quality” (Putnam (1999: 152)). For both the veridical perception of an F and a subjectively indistinguishable hallucination of an F are experiences which are subjectively indistinguishable from a veridical perception of an F. What disjunctivists deny is that what makes it true that these two experiences are describable in this way is the presence of the same fundamental kind of mental state. Disjunctivists reject what J.M. Hinton calls “the doctrine of the ‘experience’ as the common element in a given perception” and an indistinguishable hallucination (Hinton (1973: 71)). The most fundamental common description of both states, then, is a merely disjunctive one: the experience is either a genuine perception of an F or a mere hallucination as of an F. Hence the theory’s name.

The disjunctivist rejects the Common Kind Claim . Underlying this is a rejection of what Martin (2004, 2006) calls the “common kind assumption”, namely:

  • (CKA) whatever fundamental kind of mental event occurs when you veridically perceive, the very same kind of event could occur were you undergoing a subjectively indistinguishable hallucination.

But is the disjunctivist’s rejection of (CKA) plausible? The disjunctivist can note how the fact that a hallucination is subjectively indistinguishable from a veridical experience does not entail that they are of the same fundamental kind, even if it does suggest this.

However, some argue that even if such an appeal to subjective indistinguishability is not enough to establish (CKA) , it is nonetheless well supported by a causal argument (Robinson (1985)). We can suppose that when you see the snow-covered churchyard for what it is, there is some proximal cause of this experience: the experience is preceded by a certain sort of brain state B. But now we can imagine a situation in which we bring about B thus producing an experience in you, yet where B is not brought about through any interaction between you and a snow-covered churchyard—e.g., in laboratory conditions. In this scenario you have an hallucinatory experience as of a snow-covered churchyard. It is plausible to suppose that these experiences are of the very same kind given that they have the same proximal cause.

The point here is that (CKA) looks like a plausible principle for causally matching veridical and hallucinatory experiences – veridical and hallucinatory experiences with the same proximal cause. This way of motivating (CKA) appeals to a same-cause, same-effect principle:

  • Causal Principle 1: an event e1 is of the same kind as an event e2 if event e1 is produced by the same kind of proximate causal condition as e2 (Nudds 2009: 336).

Is this the end of the road for the naive realist disjunctivist, then? Not quite, since as Martin argues, the naive realist should reject this principle:

On [the naive realist] conception of experience, when one is veridically perceiving the objects of perception are constituents of the experiential episode. The given event could not have occurred without these entities existing and being constituents of it; in turn, one could not have had such a kind of event without there being relevant candidate objects of perception to be apprehended. So, even if those objects are implicated in the causes of the experience, they also figure non-causally as essential constituents of it... Mere presence of a candidate object will not be sufficient for the perceiving of it, that is true, but its absence is sufficient for the non-occurrence of such an event. The connection here is [one] of a constitutive or essential condition of a kind of event. (2004: 56–57).

Martin’s point is that the naive realist may well admit the possibility of veridical experiences and causally matching hallucinations, but they will resist the idea that sameness of proximal cause implies sameness of the kind of experience involved. This is because there are non-causal constitutive condition s for the occurrence of the veridical experience which are not satisfied in the hallucinatory case.

However, Martin suggests that the arguer from hallucination can develop their case against naive realism further. This development involves an argument with two stages. First, a modified causal argument: the reverse causal argument , and second the screening-off problem.

The modified causal argument involves a modified causal principle:

  • Causal Principle 2: an event e1 is of the same kind K as an event e2 if event e1 is produced by the same kind of proximate causal condition as e2 in circumstances that do not differ in any non-causal conditions necessary for the occurrence of an event of kind K (Nudds 2009: 337).

(Martin’s own modified causal principle is more complicated than this in allowing for indeterministic causation. We gloss over this important complication here). Take N to be the fundamental kind which characterizes a veridical experience of a snow-covered churchyard, according to the naive realist. Does Causal Principle 2 allow us to say that N is present in the causally matching hallucinatory case, as (CKA) predicts? No. For the hallucination is produced in circumstances that differ in non-causal conditions necessary for the occurrence of N given how the naive realist understands N : in the circumstances in which the hallucination occurs there is no appropriate object of perception, but the presence of such an object is necessary for the occurrence of N.

So how does Causal Principle 2 help the arguer from hallucination? We have to run an argument in “the reverse direction, from what must be true of cases of causally matching hallucinations, to what must thereby be true of the veridical perceptions they match” (Martin 2006: 368). That is, take a hallucination as of a snow-covered churchyard h, and suppose that h is of some fundamental kind H. Now we can apply Causal Principle 2 to show that H is present in a causally matching veridical experience of a snow-covered churchyard, v. For now v is produced by the same kind of proximal cause in circumstances where there is no difference in the non-causal conditions necessary for the occurrence of an event of kind H. This is because all that is necessary for an occurrence of H is some brain condition, which is present in the circumstances in which v is brought about. This reverse causal argument does not show that v is not of fundamental kind N. What it does show, however, is that whatever fundamental kind is present in a hallucinatory case will also be present in a causally matching veridical case. So even if v is fundamentally N it is also H. That is, we have the Reverse Common Kind Assumption:

  • (RCKA) Whatever fundamental kind of event occurs when you hallucinate, the very same kind of event also occurs in a causally matching veridical experience.

But now we run into the screening-off problem . There is something it is like for you to have an hallucinatory experience as of a snow-covered churchyard, and the experience seems to relate you to a snow-covered churchyard. This fact about the hallucinatory experience is grounded in its being of kind H. But now if an experience of that kind is present in the veridical case, it is difficult to see how what the naive realist says is fundamental to that case, N, is doing anything by way of explaining what it is like for a subject to have the experience. The presence of H in the veridical case seems to make N explanatorily redundant, or “screen off” N’s explanatory role, contra the ambitions of naive realism. (For more detailed expositions of this two-stage argument see Martin (2004), Byrne and Logue, (2008), Hellie (2013) and Soteriou (2014: Chapter 6)).

The most widely discussed naive realist response to this argument is that of Martin (2004, 2006). Though there are now a range of different naive realist responses available, some of which integrate critical discussion of Martin’s own approach (see Allen (2015), Logue (2012b, 2013), Fish (2009: Chapter 4), Hellie (2013), Moran (2019), Sethi (2020)).

Martin argues that the screening-off stage of the argument is only problematic if we accept a positive, non-derivative account of causally matching hallucinations. On such an account, hallucinations have a positive nature which doesn’t derive from that of veridical perception: a nature that can be specified independently of any reference to veridical perception. For instance, hallucinations are direct presentations of sense-data, or representations of ordinary objects. Instead, Martin suggests, the disjunctivist should conceive of causally matching hallucinations in a purely negative epistemic way: such a hallucination as of an F is a state of mind which is not introspectively knowably not a veridical perception of an F. What makes it the case that your hallucinatory experience is as of a snow-covered churchyard, with a certain sort of phenomenal character, is just that it is an occurrence which cannot be discriminated, by introspection alone, from a veridical perception of a snow-covered churchyard. The particular subjective perspective that a hallucinator has in a causally matching hallucination as of a snow-covered churchyard is explained just by the obtaining of this negative epistemic condition, not by anything more positive such as a relation to a white sense-datum or the representation of white snow (c.f., Dancy (1995: 425)). On such a view, causally matching hallucinations are derivative: specifying their nature requires essential reference to the basic case of veridical perception.

If we accept Martin’s account of causally matching hallucinations, then we can see how H can be present in both the hallucinatory and the veridical case: since trivially a veridical experience of a snow-covered churchyard is indiscriminable from a veridical experience of a snow-covered churchyard. But what about screening off? Does H have a nature which means that the presence of H in the veridical case threatens the explanatory power of N? It doesn’t, Martin argues, since H’s explanatory force is derivative or dependent: it is parasitic on that of N. As Martin notes with his own example:

But if that is so [if H screens off the explanatory role of N], then the property of being a veridical perception of a tree [i.e. N] never has an explanatory role, since it is never instantiated without the property of being indiscriminable from such a perception being instantiated as well. But if the property of being a veridical perception lacks any explanatory role, then we can no longer show that being indiscriminable from a veridical perception has the explanatory properties which would screen off the property of being a veridical perception (2004: 69).

Here, then, is a summary of this complex dialectic: the argument from hallucination seems to disprove naive realism, but the naive realist appeals to disjunctivism in response. However, the causal argument puts pressure on disjunctivism, by supporting the common kind assumption . In response, the naive realist rejects the key principle of this argument (Causal Principle 1). But then a two-stage argument consisting of the reverse causal argument and the screening-off problem attempts to show that: (1) the fundamental kind of experience present in hallucination is also present in causally matching veridical experience, and (2) this undermines the naive realist idea that the character of veridical experience is shaped by the directly presented world. In response, Martin accepts a form of naive realism which embraces disjunctivism (in the form of the claim that causally matching veridical and hallucinatory experiences are fundamentally different). But which also accepts (as per the reverse causal argument) that there is a common element across the cases, for the hallucinatory kind is present in veridical cases too. But since he conceives of this common element in a derivative, and purely negative epistemic way, he blocks the argument at the second stage, rejecting screening off.

Naturally, then, much subsequent critical discussion has focused on Martin’s negative epistemic conception of hallucination. Further discussion and development of Martin’s approach is to be found in Nudds (2009, 2013) and Soteriou (2014: Chapter 6). For criticism of Martin’s approach see Hawthorne and Kovakovich (2006), Farkas (2006), Sturgeon (2008), Siegel (2004, 2008), and Robinson (2013). See Burge (2005) for a general and polemical attack on disjunctivism. For more on disjunctivism, see Haddock and Macpherson (eds.) (2008), Byrne and Logue (eds.) (2009), Macpherson and Platchias (eds.) (2013) and the entry on the disjunctive theory of perception .

3.4.4 Naive Realist Disjunctivism and Our Ordinary Conception of Perceptual Experience

According to naive realist disjunctivists, at least veridical experiences are directly of ordinary objects ( Ordinary Objects ), and are direct presentations of their objects ( Presentation ). Naive realist disjunctivists thus maintain Direct Realist Presentation , and hence Direct Realism for at least veridical experiences – indeed they maintain Direct Realism without the need for any appeal to a causal theory of direct perception. Further, naive realist disjunctivists hold that the phenomenal character of such experiences is determined, at least in part, by the direct presentation of ordinary objects ( Direct Realist Character ). The only aspect of our ordinary conception of perceptual experience which naive realist disjunctivists reject outright is the Common Kind Claim .

Sense-datum theorists and adverbialists depart substantially from our ordinary conception of perceptual experience. Advocates of each view will argue, in their different ways, that this is a consequence of responding adequately to the Problem of Perception.

Intentionalists and naive realist disjunctivists disagree, and argue, in different ways, that we can respond to the Problem of Perception without departing substantially from our ordinary conception of perceptual experience: by maintaining Direct Realism in some form, and maintaining or at least being sensitive to many of the specific phenomenological components of our ordinary conception of perceptual experience. Whilst the debate between sense-datum theorists and adverbialists (and between these and other theories) is not as prominent as it once was, the debate between intentionalists and naive realist disjunctivists is a significant ongoing debate in the philosophy of perception: a legacy of the Problem of Perception that is arguably “the greatest chasm” in the philosophy of perception (Crane (2006)). The question, now, is not so much whether to be a direct realist, but how to be one.

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Any serious attempt to master the literature on the problem of perception should include a reading of Anscombe (1965), Armstrong (1968: Chapter 10), Dretske (1969), Jackson (1977), Martin (2002), Moore (1905), Peacocke (1983: Chapter 1), Robinson (1994), Russell (1912), Smith (2002), Snowdon (1992), Strawson (1979), Tye (1992), and Valberg (1992a). Useful collections: Swartz (1965), Dancy (1988), Noë and Thompson (2002), Gendler and Hawthorne (2006), Haddock and Macpherson (2008), Byrne and Logue (2009), Nanay (2010), and Brogaard (2014). Matilal (1986) explores how issues around the Problem of Perception and theories of experience play out in Classical Indian philosophy.

For discussion of how the problem of perception, somewhat differently construed, arises in the senses other than vision, see Perkins (1983). There is much literature on non-visual perception, not all of it addressing the problem of perception, but much of it will be relevant to considering the problem of perception in non-visual modalities: on sounds, see Nudds (2001), O’Callaghan (2007), Nudds and O’Callaghan (2009); on smell, see Batty (2011), Richardson (2013a, 2013b); on touch, see O’Shaughnessy (1989), Martin (1992) and Fulkerson (2014); for the senses in general, see Nudds (2003), Macpherson (2011, 2011a) and Stokes, Matthen, and Briggs (2015)). On multisensory perception, see O’Callaghan (2019).

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.
  • The Illusions Index maintained by Fiona Macpherson (University of Glasgow, Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience), designed by Keith Wilson and Mucky Puddle.
  • Akiyoshi’s Illusion Pages: The Latest Works , maintained by Akiyoshi Kitaoka (Ritsumeikan University).
  • Edward Adelson’s illusion pages , by Edward Adelson, MIT.

Brentano, Franz | color | consciousness | consciousness: and intentionality | consciousness: representational theories of | intensional transitive verbs | intentionality | mental representation | perception: epistemological problems of | perception: the contents of | perception: the disjunctive theory of | phenomenology | qualia | qualia: inverted | sense data

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to Tim Bayne, David Chalmers, Katalin Farkas, Mike Martin and Susanna Siegel for their comments on previous versions of this entry. For discussion thanks to Arif Ahmed, Joshua Gert, Anil Gomes, Penelope Mackie, and Lee Walters.

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What Is Self-Concept?

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perception of development essay

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  • Development
  • Can It Be Changed?
  • Self-Concept Theories

Frequently Asked Questions

Self-concept is the image we have of ourselves. It is influenced by many forces, including our interaction with important people in our lives. It is how we perceive our behaviors, abilities, and unique characteristics. For example, beliefs such as "I am a good friend" or "I am a kind person" are part of an overall self-concept.

Other examples of self-concept include:

  • How you view your personality traits, such as whether you are an extrovert or introvert
  • How you see your roles in life, such as whether you feel that being a parent, sibling, friend, and partner are important parts of your identity
  • The hobbies or passions that are important to your sense of identity, such as being a sports enthusiast or belonging to a certain political party
  • How you feel about your interactions with the world, such as whether you feel that you are contributing to society

Our self-perception is important because it affects our motivations , attitudes, and behaviors . It also affects how we feel about the person we think we are, including whether we are competent or have self-worth.

Self-concept tends to be more malleable when we're younger and still going through self-discovery and identity formation . As we age and learn who we are and what's important to us, these self-perceptions become much more detailed and organized.

