Imperfect Cognitions

Helena De Preester is assistant professor and researcher at University College Ghent, as well as a visiting research professor at the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences at the University of Ghent. Her research focuses on the connection between the human mind, embodiment, technology, and wider society.  Manos Tsakiris is professor of Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he leads the lab of Action & Body and the INtheSELF ERC-funded project . His research focuses on the link between body and self and how we become aware of ourselves and others. In this blog post they introduce their new co-edited, interdisciplinary volume on interoception. Interoception is the body-to-brain axis of signals originating from the internal body and visceral organs (such as gastrointestinal, respiratory, hormonal and circulatory systems), and plays a unique role in ensuring homeostasis. Interoception therefore refers to the sensing of the state of the inner bod...

Vince Polito is is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Macquarie University, and member of the Belief Formation Program at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders. His work investigates alterations of agency and body representation associated with hypnosis, virtual reality, flow, meditation, and psychoactive drugs. You can find him on twitter here . Hypnosis is used clinically as a treatment for conditions such as chronic pain , and is also becoming more commonly used as a research tool in cognitive science. Despite growing levels of interest in hypnosis, the mechanisms that underlie hypnotic effects are still not agreed upon. A common view amongst researchers is that hypnosis can profoundly influence the way that individuals monitor and evaluate their experiences but that it is not able to influence behaviours that are normally outside of conscious control. A recent study we completed provides evidence that, in certain contexts, hypnosis may actually be...

Duncan Law  is a consultant clinical psychologist at the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families and University College London. He is interested in quality improvement across child mental health systems, better collaborative practice, Goals Based Outcomes (GBOs), better use of evidence informed practice, and authentic participation. Mick Cooper  is a professor of Counselling Psychology at Roehampton University. He is the author of Existential Psychotherapy and Counselling (Sage, 2015). In this blog post, Duncan talks about their new co-edited volume Working with Goals in Psychotherapy and Counselling . Recent evidence suggests that working with goals in counselling and psychotherapy can support positive therapeutic change. Goals can empower clients and give them hope: helping them feel that they have the capacity to act towards achieving their desired futures. Goals can help focus, and direct, clients’ and therapists’ attention, building a bette...

This post is by Elisabetta Lalumera (University of Bicocca, Milan). In this post she summarises a paper forthcoming in Rivista di Estetica, entitled: "Trust in healthcare systems and vaccine hesitancy." Healthcare systems can positively influence our personal decision-making and health-related behavior only if we trust them. What does it take for the public to trust a healthcare system? I propose that the trust relation is based on an epistemic component, epistemic authority, and on a value component, the benevolence of the healthcare system. I argue that it is also affected by the vulnerability of the pubblic on healthcare matters, and by the system’s credibility. My proposed analysis of public trust in health care systems can be used to better understand the phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy, the tendency to question vaccine policies, and to seek alternative vaccine schedules or refuse vaccination. Trust Trust in health care is a three-place relation, involvin...

Jens Brockmeier is a Professor in the Psychology department at the American University of Paris. With a background in philosophy, psychology, and language studies, he is concerned with the cultural fabric of mind and language - language understood as a form of life and central dimension of human development. He is the author of Culture and Narrative (Mimesis, 2014) and a co-editor (with L.-C Hyden and H. Lindemann Nelson) of Beyond Loss: Dementia, Memory, and Identity (OUP, 2014). In this blog post he talks about his latest book Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative, and the Autobiographical Process In recent work, Brockmeier has been investigating narrative as psychological, linguistic, and cultural practice. His main interest is in the function of narrative for autobiographical memory, personal identity, and the understanding of time, issues he has explored both empirically and philosophically – empirically, in various languages and sociocultural contexts, and under conditi...

Today's post is provided by Katya Numbers . She discusses her recent paper " Ageing stereotypes influence the transmission of false memories in the social contagion paradigm ", which is forthcoming in Memory. I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of New South Wales as well as the Coordinator of the Sydney Memoryand Ageing Study . My research focuses on metamemory (our beliefs about our own and others’ memories) and ageing. Specifically, I am interested in whether peoples’ subjective beliefs about memory and age can predict and/or influence actual memory performance, both in younger and older adults. If two people are recalling a shared event, and one person misremembers that event, it is very easy for their false memory to change the other person’s memory of what occurred. We call this the social contagion of memory. It has been well established that the social contagion effect is influenced by how credible a person is seen to be. That is, people are...

This post is by Stephen Gaukroger, Emeritus Professor of History of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Sydney. In the course of the eighteenth century, philosophers, physicians, political economists and others began to think about how the study of human behaviour might be taken out of the hands of metaphysicians and theologians, and transformed into an evidence-based scientific enterprise. These projects fall under the general rubric of ‘naturalization’. The Natural and the Human looks at late eighteenth and early nineteenth century attempts to naturalize the study of human behaviour, and at the way in which this general programmes lead to the naturalization of religion. Four forms of naturalization of the human are explored. The first is anthropological medicine, in which traditional philosophical understanding of the human condition is replaced with a medical understanding, not least on the grounds that whereas philosophy confines itself to healthy min...

This post is by Tyler Flanagan, and in this post he briefly introduces and outlines his recent publication in Res Cogitans entitled “ Emotions, Practical Rationality, and the Self .” He is a first year Master’s student in Philosophy at Virginia Tech. What I am attempting to do in my paper is defend the view that our emotions are quite amenable to the view of ourselves as rational beings. Rather than throw out the picture of the emotional human, I argue that we should embrace the view instead. Our emotions do not in any way stop us from reasoning properly, and in fact provide us with reasons for action that seem to outweigh even our most thoughtful contemplation ( Arpaly, 2002 ; Jones 2004 ) With this view in tow, I suggest that the emotions we have about ourselves, such as regret or shame, act as a guide to how well or how poorly we are attending to our goals and what we care about, and in some instances can show us when we are valuing what we should not. In these ways our em...