Exploring Enactive Realism

Abstract

The paper considers the success of enactive realism about perception; the theory that perceivers gain direct access to the mind-independent physical world through their exercise of sensorimotor skills and understanding. I argue that while it is plausible that the possession of some forms of knowledge, conceptual or practical, may enable perceptual contact with the environment, the role of sensorimotor mastery is not as pervasive as the enactive realist proposes. Non-veridical perception, furthermore, cannot be captured adequately by enactivist resources under a disjunctivist framework.     

Marking the Perception–Cognition Boundary: The Criterion of Stimulus-Dependence

Philosophy, scientific psychology, and common sense all distinguish perception from cognition. While there is little agreement about how the perception–cognition boundary ought to be drawn, one prominent idea is that perceptual states are dependent on a stimulus, or are stimulus-dependent, in a way that cognitive states are not. This paper seeks to develop this idea in a way that can accommodate two apparent counterexamples: hallucinations, which are prima facie perceptual yet stimulus-independent; and demonstrative thoughts, which are prima facie cognitive yet stimulus-dependent. The payoff is not only a specific proposal for marking the perception–cognition boundary, but also a deeper understanding of the natures of hallucination and demonstrative thought.     

Hallucination And Imagination

What are hallucinations? A common view in the philosophical literature is that hallucinations are degenerate kinds of perceptual experience. I argue instead that hallucinations are degenerate kinds of sensory imagination. As well as providing a good account of many actual cases of hallucination, the view that hallucination is a kind of imagination represents a promising account of hallucination from the perspective of a disjunctivist theory of perception like naïve realism. This is because it provides a way of giving a positive characterisation of hallucination—rather than characterising hallucinations in negative, relational, terms as mental events that are subjectively indistinguishable from veridical perceptual experiences.     

Naïve Realism,Hallucination, and Causation: A New Response to the Screening Off Problem

This paper sets out a novel response to the ‘screening off’ problem for naïve realism. The aim is to resist the claim (which many naïve realists accept) that the kind of experience involved in hallucinating also occurs during perception, by arguing that there are causal constraints that must be met if an hallucinatory experience is to occur, ones that are never met in perceptual cases. Notably, given this response, it turns out that, contra current orthodoxy, naïve realists need not adopt any particular view about the psychological nature of hallucinatory experience to handle the screening off problem. Consequently, room opens up for naïve realists to endorse whatever theory of hallucinatory experience seems to best capture the distinctive nature of such episodes.     

大脑视知觉调控的神经机制

大脑的知觉加工并非单纯由外部刺激驱动,而是存在自上而下的知觉调控。尽管这一现象被大量实验研究证实,但其神经机制仍然是认知神经科学研究的重要问题。本研究系统介绍了知觉调控的神经基础、实现形式、研究范式,及其理论模型,分析指出了当前研究面临的主要问题,并对未来的研究进行了展望,以期促进该问题研究的进一步开展。     

小学教师期望对学生人格的影响:学生知觉的中介作用

以1260名小学生为被试,采用问卷法探讨小学教师期望对人格的影响,以及学生知觉在教师期望对人格影响中的中介效应。结果表明:(1)教师期望各维度与人格的智能特征、认真自控、外倾性和亲社会性均有显著正相关,品行和纪律期望维度与人格的情绪稳定性相关不显著。(2)学业期望对人格的智能特征、外倾性和情绪稳定性预测作用最大,品行期望对认真自控预测作用最大,纪律期望对亲社会性预测作用最大。(3)小学生知觉在教师期望对人格智能特征、认真自控、外倾性、亲社会性影响中起部分中介作用,在教师期望对人格情绪稳定性影响中不存在中介效应。     

On French listeners’ ability to use stress during spoken word processing

Previous studies have suggested that French listeners experience difficulties when they have to discriminate between words that differ in stress. A limitation is that these studies used stress patterns that do not respect the rules of stress placement in French. In this study, three stress patterns were tested on bisyllabic words (1) the legal stress pattern in French, namely words that were unstressed compared to words that bore primary stress on their last syllable (/?u?i/-/?u’?i/), (2) an illegal stress location pattern, namely words that bore primary stress on their first syllable compared to words that bore primary stress on their last syllable (/’?u?i/-/?u’?i/) and (3) an illegal pattern that involves an unstressed word, namely words that were unstressed compared to words that bore primary stress on their first syllable (/?u?i/-/’?u?i/). In an ABX task, participants heard three items produced by three different speakers and had to indicate whether X was identical to A or B. The stimuli A and B varied in stress (/?u’?i/-/?u?i/-/?u’?i/), in one phoneme (/?u’?i/-/?u’???/-/?u’?i/) or in both stress and one phoneme (/?u’?i/-/?u???/-/?u’?i/). The results showed that French listeners are fully able to discriminate between two words differing in stress provided that the stress pattern included an unstressed word. More importantly, they suggest that the French listeners’ difficulties mainly reside in locating stress within words.     

