How could phenomenal consciousness be involved in mental function?

In a phylogenetic perspective, the phenomenal and the functional aspects of consciousness cannot be separated because consciousness, as a phenomenal experience, must be causally effective. The hypothesis I propose is that the fundamental property of consciousness consists of a self-organizing process: the differentiation of a content. The differentiation of a content occurs on the basis of the relations internal to a representational whole, which behaves like a field and tends towards a condition of equilibrium. This hypothesis can be somehow considered an extension of Gestalt visual perceptual theory. Unlike neurocomputational processes, which are non-conscious and extrinsic to the representation, conscious processes are intrinsic to the representational whole. Consciousness, as an intrinsically self-organizing process interwoven with its phenomenal aspects, can be more than epiphenomenal and it can be involved in mental function. The paper then discusses the implications of this hypothesis for subjectivity and the explanatory gap.     

The emotional meaning of harmonic intervals

The present study reexamines the hypothesis that there exist emotional attributions specific to simple musical elements. In Experiment 1, groups of participants, with varying musical expertise, rated the emotional meaning of four natural intervals heard as two harmonic sine waves. In Experiment 2, the higher tone was kept constant at an octave above the low tone used in Experiment 1, while the lower tone was constant. Attributions for each interval were positively correlated from one experimental session to another; despite the intervals differed in terms of their component pitches. Musicians gave the most reliable choices of meaning. In a third experiment, participants rated the emotional meaning of various unfamiliar ethnic melodies with expressions describing the intervals’ meaning based on the results of Experiment 1 and 2. There were distinct profiles of emotional meanings for each melody and these coincided with the meaning of intervals that constituted the surface and deep structure of each melody. The intervallic structures (i.e., the main intervals of the tunes) and respective chords for each melody were also presented aurally and participants’ ratings showed similar emotional profiles for these when compared to those of the melodies themselves.     

Global subjective memorability and the strength-based mirror effect in recognition memory

Between-list manipulations of memory strength through repetition commonly generate a mirror effect, with more hits and fewer false alarms for strengthened items. However, this pattern is rarely seen with within-list manipulations of strength. In three experiments, we investigated the conditions under which a within-list mirror effect of strength (items presented once or thrice) is observed. In Experiments 1 and 2, we indirectly manipulated the overall subjective memorability of the studied lists by varying the proportion of nonwords. A within-list mirror effect was observed only in Experiment 2, in which a higher proportion of nonwords was presented in the study list. In Experiment 3, the presentation duration for each item (0.5 vs. 3 sec) was manipulated between groups with the purpose of affecting subjective memorability. A within-list mirror effect was observed only for the short presentation durations. Thus, across three experiments, we found the within-list mirror effect only under conditions of poor overall subjective memorability. We propose that when the overall subjective memorability is low, people switch their response strategy on an item-by-item basis and that this generates the observed mirror effect.     

Role of the parietal cortex in long-term representation of spatial information in the rat

The processing of spatial information in the brain requires a network of structures within which the hippocampus plays a prominent role by elaborating an allocentric representation of space. The parietal cortex has long been suggested to have a complementary function. An overview of lesion and unit recording data in the rat indicates that the parietal cortex is involved in different aspects of spatial information processing including allocentric and egocentric processing. More specifically, the data suggest that the parietal cortex plays a fundamental role in combining visual and motion information, a process that would be important for an egocentric-to-allocentric transformation process. Furthermore, the parietal cortex may also have a role in the long-term storage of representation although this possibility needs further evidence. The data overall show that the parietal cortex occupies a unique position in the brain at the interface of perception and representation.     

The right hemispheric dominance for face perception in preschool children depends on the visual discrimination level

The developmental origin of human adults’ right hemispheric dominance in response to face stimuli remains unclear, in particular because young infants’ right hemispheric advantage in face‐selective response is no longer present in preschool children, before written language acquisition. Here we used fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS) with scalp electroencephalography (EEG) to test 52 preschool children (5.5 years old) at two different levels of face discrimination: discrimination of faces against objects, measuring face‐selectivity, or discrimination between individual faces. While the contrast between faces and nonface objects elicits strictly bilateral occipital responses in children, strengthening previous observations, discrimination of individual faces in the same children reveals a strong right hemispheric lateralization over the occipitotemporal cortex. Picture‐plane inversion of the face stimuli significantly decreases the individual discrimination response, although to a much smaller extent than in older children and adults tested with the same paradigm. However, there is only a nonsignificant trend for a decrease in right hemispheric lateralization with inversion. There is no relationship between the right hemispheric lateralization in individual face discrimination and preschool levels of readings abilities. The observed difference in the right hemispheric lateralization obtained in the same population of children with two different paradigms measuring neural responses to faces indicates that the level of visual discrimination is a key factor to consider when making inferences about the development of hemispheric lateralization of face perception in the human brain.     

