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)

According to the global neuronal workspace model of consciousness, consciousness results from the global broadcast of information throughout the brain. The global neuronal workspace is mainly constituted by a fronto-parietal network. The anterior insular cortex is part of this global neuronal workspace, but the function of this region has not yet been defined within the global neuronal workspace model of consciousness. In this review, I hypothesize that the anterior insular cortex implements a cross-modal priority map, the function of which is (...) to determine priorities for the processing of information and subsequent entrance in the global neuronal workspace. (shrink)

How might attention intersect with normative issues and the psychology surrounding them? I provide an empirically grounded framework integrating three attentional phenomena: salience, vigilance (or broadly attunement) and attentional character. Using this frame, I review recent philosophical work on attention and norms. -/- Section 1 establishes a common ground conception of attention no more controversial than the established experimental paradigms for attention. This conception explicates the concept of a bias, which explains core features of action and attention, one that intersects (...) biological, psychological and philosophical concerns. I emphasize historical biases associated with learning and experience. Section 2 presents an analysis of automaticity and control, concepts needed to fully characterize action. Historical biases are revealed as automatic. Specifically, the automatization of attention is central to acquiring skills and excellence in light of normative standards for a practice. Section 3 argues that salience involves the deployment of attention, while Section 4 characterizes vigilance not merely as a disposition but as an active orientation to attend. Vigilance is one type of attunement, and the set of attunements constitutes the agent’s varied orientations to deploy attention, part of their attentional character. As discussed in Section 5, shaping this character is a goal of a normatively sensitive upbringing where appropriate attention is automatized through proper practice. Section 6 examines a common epistemic bias in academia and subsequent attempts to debias. I conclude with an example of acquired epistemic skill to give hope that attentional excellence is achievable. (shrink)

Embodied cognitive science has argued that cognition is embodied principally in virtue of grossmorphological and sensorimotor features. This thesis argues that cognition is also internally embodied in affective and fine-grained physiological features whose transformative roles remain mostly unnoticed in contemporary cognitive science. I call this ‘proper embodiment’. I approach this larger subject by examining various emotion theories in philosophy and psychology. These tend to emphasise one of the many gross components of emotional processes, such as ‘feeling’ or ‘judgement’ to the (...) detriment of the others, often leading to an artificial emotion-cognition distinction even within emotion science itself. Attempts to reconcile this by putting the gross components back together, such as JessePrinz’s “embodied appraisal theory”, are, I argue, destined to failure because the vernacular concept of emotion which is used as the explanandum is not a natural kind and is not amenable to scientific explication.I examine Antonio Damasio’s proposal that emotion is involved in paradigmatic ‘cognitive’ processing such as rational decision making and argue (1) that the research he discusses does not warrant the particular hypothesis he favours, and (2) that Damasio’s account, though in many ways a step in the right direction, nonetheless continues to endorse a framework which sees affect and cognition as separate (though now highly interacting) faculties. I further argue that the conflation of ‘affect’ and 'emotion' may be the source of some confusion in emotion theory and that affect needs to be properly distinguished from ‘emotion’. I examine some dissociations in the pain literature which give us further empirical evidence that, as with the emotions, affect is a distinct component along with more cognitive elements of pain. I then argue that affect is distinctive in being grounded in homeostatic regulative activity in the body proper. With the distinction between affect, emotion, and cognition in hand, and the associated grounding of affect in bodily activity, I then survey evidence that bodily affect is also involved in perception and in paradigmatic cognitive processes such as attention and executive function. I argue that this relation is not ‘merely’ casual. Instead, affect (grounded in fine-grained details of internal bodily activity) is partially constitutive of cognition, participating in cognitive processing and contributing to perceptual and cognitive phenomenology. Finally I review some work in evolutionary robotics which reaches a similar conclusion, suggesting that the particular fine details of embodiment, such as molecular signalling between both neural and somatic cells matters to cognition. I conclude that cognition is properly embodied’ in that it is partially constituted by the many fine-grained bodily processes involved in affect (as demonstrated in the thesis) and plausibly by a wide variety of other fine-grained bodily processes that likewise tend to escape the net of contemporary cognitive science. (shrink)

Prominent models of attentional control assert a dichotomy between top-down and bottom-up control, with the former determined by current selection goals and the latter determined by physical salience. This theoretical dichotomy, however, fails to explain a growing number of cases in which neither current goals nor physical salience can account for strong selection biases. For example, equally salient stimuli associated with reward can capture attention, even when this contradicts current selection goals. Thus, although 'top-down' sources of bias are sometimes defined (...) as those that are not due to physical salience, this conception conflates distinct - and sometimes contradictory - sources of selection bias. We describe an alternative framework, in which past selection history is integrated with current goals and physical salience to shape an integrated priority map. (shrink)

