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This paper revisits the debate about cognitive phenomenology. It elaborates, defends, and improves on our earlier proposal for resolving that debate, according to which the test for irreducible phenomenology is the presence of explanatory gaps. After showing how proposals like ours have been misunderstood or misused by others, we deploy our operationalization to argue that the correct way to align the debate over cognitive phenomenology is not between sensory and (alleged) cognitive phenomenology, but rather between non-conceptual and (alleged) conceptual or propositional phenomenology. In doing so we defend three varieties of non-sensory (amodal) 1 Note that the term “amodal” admits of two quite different uses in cognitive science. One (the one we intend) refers to processes or representations that are neither sensory-specific nor multi-sensory (or “multi-modal”) in nature. We assume throughout that concepts are amodal in this sense. The other use is the one that figures in the phrase “amodal completion” in vision science. This refers to the construction by low-level visual processes of an imaginary boundary of a partially-occluded object. The contrasting sort of completion – “modal completion” – refers to the construction of an imaginary boundary of the presumed occluding object. Both are exemplified in the famous Kanizsa triangles. Moreover, both are modality-specific (specific to the visual system) in our intended sense of “modal”. 1 non-conceptual phenomenology: valence, a sense of approximate number, and a sense of elapsed time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to an influential view, the detection of action possibilities and the selection of a plan for action are two segregated steps throughout the processing of visual information. This classical approach is committed with the assumption that two independent types of processing underlie visual perception: the semantic one, which is at the service of the identification of visually presented objects, and the pragmatic one which serves the execution of actions directed to specific parts of the same objects. However, as our knowledge of vision has improved over the years, this established view has turned out to be only an approximation. This paper sets out the details of a non-modularist approach to visual perception of action possibilities and explains how to resist the lure of cognitive segregation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the inductive biases that allow humans to learn in complex environments has been an important goal of cognitive science. Yet, while we have discovered much about human biases in specific learning domains, much of this research has focused on simple tasks that lack the complexity of the real world. In contrast, video games involving agents and objects embedded in richly structured systems provide an experimentally tractable proxy for real-world complexity. Recent work has suggested that key aspects of human learning in domains like video games can be captured by model-based reinforcement learning (RL) with object-oriented relational models—what we term theory-based RL. Restricting the model class in this way provides an inductive bias that dramatically increases learning efficiency, but in this paper we show that humans employ a stronger set of biases in addition to syntactic constraints on the structure of theories. In particular, we catalog a set of semantic biases that constrain the content of theories. Building these semantic biases into a theory-based RL system produces more human-like learning in video game environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the philosophical literature, self-deception is mainly approached through the analysis of paradoxes. Yet, it is agreed that self-deception is motivated by protection from distress. In this paper, we argue, with the help of findings from cognitive neuroscience and psychology, that self-deception is a type of affective coping. First, we criticize the main solutions to the paradoxes of self-deception. We then present a new approach to self-deception. Self-deception, we argue, involves three appraisals of the distressing evidence: (a) appraisal of the strength of evidence as uncertain, (b) low coping potential and (c) negative anticipation along the lines of Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis. At the same time, desire impacts the treatment of flattering evidence via dopamine. Our main proposal is that self-deception involves emotional mechanisms provoking a preference for immediate reward despite possible long-term negative repercussions. In the last part, we use this emotional model to revisit the philosophical paradoxes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human activity prediction has become increasingly valuable in many applications. This paper, initially from the perspective of cognition science, presents a novel approach to learning a hierarchical spatio-temporal pattern of human activities to predict ongoing activities from videos that contain only the onsets of the activities. Spatio-temporal pattern can be learned by a Hierarchical Self-Organizing Map (HSOM), which consists of two self-organizing maps (i.e., action map and actionlet map) connected via associative links trained by Hebbian learning. Ongoing activities can be predicted by Variable order Markov Model (VMM), which provides the means for capturing both large and small order Markov dependencies based on the training actionlet sequences. Experiments of the proposed method on four challenging 3D action datasets captured by commodity depth cameras show promising results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This review paper describes how mental imagery has been argued to assist in the process of visual perspective-taking. • We challenge this notion. It is the latest attempt to give mental imagery causal status in a cognitive process. • The so-called 'perceptual simulation' account of visual perspective-taking is not supported by the empirical evidence. The pictorial theory of mental imagery was a central concern of cognitive science during the latter years of the last century. Proponents of the theory argued that images are reinterpreted by the same processes that act upon perceptual inputs. This idea has recently re-emerged within the context of visual perspective-taking. The perceptual simulation theory argues that an observer not only generates an image of what another individual sees but the image is used by the perceptual system in a bottom-up manner. Based on the assumption of Kosslyn and colleagues, we argue that a minimum requirement of a pictorial theory of visual perspective-taking is that observers must faithfully represent relative distance between different points of a scene as would be viewed from an alternative position. The available evidence does not however support this. We conclude that the latest attempt to give mental imagery causal status in a cognitive process is unwarranted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we evaluate the pragmatic turn towards embodied, enactive thinking in cognitive science, in the context of recent empirical research on the memory palace technique. The memory palace is a powerful method for remembering yet it faces two problems. First, cognitive scientists are currently unable to clarify its efficacy. Second, the technique faces significant practical challenges to its users. Virtual reality devices are sometimes presented as a way to solve these practical challenges, but currently fall short of delivering on that promise. We address both issues in this paper. First, we argue that an embodied, enactive approach to memory can better help us understand the effectiveness of the memory palace. Second, we present design recommendations for a virtual memory palace. Our theoretical proposal and design recommendations contribute to solving both problems and provide reasons for preferring an embodied, enactive account over an information-processing treatment of the memory palace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important aim of research on bilingualism is to understand how the brain adapts to the demands of using more than one language.In this paper, we argue that pursuing such an aim entails valuing our research as a discovery process that acts on variety.Prescriptions about sample size and methodology, rightly aimed at establishing a sound basis for generalization, should be understood as being in the service of science as a discovery process. We propose and illustrate by drawing from previous and contemporary examples within brain and cognitive sciences, that this necessitates exploring the neural bases of bilingual phenotypes:the adaptive variety induced through the interplay of biology and culture. We identify the conceptual and methodological prerequisites for such exploration and briefly allude to the publication practices that afford it as a community practice and to the risk of allowing methodological prescriptions, rather than discovery, to dominate the research endeavor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central goal for cognitive science and philosophy of mind is to distinguish between perception and cognition. The representational approach has emerged as a prominent candidate to draw such a distinction. The idea is that perception and cognition differ in the content and the format in which the information is represented —just as perceptual representations are nonconceptual in content and iconic in format, cognitive representations are conceptual in content and discursive in format. This paper argues against this view. I argue that both perception and cognition can use conceptual and nonconceptual contents and be vehiculated in iconic and discursive formats. If correct, the representational strategy to distinguish perception from cognition fails. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]