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The lamppost and the clouds
Why did the lamppost seem to fall when the clouds moved behind it?
Cognitive Psychology · Consciousness Science
Jason Clarke, PhD · Cognitive Scientist
Constructing Experience
Attention, expectation, prediction, and the science of conscious perception.
How does the brain construct a conscious world from attention, expectation, and sensory evidence?
This site is for anyone who has ever wondered how the world becomes experience. It is for perception scientists and students, but also for children, artists, philosophers, and curious adults who have asked questions such as: Why do I see colour? How can I miss something right in front of me? How does the brain construct a world? What is consciousness? The essays, demonstrations, research summaries, and theoretical reflections collected here are invitations to look again at ordinary experience and find it extraordinary.
I am a cognitive scientist investigating how attention, expectation, prediction, and inference shape conscious experience. My research combines behavioural experiments, psychophysics, EEG/ERP-informed methods, predictive processing, and theoretical approaches to awareness and worldhood.
I am a Lecturer in Cognitive Psychology in the School of Human and Social Sciences at the University of West London. At UWL, I lead a research programme on attention, expectation, prediction, and conscious perception, working with my doctoral students on projects examining the interplay between attention and expectation in constructing experience, neural signatures of face perception, auditory and haptic expectation, visual acceleration, optic flow, visual gravity, and perceived duration.
Before joining UWL, I was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department at State University of New York, Farmingdale State College, and held teaching and research positions at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, The New School for Social Research, William Paterson University, New York City College/CUNY, and the W.E.B. Du Bois Scholars Institute, hosted at Princeton University.
I completed my PhD in Cognitive Psychology at the New School for Social Research with Arien Mack, Marcel Kinsbourne, and William Hirst, where my work was shaped by traditions in attention, perception, neuropsychology, memory, and consciousness. I also completed an MA in Psychology at the New School for Social Research with Arien Mack, and a BA (Hons) in Ancient World Studies at University College London. At UCL, I studied ancient Greek philosophy in seminars with Dr Robert W. Sharples, reading and discussing figures including the Presocratics, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Democritus, Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus. Dr Sharples’s work in ancient philosophy, natural philosophy, and the Aristotelian tradition remains an important part of the intellectual background to my current theoretical interests.
My research asks how experience is constructed: when awareness depends on attention, how expectations shape perception, and whether expectations can sometimes generate reports of experience in the absence of a corresponding stimulus. I use behavioural, psychophysical, online, and EEG/ERP methods, and develop theoretical links with predictive processing, active inference, the Free Energy Principle, and Awareness-First Theory.
My research on attention, expectation, and conscious perception developed in part through my earlier work with Arien Mack and the Mack Perception Lab at The New School for Social Research, an important intellectual home for my work on inattentional blindness and the relationship between attention and perception. My current theoretical work also draws on my earlier formation in ancient philosophy, especially questions concerning the nature of reality, appearance, mind, matter, ontology, and the relation between what appears and what is.
My teaching spans sensation and perception, cognitive psychology, cognitive neuroscience, neuropsychology, statistics, and quantitative research methods. Across these areas, I aim to help students understand how mind, brain, behaviour, and experience can be studied scientifically, while also encouraging them to think deeply about perception, consciousness, and the construction of reality.
Origins
Childhood questions that became a research programme.
Some of the questions that now guide my research began long before I had the language of perception science, predictive processing, or consciousness studies. They began as childhood puzzles about motion, appearance, awareness, and existence.
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Dizzy Dizzy
Why did I still feel motion after I had stopped spinning?
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The existence question
Why does any of this exist at all?
Guiding questions
Across my empirical and theoretical work, I return to a small set of connected questions about how conscious experience is constructed.
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Attention and awareness
When does sensory information become consciously available?
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Expectation Awareness
Can expectation generate conscious reports when an expected stimulus is absent?
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Predictive construction
How do priors, precision, and action shape what a perceiver experiences?
