Twentieth century philosophy and psychology have been peculiarly averse to mental images. Throughout nearly two and a half millennia of philosophical wrangling, from Aristotle to Hume to Bergson, images (perceptual and quasi-perceptual experiences), sometimes under the alias of "ideas", were almost universally considered to be both the prime contents of consciousness, and the vehicles of cognition. The founding fathers of experimental psychology saw no reason to dissent from this view, it was commonsensical, and true to the lived experience of conscious (...) thinking. However, early in this century, just about when the behaviorist revolution in psychology was loudly declaring the scientific illegitimacy of any attempt to study consciousness, and the concomitant non-existence of imagery (Watson, 1913; see Thomas, 1989), philosophy was undergoing its "linguistic turn", a turn to seeing philosophy as essentially about language rather than the world, even the 'inner' world. For decades, the very concept of the mental image was suspect, and it was certainly banished from playing any major role in theories of mind and of thinking. Ralph Ellis' Questioning Consciousness, together with the recent speculations of certain influential neuroscientists (Edelman, 1992; Damasio, 1994), may be signaling the end this unusual era. (shrink)

I propose a new approach to the constitutive problem of psychology ‘what is mind?’ The first section introduces modifications of the received scope, methodology, and evaluation criteria of unified theories of cognition in accordance with the requirements of evolutionary compatibility and of a mature science. The second section outlines the proposed theory. Its first part provides empirically verifiable conditions delineating the class of meaningful neural formations and modifies accordingly the traditional conceptions of meaning, concept and thinking. This analysis is part (...) of a theory of communication in terms of inter-level systems of primitives that proposes the communication-understanding principle as a psychological invariance. It unifies a substantial amount of research by systematizing the notions of meaning, thinking, concept, belief, communication, and understanding and leads to a minimum vocabulary for this core system of mental phenomena. Its second part argues that written human language is the key characteristic of the artificially natural human mind. Overall, the theory both supports Darwin’s continuity hypothesis and proposes that the mental gap is within our own species. (shrink)

Recent research put forward the hypothesis that eye movements are integrated in memory representations and are reactivated when later recalled. However, “looking back to nothing” during recall might be a consequence of spatial memory retrieval. Here, we aimed at distinguishing between the effect of spatial and oculomotor information on perceptual memory. Participants’ task was to judge whether a morph looked rather like the first or second previously presented face. Crucially, faces and morphs were presented in a way that the morph (...) reactivated oculomotor and/or spatial information associated with one of the previously encoded faces. Perceptual face memory was largely influenced by these manipulations. We considered a simple computational model with an excellent match that expresses these biases as a linear combination of recency, saccade, and location. Surprisingly, saccades did not play a role. The results suggest that spatial and temporal rather than oculomotor information biases perceptual face memory. (shrink)