The Construction: Perception, Memory, and Identity - Part I

by Gustave Doré

I.                Introduction

Rooted in the tradition of occularcentrism, sight has been regarded as the reliable conduit for understanding the world. Just as the famous quote “The Eyes are the Windows to the Soul” illustrates, eyes are regarded as the transparent “window” directly connecting the objective world and human minds. Based on empirical evidence and theoretical analysis, humans’ visual perception is inaccurate and constructed through one’s experience and inferences. Similarly yet counterintuitively, memory aligns with visual perception to a large extent: memory is active and constructed. Moreover, the mechanism by which personal experience, social environment, and cultural background altogether shape one’s perception and memory is similar to the social construction of one’s identity. While perception and memory rely heavily on experience and inferences, the construction of subject identity tends to rely on the social environment in which one interacts. Still, the mechanisms exhibit striking similarity.

Skepticism may question whether his article, as it assumes an “objective,” or “real” world. Whether the real world exists or not is another topic that has been hotly debated since Descartes. In fact, it has been proved that whether the real world exists cannot be known; thus, this article takes the common view that there is a “real” world.

II.              Perception

Rooted in ancient Greek philosophy, visual perception is regarded as an objective reflection of the world. Aristotle’s statement from De Anima states, “perception is of the object itself and not of the sense-organ,” believing that visual perception provides access to the external world, not just internal representation [1]. He believes that sight serves a paramount cognitive function, enabling individuals to access and comprehend information about the external world with a level of clarity and detail that other senses cannot. Plato somehow aligns with Aristotle that visual perception is a “distance sense,” which avoids bodily corruption, enabling pure contemplation and abstraction [2]. Visual perception further enables formulating the “knowledge,” as Plato writes in Timaeus: “God invented vision... to see the rational processes of the heavens and apply them to our own reasoning.” [3] Allowing humans to observe celestial order (stars, sun), visual perception inspires philosophy, mathematics, and facts to discover the nature of the universe [4].

The accuracy of vision is challenged by multiple psychological experiments on visual illusion, where “illusion” is no longer an anomalous phenomenon, but ubiquitous and unconscious in daily experience. Having an accurate visual representation of the 3D world is inherently impossible. Vision is a biological process where images form on the retina, and these images are the things that we see [5]. However, as the 3D world is transformed into 2D images on the retina, it creates a dimension gap between 2D and 3D. What’s more, an infinite 3D structure theoretically exists behind the same 2D image [6]. Thus, images on our retina may not be an accurate and targeted reflection of the 3D world. Another problem related to the inaccuracy of retina images is the distance. For the same object with different sizes, a big object at a long distance from the retina creates the same shade on the retina as a smaller object at a short distance from the retina. Still, most of the time, humans can detect the different distances [7]. Studies on change blindness- failure to detect changes- also demonstrated that human visual perception is discontinuous and intermittent, which leads to an unstable perception of the world. This is due to biological constraints. First, eyes move in rapid jumps (saccades) 3–4 times per second, creating brief “blackout” periods. Secondly, blinks further interrupt visual input for ~100- 150ms every few seconds [8]. This causes visual input to be inevitably discontinuous. In everyday life settings, by visual perception is continuous. This is because the human brain extracts the invariant structure of the world from the intermittent and changing images [9].

The mechanism behind these inferences introduces bias to visual perception. According to multiple studies and experiments, the inferences are schema-driven predictions. Humans’ prior experiences generate cognitive schemas [10]. For instance, prior knowledge that lights come from above fills in gaps between intermittent images on the light and shadow settings of a classroom. Perceptual gaps are filled with expected content. Inferences also rely on a “top-down process,” which refers to the brain’s use of pre-existing knowledge, expectations, goals, and context to interpret sensory input [11]. Unlike bottom-up processing (which builds perceptions from raw sensory data), top-down processing imposes higher-order frameworks to guide perception, memory, and decision-making. For example, experiments have indicated that wrong spelling doesn’t influence reading and understanding, given that the participants have linguistic knowledge of the language [12]. The limited attention capacity is another factor. According to the Filter Theory of Attention, the limited information processing capacity of the nervous system, a filtering mechanism only allows part of the information input to be processed [13]. With limited attention, people often merely focus on salient features instead of full details. Therefore, visual perception is constructed as a coherent gist of a scene, prioritizing meaning and invariant structure over exhaustive detail.

In the following articles, the constructive aspect of memory and identity will be discussed. The full quotation will be included in the last article on this topic.