Cognitive Science
August 1, 2011
Berit Brogaard
59 citations
The dissociation hypothesis by Milner and Goodale is often interpreted as dividing visual processing into two streams: a dorsal stream for unconscious action and a ventral stream for conscious perception. Evidence from blindsight and studies showing that illusions affect action suggests a more complex tripartite division: unconscious vision for action, conscious vision for perception, and unconscious vision for perception, leaving out conscious vision for action. The author argues that despite evidence that conscious vision can influence action, we cannot access dorsal stream representations cognitively, and these representations do not correlate with phenomenal consciousness, supporting the tripartite view.
Cognitive Science
April 1, 2019
Heng Li, Yu Cao
13 citations
Right-handed Tibetan Bön practitioners, whose religion explicitly associates the left side with goodness, still implicitly associate positive ideas with their dominant right side, just as English speakers do. This supports the Body-Specificity Hypothesis, which holds that people link positive valence to the side of space where their dominant hand acts more fluently. The study shows that implicit space-valence mappings are shaped by bodily experience rather than by cultural conventions that favor the left.
Cognitive Science
December 1, 2024
Eleanor Schille-Hudson, Kara Weisman, Tanya M Luhrmann
11 citations
Prayer, a common practice across many religions, changes not only how people feel or think but also what they perceive. Across three studies with thousands of participants from five cultures, more daily time spent in prayer is associated with more frequent reports of sensory and perceptual experiences interpreted as evidence of a god or spirit. Prayer most strongly relates to everyday events like dreams or strong emotions that feel not self-generated but caused by a deity. Prayer also relates to anomalous experiences such as voices and a sensed presence, but not to more dramatic events like possession, out-of-body experiences, or sleep paralysis. These results suggest that repeated practices can shape perception.
Cognitive Science
March 22, 2016
Jana Speth, Trevor A. Harley, Clemens Speth
9 citations
The degree to which healthy people report hearing voices or talking to imaginary characters depends on their physiological state of consciousness. Analyzing 569 mentation reports from REM sleep, non-REM sleep, sleep onset, and waking, the study found that REM sleep produced the highest levels of auditory verbal experiences and agency, while sleep onset—traditionally linked to hallucinations—produced the lowest. The quantity and pragmatic features of these experiences vary systematically across states, indicating they are a function of the distinct physiological state in which they occur.
Cognitive Science
May 1, 2024
Dylan Ludwig, Muhammad Ali Khalidi
8 citations
ASMR, a sensory-emotional experience first named in online forums, shows mounting psychological and neural evidence of a consistent set of triggers, experiential properties, and downstream effects. Psychological instruments now measure it. Despite its nonscientific origins, ASMR is a good candidate for being a real kind in cognitive sciences due to a robust causal profile and possible adaptive evolutionary history. Understanding its distinctive phenomenal experience can illuminate the functions of consciousness and challenge certain cognitive theories. ASMR warrants more extensive scientific investigation, including potential therapeutic applications.
Cognitive Science
March 1, 2025
Christian R. De Weerd, Leonard Dung
4 citations
Evolutionary arguments alone cannot confirm or falsify hypotheses about consciousness; consciousness science must rely primarily on experimental and observational evidence from humans and other animals alive today. The authors argue against "evolution-first" approaches that treat evolutionary considerations as the primary lens for assessing consciousness. Using Walter Veit's account as an example, they contend such approaches lack compelling empirical support. While evolutionary thinking can help advance consciousness research, it should not be foundational for hypothesis justification, though it may still play a role in hypothesis generation.
Cognitive Science
February 1, 2026
Julian Hauser
Self-representation can involve different types of properties—spatial, temporal, bodily, or mental. This work argues that a distinction from spatial cognition, between egocentric and allocentric forms of representation, also applies to how other properties are represented. Using examples from animal cognition and developmental psychology, the author shows that creatures allocentrically represent their temporal, bodily, and cognitive properties. These allocentric representations are minimal self-representations: they differentiate the system from other objects or its actual from merely possible properties, are directly linked to behavior and sensation, and are immune to error through misidentification. Different creatures may self-represent more or fewer kinds of property, with more substantive forms requiring integrated minimal self-representations of the right kinds.
Cognitive Science
April 1, 2023
Elizabeth A. Stoll
Consciousness may arise from the brain's use of probabilistic computation, a new approach to an old problem. The cerebral cortex, unlike spinal circuits or classical computers, shows five key features: exascale computing power not tied to binary unit count; noisy coding where random electrical events influence signaling; synchronous firing of random cell populations at nested frequencies; growth toward order by encoding predictive value; and extraordinary energy efficiency with little entropy loss. These features suggest the mammalian brain engages in probabilistic computation, which could explain the unique emergent properties of cortical networks.
Cognitive Science
November 1, 2022
Tony Cheng, Yi Lin, Philip Tseng
The letter argues that cognitive science of consciousness, despite recent progress, tends to downplay conceptual issues and underestimate the difficulties of various problems. This tendency, illustrated with a few prominent examples, may be problematic for the field's future progress.
Cognitive Science
January 1, 2018
Clemens Speth, Jana Speth
Hallucinatory states occur naturally across the human sleep-wake cycle, not only with drugs or psychopathology. This study introduces a new measure of these states by analyzing mentation reports from sleep onset, REM sleep, and non-REM sleep. The reports were examined for motor agency (indicating interactions with an imagined world) and cognitive agency (enabling recognition of the hallucinatory state). Results show a decline in cognitive functions and an increase in simulated interactions with a hallucinatory world as sleep progresses toward REM sleep. The authors propose that REM sleep, with its high levels of simulated sensorimotor processes, may have evolved as a virtual laboratory for developing embodied cognition.
Cognitive Science
November 12, 2007
Stuart Hameroff
A commentary defends the Penrose-Hameroff 'Orch OR' quantum computational model of consciousness against earlier criticism. Orch OR proposes that consciousness arises from quantum computations in microtubules inside neurons, particularly in dendrites connected by gap junctions called dendritic webs. These webs act as input layers in the brain's neurocomputational architecture, and consciousness is suggested to occur during gamma EEG-synchronized sequences of discrete quantum events within integration phases of neurocomputational integrate-and-fire cycles. The author argues that Orch OR is compatible with neurocomputation and questions whether neurocomputation alone can account for coherent gamma synchrony EEG, a candidate neural correlate of consciousness.
Cognitive Science
March 4, 2007
Terry Dartnall
The author proposes 'internalism' as a corollary to the extended mind hypothesis, arguing that people can acquire knowledge by consulting inner analogues of the world on a need-to-know basis. This creates a dilemma: if the knowledge was already stored in memory, it was not newly acquired and loses the economies of storage that motivate external memory stores; if it was not stored in memory, it was not there to be acquired. The author resolves this by invoking nonconceptual content and relating it to Kosslyn's architecture of perception and visual mental imagery, showing that the world leaks into the mind as well as the mind leaking into the world.
Cognitive Science
January 2, 2005
Terry Dartnall
The extended mind thesis argues that cognitive processes can extend into the world. This paper proposes a corollary called internalism: actions usually performed in the world can sometimes be performed in the head, so the world leaks into the mind. Internalism has epistemological implications: a process that yields empirical discovery when performed externally will also yield empirical discovery when performed internally. The author illustrates this with a simple example, explores the relation between internalism and active externalism, and compares internalism with mental modeling.