The semantic view of theories and higher-order languages

Synthese - Several philosophers of science construe models of scientific theories as set-theoretic structures. Some of them moreover claim that models should not be construed as structures in the...     

Prefrontal lesion evidence against higher-order theories of consciousness

According to higher-order theories of consciousness, a mental state is conscious only when represented by another mental state. Higher-order theories must predict there to be some brain areas (or networks of areas) such that, because they produce (the right kind of) higher-order states, the disabling of them brings about deficits in consciousness. It is commonly thought that the prefrontal cortex produces these kinds of higher-order states. In this paper, I first argue that this is likely correct, meaning that, if some higher-order theory is true, prefrontal lesions should produce dramatic deficits in visual consciousness. I then survey prefrontal lesion data, looking for evidence of such deficits. I argue that no such deficits are to be found, and that this presents a compelling case against higher-order theories.     

Implicit sequence learning and conscious awareness

This paper uses the Process Dissociation Procedure to explore whether people can acquire unconscious knowledge in the serial reaction time task [Destrebecqz, A., & Cleeremans, A. (2001). Can sequence learning be implicit? New evidence with the Process Dissociation Procedure. Psychonomic Bulletin &Review, 8, 343-350; Wilkinson, L., & Shanks, D. R. (2004). Intentional control and implicit sequence learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 30, 354-369]. Experiment 1 showed that people generated legal sequences above baseline levels under exclusion instructions. Reward moved exclusion performance towards baseline, indicating that the extent of motivation in the test phase influenced the expression of unconscious knowledge. Experiments 2 and 3 revealed that even with reward, adding noise to the sequences or shortening training led to above-baseline exclusion performance, suggesting that task difficulty and the amount of training also affected the expression of unconscious knowledge. The results help resolve some current debates about the role of conscious awareness in sequence learning.     

Detecting conscious awareness from involuntary autonomic responses

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 to sequences of piano notes that, without their being told, predicted a pleasant fanfare or an aversive noise according to an abstract rule. Stimuli were presented without distraction (attended), or while distracted by a visual task to remove awareness of the rule (unattended). A test phase included occasional violations of the rule. Only participants attending the sounds reported awareness of violations and only they showed significantly greater SCR for noise occurring in violation, vs. accordance, with the rule. Our results establish theoretically significant dissociations between conscious and unconscious processing and furnish new opportunities for clinical assessment of residual consciousness in patient populations.     

On the signals underlying conscious awareness of action

To investigate whether conscious judgments of movement onset are based solely on pre-movement signals (i.e., premotor or efference copy signals) or whether sensory feedback (i.e., reafferent) signals also play a role, participants judged the onset of finger and toe movements that were either active (i.e., self initiated) or passive (i.e., initiated by the experimenter). Conscious judgments were made by reporting the position of a rotating clock hand presented on a computer screen and were then compared to the actual measured time of movement onset. In line with previous studies, judgment errors were found to be anticipatory for both finger and toe movements. There was a significant difference between judgment errors for active and passive movements, with judgments of active movements being more anticipatory than judgments of passive movements. This is consistent with a pre-movement (from here on referred to as an “efferent”) account of action awareness because premotor and efference copy signals are only present in active movements, whereas the main source of movement information in passive movements is sensory feedback which is subject to time delays of conduction (and hence predicts later judgment times for passive movements). However, judgments of active toe movement onset time were less anticipatory than judgments of active finger movement onset time. This pattern of results is not consistent with a pure efferent account of conscious awareness of action onset - as this account predicts more anticipatory judgments for toe movements compared to finger movements. Instead, the data support the idea that conscious judgments of movement onset are based on efferent (i.e., premotor, efference copy) and reafferent (i.e., feedback from the movement) components.     

Triggering self-presentation efforts outside of people's conscious awareness

Three studies utilized priming techniques to examine whether self-presentations can be activated without conscious awareness. The results across all experiments consistently demonstrated nonconscious self-presentation effects, in that people were unaware that their self-presentations were triggered automatically and that their self-presentations were comparable to participants who were explicitly instructed to self-present. The findings are novel because they are the first to demonstrate that self-presentations can be triggered without conscious awareness in a manner similar to self-presentations that are strategically selected. In addition, the results help undermine the common misconception that self-presentation typically involves conscious deliberation, pretense, or outright deception.     

