Rui Zhe Goh

Auditory perception is traditionally conceived as the perception of sounds — a friend’s voice, a clap of thunder, a minor chord. However, daily life also seems to present us with experiences characterized by the absence of sound — a moment of silence, a gap between thunderclaps, the hush after a musical performance. In these cases, do we positively hear silence? Or do we just fail to hear, and merely judge or infer that it is silent? This longstanding question remains controversial in both the philosophy and science of perception, with prominent theories holding that sounds are the only objects of auditory experience and thus that our encounter with silence is cognitive, not perceptual. However, this debate has largely remained theoretical, without a key empirical test. Here, we introduce a novel empirical approach, presenting experimental evidence that silence can be genuinely perceived (not just cognitively inferred). We ask whether silences can ‘substitute’ for sounds in event-based auditory illusions — empirical signatures of auditory event representation in which auditory events distort perceived duration. Seven experiments introduce three new ‘silence illusions’ — the one-silence-is-more illusion, silence-based warping, and the oddball-silence illusion — each adapted from a prominent perceptual illusion previously thought to arise only from sounds. Subjects were immersed in ambient noise interrupted by silences structurally identical to the sounds in the original illusions. In all cases, silences elicited temporal distortions perfectly analogous to the illusions produced by sounds. Our results suggest that silence is truly heard, not merely inferred, introducing a general approach for studying absence perception.

Objects and events are fundamental units of perception: Objects structure our experience of space, and events structure our experience of time. A striking and counterintuitive finding about object representation is that it can warp perceived space, such that stimuli within an object appear farther apart than stimuli in empty space. Might events influence perceived time in the same way objects influence perceived space? Here, five experiments (N=500 adults) show that they do: Just as stimuli within an object are perceived as farther apart in space, stimuli within an event are perceived as further apart in time. Such “Event-based Warping” is elicited both by events characterized by sound (E1), as well as events characterized by silence (E2). Moreover, these effects cannot be explained by surprise, distraction or attentional-cueing (E3 and E4), and also arise cross-modally (from audition to vision; E5). We suggest that object-based warping and event-based warping are both instances of a more general phenomenon in which representations of structure — whether in space or in time — generate powerful and analogous relative perceptual distortions.

Regret compounds the pain of mistakes by making us ruminate on the past. Is there any value in this compounded suffering? An intuitive and widely endorsed view, the learning view, states that regret has value because it helps us learn from our mistakes. This paper challenges the learning view. I show that we often learn from our mistakes without regret, through a process I call “belief‐driven learning.” The challenge is to explain what value regret adds to our lives, over and above belief‐driven learning. To meet the challenge, I develop the idea that regret helps us overcome temptation. I show that belief‐driven learning falters for mistakes made due to temptation because the source of error is not epistemic, but motivational. I argue that the ruminative processes involved in regret can help us learn in the face of temptation by reshaping our motivational tendencies, bringing them into better alignment with the values we endorse.