# Other-centred bias in perception and epistemic justification

Lucas Battich

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Lucas Battich. Other-centred bias in perception and epistemic justification. Erkenntnis, In press, 10.1007/s10670-025-00969-x. hal-05067013

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# Other-centred bias in perception and epistemic justification

Lucas Battich¹,²

¹Institut Jean-Nicod, EHESS, CNRS, École Normale Supérieure, PSL University, Paris, France

²Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives et Computationnelles (LNC2), INSERM U960, École Normale Supérieure, PSL University, Paris, France

lucas.battich@ens.psl.eu

Forthcoming in *Erkenntnis*

Author's accepted version, not version of record. Please cite published article.

## Abstract

According to traditional phenomenal approaches to perceptual justification, perceptual experience provides rational support for actions, beliefs, and intentions. When you see a banana as yellow, that perceptual experience makes it reasonable for you to believe that the banana is yellow. Debates about perceptual justification and the merits of the phenomenal approach have been centred on the solitary mind. But decades of research show that other people have an implicit impact on individual perception and cognition: perception is often other-centred or “altercentric”. This influence even occurs with the mere presence of others: we unconsciously and spontaneously encode others’ perceptual perspectives and shift our frame of reference accordingly. What is the epistemic standing of altercentric biased perception? This paper introduces this phenomenon and maps its epistemic profile. I review empirical evidence suggesting that during altercentric bias, a perceiver represents another’s perspectival content, which can introduce a conflict between ego-centric and other-centric contents. I contrast altercentric bias with closely related phenomena, including cognitive penetrability of perception and exogenous attention capture, and argue that under certain conditions it poses unique problems to the epistemic justificatory role of perception, and particularly to the phenomenal approach to perceptual justification.

**Keywords:** Perspective-taking, Perceptual bias, Social perception, Perceptual justification, Epistemology of perception

**Acknowledgements:** The author acknowledges the support of a grant from the Fyssen Foundation, and grants from the French National Research Agency (grant ANR-23-AERC-0016 awarded to L.B., and grant ANR-17-EURE-0017 FrontCog, ENS-PSL).

For the purpose of Open Access, a CC-BY public copyright license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) has been applied by the author to the present document and will be applied to all subsequent versions up to the Author Accepted Manuscript arising from this submission.
# 1. Introduction

Perceptual experience is often taken to give rational support for our beliefs, intentions, and desires. When you perceive a strawberry as red, that perceptual experience makes it *reasonable* for you to believe that the strawberry is red. Barring extreme scepticism, what we believe about the external world is justified by what we see, hear, touch, smell, and taste (Smithies, 2014). Philosophical theories of perceptual justification have been predominantly centred on the *solitary* mind. The whole perceptual and epistemic process, from sensory intake and phenomenal experience, to belief formation and judgement, is taken to be the prerogative of an individual isolated mind. Many perceptual experiences, however, are not merely individual, but socially shared: we jointly look at the ball in a basketball game, point to a chosen piece of cake to the baker, hunters track prey together, and musicians jointly attend to the music they play. What happens to the epistemic role of experience when we perceive things together?

A growing body of research shows that other people's perceptual perspectives have an impact on individual perception and cognition (Kampis & Southgate, 2020). For example, depending on where they are attending, another person's gaze can either facilitate or impair our ability to detect and discriminate objects in a scene (Frischen et al., 2007). Human perception is not necessarily anchored on an egocentric frame of reference. Rather, perception is often other-centred or altercentric: we spontaneously encode others' perceptual perspectives and shift our frame of reference accordingly, even when we are not attending to the same objects (Fig. 1) (Kampis & Southgate, 2020; Southgate, 2020). This altercentric shift to the other's perceptual perspective often interferes with or biases our own perceptual experiences and judgements. This is the *altercentric perception bias* hypothesis.

This paper aims to introduce and map the epistemic issues surrounding the altercentric perception bias hypothesis as a unique phenomenon. After establishing the epistemic playing field through known problems and related phenomena (section 2), I delve into the empirical evidence to refine the contours of the altercentric perception bias hypothesis, with an eye to its epistemic profile (sections 3 and 4). Using a broad inferentialist approach to perceptual justification, I then argue that while altercentric perception closely approximates the epistemic problems of phenomena like the cognitive penetrability of perception, it nevertheless introduces unique challenges for the epistemology of perception (section 5). Specifically, in some situations, altercentric perception bias can introduce ill-formed inferential structures in perception, and in other situations, it can upgrade the epistemic role of perceptual experience. Finally, in sections 6 and 7, I consider these epistemic issues using non-inferential epistemic approaches, with emphasis on reliabilism, and highlight some of the unique questions that altercentric perception bias brings into more general debates on perceptual justification.
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 1.** Spontaneous encoding of another person's perspective (dashed arrow) toward the same (**a**) or a different (**b**) target or direction compared to one's egocentric perspective (solid arrow).</figcaption></figure>

**2. Perceptual justification and hijacked experiences**

According to a popular phenomenal approach to perceptual justification, merely having a perceptual experience provides immediate justification to beliefs related to the contents of that experience, at least in part by virtue of their phenomenal character, and absent consciously accessible defeaters (Johnston, 2006; Smithies, 2014). Some views within this approach are known variously as dogmatism (Pryor, 2000; Siegel, 2012), phenomenal dogmatism (Chudnoff, 2013), or phenomenal conservatism (Huemer, 2007). The phenomenal approach provides a simple and appealing take on perceptual epistemic justification: you are justified in believing that the bush contains berries because it *looks* that way. Perceptual experience has this justificatory role because it is directly supported by the relevant sensory information (Smithies, 2014).

