Thursday, July 5 2012 14:00-16:00 @ Dome Theatre
Symposium 3: "Perceptual consciousness and cognitive access"
Talk 4: “Indeterminate perceptual consciousness and cognitive access”
James Stazicker (Department of Philosophy, New York University, USA)
SUMMARY
Does perceptual consciousness require cognitive access? Those who think it does often appeal to 'inattentional blindness' experiments to confirm their view. Those who think it doesn't often appeal to partial report experiments to confirm theirs. I'll argue that these experiments seem to provide this sort of evidence about perceptual consciousness and cognitive access, only because of an assumption about the determinacy of perceptual consciousness. To assess this assumption, we have to face up to a more ancient philosophical controversy about the difference between perception and cognition.
Showing posts with label July-5. Show all posts
Showing posts with label July-5. Show all posts
Thursday, July 5, 2012
Symposium 3 Talk 3: Sligte
Thursday, July 5 2012 14:00-16:00 @ Dome Theatre
Symposium 3: "Perceptual consciousness and cognitive access"
Talk 3: "Making perceptual consciousness accessible"
Ilja Gabriël Sligte (Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
SUMMARY
In recent years, we have published several papers showing the existence of a high-capacity (up to 15 objects) and long-lived (up to 4s) form of sensory memory that can be clearly dissociated from pure iconic memory (Sligte, Scholte, Lamme, 2008) and from working memory (Sligte, Wokke, Tesselaar, Scholte, & Lamme, 2010; Vandenbroucke, Sligte, & Lamme, 2011). However, all these results were based on partial-report experiments where subjects had to choose between change and no-change responses. This fact has triggered the criticism that subjects were just guessing (Phillips, 2011) on the basis of unconscious representations, as in blindsight. To explore this alternative explanation of our findings, we tested how subjects performed on a partial-report task with continuous response options (see Zhang & Luck, 2008; Bays & Husain, 2008 for examples of the task; we added retro-cues to this paradigm similar to Sligte, Scholte, & Lamme, 2008). We observed that subjects could report 7 objects (out of 10) with high precision on pure iconic memory conditions, about 6 on retro-cue (long-lasting and fragile form of iconic memory) conditions, and only 4 on postcue, working memory conditions. This suggests that all our previous studies validly make perceptual consciousness available for cognitive access.
Symposium 3: "Perceptual consciousness and cognitive access"
Talk 3: "Making perceptual consciousness accessible"
Ilja Gabriël Sligte (Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
SUMMARY
In recent years, we have published several papers showing the existence of a high-capacity (up to 15 objects) and long-lived (up to 4s) form of sensory memory that can be clearly dissociated from pure iconic memory (Sligte, Scholte, Lamme, 2008) and from working memory (Sligte, Wokke, Tesselaar, Scholte, & Lamme, 2010; Vandenbroucke, Sligte, & Lamme, 2011). However, all these results were based on partial-report experiments where subjects had to choose between change and no-change responses. This fact has triggered the criticism that subjects were just guessing (Phillips, 2011) on the basis of unconscious representations, as in blindsight. To explore this alternative explanation of our findings, we tested how subjects performed on a partial-report task with continuous response options (see Zhang & Luck, 2008; Bays & Husain, 2008 for examples of the task; we added retro-cues to this paradigm similar to Sligte, Scholte, & Lamme, 2008). We observed that subjects could report 7 objects (out of 10) with high precision on pure iconic memory conditions, about 6 on retro-cue (long-lasting and fragile form of iconic memory) conditions, and only 4 on postcue, working memory conditions. This suggests that all our previous studies validly make perceptual consciousness available for cognitive access.
Symposium 3 Talk 2: Sackur
Thursday, July 5 2012 14:00-16:00 @ Dome Theatre
Symposium 3: "Perceptual consciousness and cognitive access"
Talk 2: “Kinds of access and phenomenality”
Jérôme Sackur (Department of Cognitive Studies, Ecole Normale Supérieure, France)
SUMMARY
The science of consciousness seems to face a recurrent dilemma: either accept a non fully reportable phenomenal quality of conscious contents or repudiate phenomenality altogether. In this talk I will argue that this dilemma seems to arise only because of the delusive simplicity of the notion of cognitive access. I will show that access is more diverse than commonly acknowledged, and that it can be probed in many ways. Cognitive access is not uniform: for one given stimulus, it may vary in completeness, and also in regards to levels of processing. Therefore, any report of a conscious state must integrate an array of disparate fragments of accessed information, and take into account prior knowledge of the context. I argue that with this richer notion of access, we can aim for a functional construal of consciousness which obviates the need for a special kind of phenomenal consciousness.
