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)

Navigating to goal locations in a known environment (wayfinding) can be accomplished by different strategies, notably by taking habitual, well-learned routes (response strategy) or by inferring novel paths, such as shortcuts, from spatial knowledge of the environment's layout (place strategy). Human and animal neuroscience studies reveal that these strategies reflect different brain systems, with response strategies relying more on activation of the striatum and place strategies associated with activation of the hippocampus. In addition to individual differences in strategy, recent behavioral (...) studies show sex differences such that men use place strategies more than women, and age differences such that older adults use more response strategies than younger adults. This paper takes a comprehensive multilevel approach to understanding these differences, characterizing wayfinding as a complex information processing task. This analysis reveals factors that affect navigation strategy, including availability of the relevant type of environmental knowledge, momentary access to this knowledge, trade-offs between physical and mental effort in different navigation contexts, and risk taking. We consider how strategies are influenced by the computational demands of a navigation task and by factors that affect the neural circuits underlying navigation. We also discuss limitations of laboratory studies to date and outline priorities for future research, including relating wayfinding strategies to independent measures of spatial knowledge, and studying wayfinding strategies in naturalistic environments. (shrink)

Navigating to goal locations in a known environment (wayfinding) can be accomplished by different strategies, notably by taking habitual, well-learned routes (response strategy) or by inferring novel paths, such as shortcuts, from spatial knowledge of the environment's layout (place strategy). Human and animal neuroscience studies reveal that these strategies reflect different brain systems, with response strategies relying more on activation of the striatum and place strategies associated with activation of the hippocampus. In addition to individual differences in strategy, recent behavioral (...) studies show sex differences such that men use place strategies more than women, and age differences such that older adults use more response strategies than younger adults. This paper takes a comprehensive multilevel approach to understanding these differences, characterizing wayfinding as a complex information processing task. This analysis reveals factors that affect navigation strategy, including availability of the relevant type of environmental knowledge, momentary access to this knowledge, trade-offs between physical and mental effort in different navigation contexts, and risk taking. We consider how strategies are influenced by the computational demands of a navigation task and by factors that affect the neural circuits underlying navigation. We also discuss limitations of laboratory studies to date and outline priorities for future research, including relating wayfinding strategies to independent measures of spatial knowledge, and studying wayfinding strategies in naturalistic environments. (shrink)

Following Gilbert Ryle’s arguments, many philosophers took it for granted that someone knows how to do something just in case they have the ability to do it. Within the last couple decades, new intellectualists have challenged this longstanding anti-intellectualist assumption. Their central contention is that mere abilities aren’t on the same rational, epistemic level as know how. My goal is to intellectualize know how without over-intellectualizing it. Intelligent behavior is characteristically flexible or responsive to novelty, and the distinctive feature of (...) creatures who exhibit flexible behavior is their capacity to learn. As it turns out, Ryle already identified a core characteristic of learning shared widely across the animal kingdom from the lowly rat to the top athlete. Taking my cues from Ryle, I argue that know how is successful performance resulting from self-regulated abilities. To regulate an ability is to be disposed to adjust to error and respond to feedback. While regulating sophisticated human abilities often requires propositional knowledge, in many simpler cases it does not. I focus on the navigational know how of rats and honeybees. Although they possess know how, whether they possess propositional knowledge is at best an open question. (shrink)

Based on instructions people can form task representations that shield relevant from seemingly irrelevant information. It has been documented that instructions can tie people to a particular way of performing a task despite that in principle a more efficient way could be learned and used. Since task shielding can lead to persistence of inefficient variants of task performance, it is relevant to test whether individuals with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder – characterized by less task shielding – are more likely and quicker (...) to escape a suboptimal instructed variant of performing a task. The paradigm used in this online study builds on the observation that in many environments different covarying features could be used to determine the appropriate response. For instance, as they approach a traffic light, drivers and pedestrians monitor the color and/or the position of the signal. Similarly, we instructed participants to respond to the color of a stimulus without mentioning that color covaried with the position of the stimulus. In order to assess whether with practice participants would use the non-instructed feature position to an increasing extent, we compared reaction times and error rates for standard trials to trials in which color was either ambiguous or did not match the usual covariation. Results showed that the covariation learning task can be administered online to adult participants with and without ADHD. Performance differences suggested that with practice ADHD participants might increase attention to non-instructed stimulus features. Yet, they used the non-instructed covarying stimulus feature to a similar extent as other participants. Together the results suggest that participants with ADHD do not lag behind in abandoning instructed task processing in favor of a learned alternative strategy. (shrink)