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Awareness-First Theory
What if awareness is the field in which bodies, minds, and worlds appear?
Overview
A visual overview of constructing experience.
These figures summarise the core idea running through my empirical and theoretical work: conscious perception is constructed through the interaction of ambiguous sensory input, prior expectations, prediction errors, and attentional precision.
Research
Empirical work on attention, expectation, and the construction of experience.
Using behavioural, psychophysical, and EEG/ERP-informed methods, I investigate how attentional selection, prior expectation, sensory evidence, scene meaning, temporal perception, and conscious report interact in the construction of experience.
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Attention and conscious access
Inattentional blindness, change blindness, iconic memory, and scene awareness
Studies examining what becomes conscious when attention is occupied or diverted, including work on natural scenes, objects, semantic incongruity, visual awareness, and iconic memory.
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Expectation Awareness
Absent but expected stimuli under conditions of inattention
A sequence of experiments testing whether observers report consciously experiencing expected stimuli that are absent on critical trials, including letters, colour patches, faces, sounds, and touch.
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Time and physical expectation
Duration perception, entropy, optic flow, visual acceleration, and visual gravity
Research on how violations of expected structure and physical regularities influence perceived duration and the organisation of perceptual experience.
Theory
Theoretical work linking perception science, active inference, and awareness.
In my theoretical work, I use these empirical findings on attention and expectation to address broader questions about predictive processing, active inference, the Free Energy Principle, and the ontological status of awareness.
Predictive processing
Perception is understood as precision-weighted inference. Attention changes the influence of sensory evidence; expectation constrains what is likely to appear.
- Attention as precision
- Expectation as prior constraint
- Perception as active construction
Awareness-First Theory
AFT asks whether awareness is not produced inside a mindless physical universe, but is the field within which bodies, worlds, measurements, and explanations appear.
The question is not only how consciousness emerges, but how a world appears at all.
Essays
Essays on Perception, Consciousness, and Reality.
These short public-facing essays explore how experience is constructed. They begin with ordinary moments — seeing colour, motion, depth, objects, faces, shadows, and changes — and use them as gateways into perception science, cognitive neuroscience, predictive processing, and philosophy.
This section is conceived as an accessible series for students, teachers, young readers, and curious adults. The essays are connected to my scientific and philosophical work, but are written as invitations into the questions rather than as peer-reviewed research articles.
Featured essay
The Night the Earth Moved
Perception, frames, and the construction of reality: a reflective essay on how a shift in reference frame can transform the experienced world, from the movement of the Milky Way to the deeper question of how perception constructs reality.
Perception essays
From ordinary experience to perceptual science
Essays that begin with lived experience and ask what science reveals about how a world is visually and phenomenologically constructed.
- Motion: Why the World Seems to Flow
- Depth: How a Flat Image Becomes a World
- Form: How the Brain Finds Shape
- Colour: Why the World Glows
- Objects: How the World Becomes Things
- Faces: Why Faces Feel Immediately Present
- Attention: Why We Miss What Is in Front of Us
- Expectation: How the Brain Sees What It Is Ready to See
Philosophy essays
Perception, reality, and the problem of consciousness
Essays that connect perceptual experience to larger philosophical questions about mind, world, appearance, and what science leaves out when it abstracts from lived experience.
- The Galilean Abstraction: How Science Removed Experience from Nature
- Primary and Secondary Qualities: Is Colour Really in the World?
- Plato’s Cave: Shadows, Science, and the Search for Reality
- The Hard Problem: Why Consciousness Is Not Just Another Object
- Awareness-First Theory: A Gentle Introduction
- A Dialogue Concerning Awareness and the World
- The Siren and the World: How Constraint Makes Experience Possible
Companion essays
Short pieces linked to the demonstrations
Brief essays designed to accompany the interactive demonstrations on the site, linking direct experience with explanation and reflection.
