A number of ways of taxonomizing human learning have been proposed. We examine the evidence for one such proposal, namely, that there exist independent explicit and implicit learning systems. This combines two further distinctions, (1) between learning that takes place with versus without concurrent awareness, and (2) between learning that involves the encoding of instances (or fragments) versus the induction of abstract rules or hypotheses. Implicit learning is assumed to involve unconscious rule learning. We examine the evidence for implicit learning (...) derived from subliminal learning, conditioning, artificial grammar learning, instrumental learning, and reaction times in sequence learning. We conclude that unconscious learning has not been satisfactorily established in any of these areas. The assumption that learning in some of these tasks (e.g., artificial grammar learning) is predominantly based on rule abstraction is questionable. When subjects cannot report the rules that govern stimulus selection, this is often because their knowledge consists of instances or fragments of the training stimuli rather than rules. In contrast to the distinction between conscious and unconscious learning, the distinction between instance and rule learning is a sound and meaningful way of taxonomizing human learning. We discuss various computational models of these two forms of learning. (shrink)

A number of ways of taxonomizing human learning have been proposed. We examine the evidence for one such proposal, namely, that there exist independent explicit and implicit learning systems. This combines two further distinctions, between learning that takes place with versus without concurrent awareness, and between learning that involves the encoding of instances versus the induction of abstract rules or hypotheses. Implicit learning is assumed to involve unconscious rule learning. We examine the evidence for implicit learning derived from subliminal learning, (...) conditioning, artificial grammar learning, instrumental learning, and reaction times in sequence learning. We conclude that unconscious learning has not been satisfactorily established in any of these areas. The assumption that learning in some of these tasks is predominantly based on rule abstraction is questionable. When subjects cannot report the “implicitly learned” rules that govern stimulus selection, this is often because their knowledge consists of instances or fragments of the training stimuli rather than rules. In contrast to the distinction between conscious and unconscious learning, the distinction between instance and rule learning is a sound and meaningful way of taxonomizing human learning. We discuss various computational models of these two forms of learning. (shrink)

Three experiments investigated the relationship between subjective experience and attentional lapses during sustained attention. These experiments employed two measures of subjective experience to examine how differences in awareness correspond to variations in both task performance and psycho-physiological measures . This series of experiments examine these phenomena during the Sustained Attention to Response Task . The results suggest we can dissociate between two components of subjective experience during sustained attention: task unrelated thought which corresponds to an absent minded disengagement from the (...) task and a pre-occupation with one's task performance that seems to be best conceptualised as a strategic attempt to deploy attentional resources in response to a perception of environmental demands which exceed ones ability to perform the task. The implications of these findings for our understanding of how awareness is maintained on task relevant material during periods of sustained attention are discussed. (shrink)

Three experiments investigated the relationship between subjective experience and attentional lapses during sustained attention. These experiments employed two measures of subjective experience to examine how differences in awareness correspond to variations in both task performance and psycho-physiological measures . This series of experiments examine these phenomena during the Sustained Attention to Response Task . The results suggest we can dissociate between two components of subjective experience during sustained attention: task unrelated thought which corresponds to an absent minded disengagement from the (...) task and a pre-occupation with one's task performance that seems to be best conceptualised as a strategic attempt to deploy attentional resources in response to a perception of environmental demands which exceed ones ability to perform the task. The implications of these findings for our understanding of how awareness is maintained on task relevant material during periods of sustained attention are discussed. (shrink)

© 2006 Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research.

Cognitive neuroscience has come to be viewed as the flagship of the cognitive sciences and is transforming our understanding of the nature of mind. In this paper we survey several research fields in cognitive neuroscience (lateralization, neuroeconomics, and cognitive control) and note that they are making rapid progress on fundamental issues. Lateralization research is developing a comparative framework for evolutionary analysis, and is identifying individual- and population-level factors that favor brain asymmetries. Neuroeconomics is creating a research framework for studying valuation (...) mechanisms in the brain that allows investigation of more complex phenomena than traditional reward paradigms. And cognitive control research has cast light on the mechanisms of task learning and top-down control that enable fluid goal-directed behavior in complex situations. Reasons for the success of cognitive neuroscience are varied: technical advances (e.g., in molecular genetics and imaging) are part of the story, but the more important factors have to do with the power of integrating a bottom-up mechanistic approach with larger functional and evolutionary perspectives. The incorporation of a bottom-up component differentiates cognitive neuroscience from the multidisciplinary ambitions of classical cognitive science, which suffered from having limited access to mechanisms. (shrink)