Symposium 3: "Perceptual consciousness and cognitive access"
Talk 2: “Kinds of access and phenomenality”
Jérôme Sackur (Department of Cognitive Studies, Ecole Normale Supérieure, France)
SUMMARY
The science of consciousness seems to face a recurrent dilemma: either accept a non fully reportable phenomenal quality of conscious contents or repudiate phenomenality altogether. In this talk I will argue that this dilemma seems to arise only because of the delusive simplicity of the notion of cognitive access. I will show that access is more diverse than commonly acknowledged, and that it can be probed in many ways. Cognitive access is not uniform: for one given stimulus, it may vary in completeness, and also in regards to levels of processing. Therefore, any report of a conscious state must integrate an array of disparate fragments of accessed information, and take into account prior knowledge of the context. I argue that with this richer notion of access, we can aim for a functional construal of consciousness which obviates the need for a special kind of phenomenal consciousness.
Symposium 3 Talk 1: Block
Thursday, July 5 2012 14:00-16:00 @ Dome Theatre
Symposium 3: "Perceptual consciousness and cognitive access"
Talk 1: "The fundamental methodological problem of consciousness research"
Ned Block (Departments of Philosophy, Psychology and Center for Neural Science, New York University, USA)
SUMMARY
Theories of consciousness are ultimately based on what we and other people report (or better: think) about their conscious states in various experimental paradigms. Some approaches—mine for example—claim that on the basis of such evidence we can conclude that cosciousness is richer than cognitive access and in particular there are experimental setups where inevitably reports and other cognitive processes will not reflect all of the specific details of conscious experience. But how can we know about the unaccessed conscious detail when being unaccessed would seem to preclude such knowledge? A similar problem arises in knowing about the conscious experience of unattended stimuli, since reporting requires attention to the stimuli or to memory traces of them, and attention is known to alter conscious experience. This talk proposes a solution to this problem.
Symposium 3: "Perceptual consciousness and cognitive access"
Talk 1: "The fundamental methodological problem of consciousness research"
Ned Block (Departments of Philosophy, Psychology and Center for Neural Science, New York University, USA)
SUMMARY
Theories of consciousness are ultimately based on what we and other people report (or better: think) about their conscious states in various experimental paradigms. Some approaches—mine for example—claim that on the basis of such evidence we can conclude that cosciousness is richer than cognitive access and in particular there are experimental setups where inevitably reports and other cognitive processes will not reflect all of the specific details of conscious experience. But how can we know about the unaccessed conscious detail when being unaccessed would seem to preclude such knowledge? A similar problem arises in knowing about the conscious experience of unattended stimuli, since reporting requires attention to the stimuli or to memory traces of them, and attention is known to alter conscious experience. This talk proposes a solution to this problem.
Symposium 3: ch. Block
Thursday, July 5 2012 14:00-16:00 @ Dome Theatre
Symposium 3: "Perceptual consciousness and cognitive access"
Chair: Ned Block (Departments of Philosophy, Psychology and Center for Neural Science, New York University, USA)
SUMMARY
Introduction by Ned Block
The most basic issue concerning the foundations of conscious perception is whether perceptual consciousness is rich or sparse. The overflow argument uses a form of iconic memory to argue that perceptual consciousness is rich, i.e. has a higher capacity than cognitive access: we are conscious of more than we can report or think about. However, there is also evidence that iconic memory is fragmentary and that it may involve “gists” or generic representations. These points have been used to argue that the informational resources that are the basis of “partial report superiority” in iconic memory experiments are really unconscious, and so the overflow argument is mistaken. A further alternative is that the debate between rich and sparse views of perception is not empirically decideable. This issue is one of the most thoroughly interdisciplinary of all theoretical issues concerning consciousness and accordingly this symposium has two philosophers and two scientists.