At its most basic, self-concept is a collection of beliefs one holds about oneself and the responses of others. It embodies the answer to the question: " Who am I? " If you want to find your self-concept, list things that describe you as an individual. What are your traits? What do you like? How do you feel about yourself?

Rogers' Three Parts of Self-Concept

Humanist psychologist  Carl Rogers believed that self-concept is made up of three different parts:

  • Ideal self : The ideal self is the person you want to be. This person has the attributes or qualities you are either working toward or want to possess. It's who you envision yourself to be if you were exactly as you wanted.
  • Self-image : Self-image refers to how you see yourself at this moment in time. Attributes like physical characteristics, personality traits , and social roles all play a role in your self-image.
  • Self-esteem : How much you like, accept, and value yourself all contribute to your self-concept. Self-esteem can be affected by a number of factors—including how others see you, how you think you compare to others, and your role in society.

Incongruence and Congruence

Self-concept is not always aligned with reality. When it is aligned, your self-concept is said to be congruent . If there is a mismatch between how you see yourself (your self-image) and who you wish you were (your ideal self), your self-concept is incongruent . This incongruence can negatively affect self-esteem .

Rogers believed that incongruence has its earliest roots in childhood. When parents place conditions on their affection for their children (only expressing love if children "earn it" through certain behaviors and living up to the parents' expectations), children begin to distort the memories of experiences that leave them feeling unworthy of their parents' love.

Unconditional love, on the other hand, helps to foster congruence. Children who experience such love—also referred to as family love —feel no need to continually distort their memories in order to believe that other people will love and accept them as they are.

How Self-Concept Develops

Self-concept develops, in part, through our interaction with others. In addition to family members and close friends, other people in our lives can contribute to our self-identity.

For instance, one study found that the more a teacher believes in a high-performing student's abilities, the higher that student's self-concept. (Interestingly, no such association was found with lower-performing students.)

Self-concept can also be developed through the stories we hear. As an example, one study found that female readers who were "deeply transported" into a story about a leading character with a traditional gender role had a more feminist self-concept than those who weren't as moved by the story.

The media plays a role in self-concept development as well—both mass media and social media . When these media promote certain ideals, we're more likely to make those ideals our own. And the more often these ideals are presented, the more they affect our self-identity and self-perception.

Can Self-Concept Be Changed?

Self-concept is not static, meaning that it can change. Our environment plays a role in this process. Places that hold a lot of meaning to us actively contribute to our future self-concept through both the way we relate these environments to ourselves and how society relates to them.

Self-concept can also change based on the people with whom we interact. This is particularly true with regard to individuals in our lives who are in leadership roles. They can impact the collective self (the self in social groups) and the relational self (the self in relationships).

In some cases, a medical diagnosis can change self-concept by helping people understand why they feel the way they do—such as someone receiving an autism diagnosis later in life, finally providing clarity as to why they feel different.

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Other Self-Concept Theories

As with many topics within psychology , a number of other theorists have proposed different ways of thinking about self-concept.

Social Identity

Social psychologist Henri Tajfel developed social identity theory, which states that self-concept is composed of two key parts:

  • Personal identity : The traits and other characteristics that make you unique
  • Social identity : Who you are based on your membership in social groups, such as sports teams, religions, political parties, or social class

This theory states that our social identity influences our self-concept, thus affecting our emotions and behaviors. If we're playing sports, for instance, and our team loses a game, we might feel sad for the team (emotion) or act out against the winning team (behavior).

Multiple Dimensions

Psychologist Bruce A. Bracken had a slightly different theory and believed that self-concept was multidimensional, consisting of six independent traits:

  • Academic : Success or failure in school
  • Affect : Awareness of emotional states
  • Competence : Ability to meet basic needs
  • Family : How well you work in your family unit
  • Physical : How you feel about your looks, health, physical condition, and overall appearance
  • Social : Ability to interact with others

In 1992, Bracken developed the Multidimensional Self-Concept Scale, a comprehensive assessment that evaluates each of these six elements of self-concept in children and adolescents.

Self-concept development is never finished. Though one's self-identity is thought to be primarily formed in childhood, your experiences as an adult can also change how you feel about yourself. If your self-esteem increases later in life, for instance, it can improve your self-concept.

Our self-concept can affect the method by which we communicate. If you feel you are a good writer, for instance, you may prefer to communicate in writing versus speaking with others.

It can also affect the way we communicate. If your social group communicates a certain way, you would likely choose to communicate that way as well. Studies on teens have connected high self-concept clarity with more open communication with parents.

Self-concept refers to a broad description of ourselves ("I am a good writer") while self-esteem includes any judgments or opinions we have of ourselves ("I feel proud to be a good writer"). Put another way, self-concept answers the question: Who am I? Self-esteem answers the question: How do I feel about who I am?

Our self-concept impacts how we respond to life, so a well-developed self-concept helps us respond in ways that are more positive and beneficial for us. One of the ways it does this is by enabling us to recognize our worth. A well-developed self-concept also helps keep us from internalizing negative feedback from others.

Different cultures have different beliefs. They have different ideas of how dependent or independent one should be, different religious beliefs, and differing views of socioeconomic development.

All of these cultural norms influence self-concept by providing the structure of what is expected within that society and how one sees oneself in relation to others.

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Richter T, Appel M, Calio F. Stories can influence the self-concept . Social Influence . 2014;9(3):172-88. doi:10.1080/15534510.2013.799099

Vandenbosch L, Eggermont S. The interrelated roles of mass media and social media in adolescents' development of an objectified self-concept: A longitudinal study . Communc Res . 2015. doi:10.1177/0093650215600488

Prince D. What about place? Considering the role of physical environment on youth imagining of future possible selves . J Youth Stud . 2014;17(6):697-716. doi:10.1080/13676261.2013.836591

Kark R, Shamir B. The dual effect of transformational leadership: priming relational and collective selves and further effects on followers . In: Avolio BJ, Yammarino FJ, eds.  Monographs in Leadership and Management . Vol 5. Emerald Group Publishing Limited; 2013:77-101. doi:10.1108/S1479-357120130000005010

Stagg SD, Belcher H. Living with autism without knowing: receiving a diagnosis in later life . Health Psychol Behav Med . 2019;7(1):348-361. doi:10.1080/21642850.2019.1684920

Tajfel H, Turner J. An integrative theory of intergroup conflict . In: Hogg MA, Abrams D, eds.  Intergroup Relations: Essential Readings. Psychology Press:94–109.

Scheepers D. Social identity theory . Social Psychol Act . 2019. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-13788-5_9

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Sampthirao P. Self-concept and interpersonal communication . Int J Indian Psychol . 2016;3(3):6. dip:18.01.115/20160303

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By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Adolescent Development: Adolescent Psychology Essay

Linked to puberty, the psychological development of adolescents is defined substantially by changes in the hormonal levels, as well as differences in the perception of their sociocultural surroundings. As a result, even though there are distinctive cultural differences in the process of adolescent development, certain similarities and a common paradigm can be identified. Due to the transition to the interactions between an individual and a group observed at the adolescent stage of development, the main features of psychological change in adolescents include alterations in self-identification and group belonging, concerns associated with physical changes, and the development of cognitive differentiation and self-awareness.

Adolescent psychological development can be viewed from several standpoints. The most common are the physiological perception of adolescence as the direct effect of hormonal change and the social one implying that adolescence is linked to cultural perceptions of the subject matter (Newman & Newman, 2020). Combining the specified viewpoints will help view adolescent development as the acquisition of essential sociocultural skills and perceptions driven by the cultural perceptions of biological changes occurring in an adolescent individual (Newman & Newman, 2020). Specifically, a shift in the sense of group belongingness and self-identification occurs due to the acceptance of social ideas and values associated with specific characteristics of men and women (Newman & Newman, 2020). Similarly, adolescent development is marked by high levels of anxiety caused by the physiological changes most adolescents view as perplexing (Newman & Newman, 2020). Therefore, adolescent development requires active support and assistance in maintaining confidence and self-esteem.

Since the adolescent developmental stage features a transition toward group interactions, the main characteristics of the process involve changes in self-identity, self-awareness, and perception of one’s physical development. Specifically, the experiences of anxiety and uncertainty are highly characteristic of adolescent development. For this reason, guidance and support combined with the encouragement of independence are highly advised at the specified developmental stage.

Newman, B. M., & Newman, P. R. (2020). Theories of adolescent development . Academic Press.

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1. IvyPanda . "Adolescent Development: Adolescent Psychology." June 16, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/adolescent-development-adolescent-psychology/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Adolescent Development: Adolescent Psychology." June 16, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/adolescent-development-adolescent-psychology/.

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Factors Affecting the Perception of Disability: A Developmental Perspective

Perception of disability is an important construct affecting not only the well-being of individuals with disabilities, but also the moral compass of the society. Negative attitudes toward disability disempower individuals with disabilities and lead to their social exclusion and isolation. By contrast, a healthy society encourages positive attitudes toward individuals with disabilities and promotes social inclusion. The current review explored disability perception in the light of the in-group vs. out-group dichotomy, since individuals with disabilities may be perceived as a special case of out-group. We implemented a developmental approach to study perception of disability from early age into adolescence while exploring cognitive, affective, and behavioral components of children’s attitudes. Potential factors influencing perception of disability were considered at the level of society, family and school environment, and the individual. Better understanding of factors influencing the development of disability perception would allow the design of effective interventions to improve children’s attitudes toward peers with disabilities, reduce intergroup biases, and promote social inclusion. Based on previous research in social and developmental psychology, education, and anthropology, we proposed an integrative model that provides a conceptual framework for understanding the development of disability perception.

Introduction

Disability is defined as any impairment of the body or mind that limits a person’s ability to partake in typical activities and social interactions in their environment ( Scheer and Groce, 1988 ). According to the most recent, albeit dated estimates, in the United States, about 16.7% of children have a developmental disability ( Boyle et al., 2011 ), whereas 5.2% of children live with a moderate or severe disability ( Brault, 2011 ; UNICEF, 2013 ). Since the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which mandated inclusive education in 1975, most children with disabilities receive their education in the general education setting, sharing classrooms with typically developing peers ( Causton-Theoharis and Theoharis, 2008 ; U.S. Department of Education, 2012 ). Interactions between children in such inclusive environments promote acceptance and social inclusion of individuals with disabilities within a classroom and in the society in general ( Vignes et al., 2009 ; de Boer et al., 2013 ). Social inclusion allows an individual with disabilities to make friends, participate in social activities, and become a contributing and valued member of society ( Murray and Greenberg, 2006 ; Mâsse et al., 2012 ).

Despite the obvious benefits of inclusive education and social inclusion, children with disabilities are not always accepted by their typically developing peers. Across cultures, children with disabilities encounter negative attitudes, bullying, social exclusion, and isolation ( Ochs et al., 2001 ; Hanvey, 2002 ; Nowicki and Sandieson, 2002 ; Cummins and Lau, 2003 ; Kelly, 2005 ; Laws and Kelly, 2005 ; Odom et al., 2006 ; Guralnick et al., 2007 ; Shah, 2007 ; Vreeman and Carroll, 2007 ; Nugent, 2008 ; Gannon and McGilloway, 2009 ; Koster et al., 2010 ; de Boer et al., 2012a ; Lindsay and McPherson, 2012 ; Snowdon, 2012 ; Kayama and Haight, 2014 ). Socially excluded children may have unsatisfying peer relationships, low self-esteem, and lack of achievement motivation, which affect their social and academic aspects of life, mental health, and general well-being ( Juvonen and Graham, 2001 ; Brown and Bigler, 2005 ; Murray and Greenberg, 2006 ; Pijl and Frostad, 2010 ; Lindsay and McPherson, 2012 ; Mâsse et al., 2012 ).

Attitudes toward individuals with disabilities vary with the type of disability. For example, children with emotional or behavioral disabilities and those with multiple disabilities are perceived more negatively by their typically developing peers than children with a specific physical disability ( McCoy and Banks, 2012 ). Moreover, children with intellectual or physical/intellectual disability are perceived more negatively than children with a physical disability ( Nowicki, 2006 ; de Laat et al., 2013 ), with level of social inclusion being positively related to the mental age of the child with disability ( Carvalho et al., 2014 ). In the school context, with its high expectations to learn and negative future consequences of failing to do so, intellectual disability may have greater salience to typically developing children than physical disability.

Children with positive attitudes toward peers having disabilities may be more willing to interact with them compared to children with negative attitudes ( Diamond, 1993 ; Okagaki et al., 1998 ; Roberts, 1999 ; Roberts and Smith, 1999 ; Favazza et al., 2000 ; Gaad, 2004 ). As a result, more exposure to individuals with disabilities may lead to better understanding of disability and higher levels of acceptance ( Hong et al., 2014 ). Thus, attitudes drive behavior, which, in turn, affects the individual’s knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes. Interventions improving children’s knowledge about disabilities and providing exposure to those with disabilities is the most successful technique of changing children’s attitudes toward peers with disabilities ( Diamond and Carpenter, 2000 ; Nikolaraizi et al., 2005 ; Nowicki, 2006 ; Rillotta and Nettelbeck, 2007 ; Siperstein et al., 2007 ; Feddes et al., 2009 ; Kalyva and Agaliotis, 2009 ; Gasser et al., 2014 ; Armstrong et al., 2016 ). Developmental psychologists suggest that early childhood is the best time to intervene against the formation of negative attitudes toward disability, before these attitudes and behavior patterns become fully established and difficult-to-change ( Killen et al., 2011 ; Lee et al., 2017 ).

The main goal of the current review was to explore factors influencing the formation of attitudes toward disability during childhood, and identify developmental trends that produce negative attitudes toward disability in typically developing children. Knowledge about these trends is important for designing timely, age-appropriate, and effective interventions to reduce the behaviors of stigmatization and social exclusion ( Abrams and Killen, 2014 ; Kayama, 2017 ). In addition to studying the development of attitudes toward individuals with disabilities, the current review examined the cognitive, affective, and behavioral 1 aspects of attitudes ( Cook and Selltiz, 1964 ; Triandis, 1971 ; Olson and Zanna, 1993 ; Findler et al., 2007 ). Also, this review evaluated personality factors, family influences, as well as cultural norms and traditions in order to better understand the full context of these attitudes ( Bronfenbrenner, 1992 ; Bronfenbrenner et al., 1994 ).

Conceptual Models of Disability

Two competing conceptual models of disability have been used to define the origins of the abnormal physiological and psychological functioning ( LoBianco and Sheppard-Jones, 2008 ). The medical model considers disability a feature of the person, directly caused by diseases, disorders, traumas, or other health conditions, which would require medical treatment or intervention with the primary goal to “correct” the problem within the individual ( Johnston, 1996 ; Marks, 2000 ; Mitra, 2006 ; Forhan, 2009 ; Nind et al., 2010 ; Brandon and Pritchard, 2011 ; Palmer and Harley, 2012 ; Bingham et al., 2013 ).

