Consciousness and Cognition
September 2011
Kiwamu Yasuda, Laura B Ray, Kimberly A Cote
To examine whether anticipatory attention or expectancy is a cognitive process that is automatic or requires conscious control, we employed a paired-stimulus event-related potential (ERP) paradigm during the transition to sleep. The slow negative ERP wave observed between two successive stimuli, the Contingent Negative Variation (CNV), reflects attention and expectancy to the second stimulus....
Consciousness and Cognition
September 2011
Tomer Fekete, Shimon Edelman
A standing challenge for the science of mind is to account for the datum that every mind faces in the most immediate--that is, unmediated--fashion: its phenomenal experience. The complementary tasks of explaining what it means for a system to give rise to experience and what constitutes the content of experience (qualia) in computational terms are particularly challenging, given the multiple...
Consciousness and Cognition
September 2011
Ryan B Scott, Ludovico Minati, Zoltan Dienes et al.
Can conscious awareness be ascertained from physiological responses alone? We evaluate a novel learning-based procedure permitting detection of conscious awareness without reliance on language comprehension or behavioural responses. The method exploits a situation whereby only consciously detected violations of an expectation alter skin conductance responses (SCRs). Thirty participants listened...
Consciousness and Cognition
September 2011
Sharon Zmigrod, Bernhard Hommel
Processing the various features from different feature maps and modalities in coherent ways requires a dedicated integration mechanism ("the binding problem"). Many authors have related feature binding to conscious awareness but little is known about how tight this relationship really is. We presented subjects with asynchronous audiovisual stimuli and tested whether the two features were...
Consciousness and Cognition
September 1, 2011
Joel Krueger
The extended mind thesis (EM) asserts that some cognitive processes are (partially) composed of actions consisting of the manipulation and exploitation of environmental structures. Might some processes at the root of social cognition have a similarly extended structure? In this paper, I argue that social cognition is fundamentally an interactive form of space management--the negotiation and...
Consciousness and Cognition
August 31, 2011
Implicit and explicit emotional behavior and mindfulness.
Consciousness and Cognition
July 22, 2011
Richard Brown
In this paper I examine the dispute between Hakwan Lau, Ned Block, and David Rosenthal over the extent to which empirical results can help us decide between first-order and higher-order theories of consciousness. What emerges from this is an overall argument to the best explanation against the first-order view of consciousness and the dispelling of the mythological notion of phenomenological...
Consciousness and Cognition
June 24, 2011
Sticking to one's diet: commentary on "Quining diet qualia" by Keith Frankish.
Consciousness and Cognition
June 2011
John F. Kihlstrom
Research by Raz and his associates has repeatedly found that suggestions for hypnotic agnosia, administered to highly hypnotizable subjects, reduce or even eliminate Stroop interference. The present paper sought unsuccessfully to extend these findings to negative priming in the Stroop task. Nevertheless, the reduction of Stroop interference has broad theoretical implications, both for our...
Consciousness and Cognition
June 1, 2011
Mark Blagrove, Josie Henley-Einion, Amanda Barnett et al.
The dream-lag effect refers to there being, after the frequent incorporation of memory elements from the previous day into dreams (the day-residue), a lower incorporation of memory elements from 2 to 4 days before the dream, but then an increased incorporation of memory elements from 5 to 7 days before the dream. Participants (n=8, all female) kept a daily diary and a dream diary for 14 days...
Consciousness and Cognition
June 1, 2011
Michelle Neider, Edward F Pace-Schott, Erica Forselius et al.
Activity in the prefrontal cortex may distinguish the meta-awareness experienced during lucid dreams from its absence in normal dreams. To examine a possible relationship between dream lucidity and prefrontal task performance, we carried out a prospective study in 28 high school students. Participants performed the Wisconsin Card Sort and Iowa Gambling tasks, then for 1 week kept dream journals...
