Novelty Perception & the Schizautistic Spectrum — condensed version
I hereby wish to present in a condensed form the ideas put forward in the three part Novelty Perception & the schizautistic spectrum essay, in particular those of its second part. The motivation of that essay was to postulate the ‘novelty perception threshold,’ a mechanism that solves the cognitive puzzle of having a functionally stable perception which is yet capable of adapting to new ideas, a puzzle that I suspect is not intuitively seen as a problem at all. A second motivation was to present this threshold as a personal variable which characterizes autism and schizophrenia as extreme ends of a single continuum that includes neurotypical individuals in the middle. This here text puts the ideas in a more concise form. For brevity I excluded the examples down to the footnotes.
The world, and our body in it, is sensed through our sensory faculties. The world comes in as a jumble of color, sound, pressure &c. Perception, the constructed image of the reality around us, is rendered from this sensory input with the guidance of our conception of the world. Perception is hierarchically organized. Low-level (more sensory) phenomena make-up high-level (more abstract) phenomena; we perceive patterns of patterns.1 This hierarchy, namely the manner by which low-level phenomena constitute high-level phenomena, depends on our conception.2
Our comprehension —the successful matching of our perception to our conception of the situation— and motivation codetermine at any moment the target of our attention. Comprehension sets the selection of possible targets and motivation picks appropriate targets from that selection.3 These targets are the highest-level phenomena relevant to the activity we are engaged in.4 In retrospection we might perceive new high-level patterns, so long as we can recall the constituent lower-level phenomena.
With our attention on a high-level phenomenon, our perception of the lower-level phenomena that constitute it are reduced. We see the forest and not the trees.5
Our conception of reality is made up of conceived regularities: phenomena and rules that govern and relate them. Rules such as how physical objects move in space and time, how cats look like, what is appropriate in a conversation.
The most commonplace application of our cognitive faculties is in the form of deductive reasoning, which makes deductions based on our conception and perception. It is the application of known rules upon the perceived situation.6 Perception itself is a product of this reasoning which makes deductions such as “this is a cat” when seeing a visual pattern that matches the rule.7 Many errors arise in the process: we expect one thing but then perceive another. Since our attention is on high-level phenomena, and their perception is tolerant to low-level variations, we are blind to a degree to prediction errors of the latter.8 Nonetheless, even though these errors do not come to our attention, they are perceived and learned. That is, they modify our future expectations of the high-level phenomenon.9 Beside these marginal errors, arising from ‘noise,‘ there are greater errors that arise when, you might say, the expectation gets superimposed by a second pattern which, so long as the latter was recognized, doesn't hinder recognition.10
Inductive reasoning works in reverse to deductive reasoning: it derives conceptions (rules, regularities) from observation. Deductive reasoning is the usual modus operandi of the mind, while inductive reasoning is a somewhat special operation.11 It is prompted when attention shifts across abstract-levels, whether up or down,12 and leads to reconceptualization, i.e. relearning, of the concept moved away from.13 When attention moves down the abstraction levels, the high-level perception might acquire a new aspect to it or lose an old aspect, and when it moves up it could acquire a new context and thus be subsumed to a greater pattern.14
Such shifts of attention across abstraction levels are rarely spontaneous. They might happen coincidentally, circumstantially,15 but otherwise our attention sticks to the level most pertinent to our goals given the situation as we conceive it. However, severe breaches of expectation, giving rise to the sense of having misrecognized, render a signal to spontaneously shift our attention across abstract-levels.16 If an alternative recognition (i.e. explanation of the situation) does not come to mind, our inductive reasoning would be triggered: the phenomenon is identified as novel, i.e. unknown, and the mind starts learning to recognize it, from the bottom up, as it were. This is accompanied, appropriately, with a heightened activity of memory storage.17
This sense of misrecognition is unsettling, negative and anxiety inducing. It evokes the emotion of awe par excellence. Inherent to it is a reflexive imperative to find an explanation. The active seeking and finding of explanations is pleasant, it is wonder. Insights —sudden conceptual revelations— whether they have been preceded by a sense of misrecognition or are sudden, cause joyful amazement. This effect is behind the delight of jokes, humour and eureka moments.18
All else being equal, what constitutes a “severe breach of expectation” varies from person to person. I claim that each one of us has an inner error threshold. Deviations between expectation and reality that are minute and thus fall under this threshold pass as mere noise; the phenomenon retains its high-level recognition even if some of its aspects, as expected by us, are off. Deviations that exceed the threshold signal misrecognition — it's not the aspects that we got wrong, but the entire concept.
