Mental representations remain the central posits of psychology after many decades of scrutiny. However, there is no consensus about the representational format(s) of biological cognition. This paper provides a survey of evidence from computational cognitive psychology, perceptual psychology, developmental psychology, comparative psychology, and social psychology, and concludes that one type of format that routinely crops up is the language-of-thought (LoT). We outline six core properties of LoTs: (i) discrete constituents; (ii) role-filler independence; (iii) predicate–argument structure; (iv) logical operators; (v) inferential (...) promiscuity; and (vi) abstract content. These properties cluster together throughout cognitive science. Bayesian computational modeling, compositional features of object perception, complex infant and animal reasoning, and automatic, intuitive cognition in adults all implicate LoT-like structures. Instead of regarding LoT as a relic of the previous century, researchers in cognitive science and philosophy-of-mind must take seriously the explanatory breadth of LoT-based architectures. We grant that the mind may harbor many formats and architectures, including iconic and associative structures as well as deep-neural-network-like architectures. However, as computational/representational approaches to the mind continue to advance, classical compositional symbolic structures – that is, LoTs – only prove more flexible and well-supported over time. (shrink)

When performing a skilled action—whether something impressive like a double somersault or something mundane like reaching for a glass of water—you exercise control over your bodily movements. Specifically, you guide their course. In what does that control consist? In this dissertation, I argue that it consists in attending to what you are doing. More specifically, in attending, agents harness their perceptual and perceptuomotor states directly and practically in service of their goals and, in doing so, settle the fine-grained manner in (...) which their bodies will move—details an intention alone leaves unsettled. This requires, among other things, that we reject views on which agents’ control is identical with their practical rationality. When all goes well, agents attentionally prioritize what is motivationally relevant to them to the exclusion of what would otherwise distract them from achieving their goals. However, sometimes agents attend distractedly—i.e., without prioritizing. As the aim of attention is to avoid distraction, this entails the possibility of defective attention. Defective attention, in turn, casts light on scenarios in which agents lose control over what they are doing, as when a skilled practitioner ‘chokes under pressure’. A complaint sometimes levelled against accounts, like mine, that claim to reduce agents’ control of their behaviour to that of causally efficacious mental states or events is that these accounts invariably deprive agents themselves of their rightful role in the generation of behaviour. This is the “Disappearing Agent Problem” for “reductive” or “event-causal” theories of action. I argue that, correctly understood, extant reductive theories do face a genuine Disappearing Agent Problem. However, it is a problem we solve by recognizing the role that conscious attention plays in making an action the agent’s own. Accordingly, I develop and defend an attentional account of action ownership. On this view, allocating conscious attention in service of your goals is sufficient for a kind of conscious perspective (“motivational perspective”), which, when active in controlling your behaviour, constitutes the behaviour as your own doing. As I explain, such perspective also contributes to explaining the subjective structure of your perceptual awareness of the world around you. (shrink)

The goal of perceptual systems is to allow organisms to adaptively respond to ecologically relevant stimuli. Because all perceptual inputs are ambiguous, perception needs to rely on prior knowledge accumulated over evolutionary and developmental time to turn sensory energy into information useful for guiding behavior. It remains controversial whether the guidance of perception extends to cognitive states or is locked up in a “cognitively impenetrable” part of perception. I argue that expectations, knowledge, and task demands can shape perception at multiple (...) levels, leaving no part untouched. The position advocated here is broadly consistent with the notion that perceptual systems strive to minimize prediction error en route to globally optimal solutions :181–204, 2013). On this view, penetrability should be expected whenever constraining lower-level processes by higher level knowledge is minimizes global prediction error. Just as Fodor feared cognitive penetration of perception threatens theory-neutral observation and the distinction between observation and inference. However, because theories themselves are constrained by the task of minimizing prediction error, theory-laden observation turns out to be superior to theory-free observation in turning sensory energy into useful information. (shrink)

