ABSTRACT
Perception is more than the mere sensory input – it is the elaboration or embellishment of this input in the service of cognition and action. This raises two immediate questions: how can we keep perception apart from sensory stimulation and how can we keep perception apart from postperceptual (cognitive) processing? Perception comes after sensory input and before cognition, and in order to zoom in on perception, we need to differentiate it from both of these.
Perception represents the world, and one question I address in this chapter is how it does so. Beliefs also represent the world, but they represent it very differently from the way perception does. Special emphasis is given to how attention influences perceptual processing and how specifying the content of perceptual representations needs to take the allocation of perceptual attention into consideration.