By contrast, the social model does not consider the disability an attribute of the individual, but rather a socially created problem ( Hutchison, 1995 ; Mitra, 2006 ; Purdue, 2009 ; Barney, 2012 ). In this case, the problem that needs to be corrected lies not within the individual, but within the unaccommodating social environment ( Brandon and Pritchard, 2011 ; Roush and Sharby, 2011 ; Barney, 2012 ; Palmer and Harley, 2012 ; Bingham et al., 2013 ). According to the social model, disability could be imposed by society on individuals with impairments through isolation and exclusion from everyday activities ( Brandon and Pritchard, 2011 ; Bingham et al., 2013 ). Such isolation and exclusion may stem from society’s unfavorable perceptions of people with disabilities and unwillingness to remove environmental barriers impeding full participation ( LoBianco and Sheppard-Jones, 2008 ; Forhan, 2009 ; Palmer and Harley, 2012 ).

However, neither medical nor social model acknowledge the complex nature of disability. Therefore, a comprehensive integration of the two approaches produced the biopsychosocial model , which considers disability in the context of an interaction between biological, psychological, and societal factors, each limiting the individual’s functioning to some extent ( Engel, 1980 ; Borrell-Carrió et al., 2004 ; Thomas, 2004 ; Shakespeare, 2006 ; Le Boutillier and Croucher, 2010 ). In the light of this model, the World Health Organization defined disability as “the outcome or result of a complex relationship between an individual’s health condition and personal factors, and of the external factors that represent the circumstances in which the individual lives” ( Peterson, 2005 , p. 106). Importantly, the extent to which impairment becomes a disability depends not only on the severity of the impairment, but also on the individual’s ability to participate in social life ( Hall and Hill, 1996 ; Peterson, 2005 ).

The biopsychosocial model can be viewed as an implementation of the ecological systems theory ( Bronfenbrenner, 1992 ; Bronfenbrenner et al., 1994 ) in the context of disability. Indeed, this theory examines ways the synergistic interaction between characteristics of the individual and features of the environment produces the individual’s behavior and development. Functioning of the individual with disability in the society, as well as the perception of this individual by other members of the society may depend on an array of factors, such as the type and severity of disability, personality traits of the individual, available physical environment adaptations, financial resources, social inclusion practices, parental attitudes and practices, availability of inclusive education, teachers’ attitudes and ability to scaffold positive interactions between students, cultural beliefs and traditions, as well as the historical context.

In-Group vs. Out-Group Perceptions and Attitudes

People tend to view others as belonging to either a familiar in-group or an unfamiliar out-group ( Allport, 1954 ; Hatemi et al., 2013 ). The out-group may consist of any individuals not belonging to the in-group; thus, racial minorities, sexual minorities, immigrants, and people with disabilities often are perceived as out-groups. The emotionally loaded process of groups’ juxtaposition may result in a biased, more favorable perception of the in-group in comparison to out-groups ( Tajfel, 1982 ; Brewer and Kramer, 1985 ; Tajfel and Turner, 1986 ; Devine, 1995 ; Gramzow and Gaertner, 2005 ).

Developing social identity shapes the individual’s self-beliefs and determines one’s place in relation to others ( Tajfel and Turner, 1979 ). To protect and promote the self through the in-group, the individual may be motivated to over-value the in-group and derogate an out-group ( Tajfel and Turner, 1979 ; Brewer, 1999 ; Aboud, 2003 ; Dovidio et al., 2010 ). Thinking in terms of “us” vs. “them” leads people to perceive an out-group as a potential threat ( Stephan and Stephan, 1985 ). For example, members of an out-group may have different values and beliefs, may potentially disapprove of and reject the in-group, or may undermine the power of the in-group in the political, economic, or cultural domains ( Esses et al., 1993 ; Stephan and Stephan, 1993 ; Quillian, 1995 ). This perceived threat may provoke negative expectations about, and reactions to, out-groups, including stigmatization and discrimination, as well as a desire to protect the in-group ( Stephan and Stephan, 1993 ; Ybarra and Stephan, 1994 ). The resulting intergroup biases lead to social exclusion of out-groups by members of the in-group. Note that intergroup biases may be activated by explicit mentioning of intergroup norms or potential out-group threat ( Blanchard et al., 1994 ; Monteith et al., 1996 ; Fahmy et al., 2006 ).

Individuals differ in their dispositional reaction toward potential threats posed by out-groups. Some exhibit a negativity bias while avoiding interactions, whereas others tend to respond in a more approach-oriented manner ( Hibbing et al., 2014 ). Previous research found a strong association between individuals’ dispositional reaction to potential threats and their political views. Thus, individuals with conservative views tend to avoid uncertainty in order to reduce possible negative outcomes, while those with liberal views tend to approach the threatening stimulus in hopes to engender positive change ( Jost et al., 2003 ; Hibbing et al., 2014 ; Hatemi and McDermott, 2020 ). For example, when being exposed to pictures with ambiguous emotional expressions, self-reported conservatives perceive them to be angry and potentially threatening, whereas liberals perceive them as being confused and non-threatening ( Vigil, 2010 ). As a result, the negativity bias may lead people to discriminate against (socially exclude) members of an out-group as a source of uncertainty and potential threat.

Note that the negativity bias was observed not only on a psychological, but also on a physiological level. Thus, people who tend to protect the in-group against out-groups (those promoting military defense and anti-immigration policies), when being presented with threatening stimuli or images associated with out-groups, show greater attention to the threat ( Nail et al., 2009 ), as well as greater physiological arousal and sympathetic nervous system activity, measured via skin conductance ( Antony et al., 2005 ; Oxley et al., 2008 ; Dodd et al., 2012 ; Hatemi et al., 2013 ; Renshon et al., 2015 ; Garrett, 2019 ). Therefore, uncertainty and perceived threat may elevate levels of fear and anxiety in some individuals, making them less willing to embrace novel social situations or interact with new people, and be more intolerant toward members of an out-group ( Jost et al., 2003 ; Hatemi et al., 2013 ).

For this review, it is also important to distinguish between peer rejection and out-group exclusion. Peer rejection is often attributed to the individual characteristics and behavior of the rejected person, making the victim the source of the exclusion. By contrast, out-group exclusion arises from internal insecurities of the excluding individual, social attitudes, group norms, stereotypic expectations, and intergroup biases ( Killen et al., 2013 ). Unfortunately, it is often hard to distinguish the cause from the consequence in this complicated, dynamic process. For example, a child with disability may be socially excluded by peers as a member of an out-group; this experience may result in this child becoming socially withdrawn, timid, and shy; such attributes, in turn, would seemingly justify the resulting peer rejection based on personality characteristics.

Development of Disability Perception During Childhood

During early development, as children integrate into society and become members of social groups, they develop not only social identity and bonds with family and peers, but also social preferences, prejudices, and intergroup biases. Children under the age of 3 years show social preferences for individuals based on age, gender, language, and other salient characteristics, such as, for example, a T-shirt color ( LaFreniere et al., 1984 ; Aboud, 1988 ; Martin, 1989 ; Kinzler et al., 2007 ; Shutts et al., 2010 ; Dunham et al., 2011 ). From the age of 3 years onward, children tend to display a positivity bias – expecting positive personality characteristics in novel individuals and focusing on positive information about self and others ( Mezulis et al., 2004 ; Boseovski and Lee, 2006 ; Boseovski et al., 2009 ; Boseovski, 2012 ; Landrum et al., 2013 ; Lapan et al., 2016 ). In general, 3-year olds make preferential judgments about other individuals based on similarity, whether in appearance or food preferences ( Fawcett and Markson, 2010 ). In these social judgments, 3-year olds seem to focus on individual characteristics rather than group affiliations. Thus, being randomly assigned to an arbitrary, minimal social group 2 , 3-year olds remembered their affiliation with the group, but displayed no sociocentric reasoning, or in-group vs. out-group biases ( Dunham and Emory, 2014 ).

Around the age of 4 years , children start manifesting in-group positivity bias, seemingly extrapolating self-related positivity toward groups they affiliate with ( Gramzow and Gaertner, 2005 ). Thus, children attribute more positive characteristics toward in-group members compared to out-group ones ( Bigler and Liben, 1993 ; Aboud, 2003 ; Kinzler et al., 2009 ; Hilliard and Liben, 2010 ; Cvencek et al., 2011 ; Dunham et al., 2011 ; Renno and Shutts, 2015 ; Over et al., 2018 ); they show preference toward their own gender and race ( Hilliard and Liben, 2010 ; Cvencek et al., 2011 ; Renno and Shutts, 2015 ), as well as toward their own, non-accented language ( Kinzler et al., 2009 ). It is still easy for children at this age to accept peers with disabilities, likely because of the low-level of complexity in their activities ( Hestenes and Carroll, 2000 ). In later ages, however, there may be a more distinct disconnect in physical, cognitive, and socioemotional abilities between typically developing children and their peers with disabilities ( Gasser et al., 2014 ).

Experimental studies reported that 5–6-year olds are capable of negative attitudes toward out-group members ( McLoughlin and Over, 2017 ; McLoughlin et al., 2017 ). While tested in the minimal group paradigm, 5–6-year olds not only internalized their membership in a minimal group, but also developed a predisposition to prefer the in-group and evaluate it more favorably than an out-group ( Aboud, 2003 ; Baron and Banaji, 2006 ; Rutland et al., 2007 ; Dunham et al., 2011 ; Buttelmann and Böhm, 2014 ; Dunham and Emory, 2014 ; Baron and Dunham, 2015 ). Moreover, 6-year olds showed positive affect after mere exposure to in-group member photographs, and assumed that in-group members would be less likely to engage in negative actions compared to out-group peers ( Nesdale and Brown, 2004 ; Dunham and Emory, 2014 ; Baron and Dunham, 2015 ). Such in-group favoritism becomes more salient in indirect measures rather than self-reports, suggesting operation of an automatic, implicit evaluative system ( Dunham and Emory, 2014 ).

Intergroup biases become even more pronounced in 6–7-year - old children. Even when 6–7-year olds display a positivity bias while accepting positive testimonies about in-group and out-group members, this bias is disproportionately higher in the case of the in-groups ( Aldan and Soley, 2019 ). Also, while choosing to accept or reject someone’s testimony about novel individuals, 6–7-year olds tend to trust an in-group informant more than an out-group one, especially when evaluating novel out-group individuals ( Kinzler et al., 2011 ; Aldan and Soley, 2019 ). This over-reliance on in-group informants during the evaluation process of novel individuals may further exacerbate the emerging intergroup biases. Thus, the developmental evidence suggests that children from 5 to 9 years of age tend to learn new information about novel members through the prism of the established intergroup biases ( Averhart and Bigler, 1997 ; Nesdale and Brown, 2004 ; Dunham et al., 2011 ; Baron and Dunham, 2015 ).

In summary, between the ages of 3 and 6 years, children’s social awareness shifts from being individuals to being members of a social group ( Dunham and Emory, 2014 ). Increasing familiarity with individual characteristics of the immediate family and the surrounding social circle makes children aware of multiple ways people are grouped in the society. Children’s experiences of being affiliated with, or rejected from, particular groups shape their sociocentric awareness and social cognition about in-groups vs. out-groups ( Aboud, 1988 ; Dunham and Emory, 2014 ; Nesdale et al., 2014 ). This social cognition uses the heuristics of “us” vs. “them” to automate social judgments; such automation of the evaluative system, though, comes at the cost of intergroup biases ( Bigler and Liben, 2007 ; Dunham and Emory, 2014 ). Thus, while becoming integrated into society, children first manifest social awareness and form group identity (3–5 years of age), then show in-group preference and in-group positivity (4–6 years of age), and finally display out-group prejudice and out-group derogation (by about 7 years of age) ( Brewer, 1999 ; Aboud, 2003 ; Nesdale, 2004 , 2008 ).

Between 6 and 9 years of age, children experience a dramatic shift in their self-identity, which instead of being focused on group membership, becomes focused on group norms ( Abrams and Rutland, 2008 ). Thus, older children practice social exclusion based on the norms of the in-group. As a result, stronger self-identity and affiliation with the in-group, emphasis on the group membership, explicitly articulated negative messages about out-groups, expression of exclusion norms, and perceived threat from an out-group are associated with an increase in intergroup biases and stronger negativity toward out-group members in 6–11-year olds ( Bigler et al., 1997 ; Nesdale et al., 2005a , c ; Nesdale and Dalton, 2011 ; Nesdale and Lawson, 2011 ; Durkin et al., 2012 ). Importantly, developing in socially homogeneous environments may speed up the emergence of negative biases toward out-groups, resulting in early onset between ages 3 and 5 years ( Rutland et al., 2005a ). On the other hand, knowledge about out-groups and exposure to out-group members may allow children to include those in their own self-concept, resulting in inclusion and positive attitudes ( Wright et al., 1997 ).

During childhood, the development of intergroup biases seems to have an inverted U-shape: generally positive attitudes of 3-year-old children become increasingly negative by the age of 7–8 years, with negativity decreasing thereafter (for review, see Raabe and Beelmann, 2011 ). Depending on the context, this general timeline may shift either way. For example, some researchers reported a decrease in negative attitudes toward children with intellectual disabilities from the age of 4–10 years ( Nowicki, 2006 ). It was suggested that younger children may over-generalize the situation and take into account only most salient characteristics of an evaluated individual, whereas older children are capable of analyzing a situation from multiple perspectives and considering a complex array of factors ( Magiati et al., 2002 ). Moreover, with age, children learn to rely more on their experience rather than external instruction. For example, in a minimal group paradigm, when a negative, overt message contradicted their own positive personal experience with an out-group, 6–7-year olds relied on the external instruction for their out-group evaluation, whereas 10–11-year olds trusted their own experience ( Kang and Inzlicht, 2012 ).

Importantly, children’s social development in the form of social attributions and in-group biases depends on their knowledge about different disabilities, understanding of disability, as well as general cognitive development ( Magiati et al., 2002 ; Diamond and Huang, 2005 ; Diamond et al., 2008 ; Diamond and Hong, 2010 ; Gasser et al., 2014 ). According to Piaget (1970) , children at the age of 2–7 years are at the preoperational stage of cognitive development; their thinking is perception-based and symbolic; they typically attend to the most salient features, while ignoring less obvious attributes or the situational context. Thus, while evaluating peers with disabilities, typically developing 5-year olds tend to consider only the highly noticeable features of an individual, such as adaptive equipment, while disregarding less noticeable features related to the individual’s dyslexia, hyperactivity, intellectual disability, or autism ( Conant and Budoff, 1983 ; Favazza and Odom, 1997 ; Diamond and Kensinger, 2002 ; Magiati et al., 2002 ). Therefore, not surprisingly, young children have better understanding of physical disabilities compared to intellectual ones ( Magiati et al., 2002 ; Laws and Kelly, 2005 ; Diamond et al., 2008 ; Diamond and Hong, 2010 ). Young children’s heightened attention to saliency may have another negative effect: the use of salient identifying labels for an out-group can trigger intergroup bias in 3–5-year-old children ( Patterson and Bigler, 2006 ; Bigler and Liben, 2007 ; Hilliard and Liben, 2010 ).