The thesis that the visual system represents objects has garnered empirical support from a variety of sources in recent decades. But what kinds of things qualify as “objects” in the relevant sense? Are they ordinary three-dimensional bodies? Are they the facing surfaces of three-dimensional bodies? I argue that there is no fact of the matter: what we have are equally acceptable ways of assigning extensions to the relevant visual states. The view I defend bears obvious similarities to Quine’s thesis that (...) linguistic reference is inscrutable. Importantly, though, I argue that even if Quine was wrong about inscrutability as a thesis about language and thought, the case for the inscrutability of visual reference remains strong. (shrink)

Can one pay attention to objects without being conscious of them? Some years ago there was evidence that had been taken to show that the answer is 'yes'. That evidence was inconclusive, but there is recent work that makes the case more compellingly: it now seems that it is indeed possible to pay attention to objects of which one is not conscious. This is bad news for theories in which the connection between attention and consciousness is taken to be an (...) essential one. It is good news for theories (including mine) in which the connection between attention and agency is taken to be essential. (shrink)

The notion that visual attention can operate over visual objects in addition to spatial locations has recently received much empirical support, but there has been relatively little empirical consideration of what can count as an `object' in the ®rst place. We have investi- gated this question in the context of the multiple object tracking paradigm, in which subjects must track a number of independently and unpredictably moving identical items in a ®eld of identical distractors. What types of feature clusters can (...) be tracked in this manner? In other words, what counts as an `object' in this task? We investigated this question with a technique we call target merging: we alter tracking displays so that distinct target and distractor loca- tions appear perceptually to be parts of the same object by merging pairs of items (one target with one distractor) in various ways ± for example, by connecting item locations with a simple line segment, by drawing the convex hull of the two items, and so forth. The data show that target merging makes the tracking task far more dif®cult to varying degrees depending on exactly how the items are merged. The effect is perceptually salient, involving in some conditions a total destruction of subjects' capacity to track multiple items. These studies provide strong evidence for the object-based nature of tracking, con®rming that in some contexts attention must be allocated to objects rather than arbitrary collections of features. In addition, the results begin to reveal the types of spatially organized scene components that can be independently attended as a function of properties such as connectedness, part struc- ture, and other types of perceptual grouping. q 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

We present work demonstrating that the nature of an object for our visual system depends on the actions we are programming and on the presence of action relations between stimuli. For example, patients who show visual extinction are more likely to become aware of two objects if the objects fall in appropriate visual locations for a common action. This effect of the action relations between objects is modulated both by the familiarity of the positioning of the objects for action, and (...) by the mere possibility of action (the ‘affordance’) between the objects. In addition, the programming of an action to a part of an object alters the representation of that object, making the ‘part’ into the object selected by the visual system. These results point to object coding being a rather flexible process, affected not only by the perceptual properties of stimuli but also by the relations between these properties and action. We discuss the implications for theories of perception as well as considering why action information, in particular, may be important for perception. (shrink)

Attempts to understand visual attention have produced models based on location, in which attention selects particular regions of space, and models based on other visual attributes . Previous studies of inattentional blindness have contributed to our understanding of attention by suggesting that the detection of an unexpected object depends on the distance of that object from the spatial focus of attention. When the distance of a briefly flashed object from both fixation and the focus of attention is systematically varied, detection (...) appears to have a location-based component. However, the likelihood that people will detect an unexpected event in sustained and dynamic displays may depend on more than just spatial location. We investigated the influence of spatial location on inattentional blindness under precisely controlled, sustained and dynamic conditions. We found that although location-based models cannot fully account for the detection of unexpected objects, spatial location does play a role even when displays are visible for an extended period. (shrink)

How are attention and consciousness related? Can we learn what the contents of someone’s consciousness are if we know the targets of their attention? What can we learn about the contents of consciousness if we know the targets of attention? Although introspection might suggest that attention and consciousness are intimately connected, a good body of recent findings in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience brings compelling reasons to believe that they are two separate and independent processes. This paper attempts to bring (...) attention and consciousness back together to make the study of attentional distributions an essential ingredient for the study of the contents of consciousness. My proposal has two main components. First, I introduce a framework for systematizing the relations between attention in its different forms and consciousness in its different forms. Although philosophers and cognitive scientists have repeatedly highlighted the importance of such systematization, most details are still to be worked out. Here I take an initial stab at this project based on the notion of degrees of informational enhancement. Second, I introduce the notion of vicarious attention to account for a kind of additional processing benefit that comes for free when attention is allocated to a target. I then propose that this kind of processing must also be considered when mapping attention targets into contents of consciousness. (shrink)

