Imperfect Cognitions

I interviewed John Sutton , Professor of Cognitive Science at the ARC Centre for Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders at Macquarie University, Sydney. John is interested in memory, skill, and distributed cognition, and in his work he seeks to integrate philosophical, psychological, and historical ideas and methods. This is the first in a series of three posts. ES-B: Do you think that distorted autobiographical memories might have pragmatic benefits insofar as they may function to fill gaps in a person’s recollection of the past, or are distorted in a self-enhancing way? JS: "I think that’s a very difficult question, and it’s probably going to pan out differently for different kinds of memory pathology. In general, yes, for sure, the mechanisms which give rise to distortions can be adaptive mechanisms, distortions might just be a by-product of mechanisms that work well enough most of the time. I am uneasy about pushing the line that specific distortions themselves ...

Richard Dub Most theories of delusion formation hold that delusions arise in response to an anomalous, unusual experience. For instance, the often-discussed Capgras delusion -- the conviction that a loved one has been replaced with an imposter -- is typically said to be formed in response to an extremely powerful feeling of unfamiliarity. We all intuitively understand what it is for a person or place to feel familiar or unfamiliar, and we have reasonably good cognitive models of how this feeling is formed. But what sort of state is this feeling? Sometimes the feeling of familiarity is listed alongside the "feeling of knowing" and other so-called "epistemic emotions." Is this a good term? Is the feeling of unfamiliarity an emotion? I recently had the opportunity to pose this question to an audience of neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists, roboticists, and philosophers at a workshop run by the Swiss Center for the Affective Sciences . Opinion varied widely....

I am posting this on behalf of David Uings, who received an MPhil for research into linguistic miscommunication, and went on to investigate the implications of split-brain research and the two visual pathways in the human brain for the philosophy of mind. His MLitt thesis was entitled Consciousness and Vision in Man: where philosophy has gone wrong. In this post David is presenting his forthcoming book, Better Than One (Karnac 2014). Better Than One by David Uing We have known for more than half a century that if the link between the two halves of the human brain is severed, the separate halves reveal all the components of mindedness: perceptions, beliefs, desires, memories, thoughts and will. There are significant differences between the two minds of split-brain patients. The left mind uses language to report its perceptions, the right mind cannot. The right mind is good at visual tasks such as pattern matching at which the left mind is very poor. When the right mind acts on a...

In this blog post, Ian James Kidd (University of Durham and University of Leeds) and I, Havi Carel  (University of Bristol), talk about our research on epistemic injustice. Many of us are familiar with stories about doctors who don’t listen, large-scale healthcare systems that are impersonal and bureaucratic, and feelings of helplessness when trying to navigate these systems. In the UK these complaints have informed recent changes to healthcare policy, such as the NHS Patient Charter and the NHS constitution. But despite this greater awareness patients continue to voice concerns, which attest to persistent experiences of being epistemically marginalised or excluded by health professionals. Focusing on the epistemic dimension of these situations, we suggest that patients’ testimonies are often dismissed as irrelevant, confused, too emotional, unhelpful, or time-consuming.

I am posting this on behalf of Nigel Sabbarton-Leary  who has research interests in philosophy of science and metaphysics and more recently philosophy of psychiatry. Nigel co-edited with Helen Beebee a volume entitled  Semantics and Metaphysics of Natural Kinds (Routledge, 2010).  Alternative Perspectives on Psychiatric Validation With Lisa Bortolotti and Matthew Broome I have recently written a paper on mental disorders and whether, or not, they should be construed as what philosophers call ‘natural kinds’. It will appear as a chapter in a volume entitled Alternative Perspectives on Psychiatric Validation , edited by Peter Zachar, Drozdstoj St. Stoyanov, Massimiliano Aragona, and Assen Jablensky for Oxford University Press (due out in November 2014). I thought I’d take this opportunity to articulate our position – in broad brush terms at least – and see what people thought. First, a bit of preamble. By a ‘natural kind’ we mean an objective, mind-independent d...

Christoph Hoerl I'm Christoph Hoerl , I work in the Department of Philosophy at Warwick University , and my research is mostly in the Philosophy of Mind. One topic I am particularly interested in is memory, and I have recently published a paper in which I discuss an example taken from C. B. Martin and Max Deutscher's 'Remembering' ( Philosophical Review 75, 1966, pp. 161-96), which is still one of the most frequently cited articles in contemporary philosophical discussions of the nature memory. The example runs as follows: "Suppose that someone asks a painter to paint an imaginary scene. The painter agrees to do this and, taking himself to be painting some purely imaginary scene, paints a detailed picture of a farmyard, including a certain colored and shaped house, various people with detailed features, particular items of clothing, and so on. His parents then recognize the picture as a very accurate representation of a scene which the painter saw just once ...

Natalie Gold This week we publish an interview with Natalie Gold , Senior Research Fellow at King's College London, and Principal Investigator of a five-year project on self-control and the person funded by the European Research Council ( TeamControl ). Project team members include: Jurgis Karpus (PhD student), Marcela Herdova (postdoc), and James Thom (postdoc). Natalie held post-doctoral fellowships in the Probability, Philosophy and Modeling group based at the University of Konstanz, and in the Philosophy Department at Duke University. Before joining King’s College London, she was a Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. Her interests are in rationality, decision theory, moral psychology, experimental philosophy and collective intentions. LB : The aim of your project is to explain self-control, defined as the capacity to resist a temptation in order to pursue a long-term goal. How did you become interested in self-control? What problems do you think a ...

Jason Braithwaite I am posting this on behalf of Jason Braithwaite , Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Psychology and Neuroscience, and head of the Selective Attention and Awareness Laboratory (SAAL), and Hayley Dewe , PhD student in the SAAL, in the School of Psychology, University of Birmingham. Hayley Dewe Using modern methods of neuroscience and psychology, we both research the neurocognition of aberrant and anomalous experiences, including (though not restricted to), the out-of-body experience, dissociation, disorders of embodiment, disembodiment, signs of depersonalization / derealization, aberrant emotional salience in hallucinatory experience, cortical hyperexcitability, and multisensory integration, etc. The rubber-hand illusion (RHI) involves experimentally inducing an anomalous body experience in observers ( Botvinick & Cohen, 1998 ). Typically observers report everything from mild sensations such as their real hand getting cold, to more striking experiences whe...