At the age of 7–11 years, children are at the concrete operational stage of cognitive development; they begin thinking logically, decrease their overgeneralizing tendency ( Gasser et al., 2014 ), and are more capable of analyzing a situational context from multiple perspectives. Better understanding of disability makes typically developing children more likely to engage in play activities with peers having disabilities ( Diamond and Huang, 2005 ). Better knowledge about and understanding of disability also allows typically developing children to overcome a tendency to generalize deficits across different domains (e.g., assume that a child in a wheelchair would also be less cognitively competent) and, instead, select activities that do not involve the affected domains and allow a child with disability to fully participate ( Diamond et al., 1997 ; Diamond and Hong, 2010 ; Gasser et al., 2014 ). Better understanding of disability, as better understanding of any out-group, reduces fears about this group and facilitates positive attitudes ( Katz and Chamiel, 1989 ; Okagaki et al., 1998 ).

Another important factor facilitating more positive attitudes toward individuals with disabilities is children’s ability to engage in moral reasoning when justifying social inclusion ( Fisher et al., 1998 ; Turiel, 1998 ; McDougall et al., 2004 ; Smetana, 2006 ; Gasser et al., 2014 ; Beaulieu-Bergeron and Morin, 2016 ; Shalev et al., 2016 ). Moral reasoning incorporates concepts of fairness, justice, equality, and human rights into social evaluations ( Killen and Rutland, 2011 ). Being reminded about fairness and equality, even 3–5-year-old typically developing children show improved inclusion of children with disabilities ( Diamond and Tu, 2009 ; Diamond and Hong, 2010 ). Explicit education about prejudice, intergroup biases, and social justice reduces intergroup biases in 6–13-year-old children (e.g., Aboud and Doyle, 1996 ; Aboud and Fenwick, 1999 ; Hughes et al., 2007 ; Brinkman et al., 2011 ). Note that explicit intergroup biases decrease with age due to social desirability concerns, as children (by about the age of 8 years) become aware of social norms explicitly condemning prejudiced social judgments and become motivated to conform to those norms ( Rutland et al., 2005b ; FitzRoy and Rutland, 2010 ). Implicit intergroup bias , on the other hand, seems to be unaffected by social desirability pressures, likely due to the lack of public accountability ( Rutland et al., 2005b ; Skinner and Meltzoff, 2019 ).

Personality Factors Affecting Perception of Disability

Roots of intergroup biases and social exclusion can be traced to early developing personality traits, as well as the features of the individual’s social-emotional and social-cognitive development.

Temperament

Previous research points toward continuity in the development of personality traits from early childhood into adulthood. Thus, personality traits exhibited by children during preschool years are positively correlated with those manifested during young adulthood. Importantly, these personality traits to a large extent determine the person’s beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors.

For example, self-confident, autonomous, resilient, expressive, impulsive, and social 3–4-year-old children became open-minded, approach-oriented, and novelty-seeking adults ( Jost et al., 2003 ; Carney et al., 2008 ; Janoff-Bulman et al., 2008 ; McAdams et al., 2008 ; Mondak and Halperin, 2008 ; Gerber et al., 2010 ; Kantner and Lindsay, 2014 ). As adults (at the age of 23 years), they expressed liberal views, while welcoming novelty, embracing change, denouncing social inequality, showing greater openness toward out-groups and less propensity toward worldview defense ( Mikulincer and Florian, 2000 ; Mikulincer and Shaver, 2001 ; Jost et al., 2003 ; Block and Block, 2006 ; Oxley et al., 2008 ; Mondak, 2010 ; Fraley et al., 2012 ).

By contrast, fearful, indecisive, withdrawn, inhibited, rigid, and easily victimized children became timorous, uncomfortable with uncertainty, loving structure and order, rigid adults ( Van Hiel and Mervielde, 2004 ; Block and Block, 2006 ; Jost et al., 2007 ). As adults, such individuals supported conservative views, promoting traditional values, established modes of behavior, strict rules, domestic surveillance, resistance to change, restricted immigration, and acceptance of inequality ( Jost et al., 2003 ; Block and Block, 2006 ; McAdams et al., 2008 ; Janoff-Bulman, 2009 ; Wegemer and Vandell, 2020 ). Thus, early temperament may facilitate the development of personality traits that would promote or impede the formation of intergroup biases and negative attitudes toward out-group members in general and individuals with disabilities in particular.

Empathy and Sympathy

Empathy and sympathy are critical for the development of prosocial behavior, social competence, and moral reasoning ( Diamond, 2001 ; Eisenberg et al., 2006 ; Mestre et al., 2019 ; Portt et al., 2020 ). Empathy is the ability to feel and understand another person’s emotional state or condition through emotional matching and affect sharing ( Eisenberg et al., 2006 ; Cuff et al., 2016 ). Sympathy is an emotional response to another person’s troublesome situation, typically expressed as feelings of pity, sorrow, or concern for the other ( Eisenberg et al., 2006 ).

Caregivers are children’s first teachers of empathy – they often mirror their infants’ positive and negative emotions, such as happiness, surprise, anger, and sadness ( Tronick, 1989 ; Gergely and Watson, 1996 ; Ray and Heyes, 2011 ; Heyes, 2018 ). In response, infants try to imitate caregivers’ facial expressions associated with certain emotions, and, by doing this, gradually internalize the emotional experiences of others ( Atkinson, 2007 ; McDonald and Messinger, 2011 ). For example, mirroring its mother’s smile may bring an infant a feeling of happiness; thus, mimicking facial expressions gradually transforms into sharing the other’s emotional state and, eventually, into emotional empathy.

Previous research found a significant, albeit gender-stereotyped, relation between children’s and parents’ empathy and sympathy: the child’s empathy and sympathy are related to the corresponding attributes in the same-sex parent ( Barnett et al., 1980 ; Eisenberg et al., 1991 ; Eisenberg and McNally, 1993 ). Development of empathy in children seems to be advanced by parents’ ability to be empathetic of their children’s emotions. Furthermore, regular observations of parent’s empathic reactions toward oneself make children more likely to model such empathic behaviors in their own interactions with others, thus, reinforcing their empathic skills. The quality of parent–child relationships (e.g., parental warmth and responsiveness, secure attachment 3 , parent–child synchrony, shared positive affect, parental use of reasoning) is positively related to children’s and adolescents’ empathy and sympathy levels, as well as their tendency toward prosocial behaviors ( Kestenbaum et al., 1989 ; Janssens and Gerris, 1992 ; Staub, 1992 ; Krevans and Gibbs, 1996 ; Kochanska, 2002 ; Van der Mark et al., 2002 ; Zhou et al., 2002 ; Kiang et al., 2004 ; Davidov and Grusec, 2006 ; Spinrad and Stifter, 2006 ; Feldman, 2007 ; Moreno et al., 2008 ).

Children’s greater empathy results in a better ability to understand others’ feelings and a higher likelihood of responding in a more appropriate, sensitive manner and genuinely trying to help; the latter behavioral patterns result in more positive social interactions. Indeed, both empathy and sympathy are positively related to the quality of interpersonal relationships, prosocial behaviors (e.g., caring for others, working to relieve suffering, treating others with kindness), and moral reasoning in children and early adolescents ( Eisenberg and Miller, 1987 ; Eisenberg and Fabes, 1990 ; Zahn-Waxler et al., 1995 ; Hoffman, 2000 ; Eisenberg et al., 2006 ; Knafo et al., 2008 ; Stocks et al., 2009 ; Mestre et al., 2019 ; Portt et al., 2020 ).

Empathy and sympathy are also associated with social competence measures, such as peer sociocentric status, perspective taking, cooperation, conflict resolution skills, as well as socially appropriate behaviors ( Adams, 1983 ; Eisenberg and Miller, 1987 ; Eisenberg and Fabes, 1995 , 1998 ; Eisenberg et al., 1996 ; Zhou et al., 2002 ; Sallquist et al., 2009 ; Carlo et al., 2010 ). Empathy and sympathy direct a person’s attention toward others’ feelings, situation, and needs; this other-oriented approach inhibits aggressive responses, motivates non-egoistic prosocial behavior, and facilitates the development of moral reasoning ( Eisenberg, 1986 ; Miller and Eisenberg, 1988 ; Batson, 1991 ; Hoffman, 2000 ; Eisenberg et al., 2001 ).

Empathy-associated decrease in aggressive behavior may inhibit bullying tendencies ( Kaukiainen et al., 1999 ; Albiero and Lo Coco, 2001 ). Indeed, starting at the age of 6 years old, high levels of empathy and sympathy are associated with low levels of children’s aggression and bullying behavior, as well as a higher likelihood of defending a victim ( Cohen and Strayer, 1996 ; Warden and Mackinnon, 2003 ; Strayer and Roberts, 2004 ; Mayberry and Espelage, 2007 ; Gini et al., 2008 ; Stavrinides et al., 2010 ; Barchia and Bussey, 2011 ; Jolliffe and Farrington, 2011 ). By contrast, a lack of empathy and sympathy may negatively affect children’s socioemotional development and result in bullying behavior. This trend continues into adolescence: low empathy is related to bullying behavior in 13–16-year olds ( Endresen and Olweus, 2002 ; Jolliffe and Farrington, 2006 ).

Although previous research reported that both affective (feeling others’ emotions) and cognitive (understanding others’ emotions) components of empathy are negatively associated with bullying ( Mitsopoulou and Giovazolias, 2015 ), the cognitive aspect has a much weaker effect ( Bryant, 1982 ; Cohen and Strayer, 1996 ; LeSure-Lester, 2000 ; Jolliffe and Farrington, 2006 ). Importantly, empathy-engendered prosocial behavior in peer-to-peer interactions may increase children’s positive attitudes toward members of out-groups and peers with disabilities. Previous research identified a bidirectional relation between emotional sensitivity and attitude toward individuals with disabilities: positive interactions with peers having disabilities make children more conscious of others’ emotional states and, therefore, more accepting of peers with disabilities; by contrast, limited exposure to peers with disabilities is associated with lower levels of both emotional sensitivity and disability acceptance ( Diamond, 2001 ; Diamond et al., 2008 ; Yu et al., 2015 ).

Theory of Mind

Theory of mind (ToM) is defined as the ability to understand that others’ perspective, knowledge, beliefs, thoughts, and intentions may differ from one’s own ( Wellman, 1990 ; Frith and Frith, 2005 ; Eisenberg et al., 2006 ). ToM is sometimes referred to as cognitive empathy ( McDonald and Messinger, 2011 ). Using false belief tests 4 , developmental researchers found that by about 4 years of age children are capable of seeing a situation from the perspective of others, making inferences about the beliefs and intentions of others, and interpreting others’ behavior in the light of those beliefs ( Wellman, 1991 ; Wellman and Bartsch, 1994 ; Wellman et al., 2001 ). Further improvement of ToM skills continues during the preschool years ( Wellman et al., 2001 ); older age is associated with more advanced ToM skills ( Walker, 2005 ; Lapan and Boseovski, 2016 ); girls reportedly develop ToM sooner than boys ( Walker et al., 2002 ; Walker, 2005 ).

Children’s understanding of other people’s circumstances and needs allows better perspective taking, more effective helping strategies, cooperative play behavior, better conflict-management skills, positive interactions with peers, more prosocial behaviors, and higher social competence ( Dunn et al., 1991 ; Dunn and Cutting, 1999 ; Watson et al., 1999 ; Jenkins and Astington, 2000 ; McDonald and Messinger, 2011 ; Caputi et al., 2012 ). By contrast, lack of ToM is associated with difficulties interpreting social information, less positive social interactions, and underdeveloped social skills ( Mundy and Crowson, 1997 ; Lapan and Boseovski, 2016 ). Note that there is a bidirectional relation between the ToM skills and successful social interactions: while better ToM skills promote more positive social interactions, the latter, in turn, improve the child’s ToM ( Watson et al., 1999 ).

Previous research found a significant relation of the ToM level to children’s perceptions and trait attributions of typically stigmatized individuals ( Lapan and Boseovski, 2016 ). Sensitivity to others’ internal states (beliefs, emotions, and intentions) makes their external characteristics less salient ( Lapan and Boseovski, 2016 ). Therefore, well-developed ToM skills enable children to appreciate individual differences and correctly evaluate others’ beliefs and abilities within the situational context ( Miller, 2002 ; Diamond and Hong, 2010 ). In this case, children with disabilities would be viewed in the light of their internal dispositions rather than, for example, visible orthosis or a wheelchair. Indeed, advanced ToM skills are associated with less hostile, more positive or neutral, and more sophisticated attributions of typically stereotyped characters; as well as more positive behavioral predictions about them ( Weiner et al., 1982 ; Thompson, 1989 ; Erdley and Dweck, 1993 ; Choe et al., 2013 ; Lapan and Boseovski, 2016 ). As a result, children with well-developed ToM skills are more likely to include a child with physical disability into play activities after appropriate evaluation of the task demands and the child’s previous experience ( Diamond and Hong, 2010 ).

Importantly, well-developed ToM skills result in the ability to regulate explicitly biased attributions and internalize bias reduction: whereas public settings with high public accountability makes all children exhibit more positive trait attributions, only children with higher level of ToM skills show positive attributions in a private setting with low public accountability ( Gee and Heyman, 2007 ; FitzRoy and Rutland, 2010 ; Aboud, 2013 ; Nesdale, 2013 ; Rutland, 2013 ; Beelmann and Heinemann, 2014 ). Thus, children with well-developed ToM skills are more likely to contemplate the legitimacy of their negative attributions and possible consequences of making potentially incorrect or offensive attributions about individuals with disabilities ( Lapan and Boseovski, 2016 ).

Self-Esteem

Individuals’ self-esteem is another important factor influencing attitudes toward out-groups and people with disabilities. Self-esteem defines the extent to which an individual approves of, likes, and values oneself (e.g., Blascovich et al., 1991 ). Evaluation of others and behaviors toward them start with the evaluation of self, and, thus, other-evaluation may be explored through the prism of self-esteem. The ability to satisfy the fundamental need to belong through positive social interactions with others improves the individual’s self-esteem ( Baumeister and Leary, 1995 ; Leary and Baumeister, 2000 ). On the other hand, adequate self-esteem is associated with better mental health and more positive interpersonal dynamics ( Greenberg et al., 1992 ; Denissen et al., 2008 ). Thus, there is a bidirectional link between self-esteem and attitudes/behaviors toward others.

