Perception and Reality: How the Mind Shapes What We See

00:07
Dr. Gary Hatfield

Color scientists not only study physiology, the rods and cones, and psychophysics, the relationship between stimuli and the experiences that we have, but they also make pronouncements about what color is that go beyond the data. So they'll say, well, color really is just a way of reflecting the light at the surface. So it's a physical property that exists independently of the mind.

00:38

Nora Youn

Dr. Gary Hatfield is the Adam Sabert Professor in Moral and Intellectual Philosophy, and the Director of the Visual Studies Undergraduate Program here at Penn. Though he has been at Penn for more than 20 years, he has previous appointments at Johns Hopkins University and Harvard University. His research interests lie in the history of modern philosophy, philosophy of psychology, theories of vision, and the philosophy of science.He has memberships in many societies that reflect his broad range of interests, including the American Philosophical Association, the Cognitive Science Society, and the History of Science Society. Professor Hatfield has dozens of publications and top journals and sits on the editorial board of Philosophical Psychology. He has written, edited and translated eight books throughout his career, including the Routledge Guidebook to Descartes’ Meditations; The Evolution of Mind, Brain, and Culture; and Visual Experience: Sensation, Cognition, and Constancy. He has won various appointments as a fellow, scholar, or researcher, but currently he teaches many classes at Penn, including “Philosophy and Visual Perception”, which he will teach next year, “History of Modern Philosophy”, and the “What is Visual Studies?” seminar, which I am grateful to be in, and I'm not lying when I say it's one of my favorite classes. Welcome, Dr. Hatfield.

02:01

Dr. Gary Hatfield

Oh, thank you.

02:02

Nora Youn

Yes. So, I wanted to go back all the way to the beginning of your career. So how did you get interested in philosophy?

02:09

Dr. Gary Hatfield

Well, I came to philosophy through my interest in vision. And I got interested in vision in the second grade when I gave a report on the sense of vision to my health studies unit group. And they liked this report so much that I went and gave it to the other second grade, then I went and gave it to the third grade, and so forth. But I was completely hooked by the sort of the mystery of vision, that things that are 10 feet, 20 feet, 30 feet away, you can be aware of them just by opening your eyes and that always seemed like a kind of magic to me. So, when I got to college, I first discovered art history, which is very visual, so I became an art history major. Then I discovered psychology, which can study vision, and was fortunate enough to have someone who taught a very excellent course on the psychology of vision. And then I needed another course to fill out the requirements of distribution, and so I took a philosophy course in the summer, and then I figured out through philosophy, you can actually study almost anything you want, and so you can make vision a theme in your philosophy. So, I wasn't a philosophy major, but I had almost enough courses to be a philosophy major. I knew from these experiences that I wanted something that included history, because I found historical approaches to be illuminating, but I also, if I was going to do philosophy of science, for instance, I wanted to know some relevant science.And of course, since I was already a psychology major, psychology was my relative science and philosophy of science. And I was fortunate enough at Wichita State University, where I went to undergraduate school, that there was a professor there who had been trained in history and philosophy of science at Indiana University, which was one of the few places that did that at that time, and so he guided me towards thinking about myself as a historian and philosopher of science, which combined the history with the present day concerns. So, I looked for programs where I could do that combination and there were several ones at Chicago, Berkeley, and so forth. But for vision, it was best, I thought, to go to Madison, Wisconsin, to the University of Wisconsin, where I could put together my own history and philosophy of science program, and the faculty was happy to support me in doing that. and there were experts in thinking about vision-- David Lindberg, thinking about the history of theories of vision, William Epstein, the psychologist who studied perceptual constancies and was happy to be part of my program, and Fred Dretske in the philosophy department who was, had written the book in 1969, Seeing and Knowing.

04:51

Nora Youn

And I know you have a lot of different interests, but I was curious about coming back to now, what are some like questions or phenomena that you've been working with recently?