- Why Does the Necker Cube Flip?
- Why Do We Miss Big Changes?
- Why Can Motion Be Seen Where Nothing Moves?
- Why Does Context Change What We See?
- What Does the Inverse Problem Show Us?
Demos
Interactive demonstrations.
These browser-based demonstrations are designed for teaching, talks, open days, and public engagement. They invite visitors to try short perceptual tasks and then reflect on what the task reveals about attention, expectation, prediction, and conscious experience. They are not formal experiments or validated measures of individual performance.
I will add further demonstrations here as they are developed.
Visual attention task
A short continuous scene demonstration
Try a brief visual task in which you watch a scene and keep track of a simple event. After you respond, the demonstration gives feedback and explains what the task can show about human perception.
Open demo
Teaching demonstration · opens in a new tab
Visual pattern task
A brief expectation-based perception demonstration
Try a short visual task involving rapid pattern judgements and a final report. After you respond, the demonstration gives feedback and explains the logic of the task.
Open demo
Teaching demonstration · opens in a new tab
Object in context task
A short visual interpretation demonstration
Try a brief task in which you describe an object as it appears in different visual scenes. After you respond, the demonstration gives feedback and explains what the task can show about visual interpretation.
Open demo
Teaching demonstration · opens in a new tab
Motion from flashes
A brief apparent-motion demonstration
Try a simple display in which two visual events alternate in time. After you respond, the demonstration explains what the task can show about perceived motion.
Open demo
Teaching demonstration · opens in a new tab
After the Spin
A motion-aftereffect demonstration
Watch a rotating pattern, then look at a still village-green scene. After you respond, the demonstration explains how motion can briefly appear to persist after physical motion has stopped.
Open demo
Teaching demonstration · opens in a new tab
Ambiguous cube task
A reversible-figure demonstration
View a classic line drawing and track how its apparent depth changes over time. After you respond, the demonstration offers a short explanation of what the display can show about visual organisation and conscious experience.
Open demo
Teaching demonstration · opens in a new tab
The Windowless Room
A Bayesian inference and inverse-problem demonstration
Step through a guided demonstration in which a being inside a sealed room hears an ambiguous sound and must infer its hidden cause. Explore how changing priors changes the posterior even when the sensory evidence stays the same.
Open demo
Teaching demonstration · opens in a new tab
The Submarine
An active inference and Markov blanket demonstration
Enter a guided underwater demonstration in which a submarine receives ambiguous sensory signals, updates beliefs about hidden causes, and then acts to reduce uncertainty and remain in viable states.
Open demo
Teaching demonstration · opens in a new tab
Optic flow and duration task
A short motion and time-perception demonstration
Try a brief visual motion task involving optic-flow displays and duration judgements. After you respond, the demonstration explains the logic of the task.
Open demo
Teaching demonstration · opens in a new tab
Supervision
Doctoral research supervision.
My current doctoral students are extending the expectation-awareness and perceptual-expectation research programmes across sensory modalities, neural measures, and perceived time.
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Expectation awareness and neural signatures
Expected absent faces, inattention, and face-sensitive processing
Doctoral work extending absent-face expectation experiments and examining evidence relevant to neural signatures of face-sensitive processing under expectation and inattention.
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Auditory expectation awareness
Perceiving the absent in audition
Doctoral research testing whether expected but absent auditory events can be consciously reported under conditions of inattention.
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Haptic expectation awareness
Expectation, touch, and bodily perception
Doctoral research extending the logic of expectation-driven conscious reports into tactile and bodily perception.
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Visual acceleration and perceived duration
Optic flow, visual gravity, and time perception
Doctoral research examining how visual acceleration, optic flow, and gravity-like motion cues influence perceived duration and the organisation of perceptual experience.
Book
Constructing Experience.
My Cambridge Element develops the central argument that conscious perception is shaped by attention, expectation, prediction, and inference.
