•  53
    There is a view on consciousness that has strong intuitive appeal and empirical support: the intermediate-level theory of consciousness, proposed mainly by Ray Jackendoff and by Jesse Prinz. This theory identifies a specific “intermediate” level of representation as the basis of human phenomenal consciousness, which sits between high-level non-perspectival thought processes and low-level disjointed feature-detection processes in the perceptual and cognitive processing hierarchy. In this article,…Read more
  •  51
    Seeing Entities without Seeing N-Entities
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 27 (1-2): 57-70. 2019.
    When seeing a jaguar, we can see all the spots on its mantle without seeing a determinate number, N, of spots on the mantle. How is this visual phenomenon possible? Philosophers have tried to provide a reliable answer to this question, by recruiting evidence from vision science about the way attention works. Here we push this idea forward, by suggesting that an alternative and less complex solution, with respect to the one proposed in the literature, is possible. In particular, we argue that the…Read more
  •  47
    In this article, we show how the phenomenon of self-deception when adequately analyzed, can be incorporated into a predictive processing framework. We describe four strategies by which a subject may become self-deceived to account for typical cases of self-deception. We then argue that the four strategies can be modeled within this framework, under the assumption that a satisfying account of motivation is possible within predictive processing. Finally, we outline how we can ground this assumptio…Read more
  •  46
    The cognitive foundations of visual consciousness: Why should we favour a processing approach?
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 15 (2): 247-264. 2016.
    How can we investigate the foundations of consciousness? In addressing this question, we will focus on the two main strategies that authors have adopted so far. On the one hand, there is research aimed at characterizing a specific content, which should account for conscious states. We may call this the content approach. On the other hand, one finds the processing approach, which proposes to look for a particular way of processing to account for consciousness.. Our aim, in this paper, is to devel…Read more
  •  40
    Visual attention in pictorial perception
    Synthese 199 (1-2): 2077-2101. 2020.
    According to the received view in the philosophical literature on pictorial perception, when perceiving an object in a picture, we perceive both the picture’s surface and the depicted object, but the surface is only unconsciously represented. Furthermore, it is suggested, such unconscious representation does not need attention. This poses a crucial problem, as empirical research on visual attention shows that there can hardly be any visual representation, conscious or unconscious, without attent…Read more
  •  31
    Cognitive Penetrability of Social Perception: A Case for Emotion Recognition
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 6 (4): 617-620. 2015.
    Adams & Kveraga argue that social visual perception is cognitively penetrable by extending a top-down model for visual object recognition to visual perception of social cues. Here I suggest that, in their view, a clear link between the top-down contextual influences that modulate social visual perception and the perceptual experience of a subject is missing. Without such a link their proposal is consistent with explanations that need not involve cognitive penetration of perceptual experience but…Read more
  •  15
    The epistemic role of early vision: Cognitive penetration and attentional selection
    Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia 11 (3): 385-396. 2020.
    : In this article I discuss Athanasios Raftopoulos’ view on the epistemic role of attention and early vision, as outlined in his most recent book. I start by examining his view on attention, which he illustrates during his discussion of structured cognitive contents and their interactions with perceptual contents, as well as during his discussion of selection effects. According to Raftopoulos, attention not only operates pre-perceptual input selection, but also influences perceptual processing d…Read more
  •  9
    Syntactic Structures and the Conscious Awareness of Language Experience. An Intermediate Level Hypothesis
    with Giacomo Ettore Tullio Romano
    Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia 5 (2): 169-183. 2014.
    In this article we review the basic idea of the “intermediate level” hypothesis about consciousness as proposed by Ray Jackendoff, then developed by Crick and Koch and finally by Prinz. According to this hypothesis, consciousness arises only at an intermediate-level, which lies between rough sensory inputs and the more abstract representations used, e.g., in object recognition. We aim at formulating a more specific hypothesis about a suitable conception of consciousness relative to the experienc…Read more