Quality of the parent-child relationships is positively related to children’s and adolescents’ self-esteem and social competence ( Simons and Robertson, 1989 ; Riggio et al., 1990 ; Allen et al., 1994 ; Arbona and Power, 2003 ; Kim and Cicchetti, 2004 ). For example, children of supportive parents, who encourage independence, are more likely to have a high self-esteem and better social skills ( Riggio et al., 1990 ; McCormick and Kennedy, 1994 ). Also, being securely attached may serve as a protective factor for self-esteem: priming a person with a secure base (exposure to the name of a supportive other) leads to a more positive self-evaluation ( Baldwin, 1994 ). Attachment to the in-group has a similar protective effect: in-group membership allows individuals to maintain high self-esteem through intergroup comparisons that favor the in-group and often devalue members of out-groups ( Tajfel and Turner, 1986 ; Crocker and Luhtanen, 1990 ; Hogg and Abrams, 1990 ; Mikulincer and Shaver, 2001 ).

Previous research experimentally manipulated the perceived threat to a person’s self-esteem in order to evaluate how that affected their behavior toward others. Exposure to false negative feedback, which signals failure and threatens the person’s self-esteem, increases authoritarian 5 responses and negative reactions toward out-groups; by contrast, a false positive feedback results in lower authoritarian tendencies and more positive attitudes toward others ( Sales and Friend, 1973 ; Fein and Spencer, 1997 ). High self-esteem is associated with more advanced social skills. For example, high self-esteem reportedly protects children and adolescents from involvement in bullying, both as victims or bullies ( O’Moore and Hillery, 1991 ; Byrne, 1994 ; Rigby and Cox, 1996 ; O’Moore and Kirkham, 2001 ; but also see Olweus, 1993 ; Slee and Rigby, 1993 ; Kaukiainen et al., 2002 ). Importantly, children with better self-beliefs concerning their social competence have more positive attitudes toward peers with disabilities ( Hellmich and Loeper, 2019 ).

Gender Differences

Gender has been considered one of the factors potentially influencing perception of disability, although previous research on this topic produced mixed findings. Some studies showed no difference between self-identified boys and girls in their attitudes toward peers with disabilities ( Tamm and Prellwitz, 2001 ; Nikolaraizi et al., 2005 ; Hong et al., 2014 ). However, most studies reported that 4–14-year-old girls manifest more positive attitudes and higher levels of acceptance toward children with disabilities compared to boys ( Sigelman et al., 1986 ; Nikolaraizi and De Reybekiel, 2001 ; Laws and Kelly, 2005 ; Nowicki, 2006 ; Siperstein et al., 2007 ; Diamond et al., 2008 ; Vignes et al., 2009 ; Gökbulut et al., 2017 ; Ersan et al., 2020 ).

In terms of the disability type, 9–12-year-old girls, compared to boys, showed more positive attitudes toward children with hearing or visual impairments, as well as those with physical impairments; whereas no gender differences were found in children’s attitudes toward peers with behavioral difficulties ( Nikolaraizi and De Reybekiel, 2001 ; Laws and Kelly, 2005 ). In terms of the attitude components, Nowicki (2006) found that 4–10-year old girls were more accepting toward children with disabilities than boys, but only on the cognitive, and not on the emotional or behavioral levels. By contrast, Armstrong et al. (2016) reported that 7–16-year-old girls demonstrated more positive affective and behavioral components of attitudes than boys.

Interestingly, Nowicki (2006) reported more positive attitudes of girls compared to boys toward any targets: peers without disability, as well as peers with physical, intellectual, or physical and intellectual disability. This indiscriminate positivity may reflect a gender-specific response bias rather than actual gender differences in attitudes toward children with disabilities. Girls’ positivity could be attributed to their greater emotional sensitivity, compassion, empathy, or tendency toward prosocial behavior ( Walker, 2005 ; Han et al., 2006 ; Landazabal, 2009 ; Gökbulut et al., 2017 ), all of which likely being the result of traditional differences in social norms and expectations, as well as socialization practices between boys and girls ( Walker, 2005 ).

Parental Factors Affecting Perception of Disability

Family plays a significant role in shaping children’s beliefs and attitudes toward others: parenting styles and children’s attachment styles may determine the child’s future attitudes toward individuals with disabilities. Importantly, there is an intricate interplay between parental factors and children’s personality factors.

Parental Influences

Being the primary agents integrating children into society, parents may significantly influence their children’s attitudes toward out-groups in general and individuals with disabilities in particular ( Hellmich and Loeper, 2019 ). However, previous research showed inconsistent findings relating parents’ and children’s beliefs about people with disabilities: some found positive relation ( Katz and Chamiel, 1989 ; Peck et al., 1992 ; Okagaki et al., 1998 ; Innes and Diamond, 1999 ; Vignes et al., 2009 ; de Boer et al., 2011 , 2012b ; Hellmich and Loeper, 2019 ), while others found no relation ( Aboud and Amato, 2001 ; Perkins and Mebert, 2005 ; Vittrup and Holden, 2011 ; Pahlke et al., 2012 ; Hong et al., 2014 ; Jugert et al., 2016 ).

Importantly, parents may communicate their beliefs and attitudes to children explicitly – through discussions or explicit teaching, or implicitly – by modeling their values in daily interactions with other people or by providing their children opportunities to interact with out-group peers ( Dunn, 1993 ; Castelli et al., 2007 ; Hellmich and Loeper, 2019 ). While this differentiation is important, it still does not lead to consensus. Thus, some researchers reported that children’s attitudes toward out-groups were related to their parents’ explicit, rather than implicit, expression of out-group attitudes ( Holub et al., 2011 ; Costello and Hodson, 2014 ). By contrast, others showed the effectiveness of implicit communication: parents’ implicit stereotyping facilitated children’s intergroup biases ( Endendijk et al., 2013 , 2014 ), whereas parents’ intergroup friendships reduced children’s intergroup biases ( Vittrup and Holden, 2011 ; Pahlke et al., 2012 ). Explicit parent-child discussions of disabilities increase children’s knowledge regarding disabilities ( Innes and Diamond, 1999 ) which, in turn, reduces the child’s intergroup biases ( Magiati et al., 2002 ; Diamond and Huang, 2005 ; Diamond et al., 2008 ; Diamond and Hong, 2010 ; Gasser et al., 2014 ).

Children’s age may play a significant role in the relation between parents’ and children’s attitudes. For example, young children may have fewer opportunities to explicitly discuss intergroup biases with their parents because the latter do not believe their children are ready for such conversations ( Pahlke et al., 2012 ; Hong et al., 2014 ). Moreover, young children may not be socially savvy enough to effectively process the implicit beliefs and attitudes communicated by their parents in daily interactions. Finally, older children may be more susceptible to social desirability concerns that would limit the explicit expression of prejudices and intergroup biases and make their explicitly expressed attitudes toward out-groups more similar to those of their parents who have been functioning under the same social desirability pressures. In accord with these notions, previous research found that children’s attitudes appeared to be more associated with parents’ attitudes as children become older, at least from the age of 5–6-years ( Katz and Chamiel, 1989 ; Roberts and Lindsell, 1997 ; Hong et al., 2014 ).

Parenting Styles

Parenting practices to a large extent affect children’s personality traits and attitudes toward others. Parenting can be classified according to responsiveness and control dimensions, resulting in four parental styles: authoritarian, authoritative, permissive, and uninvolved ( Baumrind, 1994 ). Authoritarian parents are demanding, but not responsive; they promote over-control, obedience to authority, rigidity, and use of punishment. Authoritative parents show high responsiveness and high control; they are warm but demanding, they set rules and provide guidance, but also promote respect and autonomy. Permissive parents are warm and responsive, but not demanding; they do not set rules, but provide ample autonomy. Uninvolved parents are cold and undemanding; their children receive no warmth, no rules, and very little attention or guidance.

Research on permissive and uninvolved parenting styles in relation to children’s views and attitudes produced inconclusive results. By contrast, the authoritarian parenting style has been shown to be associated with conservative views in grown-up children, whereas authoritative parenting is associated with liberal views ( Adorno et al., 1950 ; Jost et al., 2003 ; Oesterreich, 2005 ; Fraley et al., 2012 ; Wegemer and Vandell, 2020 ). In general, under-controlled children tend to grow up to be adults with liberal views, while over-controlled children often become conservatives ( Block and Block, 2006 ). Strict, unaffectionate, and punitive parenting produces social conformists who perceive the world as hostile and threatening, promote authoritarian sociopolitical attitudes and are more likely to display intergroup biases ( Duckitt et al., 2002 ; Holub et al., 2011 ; Costello and Hodson, 2014 ; Jugert et al., 2016 ).

Parents’ sociopolitical attitudes may be passed to their children via parental practices that shape specific personality traits. For example, parents with conservative views tend to enforce strict rules, discipline, and respect for authority ( Lakoff, 1996 ; Wilcox, 1998 ; Barker and Tinnick, 2006 ; McAdams et al., 2008 ). These parental practices, in turn, are more likely to produce a fearful individual with low self-esteem, who may be protective of the in-group and discriminative toward out-groups. By contrast, parents with liberal views tend to be loving and empathetic; they foster the same loving, emphatic, accepting, and open-minded attitude in their children ( Lakoff, 1996 ; McAdams et al., 2008 ); these grown-up children are more likely to condemn intergroup biases and social exclusion.

Furthermore, authoritative parenting, use of inductive reasoning, and healthy limit setting are all associated with higher levels of children’s empathy ( Bryant, 1987 ; Janssens and Gerris, 1992 ; Krevans and Gibbs, 1996 ; Hoffman, 2000 ), whereas authoritarian parenting, excessive parental control, power assertion, and harsh punishment are associated with lower levels of children’s empathy ( Hastings et al., 2002 ). Since empathy promotes the development of social skills ( Diamond, 2001 ; Eisenberg et al., 2006 ; Mestre et al., 2019 ; Portt et al., 2020 ), authoritative parenting yields the best outcomes in terms of children’s emotional intelligence, social-behavioral skills, and social competence ( Ladd and Pettit, 2002 ; Wang et al., 2019 ); the latter, in turn, may increase children’s positive peer relationships and acceptance of peers with disabilities (e.g., Diamond, 2001 ). By contrast, authoritarian parenting, which is related to decreased emotional understanding ( Wang et al., 2019 ), may result in more negative attitudes toward peers with disabilities.

Attachment Styles

Parental practices shape the individual’s attachment style, which further frames the individual’s future social attitudes and relationships. Parents serve as a secure base for infants to explore their environment while being protected from possible threats ( Bowlby, 1969 ; Ainsworth, 1991 ). The level of availability, responsiveness, and supportiveness of a caregiver (the attachment figure) determines the social mental models that individuals use to build their relationships with important others during the lifetime ( Bowlby, 1969 ; Hazan and Shaver, 1987 ; Cassidy, 1994 ; Trinke and Bartholomew, 1997 ; Fraley and Shaver, 2000 ; Shaver and Mikulincer, 2002 ; Bretherton and Munholland, 2008 ).

The security of the parent-infant attachment is usually tested in the Strange Situation paradigm ( Ainsworth and Witting, 1969 ; Ainsworth and Bowlby, 1991 ). When being separated from the mother in the presence of a stranger in an unfamiliar setting, children show different responses in terms of seeking and maintaining contact with a caregiver, avoiding contact, or resisting contact (Strange Situation Classification; Ainsworth and Witting, 1969 ; Ainsworth and Bowlby, 1991 ). Infants’ dispositional differences in the Strange Situation are manifested in the following dichotomies: sociability vs. fear, affiliation vs. exploration, and approach vs. avoidance ( Hatemi et al., 2013 ). Behaviors exhibited by infants in the Strange Situation classify them as having a secure, insecure anxious-ambivalent, or insecure avoidant attachment styles ( Ainsworth et al., 1978 ).

Securely attached infants actively explore their surroundings, maintain contact with the mother, approach the stranger, become distressed when separated from the mother and easily comforted upon her return ( Ainsworth et al., 1978 ). As adults, these individuals are approach-oriented, dependable, and trustworthy ( Hazan and Shaver, 1987 ; Collins, 1996 ). By contrast, avoidantly attached infants show less exploration and avoid contacting the mother or the stranger; they do not demonstrate strong positive or negative emotions upon the mother’s departure or return. Adults with avoidant/dismissive attachment style have a hard time trusting others and getting into close, intimate relationships. Finally, anxious-ambivalent infants show low levels of exploration, are reluctant to initiate contact with the stranger, become visibly distressed when separated from the mother, and display inconsistent emotions upon her return. As adults, they worry excessively about their relationships with others and tend to get too close to others, often scaring them away ( Hazan and Shaver, 1987 ). Moreover, individuals scoring high on the anxiety dimension tend to have lower self-esteem and less positive self-views than their more securely attached peers ( Bartholomew and Horowitz, 1991 ; Mikulincer, 1998 ).

The attachment style formed during infancy determines to a large extent the person’s future sense of security, social life, and worldviews ( Kagan et al., 1988 ; Jost et al., 2003 ). Responsive parenting establishes a secure base for the exploration of environment and tolerance of novelty and uncertainty ( Mikulincer and Shaver, 2001 ). In general, secure attachment is typically associated with liberalism, whereas insecure anxious-ambivalent attachment is linked to conservative views in grown-up children ( Mikulincer, 1997 ; Mikulincer and Florian, 2000 ; Mikulincer and Shaver, 2001 ; Koleva and Rip, 2009 ; Wegemer and Vandell, 2020 ).

Secure attachment may enable people to embrace differences in the members of out-groups; even priming secure attachment (secure base schema) reduced negative evaluations of out-group members, irrespective of the individual’s underlying attachment style ( Mikulincer and Shaver, 2001 ; Weise et al., 2008 ; Koleva and Rip, 2009 ; Gillath and Hart, 2010 ). By contrast, individuals with insecure attachment in interpersonal relationships tend to seek security in their affiliation with groups or institutions ( Smith et al., 1999 ; Popper and Mayseless, 2007 ), which triggers intergroup biases and social exclusion of out-group members.

Furthermore, the feeling of vulnerability stemming from an insecure attachment may result in defensive stereotyping and exclusion of out-group members perceived as “strangers” during adulthood ( Mikulincer, 1997 ; Mikulincer and Shaver, 2001 ; Hatemi et al., 2013 ). For example, people with higher levels of social anxiety would compare themselves to unfamiliar others using a greater number of attributes/dimensions and a greater number of comparisons per dimension ( Antony et al., 2005 ), thus, being less likely to perceive similarity and in-group affiliation, and more likely to protect in-group through defense and support punitive policies against out-groups ( Carney et al., 2008 ; Hatemi et al., 2013 ). In summary, parental responsiveness to an infant may determine the quality of the secure base that the individual would use in social relationships with others and shape the individual’s attitudes toward out-group members.