In support of content theories of art

A standard view of reference holds that a speaker's use of a name refers to a certain thing in virtue of the speaker's associating a condition with that use that singles the referent out. This view has been criticized by Saul Kripke as empirically inadequate. Recently, however, it has been argued that a version of the standard view, a response-based theory of reference, survives the charge of empirical inadequacy by allowing that associated conditions may be largely or even entirely implicit. This paper argues that response-based theories of reference are prey to a variant of the empirical inadequacy objection, because they are ill-suited to accommodate the successful use of proper names by pre-school children. Further, I argue that there is reason to believe that normal adults are, by and large, no different from children with respect to how the referents of their names are determined. I conclude that speakers typically refer positionally: the referent of a use of a proper name is typically determined by aspects of the speaker's position, rather than by associated conditions present, however implicitly, in her psychology.     

The generation of conscious awareness in an incidental learning situation

The purpose of the present experiments was to investigate the generation of conscious awareness (i.e., of verbal report) in an incidental learning situation. While the single-system account assumes that all markers of learning, verbal or nonverbal, index the same underlying knowledge representation, multiple-systems accounts grant verbal report a special status as a marker of learning because they assume that the nonverbal and verbal effects of learning rely on different memory representations. We tested these two accounts in two experiments in which we held the amount of learning in the nonverbal memory system constant while manipulating independent variables aimed at affecting learning in the declarative system. The results of both experiments revealed significant differences in verbal report between experimental conditions, but no significant differences in response times. Overall, these results provide clear evidence in favor of the multiple-systems account.     

Drop it like it’s HOT: a vicious regress for higher-order thought theories

Higher-order thought (HOT) theories of consciousness attempt to explain what it takes for a mental state to be conscious, rather than unconscious, by means of a HOT that represents oneself as being in the state in question. Rosenthal (in: Liu, Perry (eds) Consciousness and the self: new essays, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011) stresses that the way we are aware of our own conscious states requires essentially indexical self-reference. The challenge for defenders of HOT theories is to show that there is a way to explain the required reference-fixing mechanisms that is compatible with the theory. According to Rosenthal, the reference to oneself as such is grounded in the disposition to identify the individual the HOT refers to as the individual who has that HOT. I argue that this leads to a vicious infinite regress on the more than plausible assumption that our cognitive capacities are limited. This leaves such theories without a foundation, since self-reference is thought essential to consciousness.

     

Partial awareness distinguishes between measuring conscious perception and conscious content: Reply to Dienes and Seth

In their comment on Sandberg, Timmermans, Overgaard, and Cleeremans (2010), Dienes and Seth argue that increased sensitivity of the Perceptual Awareness Scale (PAS) is a consequence of the scale being less exclusive rather than more exhaustive. According to Dienes and Seth, this is because PAS may measure some conscious content, though not necessarily relevant conscious content, “If one saw a square but was only aware of seeing a flash of something, then one has not consciously seen a square.” In this reply, we claim that there is a difference between conscious visual experience, which may be partial, and the resulting conscious content, which is conceptual. Whereas PAS measures the first, confidence judgments and post-decision wagering measure the second.     

Testosterone affects gaze aversion from angry faces outside of conscious awareness

Throughout vertebrate phylogeny, testosterone has motivated animals to obtain and maintain social dominance-a fact suggesting that unconscious primordial brain mechanisms are involved in social dominance. In humans, however, the prevailing view is that the neocortex is in control of primordial drives, and testosterone is thought to promote social dominance via conscious feelings of superiority, indefatigability, strength, and anger. Here we show that testosterone administration in humans prolongs dominant staring into the eyes of threatening faces that are viewed outside of awareness, without affecting consciously experienced feelings. These findings reveal that testosterone motivates social dominance in humans in much the same ways that it does in other vertebrates: involuntarily, automatically, and unconsciously.     

