Imperfect Cognitions

In this post, Matilde Aliffi (PhD student at the University of Birmingham) reports from the 7th International Summer School of Affective Science (ISSAS) held at Château de Bossey between the 7th and the 14th July 2016. This year ISSAS was entirely dedicated to investigating the role of emotions in fiction and virtual worlds. World leading experts in philosophy, psychology, educational science, neuroscience, affective computing and game design gave their lecture to an audience composed by an international and interdisciplinary community of about forty PhD students.   During the school, workshops were also held on thought experiments, data-analysis, programming and text-based emotion recognition. Participants were divided in eight teams and had the opportunity to design and present a collaborative and interdisciplinary research project tied to the topics of the school. Alongside the lectures, participants also enjoyed artistic events that complemented nicely the lectures with a

This post is by Marko Jurjako (pictured above) and Luca Malatesti (pictured below), collaborators on the project Classification and explanations of antisocial personality disorder and moral and legal responsibility in the context of the Croatian mental health and care law (CEASCRO) , funded by the Croatian Science Foundation and based in the Department of Philosophy of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Rijeka (Croatia). Marko is a junior researcher on the project and his interests lie in moral psychology and evolutionary approaches to metaethics. Luca is assistant professor of philosophy and works mainly in philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychiatry. In this post they summarise their paper ‘ Instrumental Rationality in Psychopathy: Implications from Learning Tasks ’, forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology. Psychopathy is a personality disorder that involves traits such as pathological lying, manipulativeness, superficial charm, no or little concern for the

This is the second in a series of two posts by Phil Corlett (pictured above) and Sarah Fineberg (pictured below). Phil and Sarah are both based in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University. In a post published last week, and this post they discuss the adaptive value of delusional beliefs via their predictive coding model of the mind, and the potential delusions have for epistemic innocence  (see their recent paper ' The Doxastic Shear Pin: Delusions as Errors of Learning and Memory ', in Cognitive Neuropsychiatry) .  Phil presented a version of the arguments below at the Royal College of Psychiatrists' Annual Meeting in Birmingham in 2015, as part of a session on delusions sponsored by project PERFECT.  Our analysis depends on two distinct systems for instrumental learning, one goal-directed, the other habitual (Daw et al., 2005 ). The goal-directed system involves learning flexible relationships between actions and outcomes instantiated in the more comput

This post is by Alex Tillas and James Trafford . Alex is a a Research Fellow at the University of Düsseldorf in Germany. He holds a PhD from University of Bristol and is mainly working on philosophy of psychology and cognitive science, broadly construed. James is a Senior Lecturer in Contextual and Critical Studies at the University of the Creative Arts in London. He completed a PhD in philosophy of mind at the University of East London, and his primary research interests lie in reasoning, rationality, and logical inferentialism.   This post is based on their co-authored papers ' Intuition and Reason: Re-assessing Dual-Process Theories with Representational Sub-Activation ', forthcoming in Teorema, and 'The Fear Factor: Reconsidering the Roles of Emotion in Reasoning', currently under review. Emotionally responding to environmental cues is crucial for adaptive human behaviour. For instance, in the presence of a predator, fear can be a good advisor since it can sha