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The future of psychology: connecting mind to brain.
- Perspectives on Psychological Science,
, 2009
"... ABSTRACT-Psychological states such as thoughts and feelings are real. Brain states are real. The problem is that the two are not real in the same way, creating the mind-brain correspondence problem. In this article, I present a possible solution to this problem that involves two suggestions. First, ..."
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ABSTRACT-Psychological states such as thoughts and feelings are real. Brain states are real. The problem is that the two are not real in the same way, creating the mind-brain correspondence problem. In this article, I present a possible solution to this problem that involves two suggestions. First, complex psychological states such as emotion and cognition can be thought of as constructed events that can be causally reduced to a set of more basic, psychologically primitive ingredients that are more clearly respected by the brain. Second, complex psychological categories like emotion and cognition are the phenomena that require explanation in psychology, and, therefore, they cannot be abandoned by science. Describing the content and structure of these categories is a necessary and valuable scientific activity. Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. - Einstein & Infeld (1938, p. 33) The cardinal passions of our life, anger, love, fear, hate, hope, and the most comprehensive divisions of our intellectual activity, to remember, expect, think, know, dream , with the broadest genera of aesthetic feeling, joy, sorrow, pleasure, pain, are the only facts of a subjective order which this vocabulary deigns to note by special words. -James (1890, p. 195) From its inception in the early 18th century (as an amalgam of philosophy, neurology, and physiology), psychology has always been in a bit of an identity crisis, trying to be both a social and a natural science. 1 Psychologists attempt to bridge the social and natural worlds using the conceptual tools of their time. Throughout our history, the link between the two has felt less like a solid footbridge and more like a tightrope requiring lightness of foot and a really strong safety net. Mind-brain, and relatedly, behaviorbrain, correspondence continue to be central issues in psychology, and they remain the largest challenge in 21st-century psychology. The difficulty in linking the human mind to behavior on the one hand and to the brain on the other is rooted, ironically enough, in the way the human brain itself works. Human brains categorize continuously, effortlessly, and relentlessly. Categorization plays a fundamental role in every human activity, including science. Categorizing functions like a chisel, dividing up the sensory world into figure and ground, leading us to attend to certain features and to ignore others. Via the process of categorization, the brain transforms only some sensory stimulation into information. Only some of the wavelengths of light striking our retinas are transformed into seen objects, and only some of the changes in air pressure registered in our ears are heard as words or music. To categorize something is to render it meaningful. It then becomes possible to make reasonable inferences about that thing, to predict what to do with it, and to communicate our experience of it to others. There are ongoing debates about how categorization works, but the fact that it works is not in question. The brain's compulsion to categorize presents certain unavoidable challenges to what can be learned about the natural world from human observation. Psychologists know that people don't contribute to their perceptions of the world in a neutral way. Human brains do not dispassionately look upon the world and carve nature at its joints. We make self-interested observations about the world in all manner of speaking. And what holds true for people in general certainly holds for scientists in particular. Scientists are active perceivers, and like all perceivers, we see the world from a particular point of view (that is not always shared by other scientists). We parse the world into bits and pieces using the conceptual tools that are available at a particular point in time and with a particular goal in mind (often inextricably linked to said conceptual tools). This is not a failing of the scientific method per se-it is a natural consequence of how the human brain sees and hears and feels . . . and does science. An example of how categorization shapes science comes from the study of genetics. When molecular biologists first began to study the units of inheritance, they (inspired by Mendel) searched
Perception and Iconic Memory: What Sperling Doesn’t Show’, Mind and Language 26: 381–411
, 2011
"... Abstract: Philosophers have lately seized upon Sperling’s partial report technique and subsequent work on iconic memory in support of controversial claims about perceptual experience, in particular that phenomenology overflows cognitive access. Drawing on mounting evidence concerning postdictive per ..."
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Abstract: Philosophers have lately seized upon Sperling’s partial report technique and subsequent work on iconic memory in support of controversial claims about perceptual experience, in particular that phenomenology overflows cognitive access. Drawing on mounting evidence concerning postdictive perception, I offer an interpretation of Sperling’s data in terms of cue-sensitive experience which fails to support any such claims. Arguments for overflow based on change-detection paradigms (e.g. Landman et al., 2003; Sligte et al., 2008) cannot be blocked in this way. However, such paradigms are fundamentally different from Sperling’s and, for rather different reasons, equally fail to establish controversial claims about perceptual experience. 1.
