Imperfect Cognitions

Caroline Watt This post is by Caroline Watt , Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Edinburgh. Almost 30 years ago, I became a founder member of the Koestler Parapsychology Unit . Based in the Psychology department of Edinburgh University, the KPU studies paranormal beliefs and experiences. Our work includes testing for psychic ability under controlled conditions, and investigating the psychology of paranormal beliefs and experiences. For the last few years, I have been studying precognitive dreaming. The belief that one's dreams predict future events is one of the more commonly reported paranormal experiences and we have investigated psychological factors that have been proposed to lead to seemingly precognitive experiences. We have looked at the role of memory bias in these experiences: specifically, the selective recall of matches and mismatches between dreams and subsequent events. Our participants remembered more than twice as many dreams that matched events ...

As part of our posts written by people with lived experience of mental health issues, Amy writes about anxiety. Amy has a blog , and you can follow her on Twitter . For the past three years I have experienced severe and anxiety and depression, resulting in numerous counselling sessions and medication. It’s a long journey of recovery, but I feel I am finally getting to the other side. I feel it important to battle the stigma surrounding mental health and thus why I have created my own mental health blog, Relief from Anxiety , and why I am writing about it in this blog post. Anxiety symptoms can be varied from person to person, including loss of appetite, shortness of breath, palpitations, dizziness, and irrational thoughts. Generally, these kind of actions and thoughts occur during a panic attack, when the flight or fight system kicks in, which originates from our caveman days. It helps to either run or fight the situation. Each panic attack is different from others, and there are...

Jules Holroyd On Friday 5 and Saturday 6 February 2015, the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies and The Monitoring Group held the 'Police corruption, spying and racism' conference at Conway Hall, London. One of the speakers was the Imperfect Cognitions Network member, Jules Holroyd . Here she presents her report, which has also been published on the University of Nottingham Blog " Bias and Blame ".  I recently had the opportunity to speak at an event organised by The Monitoring Group and the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies , on Police Corruption, Spying, Racism and Accountability . At this conference, a range of participants from activist groups, academia, legal teams and victims of injustice spoke - often powerfully and movingly - on their experience of understanding the workings of injustice, and of endeavours to seek accountability in the face of police and Home Office obstruction, obfuscation and discrimination (videos from the conference can be f...

This is the last in our series of posts on the papers published in a special issue of Consciousness and Cognition on the Costs and Benefits of Imperfect Cognitions. Here I summarise my paper ‘ Implicit Bias, Confabulation, and Epistemic Innocence ’. I explore the nature of confabulatory explanations of action guided by implicit bias by focusing on two imaginary cases:  The case of Roger:  ‘Roger is on a hiring panel deciding from a stack of CVs which candidates to invite to interview. Roger thinks of himself as an egalitarian, and not as somebody who is sexist. The CVs are not anonymous with respect to gender. Roger chooses not to invite any female applicants to interview. Katie is one of the female candidates who Roger chooses not to invite to interview. Katie’s CV is of equal or better quality than at least some of her male competitors who did get invited to interview, and had Katie’s CV been headed with a male name, Katie would have been invited to interview’ (p. 3)....

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 second in a series of three posts, you can read the first here . ES-B: What is observer memory?  JS: When I think about some experience I had, maybe a mundane event like having lunch yesterday with a lot of people, I can sometimes see myself in the remembered scene. So instead of being behind my own eyes when I remember that lunch yesterday, seeing my knife and fork coming up to my face as I eat, instead I can be looking at myself in the memory from an external perspective, and that is why we use the phrase ‘observer perspective’. It is as if I am above the group: I see them all and I see myself there in some way as part of that group. We contrast...

This is the seventh in our series of posts on the papers published in a special issue of Consciousness and Cognition on the Costs and Benefits of Imperfect Cognitions. Here Jules Holroyd summarises her paper ' Implicit Bias, Awareness and Imperfect Cognitions '.  Implicitly biased actions are those that manifest the distorting influence of implicit associations. For example, a member of a hiring committee might demonstrate implicit bias in undervaluing the research history of an applicant because of negative implicit associations with her gender or race. Implicit associations are typically characterised as operating automatically, fast, beyond the reach of direct control. Sometimes they are also characterised as unconscious. This last thought - that they are associations of which we are not aware - is a premise used in arguments for the conclusion that individuals cannot be responsible for the extent to which their actions are implicitly biased. How could that margin of di...