This thesis consists of five main chapters including three independent studies, focusing on reward-based distractor interference and reward-association. In particular, the thesis addresses at which attentional processing stages the reward-based distractor interference takes place, as well as whether and how the reward association is learned on different levels. In the first chapter, I introduced a general background of attention, associative learning, and relations between reward associative learning and attention. In the end, I highlighted the open issues that this thesis aimed (...) to address. Chapter II aimed to answer the question at which processing stage the reward-based distractor interferes with the ongoing task. The study adopted the visual additional singleton search task but extended it to visual-tactile search. A classical finding of the reward-based distractor interference is that a reward-associated color feature, which appears as a task-irrelevant distractor, albeit it is not salient, captures attention and impedes task-relevant response. However, it is unclear at which attentional processing stage the reward-driven capture effects occur. To identify the distractor interference at the pre-attentional searching stage or post/focal- attentional decision-making stage, three experiments were conducted. Instead of a circular search display used in a standard attentional capture paradigm, this study used a horizontal search display to maximize potential attentional capture and disengagement. The results revealed that the reward-based distractor interference was only observed when the target and reward-based distractor were on the same side, indicating the interference likely occurred at the post/focal- attentional decision-making stage. To confirm this, Experiments 2 and 3 adopted the crossmodal search paradigm, in which the search stage and post-selective identification stage took place in different modalities. Such design enabled us to distinguish whether the interference effect occurs at the searching stage or the post/focal-attentional decision-making stage. The results further corroborated that the reward-driven capture effects occur at the post/focal-attention stage. Chapter III focused on the question related to the level of reward associative learning. Most previous studies on reward-based attentional capture implicitly used feature-based reward association, particularly on the feature level, e.g., color-reward association. This leaves the question open regarding whether the associative reward could be established at the level of response mapping or task-set mapping. Two experiments were designed to address this question. In Experiment 1, high/low rewards were associated with both the two colors and the left/right response in the training phase, and the reward-associated color became one of the task-irrelevant distractors in the test phase. We failed to find any evidence on the reward-response association. However, the results showed the distractor with previously reward-associated features facilitated search, indicating a better distractor handling in the test phase. In Experiment 2, the reward was associated with task-sets in the training phase and the task-sets kept the same in the test phase, while the search task was changed. The results suggested that reward-associated learning facilitated distractor handling and task-set learning. Chapter IV tackled the open research question - whether reward associative learning could take place at the multi-conjunction level. The question is important, given that previous studies on reward-based attentional capture only investigated associative learning of a single feature. As reward association in daily life is usually complex, Study 3 aims to explore whether reward learning can be established through reward assignments with conjunction features and whether the interference of distractors with previously reward-associated features can be observed in a similar way as previous studies shown on single-feature-based reward-driven capture effects. Reward learning was found locally trial-by-trial throughout the whole learning process, however, it was hard to establish a reliable conjunction reward association. Furthermore, there was no reward-based distractor interference in the test phase. The findings suggest that conjunction reward-association is difficult, though a short-lived trial-to-trial conjunction reward learning can be established. The final Chapter V discussed the findings of these three studies and their inter-relations. And I summarized how these findings could contribute to the debate of reward-based distractor interference. In summary, this thesis helps to improve our knowledge about reward-based distractor interference, particularly on the identification of the processing stage of distractor interference and what can be associated with reward in reward associative learning. (shrink)

Previous studies have shown that the human visual system can detect a face and elicit a saccadic eye movement toward it very efficiently compared to other categories of visual stimuli. In the first experiment, we tested the influence of facial expressions on fast face detection using a saccadic choice task. Face‐vehicle pairs were simultaneously presented and participants were asked to saccade toward the target (the face or the vehicle). We observed that saccades toward faces were initiated faster, and more often (...) in the correct direction, than saccades toward vehicles, regardless of the facial expressions (happy, fearful, or neutral). We also observed that saccade endpoints on face images were lower when the face was happy and higher when it was neutral. In the second experiment, we explicitly tested the detection of facial expressions. We used a saccadic choice task with emotional‐neutral pairs of faces and participants were asked to saccade toward the emotional (happy or fearful) or the neutral face. Participants were faster when they were asked to saccade toward the emotional face. They also made fewer errors, especially when the emotional face was happy. Using computational modeling, we showed that this happy face advantage can, at least partly, be explained by perceptual factors. Also, saccade endpoints were lower when the target was happy than when it was fearful. Overall, we suggest that there is no automatic prioritization of emotional faces, at least for saccades with short latencies, but that salient local face features can automatically attract attention. (shrink)