Altercentric bias on perceptual experience can break this direct support. According to the altercentric perception bias hypothesis, people often spontaneously encode others' perceptual perspectives, which goes on to bias their own perceptual experiences and judgments. When looking for strawberries in a bush, someone else's perspective can affect your experience so that you miss a partially visible berry you would otherwise detect. Your visual experience then becomes biased by *irrelevant* sensory and cognitive information. How does this affect the justificatory role of your biased visual experience? What factors make your perceptual judgement epistemically worse in the social scenario?

Unfortunately, the traditional phenomenal approach to perceptual justification fails to explain the epistemic status of socially influenced perception. For these theories, the *origin* of a perceptual experience — whether it was biased by any other process or phenomena, including the presence of others — plays no clear role in its epistemic force (cf. Huemer, 2007; Silins & Siegel, 2014). They cannot explain why your perceptual judgement is epistemically better or worse in a social scenario compared to a non-social scenario.
This issue has parallels with the epistemic debate on the cognitive penetrability of per-
ception. While perception certainly influences your beliefs about the world, the cognitive
penetrability thesis holds that the influence may go the other way: in some cases there is
an internal and direct causal influence of cognitive states, such as beliefs, desires and
intentions, on perceptual experience (Siegel, 2012; Stokes, 2013). If perceptual experi-
ences are themselves influenced by cognitive states, however, their justificatory role
would be jeopardised. It brings the danger of introducing a circular justificatory struc-
ture. If my previous belief that most bananas are yellow determines my current percep-
tual experience of the banana in front of me as being yellow, then it becomes suspect to
justify my current belief regarding the colour of the banana on that perceptual experi-
ence. It does not seem epistemically rational to rely on our perceptual experience to jus-
tify or increase the credence of our pre-existing beliefs, if these experiences are already
influenced by the very beliefs they are meant to justify. This sort of perceptual experience
becomes epistemically downgraded (Siegel, 2017).

This circular justificatory structure in cognitive penetrability is an exemplary case of
what Susanna Siegel calls hijacked perceptual experiences — although not the only case
—, where there is a pernicious inferential relation holding between the influencing cog-
nitive states, traits or moods, and the influenced perceptual experience or judgement:

*Hijacked experiences:* When perceptual judgements or perceptual experi-
ences arise from processes that give prior outlooks too much weight and fail
to give proper weight to perceptual inputs. (Siegel, 2017, p. 5)

A hijacked perceptual experience no longer confronts me with objects and properties in
the world around me, threatening its justificatory role in forming beliefs about those ob-
jects and properties. This characterization doesn't rely on Siegel's specific framework: It
is generally agreed that a perceptual experience is epistemically downgraded, or cannot
properly justify a perceptual judgement, "when it cuts us off from the world around us,
when it makes us less sensitive to our environments" (Lyons, 2016, p. 3; cf. Raftopoulos,
2019).

The phenomenal approach to perceptual justification may not have the resources to ad-
dress the epistemic threats of experiences with a circular justificatory structure, and of
hijacked experiences in general. The main justification-conferring condition in this ap-
proach is that the experience has a certain phenomenal character. If the influence of cog-
nitive states on perceptual experience is unconscious or goes unnoticed it would then be
irrelevant to the epistemic role of the experience (Huemer, 2006). However, the possi-
bility that perceptual experience may be part of a circular justificatory structure, or that
it fails to be properly sensitive to perceptual inputs, supports the intuition that cognitive
influences on perception should count as relevant to epistemic justification. If this is so,
then the phenomenal approach cannot account for the epistemic threats that cognitive
penetrability and circular justificatory structures bring about (cf. Puddifoot, 2016; Siegel,
2012; Toribio, 2021).

Here, I am not concerned with the merits and debates surrounding the cognitive pen-
etrability thesis on its own. But the template of circular justificatory structures, and hi-
jacked perceptual experiences more broadly, can be useful for assessing the epistemic
profile of altercentric biases in perception. In the next two sections, I will go through the
details of altercentric bias by focusing in turn on two aspects of the perspective-taking
process behind this bias: sensitivity to the direction (*where*) and the content (*what*) of
the other's perspective.

3. Seeing *where* you see

On the altercentric perception bias hypothesis, people spontaneously encode others' per-
ceptual perspectives, which then interferes with or biases their own perceptual experi-
ences and judgements. In a classic study, Samson and colleagues found that participants
were slower in judging the number of dots on a wall when a virtual agent saw a different
number of dots (inconsistent perspectives) than when the participant and agent both
viewed the same number of dots (consistent perspectives) (Samson et al., 2010; see also
Surtees & Apperly, 2012). We are also better at recognising upside-down words when
they match someone else's viewpoint (Freundlieb et al., 2018), and detecting nearly im-
perceptible patterns is easier when someone else shares our viewpoint on the same pat-
terns (Seow & Fleming, 2019). Other people's judgements can even bias our own percep-
tion of colours (Zanesco et al., 2019).

