From Perception to Appraisal - How the Environment Moves from Image to Value

A tree appears on a screen.

Around it, we see buildings, a sidewalk, cars, and an opening toward the sky.

A few moments later, someone responds:

beautiful.

safe.

pleasant.

hostile.

a place where I would like to be.

It seems simple: we see an image and assign it value.

But between what existed in the photographed environment, the pixels whose light reaches our eyes, and the judgment we can eventually express, several different events have taken place.

This is precisely why the initiative of Carolina Zähme, Isabelle Sander, Aleksandrs Koselevs, Simone Kühn, and Klaus Gramann deserves particular attention. Their 2026 paper, From perception to appraisal: Brain responses to natural and built features in urban environments, was published in Brain and Environment.

The study shows that natural and built characteristics of urban scenes are associated with EEG responses at different moments in time, while subjective evaluations are associated with later components. Among other findings, the authors report relationships between vegetation and P1, built visual characteristics and N1, and later evaluations and P3/LPP.

This creates an important opportunity to ask:

Are processing an image, consciously Perceiving it, and Judging it really the same event?

From a Religare perspective, they are not.

The Value of Observing the Time Between Image and Appraisal

Zähme and colleagues presented photographs of urban environments to participants while recording EEG and later related characteristics of those scenes to subjective evaluations.

The central result is not simply that “people prefer greenery.”

More interestingly, the data suggest temporal differentiation: visual properties of the scenes were associated with relatively early neural responses, whereas aspects related to subjective appraisal emerged later.

This allows us to move beyond an overly compressed sequence:

I see → I like or dislike.

There is processing between those moments.

But before we use these results to discuss consciousness, we need to make an even more fundamental distinction.

A Photograph Is Not a Smaller Piece of Reality

A photograph is not a fragment of reality preserved at a reduced scale.

The framing happens during capture.

A camera is positioned in relation to a physical event. Its framing selects a particular portion of the available optical field.

We therefore begin with:

reality → framing during capture.

What follows, however, is no longer a small piece of that reality.

Part of the light arriving from the framed event is converted by the photographic system into signals.

A transduction occurs.

Information is encoded, stored, and later used by another system to generate an image.

When that photograph appears on a screen, there is no piece of the original tree inside the display.

No fragment of the original building.

No small portion of the original sky.

There are pixels producing light according to a particular organization.

Thus:

reality

↓

framing during capture

↓

transduction

↓

encoding

↓

new transduction at the screen

↓

pixels / light

The screen does not contain “reduced reality.”

It contains a new material configuration representing information derived from a previous framing of reality.

This distinction is essential for interpreting the experiment.

The participants in Zähme et al. were not experiencing those streets.

They were encountering a new physical event: light produced by a screen whose organization had been derived from the transduction of photographs of those environments.

This does not diminish the value of the study.

On the contrary.

It allows us to define much more precisely what was actually investigated.

The Camera Frames. The System Transduces. The Screen Represents. The Body-Territory Lives.

At BrainLatam, we have been developing this distinction because a visual representation of a territory cannot be confused with the experience of living within that territory.

A screen may represent a tree.

But it does not simultaneously provide the body with:

the smell of vegetation;

the temperature of that air;

wind moving across the skin;

humidity;

the pressure of the feet against that ground;

the bodily effort required to walk uphill;

traffic noise;

the position of the body in space;

the visceral state produced by walking there;

or the physical presence of other bodies.

In recent work, we have used an expanded operational cartography of sensory dimensions precisely to avoid reducing human experience to the traditional five senses. The BrainLatam proposal works with vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch, proprioception, interoception, balance, nociception, thermoception, internal chemoreception, and, as a specific hypothesis, Human Quorum Sensing — HQS, related to bioaffective belonging.

We are not claiming that neuroscience has reached a consensus that humans possess exactly twelve senses.

This is a conceptual and operational cartography.

Its purpose is to remind us of something simple:

the Body-Territory lives a reality far broader than what a camera is able to visually transduce.

Even in Front of a Photograph, However, There Is Never Only Vision

We should also avoid the opposite mistake.

Although the photograph provides predominantly visual information about the represented environment, the participant looking at the screen does not become an isolated visual system.

While observing the pixels, the person:

breathes;

has a heart rate;

maintains posture;

experiences temperature;

has proprioception;

interoception;

memories;

expectations;

affective states;

a history.

The screen produces light.

But that light encounters an entire Body-Territory.

This is precisely why two people can encounter the same configuration of pixels and produce different experiences.

Processing Is Not Yet Perceiving

This brings us to an important distinction between conventional cognitive-neuroscience terminology and the 5D Consciousness hypothesis.

In neuroscience, it is entirely appropriate to speak of visual perceptual processing when referring to very early neural events.

Within 5D Consciousness, however, we propose reserving Perceiving for a condition that requires first-person consciousness.

Our formulation is:

Consciousness is a movement that perceives itself as Being within the metabolism that produced it.

This is a BrainLatam conceptual hypothesis, not a consensual definition within neuroscience.

The nervous system can process characteristics of a stimulus without all of that activity necessarily becoming what we call conscious experience.

For this reason, our interpretation would be more cautiously organized as:

pixels / light

↓

sensory transduction

↓

neural processing

↓

interaction with activated and pre-activated representational spaces

↓

conscious Perceiving

↓

Doing / Planning / Judging

We are not saying that P1 is “pre-consciousness.”