Societal Factors Affecting Perception of Disability

In addition to personality and parental factors, societal factors add another layer of influences shaping children’s attitudes toward individuals with disabilities.

According to the “contact hypothesis” ( Allport, 1954 ), prejudice may result from the incomplete or incorrect information about out-groups, which leads to overgeneralization and social exclusion; however, positive contact with out-group members may reduce stereotypes and intergroup biases. Familiarity with an out-group allows identification of similarities between the in- and out-group members, advances understanding of others, reduces anxiety and perceived out-group threat, as well as improves perspective taking and empathy ( Dovidio et al., 2005 ; González and Brown, 2006 ; Pettigrew and Tropp, 2008 ; Pettigrew et al., 2011 ). In this case, inclusive education, that places typically developing children and those with disabilities in the same classroom, should reduce intergroup biases and improve attitudes toward children with disabilities.

Previous research comparing inclusive and non-inclusive classrooms, indeed, found that inclusion and exposure has positive effects on typically developing children’s attitudes toward and acceptance of peers with disabilities ( Diamond and Carpenter, 2000 ; Nikolaraizi et al., 2005 ; Nowicki, 2006 ; Rillotta and Nettelbeck, 2007 ; Siperstein et al., 2007 ; Feddes et al., 2009 ; Kalyva and Agaliotis, 2009 ; Gasser et al., 2014 ). Face-to-face interactions increase children’s knowledge about disabilities and understanding of special needs and capabilities, as well as improve their attitudes toward peers with disabilities ( Nikolaraizi et al., 2005 ; Gasser et al., 2014 ; Yildirim Hacıibrahimoğlu and Ustaoğlu, 2020 ). Importantly, even non-physical, imaginary exposure to out-group members has positive effects. Thus, reading stories, imagining or acting out contact and friendship with out-group members reduces children’s intergroup biases ( Langer et al., 1985 ; Nesdale et al., 2005b ; Cameron et al., 2006 , 2011 ; Stathi et al., 2014 ; Vezzali et al., 2015 ). The duration of intervention may also be an important factor. For example, a several-week-long intervention involving reading stories about children with disabilities and participating in guided discussions improved young children’s attitudes toward individuals with disabilities ( Cameron et al., 2007 ); whereas 1-hour-long intervention failed to reduce intergroup biases in young children ( Gonzales et al., 2017 ).

Age is another factor influencing children’s response to inclusive settings and malleability of their attitudes toward peers with disabilities. After having face-to-face exposure to peers with disabilities, 7–10-year-old typically developing children reported more favorable attitudes than 11–16-year olds ( Armstrong et al., 2016 ); similarly, 9-year olds showed higher level of positive attitudes and social inclusion than 12-year olds ( Gasser et al., 2013 ). Thus, the most positive effect of exposure in the inclusive school context has been shown for elementary school students, rather than middle school ones ( Krahé and Altwasser, 2006 ; Rillotta and Nettelbeck, 2007 ; Gasser et al., 2013 ), possibly because younger children’s attitudes toward out-groups are less stigmatizing and more malleable ( Innes and Diamond, 1999 ; Bell and Morgan, 2000 ). Furthermore, early (elementary and middle school years) experiences in inclusive school environments may advance the development of children’s moral reasoning, making them more socially inclusive during high-school years ( McDougall et al., 2004 ; Shalev et al., 2016 ).

Importantly, previous research reported not only positive, but also non-significant or even negative effects of exposure ( Verkuyten and Kinket, 2000 ; Nowicki and Sandieson, 2002 ; Smith-D’Arezzo and Moore-Thomas, 2010 ; Kurtz-Costes et al., 2011 ; Vittrup and Holden, 2011 ; Pahlke et al., 2012 ; Vezzali et al., 2012 ; Huckstadt and Shutts, 2014 ; Aboud et al., 2015 ; Gibson et al., 2017 ; Ersan et al., 2020 ). Placement of children with disabilities in a general classroom does not automatically produce peer acceptance and social inclusion ( Kluwin and Gonsher, 1994 ; McEvoy and Odom, 1996 ). Exposure to out-group members may create discomfort, insecurity, anxiety, and fear ( Ward et al., 1994 ; Killen et al., 2013 ). For example, in typically developing 10–11-year-old children, those with intellectual disability induced feelings of sadness, pity, and sympathy ( Beaulieu-Bergeron and Morin, 2016 ), as well as fear and anger ( Nowicki et al., 2014 ). Negative feelings were associated with typically developing children’s focus on differences between them and children with disabilities, such as differences in social, emotional, and cognitive skills ( Nowicki et al., 2014 ).

Note that interactions with out-group members may also be discouraged by the in-group; typically developing children are often concerned about their own social status among peers if they want to interact with children having disabilities ( Kalymon et al., 2010 ; Obrusnikova et al., 2010 ). Therefore, typically developing children often accept their peers with disabilities only at a superficial level, with seemingly positive attitudes not being translated into readiness to interact and approach-oriented behaviors ( Nikolaraizi and De Reybekiel, 2001 ). As a result, even in inclusive environments, children with disabilities may feel excluded and socially isolated because other children prefer to play with typically developing peers ( Estell et al., 2009 ; Koster et al., 2010 ; Carvalho et al., 2014 ).

Negative attitudes often are based on misconceptions children have about peers with disabilities. For example, 5–7-year-old children expressed concerns that peers with disabilities may need medical care, be contagious, or just not be able to play ( Nikolaraizi et al., 2005 ). Furthermore, learning disability was perceived by 10–11-year-old children not only as a limited mental capacity, but also as a character deficit: sign of laziness and lack of motivation to work harder ( Smith-D’Arezzo and Moore-Thomas, 2010 ). Providing knowledge about different disabilities, both physical and intellectual, has become the focus of many interventions aiming at changing attitudes toward peers with disabilities in typically developing elementary school students ( Favazza and Odom, 1997 ; Swaim and Morgan, 2001 ; Krahé and Altwasser, 2006 ; Holtz, 2007 ; Rillotta and Nettelbeck, 2007 ; Ison et al., 2010 ).

Furthermore, typically developing children may socially exclude peers with disabilities due to the nature of activities in which they participate. More social exclusion of children with disabilities is observed indoors rather than outdoors ( Hong et al., 2020 ); outdoors likely provides more space to allow multiple playmates and encourage social interactions ( Verhaegh et al., 2006 ). Children were also more exclusive of peers with disabilities during academic activities rather than play; play activities may provide more opportunities for children to engage in collaborative games ( Hong et al., 2020 ). However, play activities requiring mobility resulted in more social exclusion of children with disabilities ( Diamond and Tu, 2009 ; Diamond and Hong, 2010 ). Moreover, children were more likely to exclude peers with disabilities from academic or sport rather than social activities, likely because the group efficacy and threat of failure are more salient in the former type of activities ( Gasser et al., 2014 ).

The effectiveness of exposure to individuals with disabilities on changing attitudes of typically developing children depends on the quality of the interactions ( Skinner and Meltzoff, 2019 ). Positive changes in children’s attitudes were recorded when their contact with children having disabilities was regular, scaffolded by adults, and structured to advance understanding, reduce anxiety, as well as promote empathy, acceptance, interdependence, and cooperation rather than competition ( Pettigrew and Tropp, 2000 ; Diamond, 2001 ; London et al., 2002 ; Kurtz-Costes et al., 2011 ; Kang and Inzlicht, 2012 ; Vezzali et al., 2012 , 2015 ; Yu et al., 2012 ; Berger et al., 2015 ; Armstrong et al., 2016 ). Also, more frequent contact with peers having disabilities was associated with more positive attitudes ( Favazza and Odom, 1997 ; Okagaki et al., 1998 ; Cameron et al., 2007 ; Hong et al., 2014 ). Importantly, the relation between contact and attitude is bidirectional: more structured, positive exposure to individuals with disabilities results in better understanding of disability and social acceptance, which, in turn, promotes further interest and willingness to interact ( Hong et al., 2014 ).

Cultural Differences

Culture represents a dynamic set of aspirations, values, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors shared by a group of people and passed from one generation to another ( Coleridge, 2000 ; Dickson et al., 2000 ; Matsumoto, 2001 ). Development of social attitudes and intergroup biases takes place within a cultural context; this is especially true in the case of disability since the latter is a socially constructed concept ( Shweder and Sullivan, 1993 ; Coleridge, 2000 ; Gollnick and Chinn, 2002 ; Narayan, 2002 ; Mandell and Novak, 2005 ).

The definition of disability depends on the traits and capacities valued in a particular culture or social context ( Whyte and Ingstad, 1995 ). For example, Tuareg in Sahara consider excessive freckles and small buttocks as impairment, since these features are socially disapproved and may prohibit marrying and, thus, fully participating in social life ( Halatine and Berge, 1990 ). By contrast, on the island of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, deafness was not considered impairment, but rather as a normal human variation: over generations, individuals with hereditary congenital deafness were so common that the majority of hearing population became fluent in sign language, which allowed deaf residents to become fully integrated into society ( Groce, 1985 ). These two examples demonstrate the way culturally shaped values arbitrarily define disability. Moreover, in “simple” societies, such as Martha’s Vineyard, where individuals have wide-spread kinship ties, regular face-to-face contact, considerable interconnection, and integration into community life, a single characteristic, such as a physical impairment, does not define one’s social identity ( Scheer and Groce, 1988 ).

In contrast to simple societies, in complex societies individuals are not so interrelated; social relationships beyond the immediate family are often task-oriented and rather impersonal ( Wright, 1983 ). In a complex society with a large number of impersonal social interactions, heuristics become handy to avoid cognitive overload; as a result, salient personal characteristics that deviate from the norm may define one’s social identity for an easy in-group vs. out-group classification and approach vs. avoidance behavior. Indeed, the 18–19th centuries’ industrialization and urbanization led to a more complex society and significantly increased social exclusion of individuals with disabilities ( Stone, 1984 ).

Another feature of a society that may affect the level of social exclusion is individualism vs. collectivism. Individualistic societies promote respect for individual differences, values, and goals. By contrast, collectivistic societies value group goals and uniformity in the ways people look and think; such pressure for uniformity makes any deviation from the norm salient and negatively valenced. In individualistic societies, being “normal” has a neutral to slightly negative connotation: there is nothing special about a “normal” individual, which is boring. By contrast, in collectivistic societies, such as Japan, being normal is required for social approval and inclusion ( Kuroishi and Sano, 2007 ; Yamada, 2009 ). Previous research found that collectivistic societies typically manifest less positive attitudes toward individuals with disabilities compared to individualistic societies ( Black et al., 2003 ; Rao et al., 2010 ; Benomir et al., 2016 ; Huppert et al., 2019 ; Ersan et al., 2020 ).

Beliefs about the perceived cause of a disability to a large extent determine attitudes and behaviors toward individuals with disabilities within a family and society ( Groce and Zola, 1993 ). For example, some societies (e.g., Navajo in US; Chagga in Tanzania; Ga in Ghana; some communities in Benin) perceive individuals with disabilities as divine beings, possessing sixth sense, protected by supernatural powers, or being pacifiers of the evil spirits; these beliefs result in awe, special care, kind treatment, and social inclusion of such individuals ( Wright, 1960 ; Medina et al., 1998 ). On a negative note, in such communities, individuals with disabilities do not receive treatment for their impairment since it may question the God’s will or interfere with supernatural powers.

By contrast, other societies (e.g., Hopi in the United States; Ashanti in Ghana; Ainu in Japan; some communities in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Nigeria, Kenya, Zimbabwe; Pakistan, India, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong) believe that disability is a result of parental sexual misconduct, sins conducted in previous life, witchcraft, juju, family curse, God’ punishment, or the involvement of evil spirits ( Munro, 1963 ; Abosi and Ozoji, 1985 ; Groce and Zola, 1993 ; Cheng and Tang, 1995 ; Rogers-Adkinson et al., 2003 ). Shame associated with disability led to severe mistreatment and social exclusion of such individuals. The view of disability as a result of past transgressions prohibits access to resources, medical care, and special interventions for individuals with disabilities ( Groce and Zola, 1993 ; Tsang et al., 2003 ).

Furthermore, the concepts of fairness, equality, and human rights differ significantly between traditional 6 and modern societies: perception of disability as a divine punishment, fate, or karma seemingly justifies social exclusion and eliminates the necessity of intervention ( Coleridge, 2000 ). Previous research showed that participants from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong (traditional societies) had more negative attitudes and higher propensity of social exclusion toward individuals with disabilities than participants from the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany (modern societies) ( Westbrook et al., 1993 ; Chan et al., 2002 ; Chen et al., 2002 ; Wang et al., 2003 ; Brown et al., 2009 ). Thus, in Asian countries, the impairment seems to become the single salient characteristic defining the identity and social life of the individual. Shame and stigma associated with disability alienates individuals with disabilities from the rest of the society, limits interpersonal contacts and opportunities to get more knowledge and understanding of disability for typically developing individuals.

However, being individualistic, developed, and modern, does not necessarily place a society among socially inclusive toward disability. For example, kindergartners from the Netherlands reportedly had much more negative attitudes toward peers with disabilities compared to children from the United States or Greece ( de Boer et al., 2012a ). A possible explanation to this phenomenon could be a lagging behind implementation of inclusive education programs in Dutch schools. Fewer opportunities to communicate with peers having disabilities may exacerbate intergroup biases and prevent social inclusion; instead, being perceived as different and unfamiliar, individuals with disabilities may be treated with caution, fear, and avoidance ( Scheer and Groce, 1988 ).

Importantly, children acquire the culturally defined concepts of ability vs. disability through everyday interactions with peers and adults, as well as from the media ( Hodkinson, 2007 ; Chen et al., 2012 ; Varenne, 2018 ). Depending on cultural beliefs, norms, and traditions, children are socialized in a particular way, which shapes their own beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors towards individuals with disabilities. For example, children socialized to respect individual differences may be more accepting of individuals with disabilities ( Crystal et al., 1999 ; Shweder et al., 2007 ). By contrast, Japanese children are socialized to become highly sensitive to any differences that would potentially stigmatize themselves or others ( Haight et al., 2016 ; Kayama et al., 2016 ). This sensitivity may have dual outcomes: on the one hand, it increases empathy and compassion, making people more understanding and willing to help; on the other hand, it leads to stigmatization, marginalization, and social exclusion ( Sano and Kuroishi, 2005 ; Kayama and Haight, 2014 ; Sato et al., 2015 ; Kayama, 2017 ). Thus, many Japanese families with individuals having disabilities traditionally felt stigmatized and socially excluded by others ( Sato et al., 2015 ), which resulted in hiding family members with disabilities and declining special education opportunities and services available to them ( Tachibana and Watanabe, 2004 ; Jegatheesan, 2009 ; Kayama and Haight, 2014 ).

