Communicating Intentions Through Nonverbal Behaviors Conscious and Nonconscious Encoding of Liking

The fundamental components of interpersonal transactions at the nonverbal level often include the cognitively held intention of one person to increase or decrease affiliation with his or her partner, the encoding of this intention into behavioral displays, and the decoding of the behavioral displays by the other. Nonverbal encoding of relational information may be conducted at less than conscious levels of information processing although intentions may be held consciously. A study was conducted in which naive confederates were induced to either increase or decrease their displays of liking for their partner. It was found that confederates’intentions to show increased or decreased liking toward their partners were positively correlated with the partners’liking for the confederate. However, less than one quarter of the confederates could demonstrate an accurate conscious awareness of the behaviors they used and how they used them. Of this small number, those who were given the conscious intention of showing decreased liking demonstrated the most conscious awareness of their nonverbal behaviors.     

Descartes on the Cognitive Structure of Sensory Experience

Descartes is often thought to bifurcate sensory experience into two distinct cognitive components: the sensing of secondary qualities and the more or less intellectual perceiving of primary qualities. A closer examination of his analysis of sensory perception in the Sixth Replies and his treatment of sensory processing in the Dioptrics and Treatise on Man tells a different story. I argue that Descartes offers a unified cognitive account of sensory experience according to which the senses and intellect operate together to produce a fundamentally imagistic representation of the world in both its primary and secondary quality aspects. At stake here is not only our understanding of the cognitive structure of sensory experience but the relation of sense and intellect more generally in the Cartesian mind. The deep bifurcation in the Cartesian mind is not between the sensory perception of primary and secondary qualities but between sensory perception and purely intellectual perception.