If altercentric perception bias displays a similar pernicious justificatory structure as the hijacked experiences in cognitive penetrability cases, then it may bring up similar episodic problems for traditional phenomenal approaches to perceptual justification. But is there a pernicious justificatory structure involved? The answer depends in part on whether the influencing state — other people's perceptual perspectives — is both cognitive and internal to the subject's mental makeup, as in cases of cognitive penetrability. Changes in perceptual experience that are mediated by external actions or stimuli, and thus not directly influenced by our cognitive states like judgements and beliefs, tend to pose no problematic justificatory issues, since they don't display the circular justificatory structure usually found in cognitive penetrability. Consider a case where you notice that your visual perception is a bit blurry, and get a new pair of glasses. When putting the glasses on, your visual perception is undoubtedly influenced. But this is not a case of cognitive penetrability: the influence is neither directly cognitive nor internal. Even if you consciously willed to put the glasses on, you are perfectly justified in your belief that your vision is not blurry anymore. There is no pernicious circular structure here. Does altercentric influence parallel this situation: is the influence on perception neither cognitive nor internal, so that there is no circular justificatory structure?

There is ongoing debate about how to interpret findings that may show that humans
spontaneously and automatically encode other people's perspectives. One relevant ques-
tion here, in particular, is whether altercentric perception is mediated by a domain-gen-
eral process of attentional orientation, or by a social-specific perspective-taking process.
The latter process would involve a minimal form of mindreading, where we estimate the
mental states of the other person (in this case, their perceptual states: "I see that you
*attend* towards x" or "I see that you *see* x"). Assuming this latter process, a second ques-
tion is what precisely is being represented when taking someone's perspective: do I rep-
resent merely *where* you see, or also *what* you see? In this and the following section, I
present recent evidence showing that altercentric influences rely on a social-specific per-
spective-taking process where the content of the other's perspective is represented (*what*
they perceive). Nevertheless, as research on these questions is ongoing, it is worthwhile
to consider possible epistemic issues in the build-up to this picture.

The mindreading interpretation of altercentric influences on perception has been chal-
lenged. An alternative “directional-orienting” explanation posits that, during social in-
fluences on perception, participants do not represent what the other person is perceiving,
but are instead influenced by non-mental directional cues (Heyes, 2014). On this view,
bodily and behavioural cues, such as head orientation and directional movements, do not
need to lead to an estimation of what the other person can see, but are themselves suffi-
cient to draw our attention to a particular direction, and thus influence our perceptual
experience. On this hypothesis, altercentric influences are not socially-based, but equiv-
alent to having your attention drawn by an inanimate object like an arrow: the influence
on perceptual experience will then be neither cognitive nor internal.

Against the directional-orienting hypothesis, several recent studies provide evidence
suggesting that altercentric interferences on perception may be cognitively mediated by
a minimal mindreading process, even when they occur spontaneously (see O'Grady et al.,
2020). These studies report altercentric influences on the perceptual abilities of partici-
pants when a virtual human avatar with directional perspectival states is present, but no
such influence when an inanimate object with non-perspectival directional cues, such as
an arrow, a car, or a desk lamp, is present instead (Santiesteban et al., 2014; Ward et al.,
2019). If altercentric perception is mediated by minimal mindreading processes, then
the influence on perception will be, in part, a cognitive influence, where the influenced
person attributes a mental state of *seeing* to the other person (or *hearing*, *attending*,
*perceiving*, depending on the situation at hand), and in virtue of this cognitive attribu-
tion, their perception becomes influenced.

However, studies that contrast a seeing avatar with an inanimate object like an arrow
cannot fully disentangle the second question: do I represent *where* you see, or also *what*
you see? The use of arrows as purely non-social cues in experimental studies has also
recently been challenged (Westra et al., 2021), as they may have “derivative intentional-
ity” (Haugeland, 1990), being endowed with semantic content through the intentions of
their authors and/or through social conventions. In the next section, I will review studies
that go beyond arrows vs. avatars to test whether a barrier in someone’s perspective (like
a wall or a blindfold) barring access to *what* they see, can make a difference to altercen-
tric influences.

But I want to assume for now that during altercentric influences I only represent *where*
you see: I represent the spatial direction of your perceptual perspective, driving my at-
tention, spontaneously and involuntarily, towards that same direction. This attentional
shift will thus alter my phenomenal experience, in the counterfactual sense that I would
not have such experience had I not represented the direction of your perceptual perspec-
tive. In this case, the bias on perceptual experience would be brought through a bias in
my perceptual attention. Although the bias would be cognitively mediated, as there is a
process of perspective attribution, it doesn't seem to pose epistemic issues similar to
those in cognitive penetrability, or any issues at all. For epistemic purposes, it is no dif-
ferent to having your attention oriented by an arrow or any other inanimate object, just
as the directional-orienting hypothesis claims.
We can contrast this profile to exogenous perceptual attention: the spontaneous and in-
voluntary capture of perceptual attention by a salient stimulus in the environment. Dur-
ing our everyday lives, our spatial attention is often swayed by external stimuli, particu-
larly by noticeable ones, like a flash or a loud siren sound, but also by emotional cues,
such as angry faces (Carretié, 2014). Moreover, the salience of objects, and thus the ex-
tent of their attention-grabbing effect, is strongly influenced by their relevance to the
perceiver's cognitive intentions, desires, and goals (see Corbetta & Shulman, 2002 for a
review). If you are searching for your friend in a crowd, and you know they are wearing
a red coat, you will notice more often other people wearing red clothes than people wear-
ing any other colour. Brogaard (2019) notes that this may open the door to epistemic
concerns. Since external stimuli will grab attention only when they are cognitively rele-
vant to the perceiver, and what is relevant may be in turn heavily influenced by the per-
ceiver's implicit biases, wishful thinking, or erroneous beliefs, we have all the ingredients
for the possibility of a circular structure in perceptual justification. This is a second-order
influence: a cognitive state can influence which external stimuli will in turn come to in-
fluence my perceptual attention.

