Abstract

It is often claimed that pre-attentive vision has an ‘iconic’ format. This is seen to explain pre-attentive vision's characteristically high processing capacity and to make sense of an overlap in the mechanisms of early vision and mental imagery. But what does the iconicity of pre-attentive vision amount to? This paper considers two prominent ways of characterising pre-attentive visual icons and argues that neither is adequate: one approach renders the claim ‘pre-attentive vision is iconic’ empirically false while the other obscures its ability to do the explanatory work, which motivates positing pre-attentive visual icons in the first place. With this noted, I introduce the (heretofore unarticulated) notion of an ‘Analogue Map’ and argue that it provides a superior characterisation of pre-attentive vision's iconicity. I then argue that this forces a reassessment of debates which have traditionally presupposed the iconicity of pre-attentive vision, emphasising ramifications for the viability of a format-based perception-thought border.

中文翻译：

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映射视觉图标

摘要

人们经常声称，注意力前的视觉具有“标志性”格式。这被视为解释了注意力前视觉特有的高处理能力，并解释了早期视觉和心理意象机制的重叠。但是，前注意视觉的象似性是什么？本文考虑了两种描述注意力前视觉图标的突出方式，并认为这两种方式都不够：一种方法使“注意力前视觉是标志性的”这一说法在经验上是错误的，而另一种方法则掩盖了它做解释工作的能力，这激发了假设首先是预先注意的视觉图标。注意到这一点，我介绍了“模拟地图”的（迄今为止未阐明的）概念，并认为它提供了对前注意视觉的相似性的优越表征。