The debate about direct perception encompasses different topics, one of which concerns the richness of the contents of perceptual experiences. Can we directly perceive only low-level properties, like edges, colors etc. (the sparse-content view), or can we perceive high-level properties and entities as well (the liberal-content view)? The aim of the paper is to defend the claim that the content ...

Do our background beliefs, desires, and mental images influence our perceptual experience of the emotions of others? In this paper, we will address the possibility of cognitive penetration (CP) of perceptual experience in the domain of social cognition. In particular, we focus on emotion recognition based on the visual experience of facial expressions. After introducing the current debate on CP...

A perceptual experience of a given object seems to make the object itself present to the perceiver’s mind. As P. F. Strawson says, ‘‘mature sensible experience (in general) presents itself as, in Kantian phrase, an immediate consciousness of the existence of things outside us’’ (1979, 47). This phenomenological directness of perceptual experience is the distinctive feature of perceptual phenome...