We pose a foundational problem for those who claim that subjects are ontologically irreducible, but causally reducible (weak emergence). This problem is neuroscience’s notorious binding problem, which concerns how distributed neural areas produce unified mental objects (such as perceptions) and the unified subject that experiences them. Synchrony, synapses and other mechanisms cannot explain this. We argue that this problem seriously threatens popular claims that mental causality is reducible to neural causality. Weak emergence additionally raises evolutionary worries about how we’ve survived (...) the perils of nature. Our emergent subject hypothesis (ESH) avoids these shortcomings. Here, a singular, unified subject acts back on the neurons it emerges from and binds sensory features into unified mental objects. Serving as the mind’s controlling center, this subject is ontologically and causally irreducible (strong emergence). ESH draws on recent experimental evidence, including the motivation of a possible correlate (or “seat”) of the subject, which enhances its testability. (shrink)

We argue that the most ambitious version of the mental files theory of singular thought, according to which mental files are a wide-ranging psychological natural kind underlying all and only singular thinking, is unsupported by the available psychological data. Nevertheless, critical examination of the theory from a psychological perspective opens up promising avenues for research, especially concerning the relationship between our perceptual capacity to individuate and track basic individuals, and our higher level capacities for singular thought.

Inverting a face impairs perception of its features and recognition of its identity. Whether faces are special in this regard is a current topic of research and debate. Kanizsa studied the role of facial features and environmental context in perceiving the emotion and identity of upright and inverted faces. He found that observers are biased to interpret faces in a retinal coordinate frame, and that this bias is readily overruled by increased realism of facial features, but not easily overruled by (...) environmental context. An additional factor contributing to a retinal coordinate-frame interpretation may be the ambiguous nature of the face stimuli. Since his facial expressions are interpretable both upright and inverted, they may in both orientations activate an endogenous attentional process for faces. We present visual search and change-blindness experiments that explore how inversion, negation, and facial emotion affect visual attention to static faces. We find that attention to faces is impaired by inversion and negation. We also find that the parts of the face that receive greater attention can be influenced by the emotional expression of the face. We propose to extend these experiments to dynamic faces. To this end, we develop a theory of the visual representation of dynamic faces, in which faces are represented by classes of `spacetime fragments'-moving regions of the face with high informational content. We then present ideas for future experiments which are motivated by the spacetime fragment theory, and which should serve to constrain its further development. (shrink)

Language is more than a source of information for accessing higher-order conceptual knowledge. Indeed, language may determine how people perceive and interpret visual stimuli. Visual processing in linguistic contexts, for instance, mirrors language processing and happens incrementally, rather than through variously-oriented fixations over a particular scene. The consequences of this atypical visual processing are yet to be determined. Here, we investigated the integration of visual and linguistic input during a reasoning task. Participants listened to sentences containing conjunctions or disjunctions and (...) looked at visual scenes containing two pictures that either matched or mismatched the nouns. Degree of match between nouns and pictures and between their expected and actual spatial positions affected fixations as well as judgments. We conclude that language induces incremental processing of visual scenes, which in turn becomes susceptible to reasoning errors during the language-meaning verification process. (shrink)

A common objection to representationalism is that a representationalist view of phenomenal character cannot accommodate the effects that shifts in covert attention have on visual phenomenology: covert attention can make items more visually prominent than they would otherwise be without altering the content of visual experience. Recent empirical work on attention casts doubt on previous attempts to advance this type of objection to representationalism and it also points the way to an alternative development of the objection.