Article Implicit Recognition Based on Lateralized Perceptual Fluency
, 2012
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Manipulating letter fluency for words alters electrophysiological correlates of recognition memory. Neuroimage 83, 849–861. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2013.07.039
- Neuropsychologia
, 2013
"... The mechanisms that give rise to familiarity memory have received intense research interest. One current topic of debate concerns the extent to which familiarity is driven by the same fluency sources that give rise to certain implicit memory phenomena. Familiarity may be tied to conceptual fluency, ..."
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The mechanisms that give rise to familiarity memory have received intense research interest. One current topic of debate concerns the extent to which familiarity is driven by the same fluency sources that give rise to certain implicit memory phenomena. Familiarity may be tied to conceptual fluency, given that familiarity and conceptual implicit memory can exhibit similar neurocognitive properties. However, familiarity can also be driven by perceptual factors, and its neural basis under these circumstances has received less attention. Here we recorded brain potentials during recognition testing using a procedure that has previously been shown to encourage a reliance on letter information when assessing familiarity for words. Studied and unstudied words were derived either from two separate letter pools or a single letter pool ("letter-segregated" and "normal" conditions, respectively) in a within-subjects contrast. As predicted, recognition accuracy was higher in the letter-segregated relative to the normal condition. Electrophysiological analyses revealed parietal old-new effects from 500-700 ms in both conditions. In addition, a topographically dissociable occipital old-new effect from 300-700 ms was present in the letter-segregated condition only. In a second experiment, we found that similar occipital brain potentials were associated with confident false recognition of words that shared letters with studied words but were not themselves studied. These findings indicate that familiarity is a multiply determined phenomenon, and that the stimulus dimensions on which familiarity is based can moderate its neural correlates. Conceptual and perceptual contributions to familiarity vary across testing circumstances, and both must be accounted for in theories of recognition memory and its neural basis.
Is Contextual Cue Learning Flexible? An Eye-Movement Study of the Contextual Cueing Task
, 2014
"... ii IS CONTEXTUAL CUE LEARNING FLEXIBLE? ..."
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Investigating the Awareness of Remembering P ERS PE CT IVE S ON PS YC HOLOGIC AL SC IENC E
"... ABSTRACT-There is a marked lack of consensus concerning the best way to learn how conscious experiences arise. In this article, we advocate for scientific approaches that attempt to bring together four types of phenomena and their corresponding theoretical accounts: behavioral acts, cognitive event ..."
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ABSTRACT-There is a marked lack of consensus concerning the best way to learn how conscious experiences arise. In this article, we advocate for scientific approaches that attempt to bring together four types of phenomena and their corresponding theoretical accounts: behavioral acts, cognitive events, neural events, and subjective experience. We propose that the key challenge is to comprehensively specify the relationships among these four facets of the problem of understanding consciousness without excluding any facet. Although other perspectives on consciousness can also be informative, combining these four perspectives could lead to significant progress in explaining a conscious experience such as remembering. We summarize some relevant findings from cognitive neuroscience investigations of the conscious experience of memory retrieval and of memory behaviors that transpire in the absence of the awareness of remembering. These examples illustrate suitable scientific strategies for making progress in understanding consciousness by developing and testing theories that connect the behavioral expression of recall and recognition, the requisite cognitive transactions, the neural events that make remembering possible, and the awareness of remembering. Determining the exact role of the brain in conscious experience is one of the Holy Grails of contemporary scientific research. Awareness is the focal point of our mental lives and is perhaps the one most highly valued component of our biological makeup. Many of the complex mental functions that guide our day-today activities, including perception, imagination, problem solving, volitional action, attention, and autobiographical memory, cannot be explained fully without a consideration of conscious awareness. Nonetheless, prospects for a thorough scientific understanding of consciousness often seem daunting. In this article, we describe recent advances in the study of conscious memory experiences in order to exemplify how progress can be made in understanding consciousness. An essential part of our argument is that the investigation of consciousness must rely on a wide range of methods and theoretical strategies used together rather than in isolation. Methods for measuring human brain activity, for instance, provide powerful tools, but the application of neuroimaging to the problems of memory and consciousness can be most fruitful when one seeks evidence concerning four specific dimensions of the problem: cognitive, neural, behavioral, and subjective. Indeed, we must not settle for purely cognitive theories, purely behavioral theories, purely neural theories, or purely subjective theories of memory. All four dimensions are essential for understanding memory and consciousness. Research on declarative and nondeclarative memory is particularly instructive in this regard because a major distinction between these broad categories of memory phenomena is that declarative memory entails the potential for being aware of memory retrieval, whereas nondeclarative memory does not. This awareness of remembering may best be investigated by combining evidence pertinent to all four perspectives. We thus envision a comprehensive scientific analysis of conscious memory phenomena-an approach that may bring us closer to specifying the essential ingredients that yield conscious experience and thus closer to solving long-standing mysteries about the human mind. WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS? One challenge in building an appropriate framework for studying consciousness is providing a suitable operational definition. Philosophers and scientists have not yet settled on a definition of consciousness, despite debate that can be traced back over 2 millennia. However, as noted by
Right © 2014 Elsevier B.V. Type Journal Article
"... Priming and implicit recognition depend on similar temporal changes in perceptual representations ..."
