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Disambiguation, Binding, and the Unity of Visual Consciousness

OAKLAND UNIVERSITYlarock{at}oakland.edu

Recent findings in neuroscience strongly suggest that an object's features (e.g., its color, texture, shape, etc.) are represented in separate areas of the visual cortex. Although represented in separate neuronal areas, somehow the feature representations are brought together as a single, unified object of visual consciousness. This raises a question of binding: how do neural activities in separate areas of the visual cortex function to produce a feature-unified object of visual consciousness? Several prominent neuroscientists have adopted neural synchrony and attention-based approaches to explain object feature binding. I argue that although neural synchrony and/or attentional mechanisms might function to disambiguate an object's features, it is difficult to see how either of these mechanisms could fully explain the unity of an object's features at the level of visual consciousness. After presenting a detailed critique of neural synchrony and attention-based approaches to object feature binding, I propose interactive hierarchical structuralism (IHS). This view suggests that a unified percept (i.e., a feature-unified object of visual consciousness) is not reducible to the activity of any cognitive capacity or to any localized neural area, but emerges out of the interaction of visual information organized by spatial structuring capacities correlated with lower, higher, and intermediate levels of the visual hierarchy. After clarifying different notions of emergence and elaborating evidence for IHS, I discuss how IHS can be tested through transcranial magnetic stimulation and masking. In the final section I present some further implications/advantages of IHS.

Key Words: ambiguity • attention • binding • consciousness • disambiguation • emergentism • object perception • spatial structure • unified experience

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