This threshold is not necessarily binary. It might be graded, such that the greater the deviation the stronger the inductive reasoning that comes into play. Still, the relationship between the inductive reasoning's magnitude and the deviation's degree19 varies from person to person. This spectrum of novelty perception sensitivity (how much error is tolerated before admitting misrecognition) corresponds to a spectrum of cognitive faculties which in turn corresponds, we might say, to a spectrum of humans, running from the low-threshold end of wonderful (full of wondering) people whose inductive reasoning is frequently prompted to the high-threshold end of analytical people who see the world in constant terms.20
At the very extremes of this spectrum are people we might call neuro-atypical: the low threshold schizophrenics who live in an unstable shifting world, and the high threshold autistics who live in an inflexible world. For further discussion of this point, see part 3 of the original schizoautistic essay.
For example, we might perceive a beach party, a high-level phenomenon. It is made up from the perception of a party and of a beach, which we could have otherwise perceived separately, i.e. beach without a party or a party elsewhere. The phenomenon of the beach consists of sand at the edge of a body of water at a particular geographical point. A party is humans dancing and speaking happily with music. A music is made up from a pattern of sounds over time. Dancing is made up of a pattern of human movement over time. The perception of a human is made up of an animate body of a certain form, which in turn is made up, visually, from a pattern of lines and colours, ultimately a pattern of photons entering our eyes.
To recognize visually a banana fruit, we must know what a banana looks like. Its colour, a low-level aspect of its appearance, indicates to the informed a higher-level aspect of the banana itself: green — unripe, yellow — ripe, black — rests in peace.
At the mall, one would pay attention to restaurants if hungry and to toilets if needing to the bathroom. If the hungry person is asked by a stranger where the toilets are she wouldn't be able to answer even though she had passed, indeed seen, toilet signs to which she nonetheless didn't pay attention, lacking the motivation. On the other hand, a person who is not familiar with the local restaurant chains (has not conception of them) would not be able to attend them, however much motivation to eat he has.
For example, talking with a stranger who turned to us in a bar, we might pay attention to his hands if we are foremost concerned about pickpockets in this city; to the environment, seeking an excuse out, if we dislike the conversation; to signals of attraction if we find the chat agreeably flirtatious; to the stranger's accent if we try to uncover a foreign spy; as far as the hands, the environment, the accent or other aspects of the conversation fall outside the relevant scope of out interest, we will not perceive them. One of the most convincing demonstrations of that is the classic psychology ball passing count test.
When watching a film we'd pay attention to different things if it was made by a friend, if we watch merely for pleasure or to make a critique, if our expectations are high or low, if we watch it for the first time or not. Playing ping-pong we would pay attention to different things if it's but an excuse for a conversation or if we are trying to win. Eating spaghetti we don't mind the patterns the lines are making on the plate.
Some years ago I had two friends visiting; one was, for that matter, neurotypical, the other had prosopagnosia or “face blindness.” I left to the bathroom and upon my return I ran a little experiment. I asked the former to tell me what had changed in my face. She gazed at me and made a few false guesses. While we were at it, our prosopagnosiac appeared over her shoulder, looked at me for a short moment and asked if I had not shaved. Indeed.
We expect getting wet under the rain, a thrown ball to fall, a movie to have sound and follow a limited set of characters, the president to be dressed formally. When we are invited to somebody's home our expectation are different if the occasion is a house party, a wake, a wedding's after party, a meeting of a union or a book club.
For the benefit of whomever is worried about circularity I'll add that what we have here is rather a spiral that ascends the hierarchy of perception. The direct sensory information is interpreted, according to known rules, to form higher-level perceptions (a pattern of light over the retina forms a line, a pattern of vibrations over time forms a single source of sound &c) which are in turn interpreted again (the line forms a form) and so on.