In summary, cultural differences in attitudes toward individuals with disabilities represent a multidimensional construct, which includes traditional values and socialization practices, causal beliefs about disability, collectivistic vs. individualistic tendencies, as well as religious traditions. Importantly, cultures are non-homogenous: different strata in the same society may have different beliefs, depending on the level of education and religious affiliations, among other factors. Moreover, cultures are dynamic: what was a cultural norm 20 years ago may not be such today; for example, the widespread implementation of inclusive education programs may dramatically change attitudes toward disabilities over one generation.

The main purpose of the current review was to identify factors that affect perception of disability in the developmental context. When and how do children develop positive vs. negative attitudes toward individuals with disabilities? What factors are imperative in this developmental process?

The current review explored disability perception in the light of the in-group vs. out-group dichotomy . Development of social identity shapes the individual’s beliefs about self and others, leading to classification of others into “us” vs. “them,” in-groups vs. out-groups ( Allport, 1954 ; Tajfel and Turner, 1979 ; Hatemi et al., 2013 ). Attitudes toward out-groups are often infused with feelings of uncertainty, discomfort, anxiety, and fear ( Ward et al., 1994 ; Killen et al., 2013 ). Lack of knowledge about an out-group may lead individuals to perceive it as a potential threat, triggering a self-protective defense reaction manifested in negative attitudes toward members of an out-group, stigmatization, and discrimination ( Stephan and Stephan, 1993 ; Ybarra and Stephan, 1994 ). Thus, intergroup biases lead to social exclusion of out-groups and social isolation of their members. Since individuals with disabilities may be perceived as a special case of out-groups, the mechanisms involved in out-group perception should also apply to the perception of disability.

Previous research suggests that during the child’s development , attitudes toward out-groups and individuals with disability become increasingly negative across 3–7-year period, but gradually improve thereafter ( Averhart and Bigler, 1997 ; Bigler and Liben, 2007 ; Nesdale and Brown, 2004 ; Dunham et al., 2011 ; Raabe and Beelmann, 2011 ; Dunham and Emory, 2014 ; Baron and Dunham, 2015 ). An increase in intergroup biases and negative attitudes toward out-groups is associated with an increased sociocentric awareness and social cognition about in-groups vs. out-groups, as well as more solidified social identity, which leads to in-group favoritism and out-group derogation ( Brewer, 1999 ; Aboud, 2003 ; Nesdale, 2004 , 2008 ; Baron and Banaji, 2006 ; Rutland et al., 2007 ; Dunham et al., 2011 ; Buttelmann and Böhm, 2014 ; Dunham and Emory, 2014 ; Baron and Dunham, 2015 ). Change to more positive attitudes toward out-groups in general, and disability in particular, at the age of 7–8 years may be attributed to the following factors: (1) children’s increased knowledge about disability ( Diamond et al., 1997 ; Diamond and Hong, 2010 ; Gasser et al., 2014 ); (2) children’s cognitive development shifting to the concrete operational stage, which allows critical thinking, perspective taking, lesser focus on most salient features, and a decrease in overgeneralization ( Piaget, 1970 ; Gasser et al., 2014 ); and (3) development of moral reasoning, increasing children’s awareness of human rights, equality, and social justice during social evaluations ( Fisher et al., 1998 ; Turiel, 1998 ; McDougall et al., 2004 ; Smetana, 2006 ; Gasser et al., 2014 ; Beaulieu-Bergeron and Morin, 2016 ; Shalev et al., 2016 ).

To provide a comprehensive model of disability perception, the current review explored cognitive, affective , and behavioral components of children’s attitudes. Previous research suggests that cognitive aspects of disability perception determine affective components, which, in turn, translate into behavioral outcomes. Thus, children with a better understanding of disability tend to have more positive attitudes toward individuals with disability ( Katz and Chamiel, 1989 ; Okagaki et al., 1998 ; Magiati et al., 2002 ; Diamond and Huang, 2005 ; Diamond et al., 2008 ; Diamond and Hong, 2010 ; Gasser et al., 2014 ); positive attitudes, in turn, make children more likely to exhibit approach-oriented behaviors, initiating interactions with peers having disabilities, and practicing social inclusion ( Diamond, 1993 ; Okagaki et al., 1998 ; Roberts, 1999 ; Roberts and Smith, 1999 ; Favazza et al., 2000 ; Gaad, 2004 ). Importantly, exposure to individuals with disabilities informs typically developing children’s knowledge about disability ( Nikolaraizi et al., 2005 ; Gasser et al., 2014 ; Yildirim Hacıibrahimoğlu and Ustaoğlu, 2020 ), thus, establishing a bidirectional connection among the cognitive, affective, and behavioral aspects of disability perception.

Furthermore, following the principles of the ecological systems theory ( Bronfenbrenner, 1992 ; Bronfenbrenner et al., 1994 ), the current review explored a multilevel structure of potential factors influencing perception of disability at the level of society , family , and school environment, as well as the individual . Importantly, disability is a socially constructed concept: the extent to which impairment becomes a disability depends to a large extent on the cultural norms and traditions ( Shweder and Sullivan, 1993 ; Hall and Hill, 1996 ; Coleridge, 2000 ; Gollnick and Chinn, 2002 ; Narayan, 2002 ; Mandell and Novak, 2005 ). In turn, cultural norms and traditions affect attitudes toward disability which are broadcast by the media, exhibited by teachers in schools, and modeled by parents to their children. Then, school environment and parental practices shape children’s individual characteristics (e.g., temperament, empathy, sympathy, ToM, self-esteem) that affect their perception of disability.

In terms of cultural differences , simple societies are more likely to produce positive attitudes toward disability since the individual’s impairment is perceived as one of many, and not the defining, characteristic of the individual ( Groce, 1985 ). By contrast, complex societies may create more conditions in which the impairment becomes a disability, thus preventing the individual’s full participation in the society; the use of heuristics in such societies often triggers response to the most salient characteristic of the individual, which may be impairment ( Wright, 1983 ). Moreover, individualistic societies typically exhibit more positive attitudes toward disability than collectivistic ones, since the former respect individual differences, whereas the latter impose pressure for uniformity ( Black et al., 2003 ; Kuroishi and Sano, 2007 ; Yamada, 2009 ; Rao et al., 2010 ; Benomir et al., 2016 ; Huppert et al., 2019 ; Ersan et al., 2020 ). It seems that in both simple vs. complex and individualistic vs. collectivistic dichotomies, societal factors that make impairment a salient feature of the individual lead to more negative attitudes toward individuals with disabilities.

Cultural norms and traditions also determine parental practices that may shape children’s attitudes toward disability ( Wu et al., 2002 ; Porter et al., 2005 ). In some countries (e.g., China), the authoritarian parenting style is very common, whereas others (e.g., the United States) widely promote authoritative parenting style ( Chen et al., 1997 ; Majumder, 2016 ). Authoritarian parenting may produce insecurely attached children with low self-esteem, low levels of empathy and sympathy, and fearful temperament ( Bryant, 1987 ; Janssens and Gerris, 1992 ; Krevans and Gibbs, 1996 ; Hoffman, 2000 ) – the individual characteristics associated with conservative views, avoidance-oriented behaviors, high level of intergroup biases, and negative attitudes toward out-groups and individuals with disabilities ( Jost et al., 2003 ; Fraley et al., 2012 ; Wegemer and Vandell, 2020 ). By contrast, authoritative parenting may produce securely attached children with high self-esteem, high levels of empathy and sympathy, and expressive, social personality ( Hastings et al., 2002 ) – the individual characteristics associated with liberal views, approach-oriented behaviors, low level of intergroup biases, and positive attitudes toward out-groups and individuals with disabilities ( Ladd and Pettit, 2002 ; Jost et al., 2003 ; Fraley et al., 2012 ; Wang et al., 2019 ; Wegemer and Vandell, 2020 ). As a result, cultural factors may affect the prevalence of particular parenting practices which, in turn, shape individual characteristics and attitudes toward out-groups and disability.

Furthermore, cultural norms determine the availability of inclusive eduction and school-based interventions, which play an important role in shaping children’s perception of disability. School-based interventions are effective if they are structured, increase knowledge about disability, promote cooperation rather than competition, focus on similarities rather than differences between children, and are implemented in early childhood ( Pettigrew and Tropp, 2000 ; Diamond, 2001 ; London et al., 2002 ; Kurtz-Costes et al., 2011 ; Kang and Inzlicht, 2012 ; Vezzali et al., 2012 , 2015 ; Yu et al., 2012 ; Berger et al., 2015 ; Armstrong et al., 2016 ).

A comprehensive review of the research allowed us to create an integrative model, encompassing complex relations among cultural, parental, and individual factors affecting perception of disability ( Figure 1 ); this model may provide a conceptual framework for understanding the development of disability perception. We would like to emphasize here the power of education to change: (1) children’s knowledge, understanding, attitudes, and behaviors; (2) parental beliefs, attitudes, and practices; and even (3) cultural norms and traditions in respect to disability perception. Furthermore, for each level (cultural, parental, individual), we outlined specific factors that affect perception of disability in a positive vs. negative way ( Table 1 ).

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Integrative model providing a conceptual framework for understanding factors influencing the development of disability perception. The current model proposes that children’s attitudes toward disability may be influenced by a range of multi-dimensional factors encompassing different hierarchical levels of the child’s environment. Specifically, cultural norms and traditions guide parental practices and educational environment, which, in turn, shape children’s attitudes toward disability. In this process, parental practices interact with children’s personality traits. For example, an authoritative parenting style may promote secure attachment of the child, which would likely encourage higher self-esteem and empathy, both positively affecting the child’s attitude toward individuals with disability. At the same time, the child’s temperament (e.g., fearful and withdrawn vs. self-confident and social) might alleviate or exacerbate the effects of negative parental practices. Importantly, this model underlines the power of the educational environment to change not only children’s attitudes toward disability, but also parents’ intergroup biases and parental practices, as well as cultural norms in regard to disability perception.

The outline of factors that affect perception of disability in a positive vs. negative way.

In conclusion, future interventions, aiming to improve perception of disability during childhood and adolescence, should target not only educational, but also parental practices. We propose that parental education should be added as an important component of such interventions. Parents should understand that the way they treat their children early on will become the way their children will treat out-groups and individuals with disabilities later on: if parents are responsive to their children’s needs, show empathy and respect toward their children, promote autonomy, provide guidance, impose an adequate amount of control, and use inductive reasoning, their children will become self-confident and well-adjusted social beings, exhibiting high levels of empathy, social competence, and moral reasoning, which would translate into positive attitudes toward others, out-groups, and individuals with disabilities. Whereas people’s individual characteristics may determine their attitudes toward out-groups and disability, importantly, the former are shaped by parental practices and educational environment which, in turn, are the product of cultural norms and traditions.

Strengths, Limitations, and Future Directions

The current review provides a comprehensive analysis of the contemporary research on the developmental aspects of disability perception that allows for deeper understanding of the ways in which cultural, parental, educational, and personality factors can either positively or negatively affect the formation of the individual’s emotional, cognitive, and behavioral aspects of disability perception. The proposed conceptual model of the disability perception development may guide future research on this topic. Based on this model, effective, age-appropriate interventions to improve perception of disability could be designed and tested.

Some factors potentially influencing the development of disability perception (e.g., genetic factors) were beyond the scope of this review. Moreover, some aspects of development (e.g., the embeddedness of emotions in language development; the role of early attachment to a caregiver, among the person’s other social relationships, in social development) discussed in the current review would require more deliberation due to controversies highlighted by previous research. Furthermore, previous research did not provide clear mechanisms behind some of the relations discussed in this review, such as the continuity of temperamental patterns across the person’s lifetime, the transition from early emotion mirroring to self-awareness of emotional states to empathy, and the potential role of puberty in the development of ToM. Extensive deliberation on these topics was beyond the scope of this review, but future research should address these issues.

Author Contributions

IB conceptualized the manuscript. IB and EG wrote the manuscript. Both authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank a team of undergraduate students of Boise State University who helped us manage the references: Jitka Elizarraras, Andrew Lahren, Azia Zajanc, Kyle Dumpel, Maddie Blew, and Caitlin Sommer.

Funding. This work was supported by the Undergraduate Research and Creative Activities (URCA, Boise State University) Grant awarded to EG.

1 The cognitive aspect reflects the individual’s thoughts, beliefs, and perceptions about an individual with disability; the affective aspect refers to the emotional valence of attitudes toward an individual with disability; the behavioral aspect highlights the individual’s willingness to interact with an individual having disability and the actual behavioral response.

2 Minimal social group paradigm is a methodology in which participants are randomly assigned to two arbitrary groups to study the minimal conditions for the emergence of the in-group favoritism and discrimination against out-group members.

3 Secure attachment is a parent–child emotional connection that satisfies the child’s need for security.

4 False belief test presents a child with the following scenario: two characters (e.g., Sally and Ann) are together in a room; Sally places an item in a specific location and leaves the room; meanwhile, Ann moves the item to a different location. Then, the child is asked where Sally will look for the item when she returns to the room. A child with ToM would point to the first location, while a child without ToM would point to the second location.

5 Authoritarian – imposing control over others, enforcing unquestioning obedience.

6 Traditional societies are characterized by powerful collective memories and importance of communal practices ensuring continuation of traditions, customs, and habits.

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The Loss of Things I Took for Granted

Ten years into my college teaching career, students stopped being able to read effectively..

Recent years have seen successive waves of book bans in Republican-controlled states, aimed at pulling any text with “woke” themes from classrooms and library shelves. Though the results sometimes seem farcical, as with the banning of Art Spiegelman’s Maus due to its inclusion of “cuss words” and explicit rodent nudity, the book-banning agenda is no laughing matter. Motivated by bigotry, it has already done demonstrable harm and promises to do more. But at the same time, the appropriate response is, in principle, simple. Named individuals have advanced explicit policies with clear goals and outcomes, and we can replace those individuals with people who want to reverse those policies. That is already beginning to happen in many places, and I hope those successes will continue until every banned book is restored.