We are not saying that P3 is “consciousness.”

Nor are we saying that LPP directly equals “judgment.”

ERP components are neurophysiological events. The categories of 5D Consciousness represent an attempt to construct an integrative hypothesis about how some processes may participate in first-person experience.

After We Perceive, We Can Do Different Things

Within Religare, Perceiving does not complete the process.

It opens possibilities.

We can:

Do — Science.

Plan — Religion.

Judge / Choose — Politics.

Imagine that someone perceives:

“this street has very little lighting.”

They may immediately change route.

That is Doing.

They may represent:

“if I come back here at night, it may be dangerous.”

That is Planning.

They may conclude:

“this is an unsafe street.”

That is Judging.

These operations may unfold rapidly and participate in one another, but they do not necessarily represent the same processing.

This is precisely why Zähme’s study is so interesting to us: it provides evidence that early visual characteristics and later subjective evaluations may have different temporal dynamics.

Judging Requires Recruiting Resources That Perceiving Did Not Necessarily Require

When we say Judging, we do not mean merely experiencing pleasure or displeasure.

A judgment may require:

comparison;

inference;

memory;

criteria;

alternatives;

prediction of consequences.

Mexican researchers Karla Mercado and Víctor de Lafuente, from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, have discussed evidence for the participation of prefrontal and premotor regions in inferential judgments.

This helps us connect with BrainLatam’s Rock–Paper–Scissors metaphor.

Rock represents faster, habitual, and readily available responses.

Scissors — Think Slowly represents greater segmentation, comparison, analysis, and deliberate recruitment, in which control networks, including prefrontal regions, may become particularly important.

We are not claiming that every judgment “takes place in the prefrontal cortex.”

The brain functions through networks.

But deliberative and inferential judgments may require additional recruitment beyond the processes involved in simply detecting stimulus characteristics.

Territory Also Participates in the One Who Judges

This is where Latin American researchers help expand the question.

Agustín Ibáñez and colleagues, in 2024, proposed a neuroecological perspective integrating the physical and social exposome, brain, body, and environment. Their central argument is that environmental conditions should not be treated merely as scenery external to brain health.

Agustina Solera and Mariana Jesús Ortecho, discussing urban environments in the Andes, bring together body, territory, coloniality, and different ways of understanding the relationship between the social and the natural.

And Argentine archaeologist Alejandro Haber questions the image of knowledge being produced by an observer completely separate from what is known. In his proposal, knowledge must also be understood as relationship.

These works do not explain P1, N1, or LPP.

But they help us formulate a necessary question:

From where do we judge what we perceive?

Value Was Not Inside the Pixels

The same image may be judged as:

“beautiful”;

“abandoned”;

“peaceful”;

“threatening”;

“familiar.”

The configuration of pixels presented may be identical.

But the Body-Territories encountering it are not.

This means that value was not stored inside the photograph waiting to be extracted.

Yet it also does not emerge from an “I” completely independent of the world.

It emerges from an encounter among:

the present stimulus;

the Body-Territory encountering it;

the available representations;

the history of that body;

and the processes recruited to evaluate.

This may be one of the most important contributions of the initiative by Zähme and colleagues: allowing us to experimentally observe part of the interval between visual characteristics and appraisal.

Religare adds another layer.

The camera framed.

The system transduced.

The screen represented.

The brain processed.

The Body-Territory Perceived.

Only then can we ask:

What will it do with what it perceived?

Will it Do?

Will it Plan?

Will it Judge?

Perhaps understanding how an image acquires value requires us precisely not to collapse these stages into one.

And perhaps metacognition begins when we are also able to perceive this:

not only what I am judging, but the process through which my Body-Territory is becoming the one who judges.

Main Reference

Zähme, C., Sander, I., Koselevs, A., Kühn, S., & Gramann, K. (2026). From perception to appraisal: Brain responses to natural and built features in urban environments. Brain and Environment, 8, 100028. DOI: 10.1016/j.braen.2026.100028.

Complementary References

Haber, A. (2022). O conhecimento é o relacionamento: cenas de gnosiologia catamarcana. Revista de Arqueologia, 35(1), 39–52. DOI: 10.24885/sab.v35i1.957.

Ibáñez, A., Melloni, L., Świeboda, P., et al. (2024). Neuroecological links of the exposome and One Health. Neuron, 112(12), 1905–1910. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2024.04.016.

Mercado, K., & de Lafuente, V. (2022). Prefrontal and Premotor Cortices Encode Inference Judgements. Neuroscience, 485, 145–146. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroscience.2022.01.011.

Solera, A., & Ortecho, M. J. (2023). The Territory of Our Body: A Conversation on Urban Environments in the Andes and Their Bodies. In Contours of Feminist Political Ecology, 289–310. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-20928-4_12.

BrainLatam (2025). Percepção é Realidade Individual — Um Ensaio sobre Cognição, Arte e Metabolismo Social. Presents an expanded sensory cartography and the hypothesis of Human Quorum Sensing.

BrainLatam (2026). Um mesmo evento — metabolismo, movimento e consciência. Develops the 5D Consciousness hypothesis and the formulation of consciousness as a movement that perceives itself as Being within the metabolism that produced it.