Adaptation Vol. 11, No. 2, pp.

103–110
doi:10.1093/adaptation/apy009
Advance Access publication July 9, 2018

Adaptation and Perception

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PASCAL NICKLAS* AND SIBYLLE BAUMBACH†

Abstract  Recognizing that a work of art is an adaptation changes the perception of it entirely
and makes it possible to perceive it as an adaptation. Adaptations are a very specific kind of art ex-
perience in physiological, cultural, and medial respects: the palimpsestuous structure of presence
and absence requires modes of processing involving feedback loops of memory and perception,
cultural mechanisms involved in the processes of selective perception and medial underpinnings
of the presentation of adaptations influencing and defining ways of perceiving them. There is a
multitude of approaches to the very under-researched topic of adaptation and perception which
is outlined here with a view to inspiring further research.

Keywords  perception, physiology, embodied cognition, media convergence, psychology.

Adaptation and perception are intimately linked: the very act of adapting a given work
is changing its perception and the recognition of an adaptation transforms its reception
by activating memory loops and causing a switch to a comparative mode of perception.
The aesthetic pleasure of perceiving adaptations as such depends on specific modes
of processing sensual and semiotic data. These include a physiological, a cultural, and
a medial dimension. Regarding the physical—including sensory and neuro-computa-
tional—conditions of perception as embodied cognition opens vistas of research into
the perceptual underpinnings of adaptation. Equally important for the understanding
of adaptation and perception is the consideration of cultural contexts which shape the
selective processes involved in perception. The technical (and economic) conditions that
facilitate participatory culture and underlie the media machine of adaptation activi-
ties, the adaptation industry (Murray), also impact the way adaptations are perceived
and can be perceived. More generally, in terms of an evolutionary theory of culture,
one could argue that the survival of the ‘fittest’ in literature and culture is driven by a
work’s capacity to be adaptable and successfully adapted (Bortolotti and Hutcheon).
The extent to which these adaptations respond to and further shape changing modes of
perception, how they connect to perception modes demanded by the source-text, and
whether they might provide insights into mechanisms of the ‘adapted mind’ (Barkow,
Cosmides, and Toby), however, has not yet been explored. This is where the current
volume sets in: the present issue aims to explore new approaches in adaptation studies
which further analyse the fundamental connection of adaptation and perception. The
contributions to this volume present only a few of the possible debates and have been
selected to illustrate the scope and variety of research touching on this constellation.
*Department of Microscopic Anatomy and Neurobiology, Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz.
E-mail: pascal.nicklas@unimedizin-mainz.de
†
Department of English, University of Innsbruck. E-mail: sibylle.baumbach@uibk.ac.at
© The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com 103
104  PASCAL NICKLAS AND SIBYLLE BAUMBACH

One of the key issues at the core of the connection between adaptation and percep-
tion relates to the stimuli and cognitive mechanisms that are involved in the recognition
of an adaptation as adaptation. As George Berkeley claimed in his Treatise Concerning the