Proneness to hallucinations and delusions in a non‐clinical sample: Exploring associations with metacognition and negative affect

Commonly, individuals prone to hallucinations and delusions hold dysfunctional metacognitive beliefs and report higher levels of negative affect, yet, these associations have not been clearly investigated in non‐clinical samples due to the failure to control for high intercorrelations between variables. The aim of the current study was to investigate how hallucination and delusion proneness are associated with dysfunctional metacognitions and negative affect. A cross‐sectional sample of 715 students free from psychiatric diagnoses (M_age = 28.1 years, SD = 10.9, range 18–65) completed the Launay‐Slade Hallucination Scale (LSHS‐R); Peters et al. Delusion Inventory (PDI‐21); Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale (DASS‐21); and the Metacognition Questionnaire (MCQ‐30). Findings that participants who were prone to both hallucinations and delusions reported elevated levels of negative affect support the need for targeted mental health treatment for individuals who experience psychological distress related to their hallucinatory and delusional experiences. While metacognition beliefs of need to control thoughts and cognitive self‐consciousness, along with the anxiety and stress DASS‐21 subscales appeared as significant cross‐sectional predictors of proneness to hallucinations and delusions, only metacognitions demonstrated any notable predictive value for delusion proneness. This finding questions the role of metacognitions in determining hallucination and delusion proneness in non‐clinical samples.     

从信息加工的角度看创造力过程

传统意义上定义的创造力并不能完全揭示创造性行为和认知的本质,最近的研究从认知信息加工的角度提出了创造力活动中的认知过程具有一定的普遍性和规律性,并将认知过程分为初级过程和次级过程,初级过程为产生合成过程,提取和组织信息;次级过程则是对信息进行更高层次的筛选和监控,同时初级过程和次级过程存在一定的交互作用     

内隐学习和无觉察知觉辨析

在无意识研究的热潮中,无觉察知觉、内隐学习相继得到很大发展。这两种认知过程都涉及到无意识加工,相互之间有非常密切的联系。本文介绍了这两种无意识加工过程,并对其联系、区别进行了辨析。     

How anxiety induces verbal hallucinations

Verbal hallucinations are often associated with pronounced feelings of anxiety, and it has also been suggested that anxiety somehow triggers them. In this paper, we offer a phenomenological or ‘personal-level’ account of how it does so. We show how anxious anticipation of one’s own thought contents can generate an experience of their being ‘alien’. It does so by making an experience of thinking more like one of perceiving, resulting in an unfamiliar kind of intentional state. This accounts for a substantial subset of verbal hallucinations, which are experienced as falling within one’s psychological boundaries and lacking in auditory qualities.     

Accounting for the phenomenology and varieties of auditory verbal hallucination within a predictive processing framework

Two challenges that face popular self-monitoring theories (SMTs) of auditory verbal hallucination (AVH) are that they cannot account for the auditory phenomenology of AVHs and that they cannot account for their variety. In this paper I show that both challenges can be met by adopting a predictive processing framework (PPF), and by viewing AVHs as arising from abnormalities in predictive processing. I show how, within the PPF, both the auditory phenomenology of AVHs, and three subtypes of AVH, can be accounted for.     

Aggressive content and related defenses in Rorschach responses of children ages 6–14

The aim of this study was to test the psychoanalytic notion that there is a gradual progression with age from primary to secondary process thinking. Three cohorts of children, age 6, 9, and 12, were administered the Rorschach procedure at yearly intervals—twice for the oldest cohort and three times for the two younger ones. No support was found for the developmental hypothesis in terms of aggressive content of the responses and the related defenses. The expectation of more aggressive content at earlier ages, as a reflection of more primitive aggressive drives, was not confirmed.     

“The primary process”: The vicissitude of a concept

Abstract

During the first twenty years that Freud spent creating his theory, he assumed that most of the functions responsible for creating mental-thought structures were organized according to two different forms or principles of thought. He called these forms “primary process” and “secondary process”. The “secondary process” is identified with rational thinking and the ego, and it is easy to follow the changes that this concept underwent in the works of Freud that followed. The concept of “primary process”, on the other hand, disappeared from his later works with no explanation. This article traces the changes that the “primary process” underwent in Freud's thinking and examines the connection between his analytical technique and his research method. A close study of the changes that the “primary process” underwent reveals that Freud's developmental thought process included concepts whose directional changes may be termed “regressive”.