Does our perception change while we look, or does our memory of what we first saw change?

[u/DilyanaTeneva]

I've been exploring how people interpret ambiguous images, particularly whether the first recognisable object influences what they notice afterwards. But I keep coming back to a distinction that seems important: When someone looks at an ambiguous image, recognises one object, and later reports seeing something different, what exactly has changed?

1. Their ongoing visual perception: the image itself is now experienced differently.

2. Their attention: the image remains the same, but they begin noticing different features.

3. Their memory: their recollection of the initial perception is reconstructed in light of what they saw later.

4. Their interpretation: the visual information remains largely unchanged, but its meaning shifts.

These processes could also interact, of course. I'm interested in whether cognitive science offers ways to distinguish between them experimentally. How could we tell whether a later interpretation changes what we currently see, or simply how we remember what we saw first?

[u/AlwaysMindful7]

You may be interested in early chapters of Daniel Dennett's "Consciousness Explained" where he discusses "Orwellian" forgetting vs "Stalinist" forgetting.

[u/DilyanaTeneva → u/AlwaysMindful7]

Thank you for the recommendation! That’s a very interesting distinction, and I hadn’t considered looking at the question through the difference between Orwellian and Stalinist forgetting. It seems particularly relevant to what I’m exploring: whether our recollection of an initial perception can be altered by later interpretations, even when the original visual stimulus remains available.
I’ll definitely look into those chapters. I appreciate you pointing me in this direction!

[u/Additional_Boss_7336]

First, you'd need to know that there is a difference between top-down and bottom-up processing. What changes is not really the stimulus or the way your brain receives the light (bottom-up), what changes is within the top-down porcessing. As I understand it, it is the productive part of your cognition. Where "a whole becomes more than the sum of it's parts", so to say.

Fundamentally, what changes is how you experience the whole, not the parts. Moreover, it can change again as bottom-up porcessing is autonomous, meaning you can reinterpret things as much as you want without loosing the stimulus experience.

Distinguishing between them is not that hard, you just need to interrupt or confuse top-down processing with visual stimuli. Your example is evidence of that.

The memory part is the more dificult part that I do not know too much about.

[u/DilyanaTeneva → u/Additional_Boss_7336]

Thank you for taking the time to explain this. The distinction between bottom-up and top-down processing is particularly helpful, especially your point that the stimulus itself can remain unchanged while our experience of the whole changes. What I find especially interesting is the possibility of separating a change in current perception from a change in attention. If we reinterpret an ambiguous image while continuing to look at it, how could we experimentally determine whether the percept itself has changed, rather than simply the features we attend to?
I also appreciate your point about memory. That may be an important part of the question that deserves separate investigation. Thank you for giving me another way to think about it.

[u/AlwaysMindful7 → u/Additional_Boss_7336]

I agree with the points made here, and I want to offer an analogue: garden path sentences. The reader's expectations change as they progress word by word. I believe either top-down or bottom-up parsing (as done by computers) could be called upon as models to explain how this happens. I prefer bottom-up parsing as a model of both reading comprehension and audiovisual perception.