Arien Mack - US grants

The ultimate aim of the proposed research is to understand the nature of the processes underlying perceptual organization which has been recognized, since the work of the gestalt psychologists, as basic to all perception. On the assumption that the grouping of visual input is a multilevel process, experiments are proposed which are designed to isolate what kinds of organization occur at what levels in the visual system. We will also examine whether the groupings that occur at different levels entail attention. We expect to find that the lower the level of the grouping process, the less likely is attention to be factor. The measures of perceived grouping will include subjects' reports of apparent grouping, reaction times to detect grouping and ratings of segregation strengths. Because the questions these experiments address have not yet received adequate answers and because they concern such a fundamental aspect of all perception, the research proposed is likely to have important ramifications for both normal and abnormal functioning.

The proposed research is an investigation into basic processes responsible for normal visual perception. The research concerns the earliest perceptual processes-responsible for parsing the visual array. It focuses on perception which is independent of attention since it is this level of perceptual processing which must create the entities to which attention is subsequently directed. The research employs a new, but already validated, procedure designed to study perception under conditions of inattention. This procedure will be used to uncover the kinds of perceptual organization that are achieved and the features of stimulation which are perceived without attention, having already demonstrated that many features of visual stimulations which have been considered preattentive, in fact, require attention. The research also explores a new phenomenon, that of Inattentional Blindness which describes the fact that between 25 and 90% of subjects fail to see a stimulus to which they are not attending. It explores whether features of stimulation not reported under conditions of inattention are nevertheless processed. It aims to analyze what aspects of attention are responsible for the failure to perceive under conditions of inattention. Whether it is its spatial or resource aspect which is responsible. Whether it is the absence of the appropriate expectation or the presence of a distraction task.

This award provides partial support for a conference. It is an interdisciplinary, two-day, public conference that addresses an important scientific question: How we determine that something is unknowable rather than merely not yet known? Experts across a range of academic disciplines (including mathematics, cosmology, biology, medicine, economics, psychology, history, and philosophy) will discuss the criteria used to determine that a deep question cannot be answered and whether these criteria differ across fields. The conference is to occur in March 2019 at the campus of The New School for Social Research in New York City. The conference is likely to attract a large audience, from 300 to 400 people, that will include members of the public, the media, and policy makers as well as students and academics.

The questions that are to be addressed by conference participants are fundamental and of perennial importance; they require revisiting from time to time. A similar conference on this specific topic occurred at Columbia University in October 2000; it was a workshop on the known, the unknown, and the unknowable; and it was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. A generation has passed, and it is both timely and important to address these questions again. It is likely that the conference will attract a large and broad audience, and that it will foster dialogue within and beyond the academy and serve to enhance public understanding of important social, intellectual, and political issues. Papers from the conference will constitute a special issue of Social Research: An International Quarterly. The conference proceedings will have a good chance of inspiring and affecting the discussion of the criteria that define the limits of knowledge, perhaps even leading to changes in those criteria.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.