Artificial systems increasingly behave in ways that resemble humans. But is that sufficient to make us see them as conscious, or as having related mental states? We contrast two broad possibilities. People may rely on a single general principle: the more appropriately an agent responds to its environment, the more conscious it is, whether human or artificial. We call this a functionalist...
Visual stimuli that are not consciously perceived can nevertheless guide the eyes. Yet, which stimulus aspects drive such oculomotor guidance by "invisible" images remains unclear. We tested whether image representations strengthened by congruent actions could guide the eyes even in the absence of visual awareness. Images of snapping fingers, tapping feet, and static noses were continuously...
CognitionDecember 2024Andreea Zaman, Roni Setton, Caroline Catmur et al.
Autonoetic consciousness is the awareness that an event we remember is one that we ourselves experienced. It is a defining feature of our subjective experience of remembering and imagining future events. Given its subjective nature, there is ongoing debate about how to measure it. Our goal was to develop a framework to identify cognitive markers of autonoetic consciousness. Across two studies...
Can one have a phenomenal experience to which one does not have access? That is, can you experience something without knowing? The dissociation between phenomenal (P) and access (A) consciousness is widely debated. A major challenge to the supporters of this dissociation is the apparent inability to experimentally demonstrate that P-without-A consciousness exists; once participants report...
The science of animal consciousness investigates (i) which animal species are conscious (the distribution question) and (ii) how conscious experience differs in detail between species (the quality question). We propose a framework which clearly distinguishes both questions and tackles both of them. This two-tier account distinguishes consciousness along ten dimensions and suggests cognitive...
Consciousness and high-level information integration have commonly been closely related to each other (Baars, 2002; Dehaene & Naccache, 2001; Tononi, 2004). Different results, however, have challenged this assumption by showing that information integration can occur for stimuli presented outside of conscious awareness. More recently, a re-examination of some of the data and different...
In philosophical thought experiments, as in ordinary discourse, our understanding of verbal case descriptions is enriched by automatic comprehension inferences. Such inferences have us routinely infer what else is also true of the cases described. We consider how such routine inferences from polysemous words can generate zombie intuitions: intuitions that are 'killed' (defeated) by contextual...
Immortality is thought to be achieved through heroic deeds, reincarnation, and the afterlife. The present studies reveal an alternative path to transcending death: dying while conscious. Seven studies demonstrate that dying while more awake, aware and/or lucid leads people to see a richer postmortem mind-an effect we call conservation of consciousness. People see more mind in the deceased when...
Mindfulness- and, more generally, meditation-based interventions increasingly gain popularity, effectively promoting cognitive, affective, and social capacities. It is unclear, however, if different types of practice have the same or specific effects on mental functioning. Here we tested three consecutive three-month training modules aimed at cultivating either attention, socio-affective...
CognitionOctober 2018Matthew J Voss, Meera Zukosky, Ranxiao Frances Wang
Although widely studied, the process of how mind wandering occurs and is subsequently sustained still remains unclear. Moreover, the traditional concept of mind wandering tendency/frequency based on the self- or probe-caught methods alone is incoherent and problematic. We developed a new approach to characterize the mind wandering process by combining the self-caught and probe-caught methods to...
Integration of body-related signals within the peripersonal space (PPS) contributes to bodily self-awareness. Whereas several studies have shown how individual PPS extension is shaped by external factors, e.g. during interactions with people and objects, no studies have looked at interoceptive influences on PPS extension. We exposed participants to an audio-tactile interaction task, to measure...
CognitionAugust 2018Rocco Chiou, Anina N Rich, Sebastian Rogers et al.
Individuals with grapheme-colour synaesthesia experience anomalous colours when reading achromatic text. These unusual experiences have been said to resemble 'normal' colour perception or colour imagery, but studying the nature of synaesthesia remains difficult. In the present study, we report novel evidence that synaesthetic colour impacts conscious vision in a way that is different from both...