I argue that Sellars’s naturalization of Kant should be understood in terms of how he used behavioristic psychology and cybernetics. I first explore how Sellars used Edward Tolman’s cognitive-behavioristic psychology to naturalize Kant in the early essay “Language, Rules, and Behavior”. I then turn to Norbert Wiener’s understanding of feedback loops and circular causality. On this basis I argue that Sellars’s distinction between signifying and picturing, which he introduces in “Being and Being Known,” can be understood in terms of what (...) I call cybernetic behaviorism. I interpret picturing in terms of cycles of cybernetic behavior and signifying in terms of coordination between cybernetic behavior systems, or what I call triangulated cybernetic behavior. This leads to a formal, naturalistic understanding of personhood as the capacity to engage in triangulated cybernetic behavior. I conclude by showing that Sellars’s thought has the resources, which he did not exploit, for introducing the concept of second-order cybernetics. This suggests that Sellars’s philosophy of mind could be developed in the direction of autopoiesis and enactivism. (shrink)

The contents of representations in non-human animals, human core cognition, and perception cannot precisely be characterized by sentences of a natural language. However, this fact does not stop us from giving imprecise characterizations of these contents through natural language. In this paper, I develop an account of the precision of content characterizations by appealing to possible-world semantics combined with set and measurement theory.

The paper presents the content, as well as approaches to the use in the educational process of the author’s Electronic educational methodical complex (EEMC) “Construction of car”. The course is created for students of the speciality 015 Professional education (Transport, the operation and repairing of automobiles). Its content covers general topics including the study of a car engine, electrical equipment and automotive driveline. The created electronic course embraces, in addition to textual material, illustrations, dynamic models, instructions, manuals, textbooks, reference books (...) and glossaries, test material for each topic. Its possibilities of application during lectures, in the course of performing 15 laboratory works, organizing test control of knowledge, as well as for managing students’ independent study activities have been shown. Approaches to expert evaluation of the developed electronic study course by 11 criteria have been disclosed. The directions for further improvement of the content and methods of organizing the study and cognitive activity of students when using the course have been highlighted. These include the organization of level assimilation of the material, the creation of an individual educational trajectory of students. A rather high assessment of the developed author’s course received from experts allows it to be used in the system of vocational preparation specialists in the transport area of expertise. (shrink)

