In this thread, I introduce the ‘Blindfold Test’ — a new tool for deciding whether an experimental effect reflects perception, or higher-level judgment. Paper here: www.nssrperception.com/docs/van%20B... - ThreadSky

bvb373.bsky.social • 17 hours ago

In this thread, I introduce the ‘Blindfold Test’ — a new tool for deciding whether an experimental effect reflects perception, or higher-level judgment.

Paper here: https://www.nssrperception.com/docs/van%20Buren%20&%20Scholl%202025%20The%20Blindfold%20Test.pdf

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bvb373.bsky.social•17 hours ago

A rich tradition in vision science emphasizes that we see the world not only in terms of its physical structure, but also in terms of its social and causal structure.

For example, even simple shapes look vividly alive if they move in particular ways (Heider & Simmel, 1944):

bvb373.bsky.social•17 hours ago

Most work on the perception of animacy involves asking participants for subjective reports about what they see (e.g. “How ‘alive’ did that shape look, from 1-7?").

For example, in one study, moving dots which changed speed or heading more were rated as more animate (Tremoulet & Feldman, 2000):

bvb373.bsky.social•17 hours ago

Subjective reports sometimes tell us about automatic visual processing, but other times they may reflect participants' post-perceptual reasoning, e.g. about what *should* look animate or causal. When do subjective reports implicate perception and when might they rather reflect higher-level judgment?

bvb373.bsky.social•17 hours ago

Here we introduce the Blindfold Test: If a study's results replicate not only w/ visual displays but also when simply describing the displays, subjects’ responses may reflect high-level reasoning rather than visual processing—and so other evidence is needed to support a 'perceptual' interpretation.

bvb373.bsky.social•17 hours ago

We applied the test to three past experiments in which observers made subjective reports about displays. In some cases the results replicated when replacing the visual stimuli with verbal descriptions, which raises the possibility that higher-level reasoning drove the original results...

bvb373.bsky.social•17 hours ago

…but for other experiments, the results depended on actually seeing the stimuli, indicating that the effect depended critically on visual processing!

ruthrosenholtz.bsky.social•3 hours ago

This is approximately how we approach the question of whether a talk belongs at a vision science conference

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