There is some evidence that social perspective-taking can also be affected by second-or-
der influences of this sort. The tendency or motivation to follow someone's perspective
can be partly driven by the other's social hierarchy status, their emotional state, and one's
own behavioural goals (e.g., Binyamin-Suissa et al., 2021; Dalmaso et al., 2020; O'Grady
et al., 2020). This could open the door to the same epistemic concerns associated with
second-order influences on attention: altercentric perception bias could be in turn influ-
enced by other biases. For example, I tend to follow the perspectives only of people like
me in gender, race, or some other factor, thus implicitly influencing my perceptual at-
tention. Such indirect influences probably constitute a subset of the bias-driven attention
cases already highlighted by Brogaard (2019). The key question, however, is whether al-
tercentric bias on perception poses any epistemic dangers itself.

To recap, the altercentric influence on perception may be mediated through social-spe-
cific cognitive mechanisms, whereby a perceiver spontaneously represents the *direction*
of someone else's perspective, and in turn that can affect the perceiver's own perceptual
experience. But, as long as the altercentric bias only involves sensitivity to the spatial
orientation of someone's perspective, it has an epistemic profile similar to non-social ex-
ogenous attention capture.

There is mounting evidence, however, that altercentric bias on perception involves more
than sensitivity to others' perceptual orientation. Altercentric perception involves not
just representing *where* the other person is looking at or attending, but *what* they per-
ceive.

4. Seeing *what* you see

A long-established distinction in developmental psychology advanced by Flavell and colleagues (1992) defines two levels of visual perspective-taking. Level-1 consists of the ability to understand *what* lies in someone's line of sight, including the recognition that their visual content may differ from our own. Level-2 consists of understanding *how* someone perceives something, displayed, for example, in the recognition that people with different
points of view may see the same thing differently. Most studies showing an altercentric
influence on perception address level-1 perspective-taking. Importantly, both kinds of
perspective-taking rely on, but go further than, the more basic ability to represent *where*
someone is looking or attending, i.e. the spatial direction of their perspective.

A new set of empirical studies has adopted a novel approach to test whether altercentric
interferences on perception are sensitive to the content, and not merely the direction, of
the other's perspective, cementing the evidence for spontaneous level-1 perspective-tak-
ing. These studies manipulate the presence or absence of perspectival states of a virtual
 avatar on the screen, by using objects that impede vision such as blindfolds, barriers, or
goggles. For example, an avatar wearing a blindfold did not induce any significant influ-
ence on the participants' sensitivity in detecting nearly imperceptible patterns, but a see-
ing avatar did (Seow & Fleming, 2019). Furlanetto and colleagues (2016) used a similar
manipulation with the dot-counting task (Samson et al., 2010), where participants are
required to count the number of dots in a scene where a virtual agent has limited percep-
tual access to all the dots. In their study, the agent was shown wearing goggles of different
colours, which participants believed to be either transparent or opaque. As in previous
studies, they found evidence for altercentric influence, so that participants were slower
to judge the number of dots when the virtual agent saw a different number of dots than
when they both saw the same number. But this altercentric influence was found only in
the trials where the agent wore "transparent" goggles and not in trials with "opaque"
goggles. These results are in line with the hypothesis that participants encode the per-
ceptual perspective of the avatars, and are not influenced merely by their orientation. In
a multisensory study, Nuku and Bekkering (2010) found that a virtual avatar's gaze di-
rection can influence the speed of spatial auditory judgements, but only if the avatar is
not wearing a hearing-impairing object like a helmet, suggesting that participants were
sensitive to the auditory states of the avatar and not merely to its visual directional cues.

Evidence that obstacles to someone's line of sight, such as barriers, blindfolds, and gog-
gles, can cancel out or diminish the influence of the other's perspective, suggests that
when perceivers represent someone's perspective, they represent the *content* of their
perspective. This process is thought to involve a minimal form of mindreading that often
occurs spontaneously and involuntarily: “I see that you see *X*” (Phillips, 2021; Schneider
et al., 2017). Some studies also show evidence for spontaneous level-2 perspective-tak-
ing. For example, Freundlieb et al. (2018) report involuntary altercentric biases in rec-
ognising words. In their study, participants were shown words displayed vertically, while
for another person sitting perpendicular to them, these words appeared either the right
way up or upside down. They found that participants were faster when the words were
displayed the right way up for the other person, suggesting that participants were spon-
taneously sensitive not just to the content of the other's perspective, but to how it ap-
peared to them (see also Ward et al., 2019). Other studies, however, have failed to find
evidence of involuntary level-2 perspective-taking (Surtees et al., 2016).

Most empirical studies on altercentric interference reviewed here investigate whether
such interference affects the *speed* at which perceptual judgements are made, and their
tasks don't allow for any meaningful measurement of accuracy (a key exception being
Seow & Fleming, 2019). By themselves, changes in the speed of perceptual judgements
don't seem to pose any epistemic issues: the concluding judgement ends up being the
same, albeit slightly slower, as it would otherwise be without altercentric influence. The empirical hypothesis behind these results on the speed of judgements, however, is that they are the consequence of a perceiver representing at least part of the content of someone's perspective, and such representation could already bring up epistemic issues.

In summary, this body of evidence suggests that social influences on perception are mediated by cognitive processes. During these processes, someone else's perspectival content can be encoded in perception, not just its orientation. This influence often occurs spontaneously and involuntarily. There is of course more research to be done to determine precisely what form of minimal mindreading mediates altercentric interference, and what are its underlying mechanisms. One hypothesis is that this process may involve spontaneously estimating the probability of whether an agent is perceiving or attending to a stimulus given their bodily and behavioural cues, and which stimulus properties they perceive or attend to — a process that may garner cues across multiple sense modalities (Battich et al., 2020; Cole et al., 2020).