Constructing Experience: Expectation and Attention in Perception
The book brings together work on inattentional blindness, iconic memory, expectation, predictive processing, and conscious perception to ask how experience is constructed.
Media
Media and interviews.
Constructing Experience: Expectation and Attention in Perception
A conversation about the brain as a predictive, generative system: how attention selects and weights sensory evidence, how expectations shape perceptual reality, and why expected but absent stimuli can sometimes be reported under conditions of inattention. The discussion also considers consciousness, the explanatory gap, controlled hallucination, and the clinical and theoretical implications of expectation-driven experience.
Publications
Publications and conference presentations.
Selected books, peer-reviewed articles, published abstracts, and conference presentations on attention, expectation, conscious perception, predictive processing, time perception, and Awareness-First Theory.
Book
2025
Clarke, J. Constructing Experience: Expectation and Attention in Perception.
Cambridge University Press, Elements in Perception.
doi.org/10.1017/9781009588577Book
Peer-reviewed publications
2026
Clarke, J. The Awareness-First Theory: A coherence principle underlying active inference and physical law.
Entropy, 28(3), 306. Published in the Special Issue: Active Inference in Cognitive Neuroscience.
doi.org/10.3390/e28030306Journal article
2024
Clarke, J., & Tyler, B. Expecting the future: Entropy-based predictions in time perception.
Timing & Time Perception.
doi.org/10.1163/22134468-bja10105Journal article
2020
Porubanova, M., Clarke, J., Erol, M., & Priefer, R. Prioritisation and interference of emotional information in briefly presented scenes: Selection advantage for positive emotional scenes.
Studia Psychologica, 62(4), 335–349.
doi.org/10.31577/sp.2020.04.808Journal article
2020
Clarke, J., & Porubanova, M. Scene and object violations cause subjective time dilation.
Timing & Time Perception, 8(3–4), 279–298.
doi.org/10.1163/22134468-bja10012Journal article
2018
Webster, A., Clarke, J., Ro, T., & Mack, A. Effects of canonical colour, luminance, and orientation on sustained inattentional blindness for natural scenes.
Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 80(7), 1833–1846.
doi.org/10.3758/s13414-018-1558-zJournal article
2018
Mack, A., Clarke, J., & Erol, M. Attention, expectation, and iconic memory: A reply to Aru and Bachmann (2017).
Consciousness and Cognition, 59, 60–63.
doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2017.10.001Journal article
2017
Mack, A., Clarke, J., Erol, M., & Bert, J. Scene incongruity and attention.
Consciousness and Cognition, 48, 87–103.
doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2016.10.010Journal article
2017
Mack, A., Erol, M., & Clarke, J. When expectation confounds iconic memory: A reply to Bachmann and Aru (2016).
Consciousness and Cognition, 49, 363–364.
doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2016.10.004Journal article
2016
Mack, A., Erol, M., Clarke, J., & Bert, J. No iconic memory without attention.
Consciousness and Cognition, 40, 1–8.
doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2015.12.006Journal article
2015
Clarke, J., & Mack, A. Iconic memory for natural scenes: Evidence using a modified change-detection procedure.
Visual Cognition, 23(7), 917–938.
doi.org/10.1080/13506285.2015.1103826Journal article
2015
Mack, A., Clarke, J., & Erol, M. Reply to Bachmann and Aru.
Consciousness and Cognition, 35, 156–157.
doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2015.05.009Journal article
2015
Mack, A., Erol, M., & Clarke, J. Iconic memory is not a case of attention-free awareness.
Consciousness and Cognition, 33, 291–299.
doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2014.12.016Journal article
2014
Clarke, J., & Mack, A. Iconic memory for the gist of natural scenes.
Consciousness and Cognition, 30, 256–265.
doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2014.09.015Journal article
2012
Mack, A., & Clarke, J. Gist perception requires attention.
