Perceptual Integration, Modularity, and Cognitive Penetration

A long-cherished view in philosophy and psychology treats perception as largely consisting in a set of segregated feature detectors. However, the current evidence suggests that this traditional view is false: there is significant interaction between distinct types of information at all levels of perception. This chapter argues that embracing an “integrative” view of perception has significant ramifications for discussions of modularity and the cognitive penetrability of perception. The chapter claims that, contrary to standard interpretations, an integrative conception of perception is compatible with a robust, if revisionary, understanding of modularity that upholds the purposes for which the notion was originally introduced, and usefully complicates the relation between the modular/non-modular distinction and the perception/cognition distinction: it shows how perceptual processes can fail to be modular without, ipso facto, being penetrated by cognition.