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Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), existence depends on being perceived (esse est per-
cipi). While Berkeley’s subjective idealism might be one of the most conspicuous notions
about human perception and knowledge, it is obviously only one approach, in a long
history of philosophical debate, on the question of what perception is. The debate
about the nature of perception and ‘being’ goes back to the beginnings of philosophy
in the Western world and continues to raise new questions.
The robust processing of sense data has made the human species all too successful in
its evolutionary struggle for survival. When we talk about perception, we refer to the ini-
tial phase of the processing of data, which enter the mind through our sensory channels.
Our ways of processing incoming data are highly efficient. For our purposes, one of the
most relevant theories involving perception is the theory of cognition as being governed by
principles of prediction. In his Surfing Uncertainty (2016), Andy Clark investigates in particu-
lar the mutual dependence of perception and action in the context of embodiment. As he
claims, perception and action are the two pillars of the cognitive system: they ‘emerge as
two sides of a single computational coin. Rooted in multilevel prediction-error minimizing
routines, perception and action are locked in complex circular causal flow’ (296).
One of the key problems of perception is that our senses are easily betrayed and
highly selective, so we cannot rely on them. The selection of stimuli, which is crucial for
further processing information, is deeply shaped by human action and dependent on
individual development and education. Adaptations might draw on this capacity of our
senses to be easily deceived in that they might activate memories of previous works to
trigger specific expectations that might initially lead us astray and ultimately contribute
to the effect and success of an adaptation. The triggers that ensure the recognition of an
adaptation as adaptation (beside the obvious ones, including same or similar titles), how-
ever, still need to be further investigated, especially as perception is always partial and
highly contingent on individual perspectives and a variety of different processes: ‘No two
individuals have the same experience of the environment, none are neurologically wired
in the same way, no two stimuli are perceived as identical’ (Chesterman 45).
Understanding perception, therefore, is key to understanding natural but also cul-
tural evolution and, in our context, it is key to understanding adaptation. Even if one
does not wholly subscribe to Berkeley’s notion, his maxim esse est percipi points to the ker-
nel of adaptation and perception: if the recipient does not realize that s/he is dealing
with an adaptation, s/he will not be able to recognize and thus perceive the adaptation
as adaptation. The film or game, book or play will be viewed as an ‘autonomous’ work
and the vibrant repercussions triggered by the relationship between the adaptation and
the work to which it is referring will be missed. The adaptation as such cannot be acti-
vated, is not recognized, and thus, in this specific instance, does not exist. In terms of
the pervasiveness of adaptation as an imaginative process (Hutcheon 177), this missing
of the adaptation side of a work of art obviously becomes a massive loss.
While perception has a physiological basis in the workings of the visual, auditory and
sensual systems, it refers to much more than the effect of a stimulus on these systems, as
sensual perception arises in a feedback loop with mental processes involving learning,
 Adaptation and Perception  105

memory, expectation, and attention. Perception entails the unconscious selection and
suppression of sensory data which depends on what we have previously seen, heard,
smelled, felt and with what these sensory data have been previously associated. Due

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to individual differences in perception, based on knowledge, expectations, or cognitive
capacities, perception itself is always in flow. There is no ‘stasis and similarity’ (Cattrysse
155) in perception. Instead, the latter is always selective, perspectivised, and essentially
incomplete: ‘one can never read a book or watch a film twice in identical ways, for while
reading or watching, both we and the book or the film have changed’ (ibid.).
Many literary works have reflected upon the complex mechanisms of perception.
Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (1908), for instance, has famously made use
of the mechanism of association which Gustav Theodor Fechner, the founder of empir-
ical aesthetics, regarded as one of the fundamental principles of perception. As Fechner
argues in his Vorschule der Aesthetik (1876, 108), all sensual data is connected to our memory
like a word to its meaning. This association, according to Fechner, has to be learnt just like
a language, and changes throughout the course of the life of an individual, shaped by new
experiences. The perception of cultural artifacts is thus dependent on both physiological
constraints and personal development, based on life-long learning and experience. This
explains why the perception of adaptations changes over a life time of reading, listening
and viewing. As there is no stable relationship of ‘originality’ and ‘derivation’, the act of
perception in recognizing an adaptation as adaptation is never the same.
Adaptations might not only provide further insight into perceptual processes (and
their pitfalls): they might also make visible what has bypassed our perception or tricked
us into perceiving what does not exist. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly
Close (2005) is a case in point. The title, which might have an autobiographical source
(Solomon), is—without this context—misleading to the extent that the event at the heart
of this acclaimed novel, it is not as loud and close as the title suggests. While the photo-
graphs of the ‘falling men’, around which the narrative revolves, are amongst the most
gruesome (and thus also most ‘present’ and fascinating [cf. Baumbach esp.  224–30])
images connected with the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, they are amongst the
most repressed: ethically problematic, they represent a (collective) trauma, something
desired to become un-seen though deeply ingrained in our consciousness. At the same
time, they may allow a necessary confrontation with trauma which rather resides in
images than in narration (Codde 249). In his novel, Foer uses a number of photos and
other graphic devices to add to the narrative. Each of these devices has a different func-
tion and the most outstanding ones are the final fifteen photographs of the falling man
that the narrator of the novel montages into a flipbook.
By means of adaptation, these traumatic images are turned into a visual illusion,
which tricks readers into perceiving motion where there is stasis and thus surpasses the
limits of the photograph, which freezes these gruesome images in time. This effect is
achieved by combining a photograph of a ‘falling man’ taken by Lyle Owerko and a
photo of one of the towers of the World Trade Centre. The original photo taken by
Owerko shows a man falling in front of the WTC. In the montage the body is placed
into the void next to the building. This montage is then repeated 13 times and the body
is placed in each consecutive image a little higher next to the building and one picture
is left without the falling body: the final page of the series, which is also the last page
106  PASCAL NICKLAS AND SIBYLLE BAUMBACH

of the novel, only shows this empty space next to the tower: the body has disappeared.
Viewed one after the other, the complete series of 15 pages (with one image each) show
the body not falling down, but rising up towards the top of the building. This sequence

