Shared perception and the sense of reality – SHAREALITY

When we perceive the world, we experience a host of perceptual contents. We see shapes, colours, and movement, experience textures through touch, and hear the timbre and frequency of sounds. But there is more to perception than sensory contents: we also have the feeling that the things we perceive are real and not, for example, merely imagined. We can differentiate veridical perceptual experiences from imagination, because veridical perception comes together with a feeling that we are perceiving the real world. We have a sense of reality. But what gives a sense of reality to our perceptual experiences?
The sense of reality in perception is often taken for granted, but for individuals suffering from neurological disorders, such as derealisation and schizophrenia, the ability to distinguish self-generated stimuli from those triggered by the real environment can be disrupted. Although the sense of reality in perception has been a recent topic of study across several disciplines, including philosophy, psychiatry, and cognitive neuroscience, the phenomenon remains poorly understood. There is currently no suitably developed account of what precisely the sense of reality in perception is, and what its underlying mechanisms may be. Similarly, most scientific and philosophical treatments of the topic take an individualistic approach. Many perceptual experiences, however, are not merely individual, but socially shared: infants learn to look where others are looking, doctors jointly assess radiographs to detect tumours, hunters track preys together, and musicians will jointly experience the music they play. What is the role of socially shared perception in supporting the sense of reality?
This project aims to rigorously examine the role of socially shared perception in supporting the sense of reality. The project will embrace an interdisciplinary approach to this aim, using philosophical, computational, and psychophysical experimental methods. First, the project will develop a novel experimental paradigm for testing specific mechanistic models of how sharing the perceptual perspectives of others may causally influence our sense of reality in perception. Second, the project will assess to what extent shared perception is a normative precondition for this sense. Specifically, it will critically examine the proposal that the ability to coordinate my perception of an object together with another individual, goes hand in hand with the ability to experience objects as real, and differentiate them from hallucinations and imagery. Finally, the project will canvas three important empirical corollaries of this proposal in psychiatry, artificial intelligent agents, and virtual reality experiences.
This project is the first attempt to test whether there is a causal relation between socially shared perception and the sense of reality, and to critically examine the normative role that the ability to share percepts with others has on the ability to distinguish self-generated sensory activity from those triggered by the outside world. In its methodology, the project is uniquely interdisciplinary, bringing together several areas of research that usually remain disjointed: philosophy and the psychophysics of perception and imagination, social cognition, and metacognition research. Overall, the proposed research project provides the first steps for a substantial new programme of research to study the links between an individual’s perceptual processing and the wider social and intersubjective structure in which these processes are embedded.