This thesis investigates the relationship between consciousness and self-consciousness. I consider two broad claims about this relationship: a constitutive claim, according to which all conscious experiences constitutively involve self-consciousness; and a typicalist claim, according to which ordinary conscious experiences contingently involve self-consciousness. Both of these claims call for elucidation of the relevant notions of consciousness and self-consciousness. -/- In the first part of the thesis ('The Myth of Constitutive Self-Consciousness'), I critically examine the constitutive claim. I start by offering an (...) elucidatory account of consciousness, and outlining a number of foundational claims that plausibly follow from it. I subsequently distinguish between two concepts of self-consciousness: consciousness of one's experience, and consciousness of oneself (as oneself). Each of these concepts yields a distinct variant of the constitutive claim. In turn, each resulting variant of the constitutive claim can be interpreted in two ways: on a 'minimal' or deflationary reading, they fall within the scope of foundational claims about consciousness, while on a 'strong' or inflationary reading, they point to determinate aspects of phenomenology that are not acknowledged by the foundational claims as being aspects of all conscious mental states. I argue that the deflationary readings of either variant of the constitutive claim are plausible and illuminating, but would ideally be formulated without using a term as polysemous as 'self-consciousness'; by contrast, the inflationary readings of either variant are not adequately supported. -/- In the second part of the thesis ('Self-Consciousness in the Real World'), I focus on the second concept of self-consciousness, or consciousness of oneself as oneself. Drawing upon empirical evidence, I defend a pluralist account of self-consciousness so construed, according to which there are several ways in which one can be conscious of oneself as oneself – through conscious thoughts, bodily experiences and perceptual experiences – that make distinct determinate contributions to one's phenomenology. This pluralist account provides us with the resources to vindicate the typicalist claim according to which consciousness of oneself as oneself – a sense of self – is pervasive in ordinary conscious experiences, as a matter of contingent empirical fact. It also provides us with the resources to assess the possibility that a subject might be conscious without being conscious of herself as herself in any way. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop an empirically-driven approach to the relationship between conceptual and non-conceptual representations. I begin by clarifying Wilfrid Sellars's distinction between a non-conceptual capacity to picture significant aspects of our world, and a capacity to stabilize semantic content in the form of conceptual representations that signify those aspects of the world that are relevant to our shared practices. I argue that this distinction helps to clarify the reason why cognition must be understood as embodied and situated. Drawing (...) on recent models of attention and valuation, I then argue that the human brain constructs a dynamic model of the world that it has encountered, encoding higher-level regularities in the form of linguistically structured representations. And I conclude by arguing that this approach to cognition provides a set of critical resources for understanding the situated nature of social cognition. (shrink)

Despite countless anecdotes and the historical significance of insight as a problem solving mechanism, its nature has long remained elusive. The conscious experience of insight is notoriously difficult to trace in non-verbal animals. Although studying insight has presented a significant challenge even to neurobiology and psychology, human neuroimaging studies have cleared the theoretical landscape, as they have begun to reveal the underlying mechanisms. The study of insight in non-human animals has, in contrast, remained limited to innovative adjustments to experimental designs (...) within the classical approach of judging cognitive processes in animals, based on task performance. This leaves no apparent possibility of ending debates from different interpretations emerging from conflicting schools of thought. We believe that comparative cognition has thus much to gain by embracing advances from neuroscience and human cognitive psychology. We will review literature on insight and discuss the consequences of these findings to comparative cognition. (shrink)

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a mental health condition in which the experience of a traumatic event causes a series of psychiatric and behavioral symptoms such as hypervigilance, insomnia, irritability, aggression, constricted affect, and self-destructive behavior. This paper investigates two case studies to argue that the experience of PTSD is not restricted to humans alone; we have good epistemic reason to hold that some animals can experience genuine PTSD, given our current and best clinical understanding of the disorder in humans. I (...) will use this evidence to argue for two claims. First, because the causal structure of PTSD plausibly requires reference to a traumatic conscious experience in order to explain subsequent behaviors, the fact that animals can have PTSD provides new evidence for animal consciousness. Second, the discovery of PTSD in animals puts pressure on accounts which hold that animal behavior can be fully explained without reference to subjective experience. (shrink)

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 1, Page 189-208, January 2022.

A novel account of semantic information is proposed. The gist is that structural correspondence, analysed in terms of similarity, underlies an important kind of semantic information. In contrast to extant accounts of semantic information, it does not rely on correlation, covariation, causation, natural laws, or logical inference. Instead, it relies on structural similarity, defined in terms of correspondence between classifications of tokens into types. This account elucidates many existing uses of the notion of information, for example, in the context of (...) scientific models and structural representations in cognitive science. It is poised to open a new research program concerned with various kinds of semantic information, its functions, and its measurement. (shrink)