# 5. Epistemic consequences

## 5.1. Epistemic downgrade

On the altercentric perception bias hypothesis, then, a perceiver represents another's perspectival content. This can introduce a conflict between the represented content from another's perceptual perspective, and the perceiver's own perceptual experiential content. To canvas the epistemic consequences of such a conflict of perspectival contents, I will first use a broad inferential framework in part drawn from Siegel's work (Siegel, 2017). I don't aim to defend this framework, but I use it here merely for its advantage in highlighting, in an intuitive way, the epistemic issues at play in altercentric bias. At the end of this section, I will consider some caveats and, in section 6, other epistemic approaches.

A useful way to understand the conflict that the altercentric perception bias hypothesis can bring on an individual's perception, is to define it in counterfactual terms:

*Altercentric perception bias:* If perceptual experience is amenable to altercentric bias, then it is nomologically possible for two subjects (or for one subject in different counterfactual circumstances, or at different times) to have perceptual experiences with different contents while perceiving and attending to the same distal stimuli under the same external conditions, as a result of differences in their sensitivity to the content of a third subject's perceptual perspective.

If I am looking for berries in a bush, and someone else's perspective is directed towards a patch of the bush with no berries at all, it may affect my experience so that I miss a partially visible berry I would otherwise detect, given my own perceptual perspective. Here, representing the other's perspectival content has a direct causal impact on how I experience my own perspectival content. In other words, I represent that “You see no berries” (or just “green foliage”). This representation causes me to have a perceptual experience of “no berries”. Moreover, I can then come to judge that “I see that there are no
berries”, a perceptual judgement that I would not have formed, had I restricted myself to my own perceptual perspective without representing yours. In inferentialist terms, the general structure can be spelt out thus:

* I have a perceptual experience of Y

* I represent that “You see X”

* This representation makes me have a perceptual experience of X

* I judge/believe that X

* I judge/believe that “I see X”

This inferential structure is cognitively mediated, and not purely external, since it involves a minimal cognitive process whereby I represent that you see X. But, in contrast to typical cases of cognitive penetrability, the influencing content is not the content of a previously held cognitive state of the perceiver, but that of someone else's perceptual state. For this reason, there cannot be a circular justificatory structure: the concluding belief ("I see X" or "there is an X in this location"), is not the same belief that prompted the experience ("You see X"). So the altercentric perception bias does not bring up exactly the same epistemic issues from cases of cognitive penetrability with a circular justificatory structure — but circular structures are not the only pernicious ones.

Even though there is no circular justification, the inferential structure above nevertheless seems inappropriate, and does share some of the features of hijacked experiences. Specifically, it counts as an instance of what Siegel calls “jumping to conclusions”: “You infer Q from P, in an inference to a Q-state from a P-state. But P doesn’t support Q” (Siegel, 2017, p. 109). Here, there is an inferential jump from “You see X (from your perspective)” to “I see X (from my perspective)”. We can redefine an altercentric version of hijacked experiences, which starts to highlight the epistemic threats posed by the altercentric perception bias hypothesis:

*Altercentric hijacked experiences:* When perceptual judgements or perceptual experiences arise from processes that make one more sensitive to information from others' perspectival frameworks and less sensitive to perceptual inputs from one's own perspectival framework.

Here, the concluding perceptual judgement is ill-formed to the extent that the content of another's perspective bleeds into the content of your own perspective, impairing your rational sensitivity to the perceptual inputs from your own perspective.

As long as there exists a suitable inferential relation holding between the influencing altercentric content from the other's perspective and the influenced perceptual experience, altercentric perception bias will pose related (albeit not the same) epistemic problems as those posed by cases where the influencing state is an internal implicit belief (cf. Siegel, 2017, chapter 6). The question of what would constitute a suitable inferential relation, germane to cognitive penetrability debates, resurfaces for altercentric perception bias. Some philosophers go as far as postulating a semantic criterion for the inferential relation required in cognitive penetrability: “[I]f a system is cognitively penetrable, then the function it computes is sensitive, in a semantically coherent way, to the organism's goals and beliefs, that is, it can be altered in a way that bears some logical relation to what the person knows” (Pylyshyn, 1999, p. 343). Following Pylyshyn, one may also postulate a
semantic criterion for this relation: my perceptual experience is epistemically down-
graded only when there is a causal semantically coherent influence between the repre-
sented content from another's perceptual perspective and my own perceptual experien-
tial content. Although I do not wish to commit to this postulate, we can at least conclude
that altercentric perception brings back some of the epistemic issues of phenomena of
hijacked experiences in a new and unique form.

5.2. Epistemic upgrade

I have so far considered cases where the perspectival contents of the perceiver and the other agent are incongruent. It is because of this incongruence that altercentric bias in perception can lead to epistemically ill-formed perceptual judgements. But an epistemic upgrade may occur in some cases of altercentric bias that feature an epistemically appropriate structure. Specifically, an epistemic upgrade can occur when social perspectives are congruent: both agents share the same perceptual content from their respective perspectives.