Symposium 3: "Perceptual consciousness and cognitive access"
Chair: Ned Block (Departments of Philosophy, Psychology and Center for Neural Science, New York University, USA)
SUMMARY
Introduction by Ned Block
The most basic issue concerning the foundations of conscious perception is whether perceptual consciousness is rich or sparse. The overflow argument uses a form of iconic memory to argue that perceptual consciousness is rich, i.e. has a higher capacity than cognitive access: we are conscious of more than we can report or think about. However, there is also evidence that iconic memory is fragmentary and that it may involve “gists” or generic representations. These points have been used to argue that the informational resources that are the basis of “partial report superiority” in iconic memory experiments are really unconscious, and so the overflow argument is mistaken. A further alternative is that the debate between rich and sparse views of perception is not empirically decideable. This issue is one of the most thoroughly interdisciplinary of all theoretical issues concerning consciousness and accordingly this symposium has two philosophers and two scientists.
Symposium 2 Talk 3: Tsakiris
Thursday, July 5 2012 11:00-13:00 @ Dome Theatre
Symposium 2: "Bringing the in-depth body to the surface: interoception, awareness and prediction"
Talk 3: "Just a heartbeat away from one’s body: interoceptive sensitivity and malleability of self-representations"
Manos Tsakiris (University of London, UK)
SUMMARY
Body-awareness relies on the representation of both interoceptive and exteroceptive percepts coming from one’s body. However, the exact relationship and possible interaction of interoceptive and exteroceptive systems for body-awareness remain unknown. Based on recent models of self-awareness that consider the insula as a convergence zone linked to the representation of the bodily self, we examined the interaction between interoceptive and exteroceptive awareness of the body. Across three experiments, we combined measures of interoceptive sensitivity with experimental manipulations of body representations. Consistent results suggests that interoceptive sensitivity predicts the malleability of body representations, that is, people with low interoceptive sensitivity experience stronger illusions of embodiment (“rubber hand illusion”) and identification (“enfacement illusion”). In one final experiment, we manipulated interoceptive sensitivity by mirror self-observation. Overall these findings suggest that interoceptive sensitivity modulates the integration of multisensory information and predicts the strength of self-representations.
Symposium 2: "Bringing the in-depth body to the surface: interoception, awareness and prediction"
Talk 3: "Just a heartbeat away from one’s body: interoceptive sensitivity and malleability of self-representations"
Manos Tsakiris (University of London, UK)
SUMMARY
Body-awareness relies on the representation of both interoceptive and exteroceptive percepts coming from one’s body. However, the exact relationship and possible interaction of interoceptive and exteroceptive systems for body-awareness remain unknown. Based on recent models of self-awareness that consider the insula as a convergence zone linked to the representation of the bodily self, we examined the interaction between interoceptive and exteroceptive awareness of the body. Across three experiments, we combined measures of interoceptive sensitivity with experimental manipulations of body representations. Consistent results suggests that interoceptive sensitivity predicts the malleability of body representations, that is, people with low interoceptive sensitivity experience stronger illusions of embodiment (“rubber hand illusion”) and identification (“enfacement illusion”). In one final experiment, we manipulated interoceptive sensitivity by mirror self-observation. Overall these findings suggest that interoceptive sensitivity modulates the integration of multisensory information and predicts the strength of self-representations.
Symposium 2 Talk 2: Hopkins
Thursday, July 5 2012 11:00-13:00 @ Dome Theatre
Symposium 2: "Bringing the in-depth body to the surface: interoception, awareness and prediction"
Talk 2: “Interoception and the Problem of Consciousness”
Jim Hopkins (Department of Philosophy, King’s College, UK)
SUMMARY
Recent studies have shown that “unconscious” processing can be surprisingly powerful (cf work in the labs of Lamme, Dijksterhuis, Mattler, Haynes, Dehaene, Bargh, myself, etc). I had taken these results to be a challenge to the notion that sensory awareness has special functional power. Here I criticize my previous arguments. A useful analogy: People without legs can move around (albeit poorly), but we all agree that legs are for locomotion. Likewise, although certain higher cognitive functions can be performed without awareness (just barely better than chance), it does not mean that awareness has no functional advantage. A different approach is to create conditions where subjects are equally good at detecting and discriminating the stimulus, but they report different subjective levels of awareness. Under these performance capacity‐matched cases, we observed functional advantage for awareness only in some specific tasks. These results give powerful constraints for theorizing about sensory awareness in general.