A prominent but poorly understood domain of human agency is mental action, i.e., thecapacity for reaching specific desirable mental statesthrough an appropriate monitoring of one's own mentalprocesses. The present paper aims to define mentalacts, and to defend their explanatory role againsttwo objections. One is Gilbert Ryle's contention thatpostulating mental acts leads to an infinite regress.The other is a different although related difficulty,here called the access puzzle: How can the mindalready know how to act in order to reach somepredefined result? A (...) crucial element in the solutionof these puzzles consists in making explicit thecontingency between mental acts and mentaloperations, parallel to the contingency betweenphysical acts and bodily movements. The paper finallydiscusses the kind of reflexivity at stake in mentalacts; it is shown that the capacity to refer tooneself is not a necessary condition of the successfulexecution of mental acts. (shrink)

Two experiments examine the effects of unreportable hints on anagram solving performance and on solvers' subjective experience of insight. In Experiment 1, after seeing a hint presented too briefly to identify, participants solved anagrams preceded by the solution fastest and solved anagrams preceded by unrelated hints slowest. Participants' “warmth” ratings for solution hints were more insight-like than those for unrelated hints. In Experiment 2 a hint, or no hint, was presented at one of three different exposure durations. Participants benefited from (...) solution-relevant hints that were either unreportable or reportable, but showed a cost only for unrelated hints that were reportable. Participants' ratings of their insight experiences showed that unreportable solution and semantically related hints produced more insight-like experiences than did unrelated hints. The results suggest that unreportable processing of solution-related information is important for the insight experience. (shrink)

Abstract.There is ample evidence that humans (and other primates) possess a knowledge instinct—a biologically driven impulse to make coherent sense of the world at the highest level possible. Yet behavioral decision‐making data suggest a contrary biological drive to minimize cognitive effort by solving problems using simplifying heuristics. Individuals differ, and the same person varies over time, in the strength of the knowledge instinct. Neuroimaging studies suggest which brain regions might mediate the balance between knowledge expansion and heuristic simplification. One region (...) implicated in primary emotional experience is more activated in individuals who use primitive heuristics, whereas two areas of the cortex are more activated in individuals with a strong knowledge drive: one region implicated in detecting risk or conflict and another implicated in generating creative ideas. Knowledge maximization and effort minimization are both evolutionary adaptations, and both are valuable in different contexts. Effort minimization helps us make minor and routine decisions efficiently, whereas knowledge maximization connects us to the beautiful, to the sublime, and to our highest aspirations. We relate the opposition between the knowledge instinct and heuristics to the biblical story of the fall, and argue that the causal scientific worldview is mathematically equivalent to teleological arguments from final causes. Elements of a scientific program are formulated to address unresolved issues. (shrink)

The understanding of decision-making systems has come together in recent years to form a unified theory of decision-making in the mammalian brain as arising from multiple, interacting systems (a planning system, a habit system, and a situation-recognition system). This unified decision-making system has multiple potential access points through which it can be driven to make maladaptive choices, particularly choices that entail seeking of certain drugs or behaviors. We identify 10 key vulnerabilities in the system: (1) moving away from homeostasis, (2) (...) changing allostatic set points, (3) euphorigenic signals, (4) overvaluation in the planning system, (5) incorrect search of situation-action-outcome relationships, (6) misclassification of situations, (7) overvaluation in the habit system, (8) a mismatch in the balance of the two decision systems, (9) over-fast discounting processes, and (10) changed learning rates. These vulnerabilities provide a taxonomy of potential problems with decision-making systems. Although each vulnerability can drive an agent to return to the addictive choice, each vulnerability also implies a characteristic symptomology. Different drugs, different behaviors, and different individuals are likely to access different vulnerabilities. This has implications for an individual's susceptibility to addiction and the transition to addiction, for the potential for relapse, and for the potential for treatment. (shrink)

This essay argues that current theories of action fail to explain agentive control because they have left out a psychological capacity central to control: attention. This makes it impossible to give a complete account of the mental antecedents that generate action. By investigating attention, and in particular the intention-attention nexus, we can characterize the functional role of intention in an illuminating way, explicate agentive control so that we have a uniform explanation of basic cases of causal deviance in action as (...) well as other defects of agency, explain cases of skilled agency and sharpen questions about the role of thought in agency. This provides for a different orientation in the theory of action. (shrink)

In this letter, we argue that an economic perspective on the mind has played—and should continue to play—a central role in the development of cognitive science. Viewing cognition as the productive application of mental resources puts cognitive science and economics on a common conceptual footing, paving the way for closer collaboration between the two disciplines. This will enable cognitive scientists to more readily repurpose economic concepts and analytical tools for the study of mental phenomena, while at the same time, enriching (...) our understanding of the modern economy, which is increasingly driven by mental, rather than physical, production. (shrink)