Consciousness and Cognition
June 1, 2011
Kristina Musholt
The author claims that concept possession is not only necessary but also sufficient for self-consciousness, where self-consciousness is understood as the awareness of oneself as a self. Further, he links concept possession to intelligent behavior. His ultimate aim is to provide a framework for the study of self-consciousness in infants and non-human animals. I argue that the claim that all...
Consciousness and Cognition
June 2011
Valdas Noreika
A number of differences between the dreams of schizophrenia patients and those of healthy participants have been linked to changes in waking life that schizophrenia may cause. This way, the "continuity hypothesis" has become a standard way to relate dreaming and waking experiences in schizophrenia. Nevertheless, some of the findings in dream literature are not compatible with the continuity...
Consciousness and Cognition
June 2011
Ran R. Hassin
In a recent comment on our paper Implicit Working Memory (Hassin, Bargh, Engell, & McCulluch, 2009) Guterman (2010) argued that a possible interpretation of the results of one of our experiments is that "conscious awareness…enabled the participants to find ways to benefit from the predictability…while nullifying the cost." Unfortunately, the data do not support this interpretation....
Consciousness and Cognition
May 23, 2011
Petr Bob, George A. Mashour
Current thinking suggests that dissociation could be a significant comorbid diagnosis in a proportion of schizophrenic patients with a history of trauma. This potentially may explain the term "schizophrenia" in its original definition by Bleuler, as influenced by his clinical experience and personal view. Additionally, recent findings suggest a partial overlap between dissociative symptoms and...
Consciousness and Cognition
May 20, 2011
Introspecting a conscious decision or the consciousness of a decision?
Consciousness and Cognition
May 13, 2011
Inductions about attention and consciousness: comments on Carolyn Suchy-Dicey, 'Inductive scepticism and the Methodological Argument'.
Consciousness and Cognition
April 16, 2011
Sue Llewellyn
If both waking and dreaming consciousness are functional, their de-differentiation would be doubly detrimental. Differentiation between waking and dreaming is achieved through neuromodulation. During dreaming, without external sensory data and with mesolimbic dopaminergic input, hyper-cholinergic input almost totally suppresses the aminergic system. During waking, with sensory gates open,...
Consciousness and Cognition
April 8, 2011
Tracking the processes behind conscious perception: a review of event-related potential correlates of visual consciousness.
Consciousness and Cognition
March 25, 2011
The concept possession hypothesis of self-consciousness.
Consciousness and Cognition
March 11, 2011
C. Kerr, J. Shaw, L. Conboy et al.
Evidence that placebo acupuncture is an effective treatment for chronic pain presents a puzzle: how do placebo needles appearing to patients to penetrate the body, but instead sitting on the skin’s surface in the manner of a tactile stimulus, evoke a healing response? Previous accounts of ritual touch healing in which patients often described enhanced touch sensations (including warmth,...
Consciousness and Cognition
March 5, 2011
Improving spatial abilities through mindfulness: effects on the mental rotation task.
Consciousness and Cognition
March 2011
William Hirstein, Katrina Sifferd
When laws or legal principles mention mental states such as intentions to form a contract, knowledge of risk, or purposely causing a death, what parts of the brain are they speaking about? We argue here that these principles are tacitly directed at our prefrontal executive processes. Our current best theories of consciousness portray it as a workspace in which executive processes operate, but...
Consciousness and Cognition
March 2011
Mauricio Sierra, Anthony S David
Depersonalization is characterised by a profound disruption of self-awareness mainly characterised by feelings of disembodiment and subjective emotional numbing. It has been proposed that depersonalization is caused by a fronto-limbic (particularly anterior insula) suppressive mechanism--presumably mediated via attention--which manifests subjectively as emotional numbing, and disables the...
Consciousness and Cognition
March 2011
Philippe Rochat
Self-awareness is viewed here as the phenotypic expression of an interaction between genes and the environment. Brain and behavioral development of fetuses and newborn infants are a rich source of information regarding what might constitute minimal self-awareness. Research indicates that newborns have feeling (subjective) experience. Unlike automata, they do not just sense and respond to...