Previous findings indicate that negative arousal enhances bottom-up attention biases favouring perceptual salient stimuli over less salient stimuli. The current study tests whether those effects were driven by emotional arousal or by negative valence by comparing how well participants could identify visually presented letters after hearing either a negative arousing, positive arousing or neutral sound. On each trial, some letters were presented in a high contrast font and some in a low contrast font, creating a set of targets that differed (...) in perceptual salience. Sounds rated as more emotionally arousing led to more identification of highly salient letters but not of less salient letters, whereas sounds’ valence ratings did not impact salience biases. Thus, arousal, rather than valence, is a key factor enhancing visual processing of perceptually salient targets. (shrink)

Observers can learn the locations where salient distractors appear frequently to reduce potential interference. The effect that observers appear to learn the spatial distribution of salient but task-irrelevant distractors in the visual environment to reduce the interference caused by such distractors was referred to as ‘statistical learning of distractor locations’. Emerging studies agreed that the observed reduction of distractor interference is largely attributable to better suppression of distractor in frequent locations, however, concerning how this spatial distractor suppression is implemented within (...) the functional architecture of search guidance, and how the learned suppression is processed in the brain to reduce the interference, remains debated and poorly understood. The line of studies of the current dissertation, therefore, explores the cognitive and neural mechanism underlying spatial distractor suppression based on statistical learning. Using psychophysical experiments, the first two studies examined a series of potentially ‘confounding’ factors that might lead to different theoretical conclusions concerning the locus of learned spatial distractor suppression in different studies. We found that irrespective of whether a salient singleton distractor is more likely to occur at multiple locations within a subregion of the display or at a specific location, observers are both likely to adopt the priority-map-based suppression strategy and dimension-based suppression strategy to reduce interference of distractor in the frequent region. Notably, a critical factor determining which strategy is adopted is whether the distractor and non-distractor items swap colors randomly across trials: without color swapping, observers are more likely to acquire a dimension-based suppression; with color swapping, they prefer to develop a priority-map-based suppression in the first beginning, and potentially shift to dimension-based suppression later with the course of learning. The third study employed functional magnetic resonance imaging techniques with the distractor-location learning paradigm with two types of distractors defined in either the same- or different- visual dimension relative to the target. We disclosed that statistical learning of distractor locations involves suppression down to the level of the early visual cortex to reduce distractor interference, potential different neural mechanisms of spatial distractor suppression between distractors defined in a different and the same dimension to the target. With different-dimension distractors, higher-level, dimension-specific filtering mechanisms plays a role to reduce the interference; with same-dimension distractors, interference reduction relies on cutting down lower-level sensory signals. (shrink)

InThe Cognitive-Emotional Brain(Pessoa 2013), I describe the many ways that emotion and cognition interact and are integrated in the brain. The book summarizes five areas of research that support this integrative view and makes four arguments to organize each area. (1) Based on rodent and human data, I propose that the amygdala's functions go beyond emotion as traditionally conceived. Furthermore, the processing of emotion-laden information is capacity limited, thus not independent of attention and awareness. (2) Cognitive-emotional interactions in the human (...) prefrontal cortex (PFC) assume diverse forms and are not limited to mutual suppression. Particularly, the lateral PFC is a focal point for cognitive-emotional interactions. (3) Interactions between motivation and cognition can be seen across a range of perceptual and cognitive tasks. Motivation shapes behavior in specific ways – for example, by reducing response conflict or via selective effects on working memory. Traditional accounts, by contrast, typically describe motivation as a global activation independent of particular control demands. (4) Perception and cognition are directly influenced by information with affective or motivational content in powerful ways. A dual competition model outlines a framework for such interactions at the perceptual and executive levels. A specific neural architecture is proposed that embeds emotional and motivational signals into perception and cognition through multiple channels. (5) A network perspective should supplant the strategy of understanding the brain in terms of individual regions. More broadly, in a network view of brain architecture, “emotion” and “cognition” may be used as labels of certain behaviors, but will not map cleanly into compartmentalized pieces of the brain. (shrink)

Humans are fundamentally social and tend to create emergent organizations when interacting with each other; from dyads to families, small groups, large groups, societies and civilizations. The study of the neuronal substrate of human social behavior is currently gaining momentum in the young field of social neuroscience. Hyperscanning is a neuroimaging technique by which we can study two or more brain simultaneously while participants interact with each other. The aim of this article is to discuss several factors that we deem (...) important in designing hyperscanning experiments. We first review hyperscanning studies performed by means of electroencephalography (EEG) that have been relying on a continuous interaction paradigm. Then, we provide arguments for favoring ecological paradigms, for studying the emotional component of social interactions and for performing longitudinal studies, the last two aspects being largely neglected so far in the hyperscanning literature despite their paramount importance in social sciences. Based on these premises we argue that music performance is a suitable experimental setting for hyperscanning and that for such studies EEG is an appropriate choice as neuroimaging modality. (shrink)