Alex Wentzell's paper, "What is the Format of Pre-Attentive Vision?,"  has been accepted for publication in the Philosophical Quarterly.  There's an abstract below; congratulations, Alex! 

 

Abstract: A current debate in the philosophy of cognitive science centers around the representational  format of visual processing prior to the deployment of focused visual attention. Recent work has  argued that pre-attentive vision’s properties imply it represents in a map-like format. This argument  is based on the empirical phenomena of conjunctive illusions and conjunction searches. In this  paper, I argue instead that we should adopt an iconic view of pre-attentive vision, where it  represents in a picture-like format. I’ll first argue that the map-like view cannot accommodate a  certain type of phenomenon in the pre-attentive vision literature: gist perception. I argue that gist  perception implies a holistically bound format and that this favors the iconic view. Second, I’ll  argue that conjunctive illusions and conjunction search can be explained by means other than  positing map-like representations in early vision.