The phenomenon of sharing perceptual perspectives towards the same target is closely related to the phenomenon of joint attention. They are not strictly the same, as joint attention is usually conceptualised as requiring an extra condition, over and above sharing perceptual attention to the same target: both agents have to be aware that they are so sharing their attention (Bakeman & Adamson, 1984; Eilan, 2005; Tomasello, 1995). For example, I see a berry in the bush and I see that you have also spotted the berry, but you are so focused that you don't notice my presence. Here, I am aware of our sharing attention to the same object, but you are not, so this isn't strictly a case of joint attention. Nevertheless, research on joint attention provides evidence supporting the view that congruent shared perception can result in the epistemic upgrade of perceptual experience — especially from studies using virtual partners, rather than real, minded, and interactive ones.

It has been suggested that joint attention deepens or enhances the encoding of stimulus
information in ways that are not observed when information is individually attended
(Mundy, 2018). If individual perceptual attention involves the selective processing of
perceptual stimuli in the environment while ignoring others (Eriksen & James, 1986),
then joint attention brings about another level of selectivity over an individual's own per-
ceptual attention. Engaging in joint attention allows us to extract from the environment
the relevant targets or specific sensory features for further information processing and
social coordination (Battich et al., 2020; see also Becchio et al., 2008; Shteynberg, 2015).
For example, it is known that people sharing perception towards the same objects with
others can facilitate memorisation of the co-attended object (Kim & Mundy, 2012). Shar-
ing perception with another agent, even when this agent does not reciprocate the inter-
action to engage in full joint attention, can equally facilitate the detection and discrimi-
nation of perceptual objects and features (Frischen et al., 2007). Recently, Seow and
Fleming (2019) have shown that when we share perceptual perspectives towards the
same object, we are better at discriminating subtle differences in contrast. This body of
research suggests that congruent altercentric bias can result in a perceptual experience
that is neater, more vivid, or more certain. In the congruent case of altercentric bias,
then, we have the following general structure for epistemic upgrade:
* I have a perceptual experience of Y

* I represent that “You see Y”

* This representation makes me have a more vivid (or neater) perceptual experience of Y

* I judge/believe that Y

* I judge/believe that “I see Y”

Here, the perceptual experience (or the concluding perceptual judgement) may be less noisy, more vivid, or I may feel justifiably more confident in my experience and perceptual judgements (cf. Battich et al., 2025), compared to the counterfactual experience I would have from my own perceptual perspective alone.

Sharing perceptual contents may not be the only case where altercentric bias results in an epistemic upgrade of perceptual experience. Epistemic upgrade may occur with contrasting perspectives on the *properties* of a jointly perceived target: when we both perceive the same object, but *how* we perceive it is different. Suppose I’m looking at a drawing on a paper from an unconventional angle and trying to ascertain if the drawing corresponds to the character R or the character я. From my perspective at an angle, the task isn’t easy, as I need to mentally rotate the drawing to the “correct” angle. But we have evidence that if there is someone else looking at the drawing from the “correct” angle, representing their perspective can facilitate my recognition of the character (Freundlieb et al., 2018; Ward et al., 2019). Here, we have contrasting perspectival representations of the shape of the same object, but this may facilitate my appraisal of its actual shape:

* I have a perceptual experience of к

* I represent that “You see к”

* This representation makes me have a perceptual experience of к

* I judge/believe that к

* I judge/believe that “I see к”

Even if the altercentric influence does not prompt a *phenomenal experience* of к, it can nevertheless facilitate the cognitive representation of к, equally leading to the concluding judgements. In this example, I have vicarious access to aspects of the world that would be difficult or impossible for me to gather from my own perceptual perspective alone. In this case, adopting your perspectival point of view on the object allows me to identify one of its properties (its shape) faster, and/or to be more certain about my experience and judgements.

There are some important caveats and concerns about the broad inferentialist approach I have used so far. The inferential structures here are meant as descriptions, at a suitably abstract descriptive level, of the causal influences at play during altercentric bias. In this sense, they are not meant to describe a personal-level inference. On this point, this approach already differs from McGrath’s (2013) inferentialist account of epistemically downgrade in cognitive penetrability, which assumes that the premises of perceptual inferences must be personal-level experiential states attributable to the subject, a view criticised as psychologically plausible (Lyons, 2016; Teng, 2021). At the same time, in spelling out the inferential structure of altercentric perception bias, I’m not attempting
to spell out the mechanistic processes underlying this bias. On this caveat, the inferential
structure does not commit to the truth of an inferential psychological mechanism
(e.g. the truth of a Bayesian mechanistic process at the algorithmic and neural imple-
mentation levels of explanation (Marr, 1982)), but merely on whether the structure
properly describes the causal aspects of the phenomenon at a more abstract level of de-
scription. For instance, there doesn't need to be two separate perceptual experiences (i.e.,
I first have a perceptual experience of the object from my own perspective, and then an-
other experience due to representing the content of your perspective). There may never
be two separate perceptual experiences, and the actual biased perceptual experience may
be some combination of the subpersonal processing of information from my own and
your perspective together. More generally, it is not necessary that the steps in the infer-
ential structure correspond to any temporal or processing steps, neatly following one an-
other, but only that, whatever the psychological mechanistic processes turn out to be, the
overall functional profile of the bias can be captured at a suitable level of abstraction by
these inferential steps. It may also be that the altercentric influence does not act at the
level of perceptual experience, but that it comes at a later stage of processing, affecting
the judgement that I form based on perception. If this is the case, then the altercentric
bias in perception would not be purely perceptual. But all the epistemic issues would
remain untouched: for it is the concluding judgement that is nevertheless ill-formed (e.g.,
“I see X”, where, counterfactually, from my own perspective I see Y).

