The Bodily Self: The Sensori-Motor Roots of Pre-Reflective Self-Consciousness

A bodily self is characterized by pre-reflective bodily self-consciousness that is “immune to error through misidentification.” To this end, the body's double involvement in consciousness is considered: it can experience objects intentionally and itself non-intentionally. Specifically, pre-reflective bodily self-consciousness, by contrast with the consciousness of the body that happens to be one's own, consists in experiencing one's body as the point of convergence of action and perception. Neither proprioception alone nor intention alone is sufficient to underlie this pre-reflective bodily self-consciousness. Rather, it is made possible thanks to a sensori-motor integration, allowing a sensitivity to the sensory consequences of one's action, through action monitoring.     

让公众走近现代健康理念——从陈晓旭剃度出家及英年早逝说起

现代健康观是文明进步的产物。让公众走近现代健康观,是追寻人类理想,建设和谐社会,管好国家核心资源,全面提高人民群众健康水平的需要。按照现代健康观的基本精神开展健康教育,是当今社会的重要课题。     

意识状态改变的心理生理学理论与实证研究

从“意识状态”解释人类意识的本质是当前意识心理学研究的一个重要取向。研究意识状态改变(ASC)的物质生理基础具有十分突出的理论和临床实践意义。意识状态改变可以分为自发、物理和生理原因、心理方式和疾病引起这样四个方面,不同类型的意识状态改变可以从激活、意识域、自我觉察和感觉振荡四个维度进行综合归类和分析。不仅脑结构功能状态、脑动力的暂时变化、神经化学过程和新陈代谢过程等因素影响着人的意识经验改变状态,而且环境变化、心理活动和自我控制及技巧也可以暂时改变人的意识功能状态。     

Animal Mind: Science,Philosophy, and Ethics

Although 20^th-century empiricists were agnostic about animal mind and consciousness, this was not the case for their historical ancestors – John Locke, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and, of course, Charles Darwin and George John Romanes. Given the dominance of the Darwinian paradigm of evolutionary continuity, one would not expect belief in animal mind to disappear. That it did demonstrates that standard accounts of how scientific hypotheses are overturned – i.e., by empirical disconfirmation or by exposure of logical flaws – is inadequate. In fact, it can be demonstrated that belief in animal mind disappeared as a result of a change of values, a mechanism also apparent in the Scientific Revolution. The “valuational revolution” responsible for denying animal mind is examined in terms of the rise of Behaviorism and its flawed account of the historical inevitability of denying animal mentation. The effects of the denial of animal consciousness included profound moral implications for the major uses of animals in agriculture and scientific research. The latter is particularly notable for the denial of felt pain in animals. The rise of societal moral concern for animals, however, has driven the “reappropriation of common sense” about animal thought and feeling.     

THE ROLE OF CONSCIOUSNESS AS MEANING MAKER IN SCIENCE, CULTURE, AND RELIGION

Two hundred years ago, Friedrich Schleiermacher took critical issue with Immanuel Kant's intellectual notion of intuition as applied to human nature (Wellmon 2006). He found it necessary to modify—"hermeneutically," as he said—Kant's notion of anthropology by enabling it to include as human the new and strange human tribes Captain Cook found in the Pacific South Seas. A similar hermeneutic move is necessary if physics is to include the local contextual empirical syntheses of relativity and quantum physics. In this hermeneutical revision the synthesis is formed around the notion of a Hilbert Vector Space as the universal grammar of physics, adding to it the dynamic of the Schrödinger equation, and representing empirical "observables" by projection operators that map the subspaces of definite measurable values. Among the set of observable projection operators, some pairs share the same subspace, commute with one another, and share a common laboratory setting. Other pairs do not share this property and are described as being mutually complementary. Complementary symmetries introduce into the discursive language of physics the commonsense notion of contextuality. The new synthesis, proposed by Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, and (in his own way) Paul Dirac, brought physics into the community of common language and established it as a work of general human achievement. ¹     

The assessment of recognition memory using the Remember/Know procedure in amnestic mild cognitive impairment and probable Alzheimer’s disease

This study used the Remember/Know (R/K) procedure combined with signal detection analyses to assess recognition memory in 20 elders with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), 10 patients with probable Alzheimer’s disease (AD) as well as matched healthy older adults. Signal detection analyses first indicated that aMCI and control participants were comparable on general recognition performance. As regards AD patients, they were impaired relative to both aMCI and healthy elders. When assessing Remember and Know responses the aMCI group showed diminished sensitivity for Remember responses but intact Know responses compared to healthy elders. In contrast, AD patients showed decreased sensitivity for both Remember and Know responses compared to control and aMCI participants. The response bias index revealed that AD patients were more liberal than aMCI and control participants when providing Know responses. On the other measures, response bias was comparable between the groups. Overall, this study indicates that the R/K procedure can characterize different aspects of recognition memory performance in persons with aMCI or AD.     

小学四年级儿童简算策略获得的认知过程研究

研究策略获得的过程是了解认知机制的重要途径。本研究采用口语报告和教学实验的结合研究,采用策略意识和策略状况两个维度的评价指标考察,结果表明：策略运用从低到高体现出8级认知序列,策略获得者在策略的掌握过程中有四种认知状态：策略运用初期的倒退状态、策略从不熟练向熟练发展过渡的不稳定状态、策略运用的不彻底状态、有较强的策略意识但缺乏条件化知识的刻板状态。这四种状态反映出,学习者在策略获得过程中策略运用缺陷的常见状况。