Search

Perceptual experience is self‐locating. This claim aligns with our intuitions and is the dominant view in philosophy. To defend the claim, some philosophers have advanced perspectival accounts and others have advanced agentive accounts. Here, I explore tensions between the two accounts and propose a novel, integrative account: the top‐down view, which defends that visual experience is self‐locating in virtue of cognitive maps that modulate visual processing in a top‐down fashion. I assess recent neuroscientific evidence of spatial modulation in the visual cortex and show how it turns existing notions of self‐location upside‐down, shifting the focus from bottom‐up to top‐down processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The societal hallmark of the Covid‐19 pandemic was a set of mitigation measures such as lockdowns and curfews. The cognitive impact on the public of the resulting spatial, social and temporal constraints is still being investigated. While pandemic time has been extensively studied and mostly described as slowed down and elongated, opposite experimental patterns across national and social contexts leave open an important explanatory gap in order to understand which factor has been causally fundamental in determining the phenomenology of the crisis. In this paper, we use a quantitative questionnaire developed for measuring temporal and social disorientation on a sample of 3306 respondents during an acute phase of restrictions in France. We show that social disorientation greatly contributed to the temporal disruptions experienced during the pandemic. This result reinforces the importance for public authorities to address the compounding effect of feeling isolated during crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of navigation in traditional cultures are reviewed and key insights provided. Traditional navigation methods often rely on deep understanding of patterns in the environment combined with physical artefacts that aid learning and dissemination of knowledge. The diverse elements involved in a navigational process all operate within a larger interrelated information system that is adapted to the local environment. Novel methods for data analysis and modelling provide new opportunities for understanding how culture and environment shape navigation skill. Research on human navigation by psychologists and neuroscientists has come mainly from a limited range of environments and participants inhabiting western countries. By contrast, numerous anthropological accounts illustrate the diverse ways in which cultures adapt to their surrounding environment to navigate. Here, we provide an overview of these studies and relate them to cognitive science research. The diversity of cues in traditional navigation is much higher and multimodal compared with navigation experiments in the laboratory. It typically involves an integrated system of methods, drawing on a detailed understanding of the environmental cues, specific tools, and forms part of a broader cultural system. We highlight recent methodological developments for measuring navigation skill and modelling behaviour that will aid future research into how culture and environment shape human navigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Notebooks are widely used in a large number of professional and everyday life contexts. The notebook has been widely mentioned in the context of distributed cognition, the extended mind hypothesis and the study of cognitive artefacts. Despite its ubiquity and almost paradigmatic status, to date, there is no dedicated analysis of the notebook qua cognitive artefact, to explain its success and its resilience. Our aim is to fill this gap in the literature by studying a set of cognitive advantages of the notebook. For our analysis, we employ the methodological framework of distributed cognition. Using this framework, we find a series of cognitive advantages at both an individual and at a group level. At an individual level, these include external non-biological memory, the consolidation of long-term biological memory encoding, effects on attention modulation, an enhancement in metacognition and the graphication of thought. At the group level, the cognitive advantages include collaboration, the transference of content from one user to another, group-level metacognition, coordination, and the transformation of the overall epistemological setting in which notebook use takes place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Time dilation was experienced in most countries and across the several years of the Covid-19 crisis: the passage of time was deemed slower than before the pandemic, and the distance to the beginning of the pandemic seemed longer than it really was. An outstanding question is how these two aspects of time judgements relate to other temporal, social and affective disturbances. We developed and validated a 59-item questionnaire to explore these questions. 3306 participants completed the questionnaire in France in May and June 2021. Here, we analyse group differences and find that both slow passage of time and long distance judgements were associated with larger disturbances across all domains under study. These included temporal disruptions—the aptness to project oneself into the future, the sense of a rift between pre-pandemic and pandemic time, the ability to locate oneself in time, the capacity to recall the order of past events—, as well as an overall sense of social disorientation, and trauma-specific disturbances. In contrast, both fast passage of time and short distance judgements were associated with beneficial effects across all of the mentioned domains. Our results indicate that perceived passage of time and temporal distance judgements are key indicators of social and temporal disorientation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We developed a quantitative Instrument for measuring Temporal and Social Disorientation (ITSD), aimed at major crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Disorientation has been identified as one of the central elements of the psychological impact of the Covid-19 era on the general public, but so far, the question has only been approached qualitatively. This paper offers an empirical, quantitative approach to the multi-faceted disorientation of the Covid-19 pandemic by operationalising the issue with the help of the ITSD. The ITSD was developed through multiple stages involving a preliminary open-ended questionnaire followed by a coder-based thematic analysis. This paper establishes the reliability and validity of the resulting ITSD using a 3-step validation process on a sample size of 3306. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Daniel Montello's commentary on our article "Subjective Disorientation as a Metacognitive Feeling" raises many interesting points. In this response, we hope to show that what might at first seem like strong disagreements are for the most part minor issues and that the disagreements that remain are of the fruitful kind that encourage further discussion and research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]