Grounding Cognition in Perceptual Experience

The aim of this Special Issue was to put forward a multifaceted reflection on the relevance of perceptual experience in affecting and modeling various aspects of cognitive performance. We sought contributions demonstrating how properties emerging from sensory experience and perceptual organization are of key importance to our mental representations, beliefs, language, imagination, evaluations, actions, and interactions. In our title, we explicitly chose to refer to perceptual experience (i.e., “Grounding cognition in perceptual experience”) rather than simply using the more familiar expression “Grounding cognition in perception”. This is because the latter approach has been characterized by a predominant focus on brain activity, whereas our aim here was to complement this valuable mainstream line of research with a different perspective that we also consider valuable. This perspective revolves around the question of what a phenomenological approach to investigating the relationship between perception and cognition might be able to contribute to current research. We looked for answers to this question in a broad framework, covering a wide range of topics. How does perceptual experience contribute to the way in which we conceptualize experience? How is perceptual experience reflected in linguistic configurations? In what ways does perception influence people’s judgments, their unfolding reasoning process, and their memories? Each of the 13 papers in this Special Issue provides answers to these questions from a unique point of view.