Perception
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We are born into a world; we develop senses and perception as we relate to it. We are our body in the world. Philosophy, psychology, science and art have put the question of our perception of the world (including ourselves) at the centre of our attention.
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In the path of modern philosophy, Rene Descartes replaced the concept of "soul" by that of "reason" in the dualistic conception of reality: thus, "body-soul" was replaced by "body-reason", endowing Homo sapiens with the self-reflective capacity (Cogito) that accounts for our existence (ergo sum), while admitting a limitation to know if the world exists beyond us (res extensa). The Cartesian method has been of great impulse for the development of the scientific method; however, its dualistic conception conserves in an underlying way an idealistic vision. The phenomenological current of Merleau Ponty, the anthropological theories on corporeality, primate anthropology, experimental psychology and neuroscience have seriously wounded the Cartesian paradigm by providing evidence in favor of phenomena such as those of the mind, consciousness, memory and perception being bodily processes, which even precede the appearance of hominids. In the course of evolution, the mechanisms of sensoriality have become extraordinarily sophisticated and complex, and this is essential for the survival of many species. This complexity implied the development of the nervous system, which allows us to register the great amount of information we receive from our environment, filter, organize and classify this information, store it in our memory and associate it with motor processes. The sense organs were developed precisely as the means of acquiring such information, while its processing occurs in an integrative manner (involving different senses, memory and emotions) in the central nervous system -mainly-, in order to assign meaning to the recorded information. As an effect of such processing, we have a perception of the self and of what surrounds us and thus, we form an idea of the world.
This perception should not be understood as a "defect" in the processing of sensory information. Faced with the impact of an overabundance of information, the nervous system, through neuronal plasticity, selects the most relevant information, abstracts it from the rest (less relevant), and constructs the mental representation of this information. Failures in these processing mechanisms have been described in different pathologies such as schizophrenia, autism (Charles-Edouard Notredame, 2014) (Sperandio, 2016) (Simone Gori, 2016 ).
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The nervous system, and with it its physiological and cognitive processes, develops throughout life, by mechanisms specific to each stage of development. As well as during embryogenesis, neurogenesis and apoptosis are key cellular mechanisms for the development of the neuroanatomical bases of these processes, neuronal plasticity is fundamental for the development of the potential of these processes in post-natal stages. It can be assumed that such processing responds to innate genetic programs, but this idea delimits the potentiality found in neuronal plasticity itself. Therefore, it is possible to hypothesize that, like all the processes of the nervous system, these mechanisms (or at least some of them) are developed throughout life, as organisms integrate new information. In spite of the relevance that it would have to elucidate if these mechanisms develop in different stages of life (either as an approach to how the conscious representations of the world are constructed -including the "I" - as a prognosis of different pathologies), there are no works that evaluate these processes in individuals of different ages. On the other hand, if these mechanisms are only innate in a potential way, and their development depends on the organism's relationship with the specific information and the context where this relationship occurs, it is also relevant to evaluate if the social-economic and/or cultural conditions have an impact on how these cognitive processes develop. Finally, the specificity of the information may be an intrinsic element of the organism's own activity: if this is so, the diversity of the processes of perception could also be correlated with these activities.
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After the experience of the stand "What do you see?" of the Biology Week (FCEN-UBA), aimed at teenagers in the upper years of secondary schools, and the project "Perception in children" in the framework of Exactas goes to School (FCEN-UBA), we propose to extend these experiences with the following objectives :
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The extension objective is to carry out a series of interactive activities in which the participants, students from primary and secondary schools, can demonstrate how the mechanisms of perception are, and finally discuss them. In this way, the youngest and the adolescents will be able to participate in interactive activities through which the processes of perception are evidenced and then, through the discussion of these physiological mechanisms, they can basically understand that perception (as a mechanism of neurological processing) plays a key role in the way we understand the world.
The research objective is to evaluate the diversity of response to perceptual activities, as an indirect parameter of the mechanisms of perceptual processing, in different populations, according to age, socio-economic level, and recurrent activities.
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It will be evaluated:
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1) Somatosensory, proprioceptive, and spatial perception: The sense of touch allows us to know the world according to its forms, textures and temperatures. But is what we perceive through touch really so? And how do we record and process that information? On the other hand, through touch we perceive ourselves: our first conscious identification of our body and our individuality (the "I") is precisely through somatosensory perception, accompanied fundamentally by our visual perception.
2) Visual and auditory perception: The sense of vision has developed early in the evolution of animals and in vertebrates it has acquired great complexity. The organ responsible for vision is the eye, and it is composed of the Cornea, the Crystalline (both translucent; the latter is modulated musclically by the ciliary muscle, to focus on the Phova) and the Retina. In the retina there are photoreceptors (rods and cones), bipolar cells, horizontal cells, amacrine cells and ganglion cells, whose axons constitute the optic nerve, which reaches the Lateral Gesticulated Nucleus of the Thalamus, where it projects towards the Visual Cortex (V1). Despite the complexity achieved in evolutionary terms, the functional anatomy of the eye leads to certain visual inconsistencies, which are corrected by central and peripheral processing to avoid ambiguity. In addition to visual perception, auditory perception will also be assessed.
3) Attentional (and other cognitive) perception: Attention and memory are two closely linked processes necessary for our functioning and adaptation in daily life. The importance of attention lies in the fact that it provides us with the ability to select - from all the sources of stimulation around us - only the information that is useful or functional for the tasks or actions we perform. Within the study of attention, two processing mechanisms have been conceptually defined: top-down (when it is regulated by pre-existing knowledge or expectations in the subject, that is, cognitive memory) and bottom-up (when attention is directed to a particular stimulus because certain characteristics of it stand out). The art of magic consists precisely in manipulating these processes so that, at the same time of generating attention to an object, blindness to others is produced. An example of this last mechanism is evidenced in the famous experiment of the gorilla (Daniel J Simons, 1999)
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