Predictive processing theories are increasingly popular in philosophy of mind; such process theories often gain support from the Free Energy Principle —a normative principle for adaptive self-organized systems. Yet there is a current and much discussed debate about conflicting philosophical interpretations of FEP, e.g., representational versus non-representational. Here we argue that these different interpretations depend on implicit assumptions about what qualifies as representational. We deploy the Free Energy Principle instrumentally to distinguish four main notions of representation, which focus on organizational, (...) structural, content-related and functional aspects, respectively. The various ways that these different aspects matter in arriving at representational or non-representational interpretations of the Free Energy Principle are discussed. We also discuss how the Free Energy Principle may be seen as a unified view where terms that traditionally belong to different ontologies—e.g., notions of model and expectation versus notions of autopoiesis and synchronization—can be harmonized. However, rather than attempting to settle the representationalist versus non-representationalist debate and reveal something about what representations are simpliciter, this paper demonstrates how the Free Energy Principle may be used to reveal something about those partaking in the debate; namely, what our hidden assumptions about what representations are—assumptions that act as sometimes antithetical starting points in this persistent philosophical debate. (shrink)

Is attention both necessary and sufficient for consciousness? Call this central question of this treatise, “Q.” We commonly have the experience of consciously paying attention to something, but is it possible to be conscious of something you are not attending to, or to attend to something of which you are not conscious? Where might we find examples of these? This treatise is a quest to find an answer to Q in two parts. Part I reviews the foundations upon which the (...) discourse on Q is built. Different inputs to Q produce different answers. After consideration of the many ways “attention” and “consciousness” have been defined, I settle upon phenomenal consciousness and Executive Attention (defined as a suite of strategies for structuring cognition for further processing implemented by the executive of working memory) as the most interesting inputs to Q, and the ones on which Part II focuses. Attention without consciousness seems relatively easy to establish empirically, but consciousness without attention is much harder. The putative candidates all seem to have major problems, but I build a strong abductive case for the hitherto ignored case of foveal phenomenal overflow. We consciously see far more detail in our foveal fields than we can Executively Attend, although there is a serious obstacle to our ever confirming that empirically—identifying conscious content relies on Executive Attentional report. Triangulating the capacity limitations of attention, consciousness, and working memory strengthens this case for consciousness without attention, and suggests that cognition must work something like my “Witches’ Hat Model,” on which content can become conscious outside of Executive Attention or working memory. I conclude with some reflections on the implications of my arguments for the discourse on Q, and for other discourses such as the ontologies of attention and consciousness, theories of consciousness, some other cognitive concepts, and ethical considerations in humans, animals, and machines. A conclusive answer to Q continues to elude us. It may perhaps be an ultimately insoluble conundrum. But it is the very essence of humanity to seek an answer, and in so doing, to improve our understanding of our own nature: “The proper study of mankind is man.”1. (shrink)

Disquotationalism is the view that the only notion of truth we really need is one that can be wholly explained in terms of such trivialities as: “Snow is white” is true iff snow is white. The 'Classical Disquotational Strategy' attempts to establish this view case by case, by showing that each extant appeal to truth, in philosophical or scientific explanations, can be unmasked as an appeal only to disquotational truth. I argue here that the Classical Strategy fails in at least (...) two cases: attributions of truth to context-dependent utterances and uses of truth psychological explanations of behavioral success or, more fundamentally, appeals to falsity in psychological explanations of behavioral failure. -/- It's my intention to turn this paper into two papers. It's become quite unwieldy as it is---not unlike "The Strength of Truth Theories". (shrink)

Structural representations are increasingly popular in philosophy of cognitive science. A key virtue they seemingly boast is that of meeting Ramsey's job description challenge. For this reason, structural representations appear tailored to play a clear representational role within cognitive architectures. Here, however, I claim that structural representations do not meet the job description challenge. This is because even our most demanding account of their functional profile is satisfied by at least some receptors, which paradigmatically fail the job description challenge. Hence, (...) the functional profile typically associated with structural representations does not identify representational posits. After a brief introduction, I present, in the second section of the paper, the job description challenge. I clarify why receptors fail to meet it and highlight why, as a result, they should not be considered representations. In the third section I introduce what I take to be the most demanding account of structural representations at our disposal, namely Gładziejewski's account. Provided the necessary background, I turn from exposition to criticism. In the first half of the fourth section, I equate the functional profile of structural representations and receptors. To do so, I show that some receptors boast, as a matter of fact, all the functional features associated with structural representations. Since receptors function merely as causal mediators, I conclude structural representations are mere causal mediators too. In the second half of the fourth section I make this conclusion intuitive with a toy example. I then conclude the paper, anticipating some objections my argument invites. (shrink)