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works like a flip book—with a twist: when these pages are flipped in the direction of
reading an English text, i.e. from left to right, the body seems to be moving upwards.
When it is flipped in the reading direction of Arabic (or Hebrew) the body appears to
be falling.
Technically, this flip book is an adaptation in a double sense. The first adaptation is
created by the cutting of Owerko’s photo of the falling man, which serves as the source
image, and its combination with a black-and-white image of one of the WTC towers.
Foer, however, goes one step further: he adapts the adaptation by challenging our habits
of perception and inserting the images in an order which makes the body rise or fall
depending on the flipping of the pages, on the action and perception of the readers.
The flip book, therefore, also serves as a meta-narrative comment on the use of the
many static pictures in the novel. The flipping of these pages turns these pictures into a
mini-movie just like reading a narrative, page by page, constitutes a story. This double
adaptation only makes sense if the perceptual conditions of a flip book (a film reel) are
met. At the same time, the perceptual quality of the black-and-white reproduction of
the Owerko photo is at stake when Oskar unsuccessfully tries to enlarge the picture in
order to identify his father. These visual images are not only an essential part of the nar-
rative, whose meaning rests on the combination of visual and verbal stimuli: they also,
as adaptations, challenge our conventional modes, our habits of perception and, by
tricking our senses, provide insight into the ways in which perception (and its manipula-
tion) operates. The success of this adaptation, the recognition of its twists and thus also
the insights into perceptual processes triggered by the flipbook, however, are contingent
on the readers’ cultural and historical knowledge, namely on their awareness of the
events of 9/11 and the traumatic images that Foer’s flipbook is based on.
Considering that the perception of an adaptation as adaptation is crucial to the (aes-
thetic) appreciation of adaptations, it is surprising that the connection between adap-
tation and perception has received only very little attention to date. There are some
notable exceptions, which point to the need of approaches in this direction, includ-
ing Thomas van Pary’s call for combining adaptation studies with ‘cognitive recep-
tion analysis’ (van Parys 409), which would allow insight into audience’s preferences
for one specific adaptation. Kamilla Elliott also suggests a cognitive approach which
recognizes that ‘[v]erbalizing and visualizing […] prove to be connected rather than
opposed cognitive processes’ (Elliott 222). Other recent approaches define adaptation
as ‘any phenomenon that ‘functions’ as an adaptation in one particular space-time con-
text’ (Cattrysse 52) and offer a first “poetics of adaptation”, based on “the pleasure of
the intertext” (Tarquinio), all implying a focus on the perceptual conditions of seeing
adaptations as adaptations.
Connecting to approaches in adaptive literary studies, adaptations can be regarded
as the products of evolutionary storytelling in that they represent a ‘special cognitive
play of art [which] allows humans to extend and refine key cognitive competences’
(Boyd 190). How exactly the different ‘interactional’, ‘institutional’, ‘intertextual’, and
‘existential’ frames and schemas as well as the ‘set of personal and collective experience
 Adaptation and Perception  107

that operate as references’ (Casetti 84) are activated by these essentially overdetermined

‘texts’, how they shape, challenge, or interact with the perception of adaptations, and
to what extent they can also help train readers’ and audiences’ cognitive capacities

