A review of Frederick Adams and Kenneth Aizawa, The Bounds of Cognition

In The Bounds of Cognition, Fred Adams and Kenneth Aizawa treat the arguments for extended cognition to withering criticism. I summarize their main arguments and focus special attention on their distinction between the extended cognitive system hypothesis and the extended cognition hypothesis, as well as on their demand for a mark of the mental.     

Making sense of mirror neurons

The discovery of mirror neurons has been hailed as one of the most exciting developments in neuroscience in the past few decades. These neurons discharge in response to the observation of others’ actions. But how are we to understand the function of these neurons? In this paper I defend the idea that mirror neurons are best conceived as components of a sensory system that has the function to perceive action. In short, mirror neurons are part of a hitherto unrecognized “sixth sense”. In this spirit, research should move toward developing a psychophysics of mirror neurons.     

Caught in the act: How extraverted and introverted friends communally cope with being recorded

This study explored how close friends who were similar or opposite on extraversion communally coped with being put on the spot to produce a recorded conversation. Participants were 50 pairs of same-sex college-age friends (54% female) who explicitly discussed the fact that their conversation was being recorded. The initial ‘on-stage’ episode emerged consistently earliest for extraverted dyads, and the majority of their episodes quickly diverted the on-stage moment. Dyads that included at least one introvert engaged in more extensive assortments of on-stage maneuvers, including research talk, soothing, and joking. In introvert–extravert dyads the extravert usually initiated and ended these episodes. Implications are discussed for understanding how personality is reciprocally implicated in managing shared everyday problems.     

A note on the consistency of estimators in the analysis of moment structures

This paper is concerned with the consistency of estimators in the analysis of moment structures. An example is given where in spite of identifiability of the parameters the associated estimator is inconsistent. Consistency is shown to hold under the additional condition of compactness of the parameter space.     

Effects of similarity, difficulty, and nontarget presentation on the time course of visual attention

Long-lasting interference from an initial visual target on a subsequent one has been measured in two paradigms: rapid serial presentation of targets and nontargets at a single location, and simple presentation of two spatially separated targets. We note that comparisons between these paradigms might be invalid, since interference in each paradigm can be attributed to a different source: demands on selective attention, or demands to switch locations. We use a novel target presentation that both minimizes selection demands and eliminates location switching, yet we still find long-lasting interference. We suggest that all three paradigms discussed tap a common attentional limit. We also examine effects of similarity between targets, and effects of discrimination difficulty on the initial target. We find that similarity effects are more pronounced when nontargets are present, and we find no effect of discrimination difficulty on subsequent interference.     

The attentional blink

When two masked targets (T1 and T2) are presented within approximately 500 ms of each other, subjects are often unable to report the second of the two targets (T2) accurately, even though the first has been reported correctly. In contrast, subjects can report T2 accurately when instructed to ignore T1, or when T1 and T2 are separated by more than 500 ms. The above pattern of results has been labelled the attentional blink (AB). Experiments have revealed that the AB is not the result of perceptual, memory or response output limitations. In general, the various theories advanced to account for the AB, although they differ in the specific mechanisms purported to be responsible, assume that allocating attention to T1 leaves less attention for T2, rendering T2 vulnerable to decay or substitution. The present report attempts to bring together these various accounts by proposing a unifying theory. This report also highlights recent attempts to determine if the AB exists across stimulus modalities and points to applications of AB methods in understanding deficits of visual neglect. We conclude by suggesting that investigations of the AB argue in favour of the view that attention may be thought of as a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for enabling consciousness.