Since Tolman’s paper in 1948, psychologists and neuroscientists have argued that cartographic representations play an important role in cognition. These empirical findings align with some theoretical works developed by philosophers who promote a pluralist view of representational vehicles, stating that cognitive processes involve representations with different formats. However, the inferential relations between maps and representations with different formats have not been sufficiently explored. Thus, this paper is focused on the inferential relations between cartographic and linguistic representations. To that effect, we (...) appeal to heterogeneous inference with ordinary maps and sentences. In doing so, we aim to build a model to bridge the gap between cartographic and linguistic thought. (shrink)

Mental time travel is defined as projecting the self into the past and the future. Despite growing evidence of the similarities of remembering past and imagining future events, dominant theories conceive of these as distinct capacities. I propose that memory and imagination are fundamentally the same process – constructive episodic simulation – and demonstrate that the ‘simulation system’ meets the three criteria of a neurocognitive system. Irrespective of whether one is remembering or imagining, the simulation system: acts on the same (...) information, drawing on elements of experience ranging from fine-grained perceptual details to coarser-grained conceptual information and schemas about the world; is governed by the same rules of operation, including associative processes that facilitate construction of a schematic scaffold, the event representation itself, and the dynamic interplay between the two ; and is subserved by the same brain system. I also propose that by forming associations between schemas, the simulation system constructs multi-dimensional cognitive spaces, within which any given simulation is mapped by the hippocampus. Finally, I suggest that simulation is a general capacity that underpins other domains of cognition, such as the perception of ongoing experience. This proposal has some important implications for the construct of ‘MTT’, suggesting that ‘time’ and ‘travel’ may not be defining, or even essential, features. Rather, it is the ‘mental’ rendering of experience that is the most fundamental function of this domain-general simulation system enabling humans to re-experience the past, pre-experience the future, and also comprehend the complexities of the present. (shrink)

A great number of investigations suggest that cognition involves both linguistic and cartographic representations. These researches have motivated a pluralist conception of cognition; also, they have been used to clarify how maps differ from linguistic representations. However, the computational processes underlying the interphase between both kinds of representations deserve further attention. In this paper, I argue that, despite their differences, cartographic representations coexist and interact with linguistic representations in interesting ways.

A common way to understand memory structures in the cognitive sciences is as a cognitive map​. Cognitive maps are representational systems organized by dimensions shared with physical space. The appeal to these maps begins literally: as an account of how spatial information is represented and used to inform spatial navigation. Invocations of cognitive maps, however, are often more ambitious; cognitive maps are meant to scale up and provide the basis for our more sophisticated memory capacities. The extension is not meant (...) to be metaphorical, but the way in which these richer mental structures are supposed to remain map-like is rarely made explicit. Here we investigate this missing link, asking: how do cognitive maps represent non-spatial information?​ We begin with a survey of foundational work on spatial cognitive maps and then provide a comparative review of alternative, non-spatial representational structures. We then turn to several cutting-edge projects that are engaged in the task of scaling up cognitive maps so as to accommodate non-spatial information: first, on the spatial-isometric approach​ , encoding content that is non-spatial but in some sense isomorphic to spatial content; second, on the ​ abstraction approach​ , encoding content that is an abstraction over first-order spatial information; and third, on the ​ embedding approach​ , embedding non-spatial information within a spatial context, a prominent example being the Method-of-Loci. Putting these cases alongside one another reveals the variety of options available for building cognitive maps, and the distinctive limitations of each. We conclude by reflecting on where these results take us in terms of understanding the place of cognitive maps in memory. (shrink)

Some thoughts just come to mind together. This is usually thought to happen because they are connected by associations, which the mind follows. Such an explanation assumes that there is a particular kind of simple psychological process responsible. This view has encountered criticism recently. In response, this paper aims to characterize a general understanding of associative simplicity, which might support the distinction between associative processing and alternatives. I argue that there are two kinds of simplicity that are treated as characteristic (...) of association, and as a result three possible versions of associative processing. This provides a framework that informs our understanding of association as a current and historical concept, including how various specific versions in different parts of psychology relate to one another. This framework can also guide debates over normative evaluations of actions produced by processes thought to be associative. (shrink)

