Grounding Cognition in Perceptual Experience

This reprint presents a multifaceted reflection on the influence of perceptual experience on various aspects of cognitive performance. It brings together contributions that demonstrate the importance of properties that emerge from perceptual experience in shaping our mental representations, beliefs, language, imagination, evaluations, actions, and interactions. The term 'perceptual experience' was chosen for the title over the more familiar 'perception' to emphasize that our focus is on human phenomenological experience rather than brain activity. This reprint demonstrates the role of experience in contemporary research in psychology and cognitive science within a broad framework. The chapters cover a wide range of topics and address various questions. One such question is how perceptual experience contributes to our conceptualization of experience. This relates to basic same-different categorization, judgements of numerosity, as well as the experienced qualities of environments (e.g. restorative environments) or movements (e.g. optimal movements). It also relates to the pleasantness of pictures and the naive theories we develop based on perception, and to how we shape paradigms such as those of 'illusions'. This volume also addresses other questions, such as how perceptual experience is reflected in linguistic configurations and how perception influences reasoning processes, memory, and empathic responses to descriptions of experiences. The thirteen papers in this reprint each provide answers to these questions from a unique point of view.