05:01

Dr. Gary Hatfield

Certain ways that I've expanded recently, I've gotten interested in the concept of illusion which you know my prime examples are vision, but nonetheless, it's a new area for me. And I came to that area through an interest that arose just after the millennium, which is the problem of the geometrical structure of visual space and I got interested in the idea that the train tracks seem to converge when you look at them, or the road seems to converge when you look down the road, or the sidewalk seems to converge, or a hallway, the sides and the walls, the floor and the ceiling all seem to converge in some way phenomenally, and we know that they're parallel physically. We don't get fooled by this. So, I wanted to know the status of this convergence. Is it an error? Is it an illusion of some kind? And I thought it was neither.I thought it's just the way vision works. And so I've been trying to promote that idea recently. Also, my initial interest in visual perception was mainly in spatial vision. Partly because when I did experiments in Wisconsin with Epstein, he was interested in spatial vision, not in color vision. But later on I got interested in color vision and actually several of my graduate students have written dissertations on color vision. And the problem there is, is color a simple physical property or is it something that depends upon the perceiver? And so, we've been pushing the line that it's something that depends upon the perceiver, which doesn't mean that it's not useful or there's nothing true or right about it. It just means that you won't look to the physics of reflectance to decide what color really is.

06:42

Nora Youn

Gotcha. Related to those, are you keeping an eye out for any recent developments in philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, psychophysics that you think could maybe contribute to these questions that you're working with?

06:55

Dr. Gary Hatfield

So, there is psychophysics now on the convergence of visual space, and I've actually contributed an empirical study that I did with Mark Wagner, a psychologist who wrote the book The Geometries of Visual Space. Another thing I've gotten interested in recently is the problem of top-down influence in perception. So, top-down influence is when you think that the beliefs or the knowledge that someone brings to perception changes the content of the perception in a way that it changes the phenomenal experience itself. It just doesn't change what you say or think about your experience, but it changes that experience itself. So, here's knowledge somehow affecting the visual processes, which somehow affects then what you see and how you see it. And there's been a long debate. [Jerry] Fodor was involved in this debate. He was in favor of some top-down influences in his first work. But then he wrote this book, Modularity of Mind, where he says, no, the visual system is walled off from the rest of cognition, and so there is no top-down influence. And his co-author, [Zenon] Pylyshyn, similarly at first had thought that there was top-down influence and then came to the idea that there's not. And recently, there's been a very widely cited paper in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences by [Chaz] Firestone and [Brian] Scholl, arguing that there are no top-down influences in perception. Interestingly, there's a perspective from within visual studies that can weigh in on this debate. And this is based on the idea that categorizing art, and knowing what type of art something is can affect your perception of it. This is a top-down effect, so it affects the structure of your experience, right? So these categorizing activities were especially put forward by a philosopher named Kendall Walton, an article that's, oh, now must be about 50 years old where he explained that he thought the perception of art was deeply affected by the categorization that he made- Is it a statue of a bust? Or is it a statue of a person who's had their waist and legs cut off? Well, if it's a statue of-- if it's a bust, then we don't believe that it's representing somebody dissected.We think it's a certain type of art that has a convention that just shows the upper portion of the body and other things like that. So, very recently, this fellow named Dustin Stokes has used Walton's work to argue against the Firestone and Scholl position that there's no top-down influence. And so I think this is an interesting convergence between philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and visual studies.

09:46

Nora Youn

Right, for sure. And definitely as a visual studies student myself, I've noticed this collaboration between these different fields and I know that one of the concentrations that we have in the major, which is also my concentration, so Sector A, couples together philosophy and science. Could you explain more about how philosophy and science can inform each other?

10:08

Dr. Gary Hatfield

Yeah, so I became convicted of this possibility of philosophy and science informing each other way back in undergraduate days and in my doctoral training at Wisconsin, and so that my theme of spatial perception, which I had in the early days I approached through these various disciplines-- philosophy, psychology, history of science. And I sat in on graduate seminars, or took graduate seminars from Epstein on these topics that then Dretske, the philosopher, came and sat in on and found very useful and he wrote a book, Knowledge and the Flow of Information, in which he brought knowledge of perception and the perceptual constancies to bear on the philosophical analysis of vision. And more recently, especially in the area of color perception, there's been a kind of camaraderie or interchange between philosophy and science, because color scientists not only study physiology, the rods and cones, and psychophysics, the relationship between stimuli and the experiences that we have, but they also make pronouncements about what color is that go beyond the data. So, they'll say, well, color really is just a way of reflecting the light at the surface. So, it's a physical property that exists independently of the mind, and then some other psychologists and then some philosophers came along and said, well, but wait a minute, human beings perceive 4 psychologically primary colors. So, four basic colors in our experience, red, green, yellow, and blue. But other mammals are dichromats and they only experience maybe along the blue-yellow dimension, but not the red-green. So, when a trichromat sees a thing as red and a dichromat sees it as a kind of yellow, is one of them wrong? Well, the people who are physicalists who want to say that it does come down just to the surface reflectance, they tend to want to pick out one type of vision as the right vision, and they tend to pick out human vision whereas more ecologically oriented, that is people that want to see color vision in relation to the environment, and so you could have different color systems that would pick out different psychological primaries in different environments. Maybe, for instance, the physicalists say, well, you know, color vision evolved so that you could pick out the yellow, red and orange fruit against the green leaves. So, you need yellow, red, green, and orange. Maybe the others say, well-