Scientists have shown that many non‐human animals such as ants, dogs, or rats are very good at using smells to find their way through their environments. But are humans also capable of navigating through their environment based on olfactory cues? There is not much research on this topic, a gap that the present research seeks to bridge. We here provide one of the first empirical studies investigating the possibility of using olfactory cues as landmarks in human wayfinding. Forty subjects participated (...) in a piloting study to determine the olfactory material for the main experiment. Then, 24 subjects completed a wayfinding experiment with 12 odors as orientation cues. Our results are astonishing: Participants were rather good at what we call “odor‐based wayfinding.” This indicates that the ability of humans to use olfactory cues for navigation is often underestimated. We discuss two different cognitive explanations and rule out the idea that our results are just an instance of sequential learning. Rather, we argue that humans can enrich their cognitive map of the environment with olfactory landmarks and may use them for wayfinding. (shrink)

Tracing the leading role of emotions in the evolution of the mind, a philosopher and a psychologist pair up to reveal how thought and culture owe less to our faculty for reason than to our capacity to feel. Many accounts of the human mind concentrate on the brain’s computational power. Yet, in evolutionary terms, rational cognition emerged only the day before yesterday. For nearly 200 million years before humans developed a capacity to reason, the emotional centers of the brain were (...) hard at work. If we want to properly understand the evolution of the mind, we must explore this more primal capability that we share with other animals: the power to feel. Emotions saturate every thought and perception with the weight of feelings. The Emotional Mind reveals that many of the distinctive behaviors and social structures of our species are best discerned through the lens of emotions. Even the roots of so much that makes us uniquely human—art, mythology, religion—can be traced to feelings of caring, longing, fear, loneliness, awe, rage, lust, playfulness, and more. From prehistoric cave art to the songs of Hank Williams, Stephen T. Asma and Rami Gabriel explore how the evolution of the emotional mind stimulated our species’ cultural expression in all its rich variety. Bringing together insights and data from philosophy, biology, anthropology, neuroscience, and psychology, The Emotional Mind offers a new paradigm for understanding what it is that makes us so unique. (shrink)

Following Gilbert Ryle’s arguments, many philosophers took it for granted that someone knows how to do something just in case they have the ability to do it. Within the last couple decades, new intellectualists have challenged this longstanding anti-intellectualist assumption. Their central contention is that mere abilities aren’t on the same rational, epistemic level as know how. My goal is to intellectualize know how without over-intellectualizing it. Intelligent behavior is characteristically flexible or responsive to novelty, and the distinctive feature of (...) creatures who exhibit flexible behavior is their capacity to learn. As it turns out, Ryle already identified a core characteristic of learning shared widely across the animal kingdom from the lowly rat to the top athlete. Taking my cues from Ryle, I argue that know how is successful performance resulting from self-regulated abilities. To regulate an ability is to be disposed to adjust to error and respond to feedback. While regulating sophisticated human abilities often requires propositional knowledge, in many simpler cases it does not. I focus on the navigational know how of rats and honeybees. Although they possess know how, whether they possess propositional knowledge is at best an open question. (shrink)

A leading theoretical framework for naturalistic explanation of mind holds that we explain the mind by positing progressively "stupider" capacities ("homunculi") until the mind is "discharged" by means of capacities that are not intelligent at all. The so-called homuncular fallacy involves violating this procedure by positing the same capacities at subpersonal levels. I argue that the homuncular fallacy is not a fallacy, and that modern-day homunculi are idle posits. I propose an alternative view of what naturalism requires that reflects how (...) the cognitive sciences are actually integrating mind and matter. (shrink)

