Imperfect Cognitions

Janet Geipel (pictured above) is currently a Postdoc at the VU University Medical Center Amsterdam. In this post, she summarises a paper she recently published in the journal Cognition, which is based on her doctoral studies at the University of Trento. Imagine yourself in the following situation. You are standing on a footbridge next to a large man. Underneath the footbridge, a runaway trolley is hurtling down the tracks and will soon kill 5 unsuspected workmen. But there is a way out. You could push the large man off the footbridge and onto the path of the runaway trolley. The person would die but the five workmen would be saved. Is it morally permissible to do so? Now consider what seems to be an insignificant variation. Instead of reading the story in your native language you read it in a non-native language that you understand well. Would this affect your moral evaluation? Studies conducted by our research group and others suggest that it might. Overall, foreign language ...

On Thursday 13 April 2017, a workshop organized at Columbia University by the Centre for Science and Society and the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America sought to explore an important and still partly unresolved question: How does our brain make sense of scents and flavors? Importantly, a key goal of the exploration was to debunk some myths about the human sense of smell. Most notably, it targeted the view that our olfactory abilities are underdeveloped and lack cognitive significance. An eminent advocate of this proposition was Immanuel Kant, who wrote the following: "Which organic sense is the most ungrateful and also seems to be the most dispensable? The sense of smell. It does not pay to cultivate it or refine it at all in order to enjoy; for there are more disgusting objects than pleasant ones (especially in crowded places), and even when we come across something fragrant, the pleasure coming from the sense of smell is always fleeting and transient" ...

Together with Ema Sullivan-Bissett , Matteo Mameli and Matthew Broome , I have written a chapter on delusions for a new volume on gradualism in psychiatry: Vagueness in Psychiatry , edited by Geert Keil, Laura Keuck and Rico Hauswald for Oxford University Press. Matteo Mameli In the paper we argue that it is difficult to distinguish pathological and non-pathological beliefs on the basis of their epistemic features. Then we consider some of the moral and legal implications of our thesis, focusing in particular on the role of beliefs in the attribution of moral responsibility and legal accountability for criminal actions that are motivated by those beliefs. Ema Sullivan-Bissett Delusions fail to meet many epistemic standards. It might look like they are not beliefs which are aimed at truth or governed by a norm of truth, that they are not responsive to evidence in the ways which ordinary beliefs typically are. But non-delusional beliefs also share such features. For instan...

In this post I am interested in the depiction of mental health issues in books aimed at young children. There are two interesting books addressing the issue of what the depression of a loved one means for the children involved. The first is The Colour Thief , by Andrew Fusek Peters and Polly Peters, illustrated by Karin Littlewood (Wayland 2014). The second is Virginia Wolf , by Kyo Maclear and Isabelle Arsenault (Kids Can Press 2016).   There are some interesting similarities in how depression is described in the two books. In both books, the point of view is that of a child. In The Colour Thief , a boy observes his father as he gradually falls prey to depression. The father soon gets to the point where he does not go out anymore and stays in bed all day. In Virginia Wolf , a book inspired by the relationship between the author Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa, a child called Vanessa witnesses a curious transformation in her beloved sister Virgina. Virginia becomes, qu...

This post is by James Andow  (pictured above), a Lecturer in Moral Philosophy at the University of Reading . James’s main research interests are in philosophical methodology, in particular, on intuitions and experimental philosophy. In this post, he talks about some recent work in epistemology. On the basis of no evidence at all, Jo comes to the private belief that aliens from another planet are helping her navigate the social world. Without that belief, Jo would experience profound social anxiety, develop paranoid tendencies, and come to suffer worse delusions that would severely impact her ability to maintain her physical wellbeing, personal relationships, employment, and so on. With her belief, Jo does pretty well for herself. Overall it is probably good Jo has this belief about aliens. There are certainly comparative benefits to having this belief. The overall quality of Jo's cognitions is improved by having this belief. She is closer to the truth, has fewer false co...

In this post, Jennifer Radden , Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Massachusetts, introduces her new book: Melancholic Habits: Burton's Anatomy & the Mind Sciences . When the process of writing a book is long and slow, as this was, one enters not entirely sure where one will end – or at least, expecting mind-change as the result of the process. For me, for this book, that change was considerable, and so incremental that it is hard to identify the moments it occurred or the sequences engendering it. Some of the befores and afters stand out, though. I’d read Burton for years, and alluded to aspects of his Anatomy of Melancholy in earlier writing. But the recognition that it was possible to find a coherent model of mind and disorder (“disease,” in his pre-modern sense) implicatively related not to the actual detail of his remedies but to his remedial principles, emerged slowly as I worked through the first and second Partitions. ...

My name is Emilie Caspar and I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Center for Research in Cognition and Neurosciences at Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. My work is mostly dedicated to understand what guides people’s decisions to perform actions that are morally acceptable or not. My current research focuses on the extent to which coercion influences the experience of being the author of one’s own actions and how this affects immoral behaviours. To achieve this goal, I combine techniques from both experimental psychology and cognitive neurosciences. Most of us consider that we have “free will”, the power to make our own choices and to control our actions. This experience stems in part from the fact that our conscious experience of intention precedes the moment we act. Feeling ‘free’ greatly influences one’s own perception of individual responsibility: We say we are responsible for our actions if we “could have done otherwise”. Does this perception of responsibility inf...

Each year, the University of Birmingham hosts the Arts &Science Festival , a week-long celebration of research, culture and collaboration across campus and beyond. During the festival, those involved in different aspects of university life deliver a programme of concerts, exhibitions, screenings, talks and workshops around a common theme. This year’s theme “Land and Water” had us at project PERFECT thinking about perceptions of climate change, and in the following, I report on a lunchtime event that we hosted on this topic, in which we were joined by Ulrike Hahn (Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Birkbeck, below) and Anna Bright (‎Chief Executive at Sustainability West Midlands). Why should those researching imperfect cognitions be interested in perceptions of climate change? Well, it turns out that the former frequently feature in, and shape, the latter. We see lots of things, beyond the consideration of climactic data, influence whether people beli...

My name is Andrea Pittarello , and I am an Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands). I am mainly interested in behavioral ethics (e.g., cheating) and I seek to understand what leads people from all walks of life to bend the rules and serve their self-interest. In a recent paper with Enrico Rubaltelli (University of Padova) and Daphna Motro (University of Arizona), we asked whether people are more likely to lie by withholding the truth (i.e., a lie of omission) or by actively breaking the rules (i.e., lie of commission). Imagine that you are selling your car and the engine is on its last legs. A lie of commission would be telling a potential customer that the engine works perfectly, whereas a lie of omission would be failing to mention the problem and let the customer find out about it on his own. From a utilitarian point of view, the two lies should be the same: After all, lying is always wrong, and the way it is brou...

This post is by Michiel van Elk who works in the Religion, Cognition and Behavior Lab at the University of Amsterdam and is currently a Fullbright Visiting Scholar at Stanford University. He recently published a paper on the self-attribution bias and paranormal beliefs in Consciousness and Cognition.   My name is Michiel van Elk and I am intrigued by religious and spiritual experiences. Why do some people have paranormal encounters? What causes people to experience the feeling that another invisible being is present? How do mystical experiences and feelings of transcendence come about? As a researcher working at the Religion, Cognition and Behavior Lab at the University of Amsterdam, I aim to answer these questions. I often go into the field to study religious experiences, but also conduct lab-based studies using a variety of different psychological and neurocognitive techniques. Together with my colleagues we found for instance that mystical experiences can be induced th...