Regardless of these caveats, the inferentialist approach, borrowing from Siegel’s work (Siegel, 2013, 2017) on cognitive penetrability of perception, is not uncontroversial (see, e.g., Ghijsen, 2016; Lyons, 2016; Teng, 2021). One relevant objection is that inferentialism, even when it purports to describe an underlying causal process, will still require a proper theory to back up distinctions between merely causal effects and genuine inferential responses (Ghijsen, 2018). There are other approaches, both from different causal and epistemic viewpoints. I now turn to these.

**6. Beyond inferentialism**

An alternative causal description of altercentric bias need not necessarily fit into an in-
ferential structure. On one possible account, the conflict between one's own perceptual
perspectival representation and the representation of the other's perspectival content
can be understood as a winner-takes-all competition between the two representations'
contents, where, due to a limited perceptual and/or cognitive bandwidth, the resulting
perceptual experience reflects only one “winner” content: the one from the other’s per-
spective. This causal process, however, arguably amounts to a more fine-grained rede-
scription of some steps in the inferential structure above: I represent that “You see X”,
and this representation makes me have a perceptual experience of X. What results from
the winner-takes-all process is a perceptual judgement that I would not have, if I had not
taken the other’s perspective. Whether the winner-takes-all causal account should affect
or not the epistemic standing of the resulting perceptual judgement, will depend on how
precisely we demarcate between causal structures amenable to epistemic modulation
and a-rational “merely causal effects” that don’t impinge on perceptual justification
(Ghijsen, 2018).
The inferentialist account is internalist in the sense that the factors that modify the epis-
temic status of perceptual experiences are mental states and processes internal to the
subject. But there are good externalist approaches to perceptual justification, with relia-
bilism being the most popular regarding the epistemic issues in cognitive penetrability
(Ghijsen, 2016; Lyons, 2011, 2016). The key tenet of reliabilism is that what makes a per-
ceptual judgement “epistemically justified is the cognitive reliability of the causal process
via which it was produced” (BonJour, 2002, p. 244). On a reliabilist approach, “the good
kinds of cognitive penetration are the kinds that increase reliability, while the bad ones
are the ones that decrease it” (Lyons, 2016, p. 300). This approach seems particularly
well suited to explaining the epistemic status of altercentric hijacked experiences, where
taking the other’s perspective can impair your rational sensitivity to the perceptual in-
puts from your own perspective. Within a reliabilist framework, altercentric perceptual
bias can downgrade the epistemic role of perceptual experience —in the “bad” cases—
because it renders the process of perceptual belief formation unreliable with respect to
(statistically) accurately tracking the external world. Alternatively, altercentric bias
makes a perceptual experience of X an invalid ground for the belief that X, since the ex-
perience is insensitive to the truth of the external environment (that “I see Y”). Good
cases of altercentric bias, on the other hand, would enhance the reliability of the percep-
tual belief formation process, by providing a perceptual experience that is statistically
more accurate, and possibly neater, clearer, and/or helps boost the degree of certainty
regarding the verity of the experience (e.g., Battich et al., 2025).

On this approach, the general explanation of the epistemic dynamics of altercentric bias
is not too different from that of cognitive penetrability: whenever a perceptual process is
rendered less reliable in tracking the truth of the external world, that process will down-
grade the justificatory role of a perceptual experience for belief formation, and the con-
verse regarding more reliable processes. This approach may have an advantage over the
inferentialist approach, as it brings the epistemic downgrade and upgrade effects of al-
tercentric bias under a single explanatory story. However, to merely claim that the “good”
cases are the ones when people are more (statistically) accurate, and the “bad” cases the
ones when they (statistically) make more mistakes, amounts to a redescription of the
issue. The difficulty resides in providing a principled criterion of reliability, stipulating
in virtue of what some cases increase the reliability, and thus the epistemic status, of the
perceptual experience-to-belief process, and some decrease it. Here, the parallel with
cognitive penetrability drops.

For altercentric bias, the criterion of reliability could focus on the congruence between
one's own and the other's perspective. The cases that decrease reliability are the ones
where the content of the other perspective and the content from my own perspective are
different: I see Y from my perspective, and you see X from yours. Conversely, the cases
that boost reliability are the ones where our perspectival contents are the same. This cri-
terion might be further modified to encompass cases where we have different perceptual
perspectives on the properties of the same object, thereby facilitating its appraisal, as in
the R versus Я case. However, if reliability is a feature of the perceptual experience-to-
belief process, then one possible complication with this criterion is that it depends not
on any property or mechanism of the process itself, but on something seemingly external
and accidental to it: the content of the other's perspective. Whether this poses any com-
plications will depend on how we define the criterion of reliability and on the specific
version of reliabilism adopted. For example, many versions of reliabilism are individual-
ist in the sense that they assume that the epistemic status of a person's judgement de-
pends entirely on the reliability of processes taking place within the boundaries of that
person's head (Goldberg, 2010). Altercentric perception bias would then provide
grounds against this individualist assumption. Again, we can at least conclude that alter-
centric perception brings some new and unique epistemic issues within a reliabilist
framework to perceptual justification.