At the University of Chicago, but it was an alliance between, basically between art history and comparative literature and didn't even include a making or studio aspect. So we were distinctive both in including a studio aspect because we thought it was, this provided another way of entry into vision to be producing visual artifacts. And we were distinctive in bringing in the philosophy and psychology of vision, thereby crossing more boundaries, more interdisciplinary boundaries than the standard visual studies paradigm coming out of Chicago.

13:21

Nora Youn

Gotcha. I myself didn't know that history as a visual studies major.That's really cool. And could you talk more about where the Visual Studies major is at right now, what the different requirements are, and why you think they fit into the major, like Visual Studies 101 to 103, and then all the different stages? 

13:39

Dr. Gary Hatfield

Yeah, so there are three stages. It starts with Visual Studies 101 called “Eye, Mind, and Image”, which was the original flagship course of the major, and which is a general requirement Sector 4 and Sector 7, you can't do both with it, but you can do one or the other with it. And that's somewhat distinctive and then we thought, well, so there will be maybe an emphasis on art history, philosophy, and psychology in “Eye, Mind, and Image”, a little bit of making, but not much, and then we need some making seminars. We decided we needed two of them, a 2D and a 3D, and that's where that's stage one requirements of 101 and either 102 or 103. I should add 0's to the end here for the new numbers, but I can't I can't do the new numbers.

14:27

Nora Youn 

Me neither.

14:28

Dr. Gary Hatfield

And then we wanted each discipline to be represented in in a second course or third course. And so we have the sort of stage two requirements for courses in philosophy and psychology, for courses in art history, and for courses in fine arts and design, so that gives a kind of solid foundation. Then, we have a junior major seminar, “What is Visual Studies?”, which sort of starts to integrate things. And then there's-- you concentrate in one of the three branches for the concentration, and you take four courses in the concentration. And then everyone does a senior project with advisors from two different disciplines required as part of the advising process, and that includes both a written component and a making component and the making component is then put on exhibition at the end of the senior spring. And in fact, later today, I think the exhibition is opening in the Fisher Fine Arts Library.

15:33

Nora Youn

Gotcha. Speaking of the senior projects and what the students are doing, could you tell us more about what the Visual Studies students are interested in and involved in, whether in the past or now?

15:45

Dr. Gary Hatfield

Yeah, it's really a wide variety of-- so interesting to look at all the different things. So here's one example that shows you sort of the difference over time. So, we had someone maybe about 10 years ago who did a sort of crowd-sourced art and he had a situation where the person who's participating would look on the screen and they would see a square, a white square with a red dot and a blue dot on one side of the square, and another red dot and a blue dot on another side of the square. Now he didn't or she didn't know where these dots had come from exactly, except that they had come from squares that they couldn't see. So there were then line segments connecting the dots in squares that they couldn't see. And their job was now to draw line segments to connect these dots without knowing, as it were, where the dots had come from, and then that's iterated for 90, 100 different people. Then, you come out at the end with a large piece of work that's got these red and blue lines that have been put together without people knowing the other parts, and so the person who did this made the made this all work by writing the code. And when I asked him, you know, what's the most beautiful part of this art? He said, it's the code. So, then a few years ago, we had a senior thesis on using ChatGPT to make art. So now it's not crowdsourced. It's can ChatGPT, what can it do and make? We've had other kinds of expectations, individual experience.So, one student was interested in hallucination and found out that by wearing these goggles that were marketed in Germany as relaxation goggles and which consisted of just having two small screens on goggles that you put over your eyes that presented various colors, a homogeneous field of color.Now what do you think would happen when you put these goggles on?Within the first second, you begin to hallucinate extremely complex shapes and patterns.

