EL HOMBRE Y SU ÉPOCA

I’ve just argued for the dissociation of mismatches (and corresponding experiences of absence) from violation of expectation. At this point, the reader may wonder how critical expectations are for seeing absence. If mismatches are to be understood as discrepancies not between what we expect and what we see, but between what we hold in memory and what we see, perhaps we should sever the ties between seeing absence and expectations entirely.

Before we answer that, let’s ask about the role of expectations in seeing absence. What is it that expectations do for the experiences of absence? Expectations explain why we activate, project and match templates of certain objects. When we expect an object to be present, this expectation causes us to form and project a template of that object. As a result, we see its absence via a mismatch. We have also seen that this causal role applies to negative expectations: when we expect an object to be absent, we similarly project its template and confirm its absence through a mismatch.

In sum, expectations explain why certain mismatches occur.But are they necessary? Can mismatches generate experiences of absence without expectations? If so, then we should cast the Mismatch Model as a memory-based, rather than an expectation-based, account. Three reasons support this decision.

First, as already noted, we often see absences when we do not know what to expect. When we search for parking space or cookies, we are ignorant about our chances of finding these items. Our forecast is vague. Second, we can perceive absences without making any kind of forecast about an object’s presence or absence. Pop-out and deviant absences were cases in point. Third, we can see

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absences randomly. For instance, you may suddenly notice that Susanna is not wearing a green sweatshirt today after an image of a green sweatshirt pops into your head. This experience of absence is just a fluke – no positive or negative expectations about the sweatshirt are in play here.

Scenarios like these speak against casting the Mismatch Model as an expectational account and challenge any expectation-based account of perception of absence like Sartre’s. Sartre claimed that expectations are essential for seeing absence: “It is evident that non-being always appears within the limits of a human expectation” (1956, p.7). 21

We have already departed from Sartre in arguing that seeing absence does not require imagination. If projections and matching of the templates of absent objects can be governed by processes that do not substantially draw upon expectations, then we have our second point of departure: seeing absence does not require expectation.

The defender of the expectation-based account of perception of absence can fight back. She will dismiss the scenarios I have cited as genuine counterexamples. First, she will say, there is nothing random about your seeing absence of a green sweatshirt on Susanna. You could have formed an implicit expectation about the sweatshirt because it is St Patrick’s Day or because you have often seen Susanna wear it before.This expectation disposes you to carry out a detection task: “Is Susanna wearing a green sweatshirt today?” Perceptual expectations do not have to be set by perception but can correspond to one’s beliefs or wishes. For instance, you may know that your friend is not coming to the party, but secretly hope that she will, which will cause you to project her image. The mismatch that will result from this projection will embody violation of expectation. Perception of deviant patterns (seeing absence of a dot in a grid of dots) similarly implicitly engages predictive

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In Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1956), Sartre’s main examples of seeing absence involved violation of expectation (expecting Pierre to be in a café, expecting fifteen hundred franks in a wallet). This seems to suggest that violation of expectation is necessary for seeing absence, for Sartre. However, Sartre may also be interpreted as proposing a broader condition, according to which seeing absence requires a psychological state in which absence is entertained as a possibility (“The world does not disclose its non-beings to one who has not first posited them as possibilities,” ibid). This psychological state can be met by positive expectations to see absences. For example, when the landscape artist expects to see the absence of trees in a desert, she posits their absence as a possibility (even as a high probability.)

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mechanisms. Viewing the display instills expectations to see a uniform grid of dots, and observing deviation in this pattern leads to a violation of expectation.

As for cookie quests and other searches with unknown outcomes, these tasks may be analyzed as engaging equiprobable positive and negative expectations – a stipulation that fits the theoretical notion of expectation. (Bubic 2009) discusses a target detection paradigm in which the subject forms equal expectations about the target’s presence or absence, and he categorizes this task as an

expectational task.) Finally, one can appeal to arguments that the primary function of any projected imagery is predictive and thus involves expectations (Moulton and Koesslyn 2011). So have we been rash in divorcing the Mismatch Model from the expectation-based accounts?

One worry is this: by divorcing mismatches from expectations, we cheapen experiences of absence. By appealing to the bare act of mismatching, the model seems to imply that it is possible to perceive an absence of an object solely by virtue of generating an image of that object and

mismatching it.22 Thus, one can imagine a potato while looking at the table, project its image, and establish a mismatch between its image and the table, and experience its absence on the table. If that’s all it takes to see an absence, then we can simulate this process and see the absence of any object we wish, at any time we wish. That doesn’t seem right.

I think, however, that we can handle this problem without bringing expectations back into the model. Perceptual experiences are spontaneous, and this also applies to experiences of absence. We can’t experience absences at will. Only spontaneously generated mismatches can yield experiences of absence. Back to the potato example, projection of a potato template must transform into a detection task (is there a potato on my office?) in order to produce an experience of absence. Without

spontaneous projection and mismatching, one will merely have thought about a potato’s absence. So, if we can show that spontaneous projections may be launched without expectations, then stripping the account from its expectational garb still works.

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