The "minimal self" in psychopathology: re-examining the self-disorders in the schizophrenia spectrum

The notion of minimal, basic, pre-reflective or core self is currently debated in the philosophy of mind, cognitive sciences and developmental psychology. However, it is not clear which experiential features such a self is believed to possess. Studying the schizophrenic experience may help exploring the following aspects of the minimal self: the notion of perspective and first person perspective, the 'mineness' of the phenomenal field, the questions of transparency, embodiment of point of view, and the issues of agency and ownership, considered as different and less fundamental than the feeling of mineness. Two clinical vignettes of patients with the diagnosis of schizophrenia will be presented: the first one, illustrating early illness stages, and the second case, of chronic schizophrenia, symptomatically marked by persistent hallucinations. Through their analysis, we will discuss the experiential dimensions of minimal self.     

Reaction time as a function of stimulus intensity for the monkey

Monkeys were trained to release a telegraph key in response to a visual or auditory stimulus. The latency of the key release response was measured for different stimulus intensities. In general, the relation between latency and intensity is inverse and exponential with greater variability of latency at the lower intensities. Some preliminary data involving differential reinforcement of short latencies are presented.     

Remember judgments and the constraint of direct experience

The most direct assessment of episodic memory is provided by Remember versus Know judgments of recalled or recognised items. We investigate whether Remember judgments reflect episodic memories as a re-experience of formerly experienced events (mental time travel). If they do, they must obey the direct experience constraint: only directly experienced events can be re-experienced but not when the event is known through indirectly conveyed information. In two Experiments participants saw simple events in Power Point, e.g. a car exploding. In the direct experience condition these events were directly perceived. In three further conditions information about the object (particular car), the kind of event (explosion), or both were verbally conveyed. After controlling for a potential encoding specificity effect in Experiment 1, the frequency of Remember judgments was twice as high in the direct experience condition than in the other three conditions. This suggests that Remember judgments are—at least to some degree—subject to the direct experience constraint.     

Is reasoning from counterfactual antecedents evidence for counterfactual reasoning?

In most developmental studies the only error children could make on counterfactual tasks was to answer with the current state of affairs. It was concluded that children who did not show this error are able to reason counterfactually. However, children might have avoided this error by using basic conditional reasoning (Rafetseder, Cristi-Vargas, & Perner, 2010 Perner, J. and Rafetseder, E. 2010. “Counterfactual and other forms of conditional reasoning: Children lost in the nearest possible world”. In Understanding counterfactuals/Understanding causation, Edited by: Hoerl, C., McCormack, T. and Beck, S. R. New York: Oxford University Press.  [Google Scholar]). Basic conditional reasoning takes background assumptions represented as conditionals about how the world works. If an antecedent of one of these conditionals is provided by the task, then a likely conclusion can be inferred based only on background assumptions. A critical feature of counterfactual reasoning is that the selection of these additional assumptions is constrained by actual events to which the counterfactual is taken to be counterfactual. In contrast, in basic conditional reasoning one enriches the given antecedent with any plausible assumptions, unconstrained by actual events. In our tasks basic conditional reasoning leads to different answers from counterfactual reasoning. For instance, a doctor, sitting in the park with the intention of reading a paper, is called to an emergency at the swimming pool. The question, “If there had been no emergency, where would the doctor be?” should counterfactually be answered “in the park”. But by ignoring the doctor's intentions, and just reasoning from premises about the default location of a hospital doctor who has not been called out to an emergency, one might answer: “in the hospital”. Only by 6 years of age did children mostly give correct answers.