Anthropomorphism is the methodology of attributing human-like mental states to animals. Zoomorphism is the converse of this: it is the attribution of animal-like mental states to humans. Zoomorphism proceeds by first understanding what kind of mental states animals have and then attributing these mental states to humans. Zoomorphism has been widely used as scientific methodology especially in cognitive neuroscience. But it has not been taken seriously as a philosophical explanatory paradigm: as a way of explaining the building blocks of the (...) human mind. The philosophical explanatory paradigm of zoomorphism may not explain all aspects of human behavior, but if we accept the zoomorphic way of thinking about the human mind, we should only posit new, different kinds of mental states if the zoomorphic attribution of animal mental states fails to explain our behavior. (shrink)

I argue that Sellars’s distinction between signifying and picturing should be taken seriously by philosophers of mind, language, and cognition. I begin with interpretations of key Sellarsian texts in order to show that picturing is best understood as a theory of non-linguistic cognitive representations through which animals navigate their environments. This is distinct from the kind of discursive cognition that Sellars called ‘signifying’ and which is best understood in terms of socio-linguistic inferences. I argue that picturing is required because reflection (...) on signifying cannot adequately explain our need for cognitive friction. I then show how the idea of picturing is further developed by Paul Churchland, Ruth Garrett Millikan, and Huw Price. I finally turn to predictive processing as a theory of cognitive representation, and in particular Andy Clark’s ‘radical predictive processing’, to further characterize picturing. However, doing so has the cost of pushing picturing and signifying further apart than Sellars intended. (shrink)

Down syndrome (DS), the most common genetic cause of intellectual disability, results from the partial or complete triplication of chromosome 21. Individuals with DS are impaired at using a high-resolution, allocentric spatial representation to learn and remember discrete locations in a controlled environment. Here, we assessed the capacity of individuals with DS to perform low-resolution spatial learning, depending on two competing memory systems: (1) the place learning system, which depends on the hippocampus and creates flexible relational representations of the environment; (...) and (2) the response learning system, which depends on the striatum and creates fixed stimulus-response representations of behavioral actions. Individuals with DS exhibited a preservation of the low-resolution spatial learning capacities subserved by these two systems. In place learning, although the average performance of individuals with DS was lower than that of typically-developing (TD) mental age-matched children and TD young adults, the number of individuals with DS performing above chance level did not differ from TD children. In response learning, the average performance of individuals with DS was lower than that of TD adults, but it did not differ from that of TD children. Moreover, the number of individuals with DS performing above chance level did not differ from TD adults, and was higher than that of TD children. In sum, whereas low-resolution place learning appears relatively preserved in individuals with DS, response learning appears facilitated. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the neural pathways supporting low-resolution place learning and response learning are relatively preserved in DS. (shrink)

In recent years there has been a wealth of studies investigating how memories are allocated in the hippocampus. Some of those studies showed that it is possible to manipulate the identity of neurons recruited to represent a given memory without affecting the memory's behavioral expression. Those findings raised questions about how the hippocampus represents memories, with some researchers arguing that hippocampal neurons do not represent fixed stimuli. Herein, an alternative hypothesis is argued. Neurons in high‐order brain regions can be tuned (...) to multiple dimensions, forming complex, abstract representations. It is argued that such complex receptive fields allow those neurons to show some flexibility in their responses while still representing relatively fixed sets of stimuli. Moreover, it is pointed out that changes induced by artificial manipulation of cell assemblies are not completely redundant—the observed behavioral redundancy does not imply cognitive redundancy, as different, but similar, memories may induce the same behavior. (shrink)

Some thoughts just come to mind together. This is usually thought to happen because they are connected by associations, which the mind follows. Such an explanation assumes that there is a particular kind of simple psychological process responsible. This view has encountered criticism recently. In response, this paper aims to characterize a general understanding of associative simplicity, which might support the distinction between associative processing and alternatives. I argue that there are two kinds of simplicity that are treated as characteristic (...) of association, and as a result three possible versions of associative processing. This provides a framework that informs our understanding of association as a current and historical concept, including how various specific versions in different parts of psychology relate to one another. This framework can also guide debates over normative evaluations of actions produced by processes thought to be associative. (shrink)