Coming out to the street, we expect cars to be parked along the curb. It scarcely matters to us what sort of cars are parked there, but nonetheless we form, you might say subconsciously, expectations about them which are very likely to be somewhat false. Where we would have guessed, if we had to, that a silver car would be parked, really is a black car. This error does not however contradict our conception of the street. If however their deviation brings forth a perception of an unexpected high-level phenomenon, for example there are no cars parked at all, or all of the parked cars are orange, we are likely to notice.
If over time orange cars become more popular, to the point of becoming the most popular car colour, we might one day come out to a street with only orange cars parking and not feel like something was going on. To take a less fantastical scenario we may substitute colour and design. Car design changes over time, mostly marginally (though the introduction of electric cars makes some changed less “marginal”). We scarcely perceive these changed, but if we were to be shown a photo of a street from 30 years ago, we could tell by the cars alone that it was taken at another era; our expectations, that is, perception, has adapted gradually but to a significant extent these years. We have never perceived ourselves to have grown taller from one day to the next, either; still our expectation of our own height has changed together with our stature.
If you meet an acquaintance you might not even notice that he has grown half a centimeter or has had a haircut, but you'd notice if he's suddenly wearing an eyepatch. It's a major deviation from his expected appearance but it does not hinder his recognition.
I suppose that the “marginal learning” described, i.e. the gradual adaptation of concepts to non-disruptive to perception changes such as the self and other growing, fashions changing, deepening familiarity with a class of entities &c, is too “inductive reasoning,” rendering it a commonplace, albeit still subjugated to deductive reasoning, operation.
From the forest down to the trees, or up to nature, for example.
This conviction is based on a series of papers by R. R. Vallacher and D. M. Wegner on “action identification.” See for example Vallacher, R. R., & Wegner, D. M. (1987). What do people think they’re doing? Action identification and human behavior. Psychological Review, 94(1), 3–15. (sci-hub) They discuss the relationship between one's action and one's conception of that action, but I believe the effect described extends beyond action to perception of any kind.
I find it challenging to come up with examples that are not rather ridiculous. I present what I can. A person passionate about basketball might direct her attention from the game itself to the movements she makes playing it and realize that it's a sport, and she could do it to exercise (as opposed to just having a good time); a person who has been taking for granted some behaviour of others might shift his attention to the effort involved and realize that it is a gesture of great caring; similarly a person might start appreciating a piece of art once he considered the work that must go into it.
Examples for a shift up the abstraction levels: one might realize that that an acquaintance is often already there where one habitually comes is not coincidental but because the other is interested in contact; most inventions are a result of such reasoning, the insight that switching an electric current on and off over time might serve as a signal, giving us the telegraph; that wind, rivers and vapour exert pressure that could be channeled to move mechanical implements, giving us the windmill, the watermill and the steam-engine; that an engraved surface could be inked to produced writing on paper, giving us printing.
For example if one looks for a makeshift prop and consequently objects that are usually perceived on a more abstract level are reduced to their physical dimensionality: books, packages, boxes, utensils, vases. Any sort of searching is the narrowing of one's attention to a pattern, whether sensory (visual, auditory &c) or abstract, through which everything that comes to mind is regarded.
If we don't get wet under the rain or a basketball gets suspended midair, we shift our attention from finding our way or from the game down to the physicality of the situation. If we arrive to a wake and everybody is dressed in red instead of black we shift our attention to everything we know about wakes and the deceased, to the particular behaviour of the attenders. We wouldn't mind the president's tie colour during an address, but would be perplexed if he wore a tank top.
I can report that there are people from my long past in relation to whom I retain most vividly memories of my blunders, as well as extreme cases of their erratic behaviour, i.e. moments of severe breaching of expectation.
These two sides of misrecognition take part in our appreciation of narrative art pieces and the company of others. A story that defies our worldview without justification —without leading us to wonder— would not be liked; one that amazes us would. We would be put off by a person we cannot comprehend and be attracted to whom leads us to insights.
We can say, “inductive reasoning magnitude as a function of deviation degree.”
The low-threshold person might make much about an orange tie worn by an official, while the high-threshold person would not make anything of an official wearing a tank top.