Because the visual system cannot process all of the objects, colors, and features present in a visual scene, visual attention allows some visual stimuli to be selected and processed over others. Most research on visual attention has focused on spatial or location-based attention, in which the locations occupied by stimuli are selected for further processing. Recent research, however, has demonstrated the importance of objects in organizing (or segregating) visual scenes and guiding attentional selection. Because of the long history of spatial (...) attention research, theories of spatial attention are more mature than theories of other visual processes, such as object segregation and object attention. In the present paper, I outline a biased competition account of object segregation and attention, following similar accounts that have been developed for spatial attention (Desimone and Duncan, 1995). In my biased competition account, I seek to understand how some objects can be segregated and selected over other objects in a complex visual scene. Under this account, there are two sources of visual information that allow an object to be processed over other objects: bottom-up information carried by the physical stimulus and top-down information based on an observer's goals. I use the biased competition account to combine many diverse findings from the object segregation and attention literatures into a common framework. (shrink)

Neuropsychological deficits have been widely used to elucidate normal cognitive functioning. Can patients with such deficits also be used to understand conscious visual experience? In this paper, we ask what it would be like to be a patient with apperceptive agnosia . Philosophical analyses of such questions have suggested that subjectively experiencing what another person experiences would be impossible. Although such roadblocks into the conscious experience of others exist, the experimental study of both patients and neurologically normal subjects can be (...) used to understand visual processing mechanisms. In order to understand the visual processes damaged in apperceptive agnosia, we first review this syndrome and present a case study of one such patient, patient J.W. We then review several theoretical accounts of apperceptive agnosia, and we conclude that studies of the patients themselves may not allow us to discriminate between the various explanations of the syndrome. To test these accounts, we have simulated apperceptive agnosia in neurologically normal subjects. The implications of our results for understanding both apperceptive agnosia and normal visual processing are discussed. (shrink)

According to the spreading hypothesis of object-based attention, a subliminal cue that can successfully capture attention to a location within an object should also cause attention to spread throughout the whole cued object and lead to the same-object advantage. Instead, we propose that a subliminal cue favors shifts of attention between objects and strengthens the between-object link, which is coded primarily within the dorsal pathway that governs the visual guidance of action. By adopting the two-rectangle method and using an effective (...) subliminal cue to compare with the classic suprathreshold cue, we found a different result pattern with suprathreshold cues than with subliminal cues. The suprathreshold cue replicated the conventional location and object effects, whereas a subliminal cue led to a different-object advantage with a facilitatory location effect and a same-object advantage with an inhibitory location effect. These results support our consciousness-dependent shifting hypothesis but not the spreading hypothesis. (shrink)

Neuropsychological studies suggest the existence of lateralized networks that represent categorical and coordinate types of spatial information. In addition, studies with neural networks have shown that they encode more effectively categorical spatial judgments or coordinate spatial judgments, if their input is based, respectively, on units with relatively small, nonoverlapping receptive fields, as opposed to units with relatively large, overlapping receptive fields. These findings leave open the question of whether interactive processes between spatial detectors and types of spatial relations can be (...) modulated by spatial attention. We hypothesized that spreading the attention window to encompass an area that includes two objects promotes coordinate spatial relations, based on coarse coding by large, overlapping, receptive fields. In contrast, narrowing attention to encompass an area that includes only one of the objects benefits categorical spatial relations, by effectively parsing space. By use of a cueing procedure, the spatial attention window was manipulated to select regions of differing areas. As predicted, when the attention window was large, coordinate spatial transformations were noticed faster than categorical transformations; in contrast, when the attention window was relatively smaller, categorical spatial transformations were noticed faster than coordinate transformations. Another novel finding was that coordinate changes were noticed faster when cueing an area that included both objects as well as the empty space between them than when simultaneously cueing both areas including the objects while leaving the gap between them uncued. (shrink)

