Orienting of attention, pupil size, and the norepinephrine system

This research examined a novel suggestion regarding the involvement of the locus coeruleus-norepinephrine (LC-NE) system in orienting reflexive (exogenous) attention. A common procedure for studying exogenous orienting of attention is Posner's cuing task. Importantly, one can manipulate the required level of target processing by changing task requirements, which, in turn, can elicit a different time course of inhibition of return (IOR). An easy task (responding to target location) produces earlier onset IOR, whereas a demanding task (responding to target identity) produces later onset IOR. Aston-Jones and Cohen (Annual Review of Neuroscience, 28, 403-450, 2005) presented a theory suggesting two different modes of LC activity: tonic and phasic. Accordingly, we suggest that in the more demanding task, the LC-NE system is activated in phasic mode, and in the easier task, it is activated in tonic mode. This, in turn, influences the appearance of IOR. We examined this suggestion by measuring participants' pupil size, which has been demonstrated to correlate with the LC-NE system, while they performed cuing tasks. We found a response-locked phasic dilation of the pupil in the discrimination task, as compared with the localization task, which may reflect different firing modes of the LC-NE system during the two tasks. We also demonstrated a correlation between pupil size at the time of cue presentation and magnitude of IOR.     

The (Im)Possible Grasp of Networked Realities: Disclosing Gregory Bateson’s Work for the Study of Technology

In a world that is becoming more ‘networked’ than ever, especially on the personal-everyday level—with for example digital media pervading our lives and the Internet of Things now being on the rise—we need to increasingly account for ‘networked realities’. But are we as human beings actually well-equipped enough, epistemologically speaking, to do so? Multiple approaches within the philosophy of technology suggest our usage of technologies to be in the first instance oriented towards efficiency and the achievement of goals. We thereby neglect the actual systemic, networked nature of technology, or its wider impacts. With regard to the pressing issue of how to cross the ‘gap’ between these two ‘modes,’ the paper at hand engages with the work of Gregory Bateson, reading him as a philosopher of technology. Bateson’s notions of “conscious purpose” and “learning” offer excellent tools to understand our predicament of living in a networked world but being partly unable to sufficiently grasp and come to terms with this situation. Moreover, as the article endeavors to demonstrate, Bateson’s thought is to be cast as a crucial addition to the body of theory being developed in the philosophy of technology.     

Completeness and Cut-Elimination for First-Order Ideal Paraconsistent Four-Valued Logic

Studia Logica - In this study, we prove the completeness and cut-elimination theorems for a first-order extension F4CC of Arieli, Avron, and Zamansky’s ideal paraconsistent four-valued logic...     

The privileged role of location in visual working memory

Reports have conflicted about the possible special role of location in visual working memory (WM). One important question is: Do we maintain the locations of objects in WM even when they are irrelevant to the task at hand? Here we used a continuous response scale to study the types of reporting errors that participants make when objects are presented at the same or at different locations in space. When several objects successively shared the same location, participants exhibited a higher tendency to report features of the wrong object in memory; that is, they responded with features that belonged to objects retained in memory but not probed at retrieval. On the other hand, a similar effect was not observed when objects shared a nonspatial feature, such as color. Furthermore, the effect of location on reporting errors was present even when its manipulation was orthogonal to the task at hand. These findings are consistent with the view that binding together different nonspatial features of an object in memory might be mediated through an object’s location. Hence, spatial location may have a privileged role in WM. The relevance of these findings to conceptual models, as well as to neural accounts of visual WM, is discussed.