One question we can ask when investigating the nature of self-representation concerns the types of property that must figure in its content. Here, authors have claimed that self-representations must be about spatial, temporal, bodily, or mental properties. However, we can also ask a second question: how do we need to represent a property to self-represent it? I address this latter question. I...
There is much interest in investigating the evolution question: How did consciousness evolve? In this paper, we evaluate the role that evolutionary considerations can play in justifying (i.e., confirming or falsifying) hypotheses about the origin, nature, and function of consciousness. Specifically, we argue against what we call evolution-first approaches to consciousness, according to which...
Prayer, a repeated practice of paying attention to one's inner mental world, is a core behavior across many faiths and traditions, understudied by cognitive scientists. Previous research suggests that humans pray because prayer changes the way they feel or how they think. This paper makes a novel argument: that prayer changes what they feel that they perceive. Those who pray, we find, are more...
"Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response" (ASMR) refers to a sensory-emotional experience that was first explicitly identified and named within the past two decades in online discussion boards. Since then, there has been mounting psychological and neural evidence of a clustering of properties common to the phenomenon of ASMR, including convergence on the set of stimuli that trigger the experience,...
The study of individual experience during the performance of a psychological task using a phenomenological approach is a relatively new area of research. The aim of this paper was to combine first- and third-person approaches to investigate whether the strategies individuals use during a working memory task are associated with specific task conditions, whether the strategies combine to form...
AbstractA central problem in the cognitive sciences is identifying the link between consciousness and neural computation. The key features of consciousness—including the emergence of representative information content and the initiation of volitional action—are correlated with neural activity in the cerebral cortex, but not computational processes in spinal reflex circuits or classical...
Cognitive ScienceApril 2023Thomas Swan, Jesse M. Bering, Ruth Hughes et al.
The practice of burying objects with the dead is often claimed as some of the earliest evidence for religion, on the assumption that such "grave goods" were intended for the decedents' use in the afterlife. However, this assumption is largely speculative, as the underlying motivations for grave-good practices across time and place remain little understood. In the present work, we asked if...
AbstractIn this letter we focus on the cognitive science of consciousness. The general message is that, while this interdisciplinary area has made much progress in recent years, there is a tendency of downplaying conceptual issues, and therefore underestimating the difficulties of various problems. We briefly focus on a few prominent examples only, due to the space limit, but the general...
We present an empirically supported theoretical and methodological framework for quantifying the system-level properties of person-plus-tool interactions in order to answer the question: "Are person-plus-tool-systems extended cognitive systems?" Nineteen participants provided perceptual judgments regarding their ability to pass through apertures of various widths while using visual information,...
According to the Body-Specificity Hypothesis (BSH), people implicitly associate positive ideas with the side of space on which they are able to act more fluently with their dominant hand. Though this hypothesis has been rigorously tested across a variety of populations and tasks, the studies thus far have only been conducted in linguistic and cultural communities which favor the right over the...
In this Letter to the Editor, we seize the opportunity to respond to the recent comments by Anzulewicz and Wierzchoń, and further clarify and extend the scope of our original paper. We re-emphasize that conscious experiences come in degrees, and that there are several factors that determine this degree. Endorsing the suggestions of Anzulewicz and Wierzchoń, we discuss that besides low-level...
Fazekas and Overgaard () present a novel, multidimensional model that explains different ways in which conscious representations can be degraded. Moreover, the authors discuss possible mechanisms that underlie different kinds of degradation, primarily those related to attentional processing. In this letter, we argue that the proposed mechanisms are not sufficient. We propose that (1)...
Hallucinatory states are experienced not only in connection with drugs and psychopathologies but occur naturally and spontaneously across the human circadian cycle: Our nightly dreams bring multimodal experiences in the absence of adequate external stimuli. The current study proposes a new, tighter measure of these hallucinatory states: Sleep onset, REM sleep, and non-REM sleep are shown to...
In this paper we argue that awareness comes in degrees, and we propose a novel multi-factor account that spans both subjective experiences and perceptual representations. At the subjective level, we argue that conscious experiences can be degraded by being fragmented, less salient, too generic, or flash-like. At the representational level, we identify corresponding features of perceptual...
We present one of the first quantitative studies on auditory verbal experiences ("hearing voices") and auditory verbal agency (inner speech, and specifically "talking to (imaginary) voices or characters") in healthy participants across states of consciousness. Tools of quantitative linguistic analysis were used to measure participants' implicit knowledge of auditory verbal experiences (VE) and...
David Milner and Melvyn Goodale's dissociation hypothesis is commonly taken to state that there are two functionally specialized cortical streams of visual processing originating in striate (V1) cortex: a dorsal, action-related "unconscious" stream and a ventral, perception-related "conscious" stream. As Milner and Goodale acknowledge, findings from blindsight studies suggest a more...
Dream reports from 21 dreamers in which a metamorphosis of a person-like entity or animal occurred were coded for characters and animals and for inner states attributed to them (Theory of Mind). In myths and fairy tales, Kelly and Keil (1985) found that conscious beings (people, gods) tend to be transformed into entities nearby in the conceptual structure of Keil (1979). This also occurred in...
In their article, Is the Brain a Quantum Computer,? Litt, Eliasmith, Kroon, Weinstein, and Thagard (2006) criticize the Penrose-Hameroff "Orch OR" quantum computational model of consciousness, arguing instead for neurocomputation as an explanation for mental phenomena. Here I clarify and defend Orch OR, show how Orch OR and neurocomputation are compatible, and question whether neurocomputation...
Active externalism (also known as the extended mind hypothesis) says that we use objects and situations in the world as external memory stores that we consult as needs dictate. This gives us economies of storage: We do not need to remember that Bill has blue eyes and wavy hair if we can acquire this information by looking at Bill. I argue for a corollary to this position, which I call...
Cognitive ScienceMay 6, 2006Abninder Litt, Chris Eliasmith, Frederick W Kroon et al.
We argue that computation via quantum mechanical processes is irrelevant to explaining how brains produce thought, contrary to the ongoing speculations of many theorists. First, quantum effects do not have the temporal properties required for neural information processing. Second, there are substantial physical obstacles to any organic instantiation of quantum computation. Third, there is no...
One of the arguments for active externalism (also known as the extended mind thesis) is that if a process counts as cognitive when it is performed in the head, it should also count as cognitive when it is performed in the world. Consequently, mind extends into the world. I argue for a corollary: We sometimes perform actions in our heads that we usually perform in the world, so that the world...