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and their (media) literacy still needs to be explored in more detail. Marie-Laure Ryan
has already argued that ‘the narrative success of games lies in their ability to exploit
the most fundamental of the forces that move a plot forward: the solving of prob-
lems’ (2014, 349). It has to be further investigated, however, to what extent adaptations
through readers’, audiences’ or gamers’ intense cognitive involvement might help refine
problem-solving capacities and promote greater cognitive flexibility, which intensifies
awareness for interconnectivity and intertextual ‘maps’.
In addition to these calls for (re-)considering the role of perception in adaptation
studies, this special issue was prompted by recent approaches in cognitive poetics and
empirical aesthetics, which focus on the mechanisms of perception and aesthetic strate-
gies of literature and art (cf. Burke/Troscianko) as well as changing modes of produc-
tion, perception, and consumer engagement after the digital turn. New developments
in media-technology as well as in media culture have fundamentally changed our
modes of perception and participation, leading to the dissolution of formerly clearly
defined roles of producers and recipients or consumers. This had a deep effect on hier-
archies of production and consumption and led to different perceptions of the products
as well as the processes of adaptation. The act of adaptation as such has shifted from
being perceived as a socially, intellectually, and emotionally privileged undertaking by a
talented individual to collective and also anonymous forms of participation: following
these developments in convergence and participatory culture (Nicklas/Voigts 2013),
the notion of the passive consumer has been replaced by the ‘produser’ or ‘prosumer’,
respectively, which point to the intersection of producers and consumers first registered
in Henry Jenkins’ definition of convergence culture (Jenkins).
Technological changes have not only facilitated media convergence: they have also
fundamentally changed the role that receptive processes such as reading, watching, and
listening, have played, and will continue to play, in processes of adaptation. The ability to
adapt a text, a film, or a piece of music by means of digital devices, for instance, blurs the
line between purely receptive and purely productive modes of interaction and enables
new modes of participatory adaptation. Furthermore, increasingly decentred modes of
reception, distribution, and production enabled through social media provide a fertile
ground for the dissemination of creative readings and writings (Hassler-Forest/Nicklas).
Within this new media matrix, content seems to flow more easily across multiple chan-
nels connecting multiple technological platforms. Replacing the traditional interfaces of
page and screen, laptop computers, tablets, and smartphones enable innovative forms of
participation and creativity by opening up new avenues for recording and producing media.
All of these developments have had a profound impact on our everyday use of techno-
logical devices and on our patterns of behaviour and perception. New forms of media
literacy have emerged, which alter our understanding of ‘inter-’ and ‘source-text’, adding
to the already complex question posed towards the end of Hutcheon’s seminal A Theory
of Adaptation: ‘What is not an adaptation?’ (170). The cardinal role of perception in these
changing processes of adaptation, however, remains largely unexplored. This is all the more
surprising as the appreciation of an aesthetics of adaptation, which is intimately connected
108  PASCAL NICKLAS AND SIBYLLE BAUMBACH

to media convergence, would help reveal the underlying conditions of perception that have
shaped and continue to shape adaptations in contemporary convergence culture.
Adaptation has increasingly become the product of prosumption: both mash-ups

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and GIFs are fine examples of these slightly anarchic acts of casual adaptation pervad-
ing internet and communication cultures. The recent mash-up Starwars Uncut (2012), for
instance, demonstrates the immense implications of this trend, which forces the studios
and copyright holders to endorse acts of piracy and to embrace what could not be con-
doned. These changes to the policies and politics of adaptation have a profound impact
on the perception of adaptations. In the digital era, adaptations provide novel ways
of interaction, participation, and consumer engagement. At the same time, they open
up new avenues for creative expression and foster the democratisation of content and
production. Considering that consumers and prosumers alike have an impact on both
the evolution and development of fictional works (e.g. fan fiction), the question arises
to what extent these new developments shape and ultimately change our practices of
story-telling and, on a broader scope, also our ways of worldmaking (Goodman) based
on the assumption that ‘[n]arrative is a timeless and universal cognitive model by which
we make sense of temporal existence and human action’ (Ryan 242). The democratisa-
tion of adaptation processes, prompted by the digital turn, leads to a proliferation of
adaptations and new (serialised) forms of adaptations, which might further complicate
our perception of ‘adaptation’, which—not unlike the novel, which Virginia Woolf
famously referred to as ‘cannibal’ (Woolf 224)—might contain several sub-forms of
adaptations, for which we yet lack a term.
This special issue of Adaptation, rooted in comparative adaptation studies, aims to
explore and assess perceptual underpinnings and perceptual changes involved in the
reception and/or production of adaptations in media convergence. The articles, which
cover a broad range of different aspects and a variety of genres, indicate the scope and
potential of research at the nexus of adaptation and perception. They explore the rela-
tionships between play and film, novel and graphic novel, film and novel, computer games
and novels, and analyse the new hybrid form of Live Theatre Broadcast. Besides their
wide generic scope, they cover a great variety of methodology and historical material.
Using theories from psychology, Robert Geal explores the paradox of adaptations,
which is quite a typical effect, namely that the recipient experiences suspense despite being
already aware of the outcome of the story. In his case study of Gnomeo and Juliet (2011),
this effect is coupled with the contradiction between low-level automated modes of per-
ception while consciously knowing that these modes are being deceived. Romeo and Juliet
is a classic of adaptation culture in more than one way: it deals with an archetypal story
of ‘star-crossed’ lovers which had been retold before Shakespeare’s version many times,
making Shakespeare’s famous tragedy only one specimen in a long genealogy of similar
love stories, and yet, at the same time, Romeo and Juliet becomes a starting point for a trad-
ition in its own rights. The animated adaptation Gnomeo and Juliet with its setting in English
suburban gardens is as such a meta-cinematic and ironical take on the cultural icon which
has become the source for specific perceptual cultural conventions that inform patterns of
automated perception. The meta-cinematic aspects of Geal’s probing of the perceptual
implications of the anomalous foreknowledge and the deception of our senses that in an
animated film we see things move which cannot move binds together these two effects.
 Adaptation and Perception  109