The last difficulty arises, in part, because the processes that give rise to altercentric bias
might have evolved as a whole to *increase* the reliability of sensory estimates. But if this
is so, then it is not clear that we should try to find an epistemic fault to them. This prob-
lem holds regardless of reliabilist or inferentialist approaches to perceptual justification,
as it questions whether the postulation of altercentric hijacked experiences brings any
epistemic threat, or boost, at all. Humans are an ultra-social species, shaped by the need
to successfully cooperate and compete with each other (Tomasello, 2014). The processes
behind altercentric bias might be, after all, the most optimal ones we have to boost our
overall perceptual accuracy in most social circumstances that matter to us, only deliver-
ing “mistakes” in some seldom occurring natural cases, artificially controlled laboratory
settings, and the contrived examples of philosophers. What is at stake in such a claim,
however, is not merely whether altercentric bias should pose any epistemic problems,
but which epistemic criterion of correctness and/or optimality are we using to evaluate
what counts as an epistemic problematic phenomenon in the first place. This paper is
written under a common intuitive assumption behind much work on perceptual justifi-
cation: perceptual judgements are rational when they reflect the physical world as accu-
rately as possible. But this assumption can be challenged (e.g., Graham, 2014; Lupyan,
2017; Polanía et al., 2024). This issue touches on a fundamental question about the epis-
temology of perception in general, germane not just to altercentric bias but also cognitive
penetrability and other similar phenomena.

Finally, related to the optimality issue, there is a more general worry about whether al-
tercentric bias should be properly characterised as a bias. On Thomas Kelly's (2022) re-
cent account, a bias is a systematic, non-random departure from a norm or standards of
correctness. In this article, I treat altercentric perceptual bias as a systematic deviation
of one's perceptual experiences and judgements from one's own perspective *towards* the
other's perspectival content, regardless of where that perspective is focused, that is, re-
gardless of whether the deviation is congruent or incongruent with one's perspective. In
this sense, altercentric perception bias is like a thermometer whose readings are consist-
ently deviated towards, or biased by, a magnet moving nearby. Sometimes the thermom-
eter will read the correct temperature but sometimes not, depending on the position of
this magnet. However, one could argue that such deviations are random when taken as
departures from the norm of correctness of the thermometer itself. Analogously, a key
norm of correctness at play in perceptual justification is that perceptual experiences and
judgements are “correct” when they reflect the external world from one’s own perspec-
tive. From the vantage viewpoint of this norm, altercentric influences will sometimes ac-
cord to it and sometimes not, opening the question of whether they should properly be
called a bias, or merely an interference.
## 7. Conscious access

Properly disentangling the epistemic consequences of the altercentric perception bias depends on a further question that has not yet been sufficiently addressed by the available empirical evidence: to what extent are the altercentric influences on perception accessible to consciousness? While previous studies show that altercentric perception occurs spontaneously and may be involuntary (Kampis & Southgate, 2020; O'Grady et al., 2020; Ward et al., 2019), it remains unclear to what extent we can retain any form of conscious access to the social influence.

According to the phenomenal approach to perceptual justification, perceptual experience confers justification because of its particular phenomenal character, a character that is internal in the sense that it refers to the subject's own mental states (Huemer, 2006). Following this internalist condition on perceptual justification, only factors that are consciously accessible to the believer can be relevant to epistemic justification (Feldman & Conee, 2001). If the altercentric influence on perception is unconscious or goes unnoticed by the perceiver, then it would be irrelevant to the epistemic role of the experience. However, the possibility that perceptual experience is no longer properly sensitive to perceptual inputs, and may be part of a justificatory structure where the perceptual judgment is formed by jumping to ill-formed conclusions and/or becomes less reliable, supports the intuition that altercentric influences on perception should count as relevant to epistemic justification. If this is so, then the phenomenal approach to perceptual justification does not have the resources to account for the epistemic threats posed by the altercentric perception bias.

Moreover, if in some cases perceivers are minimally conscious of the fact that their perception is being influenced by others, they may not be absolved of epistemic threat, but would become epistemically responsible for any judgements or beliefs based on their biased perception. They may even have epistemic obligations to distrust their perceptual judgements formed from biased percepts (cf. Rettler, 2018; Battich & Deroy, 2023).

## 8. Conclusion

According to the *altercentric perception bias* hypothesis, human perception is often other-centred or altercentric: we spontaneously encode the content of someone else's experience, in ways that interfere with or bias our own perceptual experiences and judgments. Altercentric influences on perception can affect the epistemic role of perceptual experience, when there is a suitable inferential relation between altercentric content and the content of one's own perceptual experience, posing the danger of a pernicious justificatory structure. In contrast to typical cases of cognitive penetrability of perception, the influence during altercentric perception is at the same time external and cognitively mediated. Altercentric perception bias introduces specific epistemic challenges to the justificatory role of perceptual experience: the threat of epistemically downgraded altercentric hijacked experiences in situations where the agents' perspectives are incongruent; and the possibility of an epistemic upgrade in situations where the agents' perspectives are congruent, or when the aspects of the world vicariously gathered by taking the other's perspective lead to well-formed perceptual judgements.
One outstanding question to fully assess the epistemic issues in altercentric perception for phenomenal approaches to perceptual justification, is that of conscious access. If you are unaware that others influence your perceptual experience, are you epistemically responsible for the beliefs and behaviours based on that experience? Similarly, other agents may never be conscious of the effect they have on someone else's perception. What is then, if any, the epistemic responsibility of other agents in distorting, or aiding, an individual's perception?

Cognitive penetrability, hijacked experiences, and their epistemic consequences have been studied and debated as a phenomenon affecting the individual and arising from the individual's own internal mental makeup, even when the influence may be indirectly driven by social factors. There has been an increasing interest in philosophy of perception to analyse the effects of structural implicit biases (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995) and social biases more generally (Dovidio et al., 2010) on perceptual experiences and judgments — how individually-internalised social categories and stereotypes can affect our perception of physical objects and environments (e.g., Nanay, 2021; Siegel, 2020). The altercentric bias hypothesis brings the issue of social influences on perception to a more basic and immediate level of social interaction.

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