Representational parts

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences -     

Dissimilarity and attraction: when difference makes a difference.

Students in 93 university classes described themselves and their instructors on personality tests measuring traits relevant (ascendancy and personal relations) and irrelevant (sociability and cautiousness) to teaching skill. Dissimilarity (instructor being higher than student) on relevant trait dimensions was hypothesized to be instrumental for student satisfaction with an instructor's role performance. When students were classified as similar or dissimilar to their instructors on the personality dimensions, those most attracted to their instructors were those dissimilar on relevant (but not irrelevant) traits. The dissimilarity finding was not an artifact of differences in skill of instructor nor of differences in students' perceptions of their instructors' traits. A three-dimensional system was devised to specify when similarity and dissimilarity should promote attraction.     

How to, and how not to, bridge computational cognitive neuroscience and Husserlian phenomenology of time consciousness

A number of recent attempts to bridge Husserlian phenomenology of time consciousness and contemporary tools and results from cognitive science or computational neuroscience are described and critiqued. An alternate proposal is outlined that lacks the weaknesses of existing accounts.     

Skill theory v2.0: dispositions,emulation, and spatial perception

An attempt is made to defend a general approach to the spatial content of perception, an approach according to which perception is imbued with spatial content in virtue of certain kinds of connections between perceiving organism’s sensory input and its behavioral output. The most important aspect of the defense involves clearly distinguishing two kinds of perceptuo-behavioral skills—the formation of dispositions, and a capacity for emulation. The former, the formation of dispositions, is argued to by the central pivot of spatial content. I provide a neural information processing interpretation of what these dispositions amount to, and describe how dispositions, so understood, are an obvious implementation of Gareth Evans’ proposal on the topic. Furthermore, I describe what sorts of contribution are made by emulation mechanisms, and I also describe exactly how the emulation framework differs from similar but distinct notions with which it is often unhelpfully confused, such as sensorimotor contingencies and forward models.     

Habituation,memory, and the evaluative dimension of meaning

Two groups of subjects were exposed to a series of 20 either positively evaluated words (E⁺ group) or negatively evaluated words (E^? group). On the twenty-first trial, half the subjects in E⁺ group (the E^+? group) received a negatively evaluated word while the other half of the subjects received a further positively evaluated word (E⁺⁺ group). A similar subdivision was made with the E^? group to yield E^?+ and E^?? groups. Skin conductance responses to all stimulus words were measured. The responses of the E^+? and E^?+ groups were compared to those of their control groups (E⁺⁺ and E^??) for stimulus words 21 and 22. The results of these analyses, and the data concerning responses prior to stimulus word 21, indicated that subjects habituated to semantic stimuli of the same evaluative meaning. Memory for the words was assessed postexperimentally and its relationship to the orienting response in discussed.     

Agency,perception, space and subjectivity

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - The goal of this paper is to illuminate the connections between agency, perception, subjectivity, space and the body. Such connections have been the...     

The emulation theory of representation: motor control, imagery, and perception

The emulation theory of representation is developed and explored as a framework that can revealingly synthesize a wide variety of representational functions of the brain. The framework is based on constructs from control theory (forward models) and signal processing (Kalman filters). The idea is that in addition to simply engaging with the body and environment, the brain constructs neural circuits that act as models of the body and environment. During overt sensorimotor engagement, these models are driven by efference copies in parallel with the body and environment, in order to provide expectations of the sensory feedback, and to enhance and process sensory information. These models can also be run off-line in order to produce imagery, estimate outcomes of different actions, and evaluate and develop motor plans. The framework is initially developed within the context of motor control, where it has been shown that inner models running in parallel with the body can reduce the effects of feedback delay problems. The same mechanisms can account for motor imagery as the off-line driving of the emulator via efference copies. The framework is extended to account for visual imagery as the off-line driving of an emulator of the motor-visual loop. I also show how such systems can provide for amodal spatial imagery. Perception, including visual perception, results from such models being used to form expectations of, and to interpret, sensory input. I close by briefly outlining other cognitive functions that might also be synthesized within this framework, including reasoning, theory of mind phenomena, and language.