18:00

Nora Youn

Oh my God.

18:01

Dr. Gary Hatfield

I don't know if you've ever seen the cover to the Cream album, Wheels of Fire.

18:06

Nora Youn

Nope.

18:07

Dr. Gary Hatfield

But this was exactly the kind of things that you saw. You saw these wheel-shaped patterns and each person that did this in the in the exhibit would put on the goggles and lay down on a sort of couch there. They then drew what they saw afterwards. And she got all these different kinds of forms and patterns out of this. So, then she connected this up with the with the idea of the Mandela, the round, complex shapes that can be found in various parts of the art world around the globe and thought that there could be then some basis in the basic properties of the system. Because she thought of the homogeneous fields as revealing some kind of predisposition within the visual system that came out as these complex forms, manipulating low-level aspects of visual stimuli, bandwidth or resolution of spatial resolution, and also color tone, and seeing how that affects the perception of artworks that are put up online and the way - and the aesthetic response of liking the artwork or various aspects of the artwork.And there have been a lot of interest in psychology of marketing over the years. So, we've had a good number of senior projects that explored various dimensions of the psychology of marketing.

19:36

Nora Youn

Gotcha. And then after you know graduating with the visual studies major and working on these senior projects, could you tell us more about what students were able to become involved in after graduation?

19:49

Dr. Gary Hatfield

Yeah, so I have to say that I think the majority of visual studies majors have gone to New York and gotten involved somehow, either in the marketing world or in the nonprofit world. Some of them have gone to Christie's, some of them have become central cogs in marketing firms that produce original marketing, creative material, and so I like to say that our students can walk both sides of the street, that they're able to talk to the marketing people per say, and they're able to talk to the creatives that are creating the product that the marketing people will then use and so it's a highly successful major in that way. But others have done other things. It's interesting that out of one class, two people went for a PhD in social work after they'd been in visual studies. And I think one of them had a project on making a quiet room for autistic patients where they collaborated with the medical school and the hospital in thinking about that problem.I should say that others of our majors have collaborated with people in the vet school, the engineering school, and of course, fine arts and arts and sciences. Others have gone on for an MFA. It only recently became a department of its own. And we always had a little collaboration with individual faculty members, but I'd like to see more sustained collaboration with Cinema and Media Studies. Also, we have new faculty coming on board in philosophy who have interests different from mine and are interested in vision and interested in aesthetics. And so it was actually from a colleague that I became aware of this relation between Kendall Walton and the guy Stokes.I have now include that topic within my “Philosophy and Visual Perception” course in the fall, because we already did top-down. We read Firestone and Scholl's article, but we didn't have such an effective counter as this one provided by Walton and Stokes.

21:54

Nora Youn

Nice. And for students who are interested in these kinds of questions and want to be at the forefront of knowledge in investigating these questions, whether it be in philosophy or science, art history, could you explain how visual studies students can become involved in research?

22:08

Dr. Gary Hatfield

Well, so if they want to become involved in research while they're here, a good thing is to take some upper-level classes with a particular faculty member and then ask to join that research group. That means different things in different disciplines. So, in psychology and cognitive science, there are regular undergraduate positions for research. In philosophy, it's more of getting to know a particular faculty member and then either volunteering or just letting them know you're interested.

22:38

Nora Youn

And finally, as I'm sure many Penn students, how can they get more information about the visual studies major? Are there any like talks they could attend? And how else can they get involved?

22:50

Dr. Gary Hatfield

Yeah, so there are talks. We've just had a couple in the last month. These bring distinguished figures, either from the art world or from philosophy or psychology or neuroscience, from the history of art to campus for a lecture and then a subsequent meeting with students. And so that's a way for people to, you know, find out more about the major. You can always take the 101 class for the GenRec, either Sector 4 or Sector 7. That's a way to find out more about the major while killing off one of your GenRec requirements. Yeah, those, I think, are the main ways to make connection or talk to Visual Studies majors.

23:31

Nora Youn

Yeah, like me. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Hatfield. And that brings our session to the end. And yeah, if you want to check out more about the Visual Studies major, again, there's a lot of information online, senior projects online and stuff like that. So. make sure to go check it out.

23:47

Dr. Gary Hatfield

OK. Thanks so much for this opportunity.

23:49

Nora Youn

Of course.