If and when that happens, however, we will not be able to declare victory quite yet. Defeating the open conspiracy to deprive students of physical access to books will do little to counteract the more diffuse confluence of forces that are depriving students of the skills needed to meaningfully engage with those books in the first place. As a college educator, I am confronted daily with the results of that conspiracy-without-conspirators. I have been teaching in small liberal arts colleges for over 15 years now, and in the past five years, it’s as though someone flipped a switch. For most of my career, I assigned around 30 pages of reading per class meeting as a baseline expectation—sometimes scaling up for purely expository readings or pulling back for more difficult texts. (No human being can read 30 pages of Hegel in one sitting, for example.) Now students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding. Even smart and motivated students struggle to do more with written texts than extract decontextualized take-aways. Considerable class time is taken up simply establishing what happened in a story or the basic steps of an argument—skills I used to be able to take for granted.

Since this development very directly affects my ability to do my job as I understand it, I talk about it a lot. And when I talk about it with nonacademics, certain predictable responses inevitably arise, all questioning the reality of the trend I describe. Hasn’t every generation felt that the younger cohort is going to hell in a handbasket? Haven’t professors always complained that educators at earlier levels are not adequately equipping their students? And haven’t students from time immemorial skipped the readings?

The response of my fellow academics, however, reassures me that I’m not simply indulging in intergenerational grousing. Anecdotally, I have literally never met a professor who did not share my experience. Professors are also discussing the issue in academic trade publications , from a variety of perspectives. What we almost all seem to agree on is that we are facing new obstacles in structuring and delivering our courses, requiring us to ratchet down expectations in the face of a ratcheting down of preparation. Yes, there were always students who skipped the readings, but we are in new territory when even highly motivated honors students struggle to grasp the basic argument of a 20-page article. Yes, professors never feel satisfied that high school teachers have done enough, but not every generation of professors has had to deal with the fallout of No Child Left Behind and Common Core. Finally, yes, every generation thinks the younger generation is failing to make the grade— except for the current cohort of professors, who are by and large more invested in their students’ success and mental health and more responsive to student needs than any group of educators in human history. We are not complaining about our students. We are complaining about what has been taken from them.

If we ask what has caused this change, there are some obvious culprits. The first is the same thing that has taken away almost everyone’s ability to focus—the ubiquitous smartphone. Even as a career academic who studies the Quran in Arabic for fun, I have noticed my reading endurance flagging. I once found myself boasting at a faculty meeting that I had read through my entire hourlong train ride without looking at my phone. My colleagues agreed this was a major feat, one they had not achieved recently. Even if I rarely attain that high level of focus, though, I am able to “turn it on” when demanded, for instance to plow through a big novel during a holiday break. That’s because I was able to develop and practice those skills of extended concentration and attentive reading before the intervention of the smartphone. For children who were raised with smartphones, by contrast, that foundation is missing. It is probably no coincidence that the iPhone itself, originally released in 2007, is approaching college age, meaning that professors are increasingly dealing with students who would have become addicted to the dopamine hit of the omnipresent screen long before they were introduced to the more subtle pleasures of the page.

The second go-to explanation is the massive disruption of school closures during COVID-19. There is still some debate about the necessity of those measures, but what is not up for debate any longer is the very real learning loss that students suffered at every level. The impact will inevitably continue to be felt for the next decade or more, until the last cohort affected by the mass “pivot to online” finally graduates. I doubt that the pandemic closures were the decisive factor in themselves, however. Not only did the marked decline in reading resilience start before the pandemic, but the students I am seeing would have already been in high school during the school closures. Hence they would be better equipped to get something out of the online format and, more importantly, their basic reading competence would have already been established.

Less discussed than these broader cultural trends over which educators have little control are the major changes in reading pedagogy that have occurred in recent decades—some motivated by the ever-increasing demand to “teach to the test” and some by fads coming out of schools of education. In the latter category is the widely discussed decline in phonics education in favor of the “balanced literacy” approach advocated by education expert Lucy Calkins (who has more recently come to accept the need for more phonics instruction). I started to see the results of this ill-advised change several years ago, when students abruptly stopped attempting to sound out unfamiliar words and instead paused until they recognized the whole word as a unit. (In a recent class session, a smart, capable student was caught short by the word circumstances when reading a text out loud.) The result of this vibes-based literacy is that students never attain genuine fluency in reading. Even aside from the impact of smartphones, their experience of reading is constantly interrupted by their intentionally cultivated inability to process unfamiliar words.

For all the flaws of the balanced literacy method, it was presumably implemented by people who thought it would help. It is hard to see a similar motivation in the growing trend toward assigning students only the kind of short passages that can be included in a standardized test. Due in part to changes driven by the infamous Common Core standards , teachers now have to fight to assign their students longer readings, much less entire books, because those activities won’t feed directly into students getting higher test scores, which leads to schools getting more funding. The emphasis on standardized tests was always a distraction at best, but we have reached the point where it is actively cannibalizing students’ educational experience—an outcome no one intended or planned, and for which there is no possible justification.

We can’t go back in time and do the pandemic differently at this point, nor is there any realistic path to putting the smartphone genie back in the bottle. (Though I will note that we as a society do at least attempt to keep other addictive products out of the hands of children.) But I have to think that we can, at the very least, stop actively preventing young people from developing the ability to follow extended narratives and arguments in the classroom. Regardless of their profession or ultimate educational level, they will need those skills. The world is a complicated place. People—their histories and identities, their institutions and work processes, their fears and desires—are simply too complex to be captured in a worksheet with a paragraph and some reading comprehension questions. Large-scale prose writing is the best medium we have for capturing that complexity, and the education system should not be in the business of keeping students from learning how to engage effectively with it.

This is a matter not of snobbery, but of basic justice. I recognize that not everyone centers their lives on books as much as a humanities professor does. I think they’re missing out, but they’re adults and they can choose how to spend their time. What’s happening with the current generation is not that they are simply choosing TikTok over Jane Austen. They are being deprived of the ability to choose—for no real reason or benefit. We can and must stop perpetrating this crime on our young people.

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Title: an interactive agent foundation model.

Abstract: The development of artificial intelligence systems is transitioning from creating static, task-specific models to dynamic, agent-based systems capable of performing well in a wide range of applications. We propose an Interactive Agent Foundation Model that uses a novel multi-task agent training paradigm for training AI agents across a wide range of domains, datasets, and tasks. Our training paradigm unifies diverse pre-training strategies, including visual masked auto-encoders, language modeling, and next-action prediction, enabling a versatile and adaptable AI framework. We demonstrate the performance of our framework across three separate domains -- Robotics, Gaming AI, and Healthcare. Our model demonstrates its ability to generate meaningful and contextually relevant outputs in each area. The strength of our approach lies in its generality, leveraging a variety of data sources such as robotics sequences, gameplay data, large-scale video datasets, and textual information for effective multimodal and multi-task learning. Our approach provides a promising avenue for developing generalist, action-taking, multimodal systems.

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  1. Essay on Perception

    Essay # 8. Development of Perception: The infant's perceptual world is different from the adult's. Perception develops gradually as the individual grows and develops. It has also been shown that it is influenced to a great extent by the biological needs, maturation, learning, culture etc. Thus, qualitative and quantitative changes in ...

  2. Perceptual Development

    Perceptual Development. L.A. Thompson, G.L. Strosser, in Encyclopedia of Human Behavior (Second Edition), 2012 Abstract. The study of perceptual development begins with an understanding of the earthly environment of energy and matter that is to be perceived by an infant. From there, human perception connects to that environment with specialized sensory systems for vision, audition, muscle ...

  3. Perception: The Sensory Experience of the World

    Environmental stimulus: The world is full of stimuli that can attract attention.Environmental stimulus is everything in the environment that has the potential to be perceived. Attended stimulus: The attended stimulus is the specific object in the environment on which our attention is focused. Image on the retina: This part of the perception process involves light passing through the cornea and ...

  4. Perception and Play: How Children View the World

    Mariko Hewer. Developmental scientists typically study the behavior of children through the lens of adult experience. But APS Fellow Linda B. Smith has taken a new approach to this line of inquiry by trying to see the world through children's own eyes. Smith, an Indiana University Bloomington (IU) psychological scientist renowned for her ...

  5. How Does Experience Shape Early Development? Considering the Role of

    First, demonstrations of perceptual learning in adulthood challenge the view that, after early development, perceptual systems are inflexible and largely resistant to change as a result of new experiences. Second, in adulthood, perception and perceptual learning are highly influenced by top-down information.

  6. Brain Development and the Role of Experience in the Early Years

    Brain development that occurs during the prenatal months is largely under genetic control, although clearly the environment can play a role; for example, it is well known that the lack of nutrition (e.g., folic acid) and the presence of toxins (e.g., alcohol) can both deleteriously influence the developing brain.

  7. Perception and Brain Development

    This essay, "Perception and Brain Development" is published exclusively on IvyPanda's free essay examples database. You can use it for research and reference purposes to write your own paper. However, you must cite it accordingly. Donate a paper. Removal Request.

  8. Perception and its Development in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology

    For example, the guiding theme of perceptual development (understood as the development of a subject's perceptual capacities) is nicely elucidated. A number of essays also clarify the stakes of key concerns in Merleau-Ponty's work, including his reflections on expression, institution, space, temporality, philosophical reflection, and art.

  9. Theories of Child Development and Their Impact on Early Childhood

    Developmental theorists use their research to generate philosophies on children's development. They organize and interpret data based on a scheme to develop their theory. A theory refers to a systematic statement of principles related to observed phenomena and their relationship to each other. A theory of child development looks at the children's growth and behavior and interprets it. It ...

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    It argues that taking a developmental approach to face perception can resolve some of the major current debates in the adult face perception and cognitive neuroscience literature. Thus, face perception and development continue to be mutually informative domains of study. The work on newborns designed to test the "innate knowledge" of faces ...

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    Prenatal Development . The prenatal period is of interest to developmental psychologists who seek to understand how the earliest influences on development can impact later growth during childhood. Psychologists may look at how primary reflexes emerge before birth, how fetuses respond to stimuli in the womb, and the sensations and perceptions ...

  12. Perception

    perception, in humans, the process whereby sensory stimulation is translated into organized experience. That experience, or percept, is the joint product of the stimulation and of the process itself. Relations found between various types of stimulation (e.g., light waves and sound waves) and their associated percepts suggest inferences that can be made about the properties of the perceptual ...

  13. The Problem of Perception

    The Problem of Perception is that if illusions and hallucinations are possible, then perceptual experience, as we ordinarily understand it, is impossible. The Problem is animated by two central arguments: the argument from illusion (§2.1) and the argument from hallucination (§2.2).

  14. The Perception of the Environment

    Neither innate nor acquired, skills are grown, incorporated into the human organism through practice and training in an environment. They are thus as much biological as cultural. The twenty-three essays comprising this book focus in turn on the procurement of livelihood, on what it means to 'dwell', and on the nature of skill, weaving together ...

  15. Perceptual Abilities Development

    So in this stage, the pattern and form of perception are different from an adult. (The Perceptual Abilities of Babies) With this law, visual power infant babies look into the facial pattern and moving objects rather than nonfacial patterns and stationary objects. When we see an infant baby, he or she looks into our face.

  16. Self-Concept in Psychology: Definition, Development, Theories

    Psychologist Bruce A. Bracken had a slightly different theory and believed that self-concept was multidimensional, consisting of six independent traits: Academic: Success or failure in school. Affect: Awareness of emotional states. Competence: Ability to meet basic needs. Family: How well you work in your family unit.

  17. The Development of Color Perception and Cognition

    Color is a pervasive feature of our psychological experience, having a role in many aspects of human mind and behavior such as basic vision, scene perception, object recognition, aesthetics, and communication. Understanding how humans encode, perceive, talk about, and use color has been a major interdisciplinary effort. Here, we present the current state of knowledge on how color perception ...

  18. Infant perceptual development for faces and spoken words: An integrated

    Newborns display what appears to be surprising capability in multi-sensory perception, which clearly suggests that the type of information that is redundant in audio-visual speech is a very important cue supporting the development of both face and spoken word perception. For example, newborns at 3 weeks of age have been shown to spontaneously ...

  19. Perception And Perception Of The Cognitive Development Of ...

    1367 Words 6 Pages. Both attention and perception are concepts that relate to the cognitive development of human beings. Both concepts contribute to our ability to control and direct the processing of stimuli, whether it is physical, visual, auditory or retrieved from stored memory. Perception is the ability to make sense of our surroundings ...

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    We will write a custom essay on your topic. Adolescent psychological development can be viewed from several standpoints. The most common are the physiological perception of adolescence as the direct effect of hormonal change and the social one implying that adolescence is linked to cultural perceptions of the subject matter (Newman & Newman ...

  21. Erik Erikson Theory of Development

    The theory of development came up in 20th century when interest to change the perception of children being small adults and aim to discover the abnormal behaviors became a concern. There have been many theories on this ground like Freud's psychosexual stages which focused on mental disorders in childhood.

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    This reveals development is equated to empowerment and growth across all dimensions of political, social or economic life. It is the transformation or betterment from the current state of affairs ...

  23. PDF Strategies for Essay Writing

    number of paragraphs in your essay should be determined by the number of steps you need to take to build your argument. To write strong paragraphs, try to focus each paragraph on one main point—and begin a new paragraph when you are moving to a new point or example. A strong paragraph in an academic essay will usually include these three ...

  24. Preservice elementary teachers' perceptions of their science laboratory

    Phenomena‑based approaches have become popular for elementary school teachers to engage children's innate curiosity in the natural world. However, integrating such phenomena‑based approaches in existing science courses within teacher education programs present potential challenges for both preservice elementary teachers (PSETs) and for laboratory instructors, both of whom may have had ...

  25. A Study on Professional Ethics Perception and Job Satisfaction of Real

    DOI: 10.33097/jncta.2022.06.11.2144 Corpus ID: 254435588; A Study on Professional Ethics Perception and Job Satisfaction of Real Estate Developers @article{Sim2022ASO, title={A Study on Professional Ethics Perception and Job Satisfaction of Real Estate Developers}, author={Youn-soo Sim and In-Ho Choi}, journal={The Journal of Next-generation Convergence Technology Association}, year={2022 ...

  26. Factors Affecting the Perception of Disability: A Developmental

    Some factors potentially influencing the development of disability perception (e.g., genetic factors) were beyond the scope of this review. Moreover, some aspects of development (e.g., the embeddedness of emotions in language development; the role of early attachment to a caregiver, among the person's other social relationships, in social ...

  27. China sees Europe as increasingly 'rational' about its development

    China said it sees Europe as increasingly viewing the country with a "rational perception," and that Europe should "not be afraid of it," Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said.

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  29. [2402.05929] An Interactive Agent Foundation Model

    The development of artificial intelligence systems is transitioning from creating static, task-specific models to dynamic, agent-based systems capable of performing well in a wide range of applications. We propose an Interactive Agent Foundation Model that uses a novel multi-task agent training paradigm for training AI agents across a wide range of domains, datasets, and tasks. Our training ...