Chiao-I Tseng draws on concepts and methodologies from linguistics to analyse

transmedial cohesion in order to facilitate quantitative empirical comparison of adap-
tations of City of Glass. This approach is one of the few attempts at empirical aesthetics

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in adaptation studies by looking at quantifiable structures that can be identified inde-
pendently of the media in which the adaptation is performed. Mechanisms and meth-
ods of cohesion in narrative strategies can be described within the same framework
independent of media-specificity. This permits a quantifiable comparative description
despite transmediality. This sameness in difference functions also as a perception cat-
egory. Cohesion of a narrative is perceived no matter how the narrative is presented,
we make the same connections of static points to create the trajectory of the narrative.
This approach may seem rather formalistic but it also gives an answer to the perennial
question of adaptation studies: ‘What is adapted?’
David Richard’s study of Jane Campion’s In the Cut (2003) introduces a phenomeno-
logical approach to film which goes beyond visual perception in that it includes all the
senses in an attempt to retrieve an embodied spectatorship for a more holistic approach
to the experience of viewing an adaptation as an adaptation. This methodology of see-
ing the spectator of a film not as a spectator alone, i.e. as someone who sees only, but as
someone whose whole senses are involved in the experience of meaningfully living the
art experience of adaptation, is perfectly apt for a focus on perception. In his case study
of In the Cut, Richard focuses particularly on the sense of touch. The highly subjective
cinematography of Campion allows an internal focalization leading to what Richard
calls ‘tactile orientation’ which is evoked by the filmic means. These synaesthetic effects
are important to follow up in order to understand the holistic effect of the film on the
perceptual processing in the recipient and open up the meaning potential in this phe-
nomenological approach.
Elisavet Ioannidou argues from a media studies’ point of view that playing hidden
object games has a profound effect on the player’s perception through reconciling inter-
action and immersion in a kind of flow experience which is quite different from the
immersive experience literature can offer. Ioannidou uses Ryan’s dictum that interaction
with a text requires textual self-consciousness which destroys readerly immersion. As
the computer games looked at here take their narrative elements from literary Victorian
texts, this switch in the mode of reception makes for an interesting case of perceptive
change through adaptation. The enactment of the past is also an attempt to rectify
history and make the player experience the ‘historical reality’ in a multi-sensory way.
Lauren Hitchman explores the very under-researched and rare live theatre broad-
cast as a newly emerging hybrid form, which changed the perceptive framework of
audiences in marked ways. The auratic element of a live performance is part of the
broadcast as well which is live and recorded at the same time. In this light, the concept
of ‘liveness’ needs to be questioned as it is symbolic capital and influences strongly the
perception of a performance by becoming part of a hierarchy in which the un-repro-
duced live performance acquire a higher standing. So, the same performance triggers
two different modes of perceptions and ontologies depending on where the audience
experiences it: in the theatre or in the cinema. Hitchman argues for the very special sta-
tus of the live broadcast which she also sees as a specific kind of adaptation.
110  PASCAL NICKLAS AND SIBYLLE BAUMBACH

Though by no means exhaustive, these contributions point to the need to further

explore the aesthetics of adaptation in the digital age, and to introduce new approaches
in the field of cognitive adaptation studies by proposing first methodological and theor-

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etical frameworks for future studies that will address the complex levels of participatory
adaptation culture we have come to live by, and its effects on our different modes of
perception.

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