Empirical comparisons of bilinear and nonbilinear utility theories

Several bilinear and nonbilinear utility theories are evaluated using individual data from 144 informants. The nonbilinear models are best for 67% of the informants. The nonrational property of duplex decomposition linking joint receipts and mixed gambles of gains and losses is more adequate than the rational link of general segregation for 73% of the informants. The correlations are very high and linear, even in the worst fitting case. The weighting functions are mostly inverse-S-shaped and for 84% of the informants are fit best by the class of functions proposed by D. Prelec. These fits were generally excellent, with a minimum correlation of.81, a maximum of.99, and an average of.97.     

Anxiety sensitivity, conscious awareness and selective attentional biases in children

The current study investigated whether physical anxiety sensitivity (AS) is associated with selective attentional biases to affective stimuli in children. The dot-probe paradigm was used to examine the deployment of attention towards words pertaining to anxiety symptomatology, socially threatening words, and positive words, in samples of 8-10-year-old children. Word pairs were presented under both masked and unmasked conditions. Irrespective of masking, children high in physical AS displayed an attentional vigilance for emotional words relative to neutral words, whereas those low in physical AS displayed a relative avoidance of such material. The results of this study are interesting as they not only suggest the presence of automatic AS-related biases in childhood, but that this is a general emotionality bias rather than one related to specific anxiety-related stimuli.     

Arousal, working memory, and conscious awareness in contingency learning

There are wide individual differences in the ability to detect a stimulus contingency embedded in a complex paradigm. The present study used a cognitive masking paradigm to better understand individual differences related to contingency learning. Participants were assessed on measures of electrodermal arousal and on working memory capacity before engaging in the contingency learning task. Contingency awareness was assessed both by trial-by-trial verbal reports obtained during the task and by a short post-task recognition questionnaire. Participants who became aware had fewer non-specific skin conductance responses and tended to score higher on a digit span assessment. Skin conductance level was not significantly lower in the aware group than in the unaware group. These findings are consistent with studies showing that lower arousal and greater cognitive processing capacity facilitate conscious perception of a greater breadth of information within a scene or a task.     

Links between rapid ERP responses to fearful faces and conscious awareness

To study links between rapid ERP responses to fearful faces and conscious awareness, a backward‐masking paradigm was employed where fearful or neutral target faces were presented for different durations and were followed by a neutral face mask. Participants had to report target face expression on each trial. When masked faces were clearly visible (200 ms duration), an early frontal positivity, a later more broadly distributed positivity, and a temporo‐occipital negativity were elicited by fearful relative to neutral faces, confirming findings from previous studies with unmasked faces. These emotion‐specific effects were also triggered when masked faces were presented for only 17 ms, but only on trials where fearful faces were successfully detected. When masked faces were shown for 50 ms, a smaller but reliable frontal positivity was also elicited by undetected fearful faces. These results demonstrate that early ERP responses to fearful faces are linked to observers' subjective conscious awareness of such faces, as reflected by their perceptual reports. They suggest that frontal brain regions involved in the construction of conscious representations of facial expression are activated at very short latencies.     

Empirical support for a Type A belief system

Much of the research on Type A behavior has focused on overt manifestations of the pattern; consequently, the underlying psychological dimensions are poorly understood (Matthews, 1982). Price (1982) has proposed an elaborate, but empirically unvalidated, model suggesting that a specific set of beliefs underlies the Type A behavior pattern. A series of experiments was conducted to test the validity of Price's model and to develop a device for assessing these beliefs. The internal consistency and test-retest reliability of this measure were .94 and .84, respectively. Significant positive correlations were found with traditional measures of Type A behavior as well as various facets of anger and anxiety. Finally, subjects who endorsed a high degree of Type A beliefs set significantly higher performance standards and were less likely to achieve these standards than their low-scoring counterparts. Results are discussed with regard to the theoretical construct of Type A as well as their implications for future research and treatment.This research is an extension of a study presented at the 92nd meeting of the American Psychological Association, Toronto, Canada, August 1984Special thanks to to Drs. James A. Blumenthal, Martin T. Gipson, Abby C. King, and Ellie T. Sturgis for their helpful comments in the preparation of this article.