Symposium 2: "Bringing the in-depth body to the surface: interoception, awareness and prediction"
Talk 2: “Interoception and the Problem of Consciousness”
Jim Hopkins (Department of Philosophy, King’s College, UK)
SUMMARY
Recent studies have shown that “unconscious” processing can be surprisingly powerful (cf work in the labs of Lamme, Dijksterhuis, Mattler, Haynes, Dehaene, Bargh, myself, etc). I had taken these results to be a challenge to the notion that sensory awareness has special functional power. Here I criticize my previous arguments. A useful analogy: People without legs can move around (albeit poorly), but we all agree that legs are for locomotion. Likewise, although certain higher cognitive functions can be performed without awareness (just barely better than chance), it does not mean that awareness has no functional advantage. A different approach is to create conditions where subjects are equally good at detecting and discriminating the stimulus, but they report different subjective levels of awareness. Under these performance capacity‐matched cases, we observed functional advantage for awareness only in some specific tasks. These results give powerful constraints for theorizing about sensory awareness in general.
Symposium 2 Talk 1: Critchley
Thursday, July 5 2012 11:00-13:00 @ Dome Theatre
Symposium 2: "Bringing the in-depth body to the surface: interoception, awareness and prediction"
Talk 1: "Visceral afferent signaling, interoceptive awareness and predictive coding: Impact on emotional processes"
Hugo Critchley (Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, Department of Psychiatry, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, UK)
SUMMARY
The experience of emotions as subjective feeling states arguably reflects the cognitive appraisal of information about changes in bodily state in conjunction with the inferences about the causes of those changes, consistent with a predictive coding framework. Moreover, individual differences in physiological responsivity influence the experience of emotions and people can be categorized according to their accuracy in judging physiological processes including heartbeats. Studies of good and bad 'heartbeat detectors' confirm a relationship between enhanced interoceptive ability and intensity of emotional experiences. Mechanistically, central signalling of cardiovascular arousal occurs via the activation of baroreceptors at cardiac systole that signals the occurrence and amplitude of individual heartbeats. We have shown this interoceptive stream differentially influences automatic processing and intentional evaluation of emotional stimuli including facial expressions. Nevertheless, cognitive and physiological dimensions of interoception can be dissociated experimentally, endorsing a model of interoceptive predictive coding which we have recently developed.
Symposium 2: "Bringing the in-depth body to the surface: interoception, awareness and prediction"
Talk 1: "Visceral afferent signaling, interoceptive awareness and predictive coding: Impact on emotional processes"
Hugo Critchley (Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, Department of Psychiatry, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, UK)
SUMMARY
The experience of emotions as subjective feeling states arguably reflects the cognitive appraisal of information about changes in bodily state in conjunction with the inferences about the causes of those changes, consistent with a predictive coding framework. Moreover, individual differences in physiological responsivity influence the experience of emotions and people can be categorized according to their accuracy in judging physiological processes including heartbeats. Studies of good and bad 'heartbeat detectors' confirm a relationship between enhanced interoceptive ability and intensity of emotional experiences. Mechanistically, central signalling of cardiovascular arousal occurs via the activation of baroreceptors at cardiac systole that signals the occurrence and amplitude of individual heartbeats. We have shown this interoceptive stream differentially influences automatic processing and intentional evaluation of emotional stimuli including facial expressions. Nevertheless, cognitive and physiological dimensions of interoception can be dissociated experimentally, endorsing a model of interoceptive predictive coding which we have recently developed.
Symposium 2: ch. Tsakiris
Thursday, July 5 2012 11:00-13:00 @ Dome Theatre
Symposium 2: "Bringing the in-depth body to the surface: interoception, awareness and prediction"
Chair: Manos Tsakiris (Department of Psychology, University of London, UK)
SUMMARY
Introduction by Manos Tsakiris.
