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What effect ? Reassessing the Perky experiment| title | What effect ? Reassessing the Perky experiment |
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| start_date | 2026/06/12 |
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| schedule | 16-17H30 |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | pavillon jardin, meeting room |
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| summary | This presentation aims to reassess the role of imagination in the Perky effect and to argue that there is little reason to think that Perky (1910) has shown that perceptual experience can be mistaken with imagination.
When we talk about the Perky “effect” we usually refer to the results of a famous experiment directed by Cheves West Perky. Very roughly, Perky’s experiment went like this : participants were asked to visualize a sequence of objects while not knowing that faint images of the same objects were being projected onto a translucent glass screen in front of them. Although their descriptions closely matched the projections, participants reported only imagining the objects and never perceiving the projected images.
The Perky experiment ‘has achieved almost mythical status within imagery research’ in general (Dijkstra & Fleming 2023 : 1), and among philosophers in particular. Many contemporary philosophers of mind take Perky to have shown that the phenomenology of perceptual experiences and imagination can be very similar, or even the same (Kind 2001 ; Nanay 2015, 2023), or that perception can lack ""phenomenal force"" (Silins 2025 ; Teng 2023, 2024).
However, not everyone accepts that the Perky experiment licenses any of these conclusions. In this presentation, I side with the critics. I will argue that Perky has not shown that perception and imagination are phenomenally similar (let alone that they can be phenomenally indistinguishable), nor has she demonstrated that perceptual experiences can lack phenomenal force. However, I believe that even the most thoroughgoing critics have been too concessive. For, as I argue, there is no good reason to think Perky has shown that any of her subjects mistook one kind of mental state or episode for another. If such a mistake is what the Perky effect is supposed to be, then Perky’s experiment gives us no good reason to think there is such an effect. |
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| responsibles | NC |
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Workflow history| from state (1) | to state | comment | date |
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| submitted | published | | 2026/04/21 13:54 UTC |
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