In this paper, I show how semantic factors constrain the understanding of the computational phenomena to be explained so that they help build better mechanistic models. In particular, understanding what cognitive systems may refer to is important in building better models of cognitive processes. For that purpose, a recent study of some phenomena in rats that are capable of ‘entertaining’ future paths (Pfeiffer and Foster 2013) is analyzed. The case shows that the mechanistic account of physical computation may be complemented (...) with semantic considerations, and in many cases, it actually should. (shrink)

This is a work concerned with justification and freedom and the relationship between these. Its summational aim is to defend a transcendental argument for free will – that we could not be epistemically justified in undermining a strong notion of free will, as a strong notion of free will would be required for any such process of undermining to be itself epistemically justified. The book advances two transcendental arguments – for a deontically internalist conception of epistemic justification and the aforementioned (...) argument for a libertarian conception of free will. In defending each of these arguments, the book both defends and relies upon the principle that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. In articulating the latter transcendental argument – for freedom – heavy reliance is made on the earlier, epistemic, work: especially on the deontological conception of rational justification (on epistemic internalism). (shrink)

Passive frame theory attempts to illuminate what consciousnessis, in mechanistic and functional terms; it does not address the “implementation” level of analysis (how neurons instantiate conscious states), an enigma for various disciplines. However, in response to the commentaries, we discuss how our framework provides clues regarding this enigma. In the framework, consciousness is passive albeit essential. Without consciousness, there would not be adaptive skeletomotor action.

Response to spatial and nonspatial change in wild and Wistar rats The purpose of the experiment was to investigate the effects of domestication on exploration in rats. The comparison was made between wild Warsaw-Wild-Captive-Pisula-Stryjek rats and Wistar laboratory rats. The study used a purpose-built maze divided into zones connected with a corridor. Objects were placed in two out of four zones. Their location and shape were subject to experimental manipulation. Transporter used to move rats to the maze provided the opportunity (...) for spontaneous exploration of the experimental arena. Rats were subjected to a series of 10 sessions, followed by a spatial or nonspatial change in the experimental arena, after which another 5 experimental sessions were conducted. The study revealed that wild rats had much higher exploration latency than their laboratory counterparts. At each analyzed stage, WWCPS rats spent much more time in the transporter than Wistar rats. Wistar rats spent much more time during the experiment on object interaction in the experimental arena. In post-manipulation sessions, however, it was wild rats that explored object zones relatively longer than laboratory rats. No differences in the animals' behavior depending on the type of change were observed. Results suggest that wild rats tend to explore much more cautiously than laboratory rats and are more sensitive to changes in their environment. The underlying cause of these differences is likely to be the higher level of stress in wild rats, resulting from threats in their natural habitat. (shrink)

Some philosophers have laid down rather severe strictures on whether there can be thought without language. Wittgenstein asserted that ‘the limits of language…mean the limits of my world’. Davidson has argued that ‘a creature cannot have thoughts unless it is an interpreter of the speech of another’. Dummett has interpreted some pronouncements as meaning that ‘the study of thought is to be sharply distinguished from the study of the psychological processes of thinking and…the only proper method of analysing thought consists (...) in the analysis of language’. And there is also the position that thought has its own language that might exist even prior to or in the absence of natural language. But here I am going to concentrate on what might be possible in the absence of natural language. I do not know what it would mean to consider thinking in the absence of its own intrinsic language, a language of thought, if the two always co-exist. (shrink)

Optimal decision-making requires us to accurately pinpoint the basis of our thoughts, e.g. whether they originate from our memory or our imagination. This paper argues that the phenomenal qualities of our subjective experience provide permissible evidence to revise beliefs, particularly as it pertains to memory. I look to the source monitoring literature to reconcile circumstances where mnemic beliefs and mnemic qualia conflict. By separating the experience of remembering from biological facts of memory, unusual cases make sense, such as memory qualia (...) without memory or a failure to have memory qualia with memory. I argue that a pragmatic, probabilistic approach to belief revision is a way to rationally incorporate information from conscious experience, whilst acknowledging its inherent difficulties as an epistemic source. I conclude with a Bayesian defense of source monitoring based on C.I. Lewis’ coherence argument for memorial knowledge. (shrink)