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Priming and implicit recognition depend on similar temporal changes in perceptual representations
PERSPECTIVES ON PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE The Future of Psychology Connecting Mind to Brain
"... ABSTRACT—Psychological states such as thoughts and feelings are real. Brain states are real. The problem is that the two are not real in the same way, creating the mind–brain correspondence problem. In this article, I present a possible solution to this problem that involves two suggestions. First, ..."
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ABSTRACT—Psychological states such as thoughts and feelings are real. Brain states are real. The problem is that the two are not real in the same way, creating the mind–brain correspondence problem. In this article, I present a possible solution to this problem that involves two suggestions. First, complex psychological states such as emotion and cognition can be thought of as constructed events that can be causally reduced to a set of more basic, psychologically primitive ingredients that are more clearly respected by the brain. Second, complex psychological categories like emotion and cognition are the phenomena that require explanation in psychology, and, therefore, they cannot be abandoned by science. Describing the content and structure of these categories is a necessary and valuable scientific activity. Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. —Einstein & Infeld (1938, p. 33) The cardinal passions of our life, anger, love, fear, hate, hope, and the most comprehensive divisions of our intellectual activity, to remember, expect, think, know, dream, with the broadest genera of aesthetic feeling, joy, sorrow, pleasure, pain, are the only facts of a subjective order which this vocabulary deigns to note by special words. —James (1890, p. 195) From its inception in the early 18th century (as an amalgam of philosophy, neurology, and physiology), psychology has always been in a bit of an identity crisis, trying to be both a social and a natural science. 1 Psychologists attempt to bridge the social and natural worlds using the conceptual tools of their time. Throughout our history, the link between the two has felt less like a solid
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, 2012
"... The hippocampus reevaluated in unconscious learning and memory: at a tipping point? ..."
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The hippocampus reevaluated in unconscious learning and memory: at a tipping point?
Human Memory Systems: A Framework for Understanding the Neurocognitive Foundations of Intuition
"... Abstract. A neurocomputational framework is described for characterizing how intuitive and deliberate processing are accomplished in the human brain. The framework is derived from memory systems theory and supported by research findings on contrasts between implicit versus explicit (nonconscious ver ..."
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Abstract. A neurocomputational framework is described for characterizing how intuitive and deliberate processing are accomplished in the human brain. The framework is derived from memory systems theory and supported by research findings on contrasts between implicit versus explicit (nonconscious versus conscious) memory. Implicit intuition and deliberate deduction depend on separate types of memory supported by distinct brain networks. For optimal decision making, training should be designed to accommodate the operating characteristics of both types of memory. Furthermore, reliance on explicit memory can inhibit the use of implicit intuition, so training must facilitate effective interactions between the two types of mechanism. To aid investigations of these effects, we introduce a Mixture-of-Experts model that characterizes the interaction between memory systems — the PINNACLE model (Parallel Interacting Neural Networks Competing in Learning). This model captures the separate neural networks that reflect implicit and explicit processing, as well as their interaction, and it can thus guide the development of training approaches to maximize the benefits of concurrent use of both intuition and deliberation in decision making.