In this paper we suggest that differing approaches to the science of social cognition mirror the arguments between radical embodied and traditional approaches to cognition. We contrast the use in social cognition of theoretical inference and mental simulation mechanisms with approaches emphasizing a direct perception of others’ mental states. We build from a recent integrative framework unifying these divergent perspectives through the use of dual-process theory and supporting social neuroscience research. Our elaboration considers two complementary notions of direct perception: one (...) primarily stemming from ecological psychology and the other from enactive cognition theory. We use this as the foundation from which to offer an account of the informational basis for social information and assert a set of research propositions to further the science of social cognition. In doing so, we point out how perception of the minds of others can be supported in some cases by lawful information, supporting direct perception of social affordances and perhaps, mental states, and in other cases by cues that support indirect perceptual inference. Our goal is to extend accounts of social cognition by integrating advances across disciplines to provide a multi-level and multi-theoretic description that can advance this field and offer a means through which to reconcile radical embodied and traditional approaches to cognitive neuroscience. (shrink)

The mythical1 hungry ass, facing two identical bundles of hay equidistant from him, has engendered two related questions. Can he choose one of the bundles, there seemingly being nothing to incline him one way or the other? If he can, the second puzzle — pertaining to rational choice — arises. It seems the ass cannot rationally choose one of the bundles, because there is no sufficient reason for any choice.2In what follows, I will argue that choice is possible even when (...) there is no option which is better than the others (section II), and that it is perfectly reasonable to choose an option even when there is no sufficient reason for it (section III). I will then (section IV) point to another puzzling feature of the .. (shrink)

The last decade has seen great progress in the study of the nature of crossmodal links in exogenous and endogenous spatial attention . Exogenous spatial cuing studies of human crossmodal attention and multisensory integration. In C. Spence, & J. Driver , Crossmodal space and crossmodal attention . Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.], for a recent review). A growing body of research now highlights the existence of robust crossmodal links between auditory, visual, and tactile spatial attention. However, until recently, studies of (...) exogenous and endogenous attention have proceeded relatively independently. In daily life, however, these two forms of attentional orienting continuously compete for the control of our attentional resources, and ultimately, our awareness. It is therefore critical to try and understand how exogenous and endogenous attention interact in both the unimodal context of the laboratory and the multisensory contexts that are more representative of everyday life. To date, progress in understanding the interaction between these two forms of orienting has primarily come from unimodal studies of visual attention. We therefore start by summarizing what has been learned from this large body of empirical research, before going on to review more recent studies that have started to investigate the interaction between endogenous and exogenous orienting in a multisensory setting. We also discuss the evidence suggesting that exogenous spatial orienting is not truly automatic, at least when assessed in a crossmodal context. Several possible models describing the interaction between endogenous and exogenous orienting are outlined and then evaluated in terms of the extant data. (shrink)

This experimental study sets out to determine whether people detect click sounds in American English. Recent research has documented the use of non-phonemic clicks in a variety of languages to fulfill a range of functions such as sequence management or signaling searches and different types of attitudinal stance. While these clicks are acoustically salient and have been reported to occur with a frequency of up to 14 per minute in British English, they have not been widely investigated until relatively recently. (...) For this experiment, we designed video stimuli consisting of A and B pairs of approximately 10 seconds of speech, one with a click and the other with the click edited out. We gave 118 participants a questionnaire and asked if they could detect a difference between the pairs of videos. The results indicate that the majority of participants, between 79% and 86%, do not detect click sounds. (shrink)

In everyday life it is often important to have a mental model of the knowledge, beliefs, desires, and intentions of other people. Sometimes it is even useful to to have a correct model of their model of our own mental states: a second-order Theory of Mind. In order to investigate to what extent adults use and acquire complex skills and strategies in the domains of Theory of Mind and the related skill of natural language use, we conducted an experiment. It (...) was based on a strategic game of imperfect information, in which it was beneficial for participants to have a good mental model of their opponent, and more specifically, to use second-order Theory of Mind. It was also beneficial for them to be aware of pragmatic inferences and of the possibility to choose between logical and pragmatic language use. We found that most participants did not seem to acquire these complex skills during the experiment when being exposed to the game for a number of different trials. Nevertheless, some participants did make use of advanced cognitive skills such as second-order Theory of Mind and appropriate choices between logical and pragmatic language use from the beginning. Thus, the results differ markedly from previous research. (shrink)