Aberrant Beliefs and Reasoning In this post, Niall Galbraith, psychologist and Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Wolverhampton, introduces a new book he edited, Aberrant Beliefs and Reasoning (Current Issues in Thinking and Reasoning series, Psychology Press, 2014). Niall's research interests include the study of beliefs – such as delusions - and the psychological factors that make one more or less prone to developing such beliefs. The book is a new edited text with contributions from a collection of leading authors in the field. An aberrant belief is extreme or unusual in nature. In the most serious cases these beliefs cause emotional distress in those who hold them, and typify the core symptoms of psychological disorders. The issue of whether reasoning plays a role in aberrant beliefs has become increasingly important for psychology, psychiatry and philosophy.

Hearing the Voice logo Today we publish a post that originally appeared in The Conversation   on 11th March 2015 , authored by Angela Woods and Ben Alderson-Day (both at the University of Durham and working on Hearing the Voice ). For many people hearing voices is synonymous with schizophrenia and severe mental illness. But is this always the case? We’ve known for a long time that hearing voices, or auditory hallucination, is reported by people with a wide range of psychiatric diagnoses as well as by those who have none . Indeed, 5-13% of adults will hear voices at some point during their lives – in circumstances that may be related to spiritual experiences, bereavement, trauma, sensory deprivation or impairment, as well as mental and emotional distress. Despite this, many people, including health-care professionals, still regard hearing voices as a “first-rank” symptom of schizophrenia and assume that these voices are experienced as negative, commanding, loud, frequent and c...

This is the sixth in our  series of posts on the papers published in a special issue of Consciousness and Cognition on the Costs and Benefits of Imperfect Cognitions. Here Kengo Miyazono summarises his paper ' Delusions as Harmful Malfunctioning Beliefs '. Delusional beliefs are typically pathological. Being pathological is not the same as being false or being irrational. A woman might falsely believe that Istanbul is the capital of Turkey but it might just be a simple mistake. A man might believe without good evidence that he is smarter than his colleagues, but it might just be a healthy self-deceptive belief. On the other hand, when a patient with brain damage caused by a car accident believes that his father was replaced by an imposter, or when another patient with schizophrenia believes that 'The Organization' painted the doors of the houses on a street to send a message to him, these beliefs are not merely false or irrational. They are pathological. What makes...

Logo of the Normativity Project On 16th January the Department of Philosophy at the University of Southampton hosted a one day workshop on Epistemic and Practical Normativity: Explanatory Connections. The workshop was the second in a series of three workshops, which are being held as part of the Normativity: Epistemic and Practical project at Southampton.  The first speaker was Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen  (Aarhus), giving a paper entitled ‘Epistemic Normativity: Absolute or Instrumental?’ Steglich-Petersen argued that some features of epistemic assessment which have been thought to support an absolutist conception of epistemic rationality (and speak against an instrumentalist conception), actually suggest a problem of normative insignificance for the absolutist. He offered a positive proposal of epistemic normativity which made use of aim-restricted instrumental assessment, the idea was that epistemic assessment could be a version of assessment of this kind. This means t...

This is the fifth in our series of posts on the papers published in a special issue of Consciousness and Cognition on the Costs and Benefits of Imperfect Cognitions. Here Aikaterini Fotopoulou summarises her paper ' The Virtual Bodily Self:  Mentalisation of the Body as Revealed in Anosognosia for Hemiplegia '.  How do humans know what is real? As though the philosophical issues raised by this question were not complex enough, my paper tries to tackle an even more convoluted question; how do humans know what is real about their own body? A simple answer would be that they have an evolutionary prescribed perceptual system that allows their brain to combine and ‘read out’ various signals about the body deriving from (a) within the body (e.g. heart beats), (b) outside the body (e.g. light), and (c) the body’s boundary, the skin (e.g. pressure). This answer however turns out to be simplistic both philosophically and scientifically. Thankfully for the reader, the paper...