Strategies that shape perception

In recent years there has been an increased focus on individual differences. Such differences have been observed in conditions where people display performance deficits, such as developmental prosopagnosia (McConachie, 1976), in conditions where subjects demonstrate enhanced skills, such as synesthesia (Terhune et al., 2013), as well as in neurotypical individuals, for instance, in the form of subtle individual differences in visual perception (Zelazny & Sørensen, 2020). Our interaction with the environment during brain maturation shapes how perceptual strategies are formed and prioritized. One of the principal tasks for the brain during this stage is to establish templates and context frames in long-term memory. These templates and context frames serve as the basis for various perceptual strategies used to interpret sensory information. Over time, these templates are updated in light of both sensory evidence and the perceptual strategies that have proven advantageous. Successful strategies thus have a greater likelihood of being used in the future, hence shaping our perceptual strategic preferences. In the well-known case of AB, who was afflicted with developmental prosopagnosia (McConachie, 1976), there is evidence to suggest that she prioritized peoples’ clothing as a strategy for recognition over the more common one of relying on facial features. Similarly, grapheme-color synesthesia may develop as a strategy for learning the alphabet. Here, a common strategy may be to associate the abstract letter shapes with previously established color categories in an attempt to aid letter recognition (Brogaard & Sørensen, in press). If this particular strategy is sufficiently prioritized, this may result in grapheme-color synesthesia (cf. Mannix & Sørensen, in press). Here, we argue that individual variability in visual perception reflects differences in perceptual strategies. An interesting consequence of this thesis is that perceptual experience is likely to vary considerably more across individuals than hitherto assumed.