Visual Cognition, 20(3), 300–327.
doi.org/10.1080/13506285.2012.666578Journal article
Conference presentations and published abstracts
2026
Gerstmayer, G., & Clarke, J. Attention modulates duration perception for accelerating but not uniform motion.
European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP), Bournemouth, UK.
Poster, forthcoming
2026
Verbickas, A., & Clarke, J. Perceiving the absent: Auditory expectations generate illusory percepts under inattention.
Auditory Science Meeting, Manchester, UK.
Poster, forthcoming
2025
Gerstmayer, G., & Clarke, J. Subjective time dilation in optic flow: Effects of visual gravity and motion speed on duration estimation.
European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP), Mainz, Germany.
doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.27732.46726Poster
2025
Tyler, B., Clarke, J., & Silas, J. Is attention necessary for non-perceptual conscious experiences? An event-related potential analysis of expectation awareness.
British Neuroscience Association International Festival of Neuroscience, Liverpool, UK.
Poster
2021
Clarke, J., Porubanova, M., Mazzoli, A., & Kut, G. Perception of time’s arrow and entropy: Violations to the second law of thermodynamics disrupt time perception.
European Conference on Visual Perception.
Poster
2018
Clarke, J., Kuvaldina, M., & Mack, A. Frames of reference determine the direction of the motion aftereffect (MAE): Evidence supporting the influence of perceived motion in the MAE.
Vision Sciences Society Annual Conference, Florida, USA.
Poster
2018
Erol, M., Mack, A., & Clarke, J. Expectation blindness: Seeing a face when there is none.
Journal of Vision, 18(10), 1115.
doi.org/10.1167/18.10.1115Published abstract
2017
Porubanova, M., Kuvaldina, M., Clarke, J., & Erol, M. Emotional inattentional blindness effect.
OPAM: Object Perception, Visual Attention, and Visual Memory, Vancouver, Canada.
Poster
2017
Porubanova, M., Brocker, D., Geiger, E., Clarke, J., Erol, M., & Mack, A. Directed inhibition of emotional scenes in iconic memory: Interference of positive information.
Perception 46 ECVP Abstract; European Conference on Visual Perception, Berlin, Germany.
Abstract
2016
Erol, M., Mack, A., Clarke, J., & Bert, J. Inattentional blindness to absent stimuli: The role of expectation.
Journal of Vision, 16(12), 40.
doi.org/10.1167/16.12.40Published abstract
2015
Clarke, J., & Mack, A. Evidence for iconic memory of natural scenes before change blindness.
Journal of Vision, 15(12), 348.
doi.org/10.1167/15.12.348Published abstract
2015
Holder, L., Erol, M., Mack, A., Bert, J., & Clarke, J. Action video game playing does not reduce inattentional blindness.
Journal of Vision, 15(12), 441.
doi.org/10.1167/15.12.441Published abstract
2014
Webster, K., Clarke, J., Mack, A., & Ro, T. Appropriately coloured scenes reduce inattentional blindness.
Journal of Vision, 14(10), 609.
doi.org/10.1167/14.10.609Published abstract
2013
Clarke, J., Ro, T., & Mack, A. The persistence of inattentional blindness and the absence of priming from natural scenes.
Journal of Vision, 13(9), 1136.
doi.org/10.1167/13.9.1136Published abstract
2011
Clarke, J., Mack, A., Kuvaldina, M., Slesar, C., & Erol, M. No gist perception without attention.
Journal of Vision, 11(11), 156.
doi.org/10.1167/11.11.156Published abstract
2011
Slesar, C., Mack, A., Clarke, J., & Erol, M. Two object subliminal priming.
Journal of Vision, 11(11), 1280.
doi.org/10.1167/11.11.1280Published abstract
Contact
Contact and academic profiles.
I am open to conversations about research collaboration, doctoral supervision, media enquiries, talks, and work relating to attention, expectation, prediction, perception, consciousness, active inference, and Awareness-First Theory.