Happiness Prospers in Democracy

An econometric analysis of a happiness function, based on a surveyof 6,000 persons in Switzerland, indicates that:(1) the more developed the institutions of direct democracy, the happier the individuals are;(2) people derive procedural utility from the possibility of participating in the direct democratic process over and above a more favorable political outcome;(3) the unemployed are much less happy than the employed, independent of income;(4) higher income is associated with higher levels of happiness.The consideration of institutional differences in cross-regional data offers important new insights into happiness research.     

Auditory dominance in temporal processing: new evidence from synchronization with simultaneous visual and auditory sequences

Evidence that audition dominates vision in temporal processing has come from perceptual judgment tasks. This study shows that this auditory dominance extends to the largely subconscious processes involved in sensorimotor coordination. Participants tapped their finger in synchrony with auditory and visual sequences containing an event onset shift (EOS), expected to elicit an involuntary phase correction response (PCR), and also tried to detect the EOS. Sequences were presented in unimodal and bimodal conditions, including one in which auditory and visual EOSs of opposite sign coincided. Unimodal results showed greater variability of taps, smaller PCRs, and poorer EOS detection in vision than in audition. In bimodal conditions, variability of taps was similar to that for unimodal auditory sequences, and PCRs depended more on auditory than on visual information, even though attention was always focused on the visual sequences.     

Circle graphs and monadic second-order logic

This article is part of a project consisting in expressing, whenever possible, graph properties and graph transformations in monadic second-order logic or in its extensions using modulo p cardinality set predicates or auxiliary linear orders. A circle graph is the intersection graph of a set of chords of a circle. Such a set is called a chord diagram. It can also be described by a word with two occurrences of each letter, called a double occurrence word. If a circle graph is prime for the split (or join) decomposition defined by Cunnigham, it has a unique representation by a chord diagram, and this diagram can be defined by monadic second-order formulas with the even cardinality set predicate. By using the (canonical) split decomposition of a circle graph, we define in monadic second-order logic with auxiliary linear orders all its chord diagrams. This construction uses the fact that the canonical split decomposition of a graph can be constructed in monadic second-order logic with help of an arbitrary linear order. We prove that the order of first occurrences of the letters in a double occurrence word w that represents a connected circle graph determines this word in a unique way. The word w can be defined by a monadic second-order formula from the word of first occurrences of letters. We also prove that a set of circle graphs has bounded clique-width if and only if all the associated chord diagrams have bounded tree-width.     

New Age Beliefs and Societal Risk Perception1

The New Age movement is a transpersonal movement focused on mystic awakening and human potential development. It has become an important component in modern risk discourse, as it often goes hand in hand with technology opposition and worries about technology risks. The present study examined the possible relationships between New Age beliefs and societal risk perception. It was shown that several hazards—particularly the ones at the center of current debates about security policies and environmental policies—were perceived as significantly riskier by the New Agers than by others. These (hot) hazards include nuclear waste storage, chemical plants, urban violence, genetically engineered organisms, marijuana, and hospital waste.     

Molyneux' question redux

After more than three centuries, Molyneux's question continues to challenge our understanding of cognition and perceptual systems. Locke, the original recipient of the question, approached it as a theoretical exercise relevant to long-standing philosophical issues, such as nativism, the possibility of common sensibles, and the empiricism-rationalism debate. However, philosophers were quick to adopt the experimentalist's stance as soon as they became aware of recoveries from congenital blindness through ophtalmic surgery. Such recoveries were widely reported to support empiricist positions, suggesting that the question had found its empirical answer. Contrary to this common view, we argue that studies of patients recovering from early blindness through surgery cannot provide an answer. In fact, because of the very nature of such ophtalmological interventions it is impossible to test the question in the empirical conditions outlined by Molyneux. Thus we propose that Molyneux's question be treated as an early thought experiment of a specific kind. Although thought experiments of this kind cannot be turned into actual experimental conditions, they provide a conceptual restructuring of theories. Such restructuring in turn leads to new predictions that can then be tested by normal experiments. In accord with this interpretation, we show that Molyneux's question can be analyzed into a hierarchy of specific questions about vision in its phenomenal and sensory-motor components. Some of these questions do lead to actual experimental conditions that could be studied empirically.