Interoception is a ubiquitous information channel used for the central representation of internal bodily states. A renewed interest in the functional role of interoception has emphasized its primary role for the representation of an integrated sense of self. At the same time, current models of perception have been largely influenced by a Bayesian approach that underlines the role of internal predictive models for the processing and interpretation of incoming exteroceptive information. Could the functional role of interoception be understood in terms of predictive coding, and if yes what are the implications for interoceptive awareness? Interoceptive awareness (i.e. the awareness of the physiological state of one’s body) is assessed by quantifying interoceptive sensitivity (IS), usually in the context of heartbeat detection tasks. Behaviourally, the sensitivity to the perception of internal states of the body has been shown to modulate a range of cognitive, affective and sensory processes. The three talks of this symposium will focus on how sensitivity to internal bodily states comes to awareness and how it modulates emotional processes (Critchley), self-other representations (Tsakiris) and internal conflicts (Hopkins) via predictive internal models. Across three disciplines (e.g. neuroscience, psychology and philosophy), the three talks provide a timely debate of interoception as a model of predictive coding.
Symposium 2: "Bringing the in-depth body to the surface: interoception, awareness and prediction"
Chair: Manos Tsakiris (Department of Psychology, University of London, UK)
SUMMARY
Introduction by Manos Tsakiris.
Interoception is a ubiquitous information channel used for the central representation of internal bodily states. A renewed interest in the functional role of interoception has emphasized its primary role for the representation of an integrated sense of self. At the same time, current models of perception have been largely influenced by a Bayesian approach that underlines the role of internal predictive models for the processing and interpretation of incoming exteroceptive information. Could the functional role of interoception be understood in terms of predictive coding, and if yes what are the implications for interoceptive awareness? Interoceptive awareness (i.e. the awareness of the physiological state of one’s body) is assessed by quantifying interoceptive sensitivity (IS), usually in the context of heartbeat detection tasks. Behaviourally, the sensitivity to the perception of internal states of the body has been shown to modulate a range of cognitive, affective and sensory processes. The three talks of this symposium will focus on how sensitivity to internal bodily states comes to awareness and how it modulates emotional processes (Critchley), self-other representations (Tsakiris) and internal conflicts (Hopkins) via predictive internal models. Across three disciplines (e.g. neuroscience, psychology and philosophy), the three talks provide a timely debate of interoception as a model of predictive coding.
Keynote 3: Singer
Thursday, July 5 2012 09:15-10:30 @ Dome theatre
Keynote 3: "Social Emotions from the Lens of Social Neuroscience: Modulation, Development and Plasticity"
Tania Singer (Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany).
SUMMARY
With the emergence of social neuroscience, researchers have started to investigate the underpinnings of our ability to share and understand feelings of others. After a definition of concepts, I will shortly revise the main results of neuroscientific studies investigating empathic brain responses elicited by the observation of others in pain and show how these empathic brain responses are modulated by several contextual and stimulus intrinsic factors such as perceived fairness or ingroup/outgroup membership. Furthermore, I will present data from a novel paradigm on empathy for pleasant and unpleasant touch allowing the investigation of the neural mechanisms underlying affective egocentric bias in adults. These data will be complemented with developmental findings showing age-differences in egocentric bias, social emotions such as envy and Schadenfreude as well as strategic decision making during childhood. Finally, I present evidence of affective brain plasticity based on mental training of social emotions. These data will be discussed in lights of their relevance for recent models of social cognition.
Keynote 3: "Social Emotions from the Lens of Social Neuroscience: Modulation, Development and Plasticity"
Tania Singer (Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany).
SUMMARY
With the emergence of social neuroscience, researchers have started to investigate the underpinnings of our ability to share and understand feelings of others. After a definition of concepts, I will shortly revise the main results of neuroscientific studies investigating empathic brain responses elicited by the observation of others in pain and show how these empathic brain responses are modulated by several contextual and stimulus intrinsic factors such as perceived fairness or ingroup/outgroup membership. Furthermore, I will present data from a novel paradigm on empathy for pleasant and unpleasant touch allowing the investigation of the neural mechanisms underlying affective egocentric bias in adults. These data will be complemented with developmental findings showing age-differences in egocentric bias, social emotions such as envy and Schadenfreude as well as strategic decision making during childhood. Finally, I present evidence of affective brain plasticity based on mental training of social emotions. These data will be discussed in lights of their relevance for recent models of social cognition.
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