Recent studies have highlighted the role of multisensory integration as a key mechanism of self-consciousness. In particular, integration of bodily signals within the peripersonal space (PPS) underlies the experience of the self in a body we own (self-identification) and that is experienced as occupying a specific location in space (self-location), two main components of bodily...
The spiritual but not religious (SBNR) are a growing population in secularizing societies. Yet, we know little about the underlying psychology of this group or their belief profile. Based on an individual difference approach, we address this knowledge gap by comparing SBNR with religious and non-religious participants. In a sample of Americans (n=1013), we find that the SBNR differ from...
Interoceptive and exteroceptive information are both essential for the construction and update of self-awareness. Whereas several studies have shown how interoceptive accuracy or cardiac feedback influences body-awareness, no studies have looked at the reverse effect, namely how exteroceptively-driven changes in body-ownership and self-identification can influence individuals' ability to detect...
In this article, we aim to strengthen the emerging radical, non-representational, approaches to cognitive science by defusing the worries radical enactivists have with the use of information in the ecological approaches - namely the worry that information carries content. We show that Gibson's later use of the concept is meant to allow for a content-less notion of information, but that the...
The philosophical study of mind in the twentieth century was dominated by a research program that used a priori methods to address foundational questions. Since that time, however, the philosophical study of mind has undergone a dramatic shift. To provide a more accurate picture of contemporary philosophical work, I compared a sample of highly cited philosophy papers from the past five years...
In order to interpret a constantly changing environment, visual events far apart in space and time must be integrated into a unified percept. While spatial properties of invisible signals are known to be encoded without awareness, the fate of temporal properties remains largely unknown. Here, we probed temporal integration for two distinct motion stimuli that were either visible or rendered...
Is visual awareness graded or binary? Experimental work has provided support for both possibilities, leading to two coexisting but contradictory theoretical accounts. Here we propose a promising candidate factor through which to integrate both accounts: the depth of stimulus processing required by the task. We compared color identification (a low-level task) with numerical judgements (a...
CognitionApril 1, 2013Jesse Lee Preston, Ryan S Ritter, Justin Hepler
The development of fMRI techniques has generated a boom of neuroscience research across the psychological sciences, and revealed neural correlates for many psychological phenomena seen as central to the human experience (e.g., morality, agency). Meanwhile, the rise of neuroscience has reignited old debates over mind-body dualism and the soul. While some scientists use neuroscience to bolster a...
Subjective measures of awareness rest on the assumption that conscious knowledge is knowledge that participants know they possess. Post-Decision Wagering (PDW), recently proposed as a new measure of awareness, requires participants to place a high or a low wager on their decisions. Whereas advantageous wagering indicates awareness of the knowledge on which the decisions are based, cases in...
In the current study, we tested the embodied cognition theory (ECT). The ECT postulates mandatory sensorimotor processing of words when accessing their meaning. We test that prediction by investigating whether invisible (i.e., subliminal) spatial words activate responses based on their long-term and short-term meaning. Masking of the words is used to prevent word visibility and intentional...
Psychologists often dismiss introspection as an inappropriate measure, yet subjects readily volunteer detailed descriptions of the time and effort that they spent on a task. Are such reports really so inaccurate? We asked subjects to perform a psychological refractory period experiment followed by extensive quantified introspection. On each trial, just after their objective responses, subjects...
Although the veridicality of unconscious perception is increasingly accepted, core issues remain unresolved [Jack, A., & Shallice, T. (2001). Introspective physicalism as an approach to the science of consciousness. Cognition, 79, 161-196], and sharp disagreement persists regarding fundamental methodological and theoretical issues. The most critical problem is simple but tenacious-namely, how...
The subject of this article is the frame problem, as conceived by certain cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind, notably Fodor for whom it stands as a fundamental obstacle to progress in cognitive science. The challenge is to explain the capacity of so-called informationally unencapsulated cognitive processes to deal effectively with information from potentially any cognitive domain...