Visual attentional processes have been an important topic in psychological research for years. Over the last few decades, new methods have been developed, aiming to explore the characteristics of the focus of attention in more detail. Studies that applied the “Attention-Window Task” quantified the maximum extent of the “Attention Window” along its horizontal, vertical, and diagonal meridians, when subjects were required to perceive two peripheral stimuli simultaneously. In three experiments using the AWT, we investigated the effects of cue validity, stimulus-onset (...) asynchrony, and target stimuli complexity on the size and shape of the AW. Results showed that the AW was greater under valid cue conditions compared to invalid conditions, when the locations of cue and target stimuli differed. Furthermore, the AW decreased when the SOA between the cue and targets was reduced and also when the task complexity was higher and more objects within the target stimuli had to be classified. Overall, it can be stated that the AWT with its possible task changes and adjustments can be considered as a potential standard tool to measure the maximum spread and shape of the spatial AW. (shrink)

Previous accounts of how people develop expertise have focused on how deliberate practice transforms the cognitive and perceptual representations and processes that give rise to expertise. However, the likelihood of developing expertise with a particular tool may also depend on the degree to which that tool fits pre‐existing perceptual and cognitive abilities. The present studies explored whether the abacus—a descendent of the first human computing devices—may have evolved to exploit general biases in human visual attention, or whether developing expertise with (...) the abacus requires learning special strategies for allocating visual attention to the abacus. To address this question, we administered a series of visual search tasks to abacus experts and subjects who had little to no abacus experience, in which search targets and distractors were overlaid atop abacus “beads.” Across three studies, we found that both experts and naïve subjects were faster to detect targets in semantically relevant components of the abacus, suggesting that abacus training is not required to exhibit attentional biases toward these components of the abacus. This finding suggests that the attentional biases that scaffold numerical processing of the abacus may emerge from general properties of visual attention that are exploited by the design of the abacus itself. (shrink)

In the philosophy of perception, typically, everything is illuminated. Discussions of perceptual experience primarily focus on subjects situated in illuminated environs. Rarely do we see treatment of putative perceptual experience involving darkness. In this paper, I will carefully canvas and characterize the nature of experiences of darkness, marking a substantive distinction between two such kinds of experiences. Crucially, I give an account of the distinctive phenomenology of experiences of darkness, and show that neither of the two broad kinds of experiences (...) of darkness requires, as Roy Sorensen has recently suggested, the reification of unfamiliar entities to serve as objects of perceptual awareness. I will also offer potential candidates for the proper representational contents of experiences of darkness. This exploration not only reveals that such experiences pose no threat to a view like representationalism, but also demonstrates how experiences of darkness can be given their rightful place in a naturalistic theory of perceptual awareness. Atlast, darkness will be brought out from the shadows. A dungeon horrible, on all sides round, As one great furnace flamed, yet from those flames No light; but rather darkness visible ? ?John Milton, Paradise Lost. (shrink)

There is ongoing debate about whether number is perceived directly. Clarke and Beck suggest that what plagues this debate is a lack of shared understanding about what it means to perceive number in the first place. I agree. I argue that the perception of number is held to a different standard than, say, the perception of objecthood; considering this, I explore what it might mean for the number system to represent rational numbers.

Many have held that when a person visually attends to an object, her visual system deploys a representation that designates the object. Call the referential link between such representations and the objects they designate attentive visual reference. In this article I offer an account of attentive visual reference. I argue that the object representations deployed in visual attention—which I call attentive visual object representations —refer directly, and are akin to indexicals. Then I turn to the issue of how the reference (...) of an AVOR is determined relative to a context. After raising problems for existing accounts, I propose a mechanism of reference determination that is both causal and descriptive: For an AVOR to refer to a particular object, the object must appropriately cause the deployment of the AVOR, and the AVOR must be associated with descriptive information about some of the object's geometrical and mereological properties. (shrink)

This article compares the ability to track individuals lacking mental states with the ability to track intentional agents. It explains why reference to individuals raises the problem of explaining how cognitive agents track unique individuals and in what sense reference is based on procedures of perceptual-motor and epistemic tracking. We suggest applying the notion of singular-files from theories in perception and semantics to the problem of tracking intentional agents. In order to elucidate the nature of agent-files, three views of the (...) relation between object- and agent-tracking are distinguished: the Independence, Deflationary and Organism-Dependence Views. The correct view is argued to be the latter, which states that perceptual and epistemic tracking of a unique human organism requires tracking both its spatio-temporal object-properties and its agent-properties. (shrink)