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Cognition and Perception Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Cognition and Perception

Reid On Olfaction And Secondary Qualities, Jake Quilty-Dunn Dec 2013

Reid On Olfaction And Secondary Qualities, Jake Quilty-Dunn

Publications and Research

Thomas Reid is one of the primary early expositors of the “dual-component” theory of perception, according to which conscious perception constitutively involves a non-intentional sensation accompanied by a noninferential perceptual belief. In this paper, I will explore Reid's account of olfactory perception, and of odor as a secondary quality. Reid is often taken to endorse a broadly Lockean picture of secondary qualities, according to which they are simply dispositions to cause sensations. This picture creates problems, however, for Reid's account of how we perceive secondary qualities, including odors. Given Reid's insistence that we come to be aware of odors only …


Can Enlightenment Be Traced To Specific Neural Correlates, Cognition, Or Behavior? No, And (A Qualified) Yes, Jake H. Davis, David R. Vago Nov 2013

Can Enlightenment Be Traced To Specific Neural Correlates, Cognition, Or Behavior? No, And (A Qualified) Yes, Jake H. Davis, David R. Vago

Publications and Research

The field of contemplative science is rapidly growing and integrating into the basic neurosciences, psychology, clinical sciences, and society-at-large. Yet the majority of current research in the contemplative sciences has been divorced from the soteriological context from which these meditative practices originate and has focused instead on clinical applications with goals of stress reduction and psychotherapeutic health. In the existing research on health outcomes of mindfulness-based clinical interventions, for example, there have been almost no attempts to scientifically investigate the goal of enlightenment. This is a serious oversight, given that such profound transformation across ethical, perceptual, emotional, and cognitive domains …


Unconscious Priming Requires Early Visual Cortex At Specific Temporal Phases Of Processing, Marjan Persuh, Tony Ro Sep 2013

Unconscious Priming Requires Early Visual Cortex At Specific Temporal Phases Of Processing, Marjan Persuh, Tony Ro

Publications and Research

Although examples of unconscious shape priming have been well documented, whether such priming requires early visual cortex (V1/V2) has not been established. In the current study, we used TMS of V1/V2 at varying temporal intervals to suppress the visibility of preceding shape primes while the interval between primes and targets was kept constant. Our results show that, although conscious perception requires V1/V2, unconscious priming can occur without V1/V2 at an intermediate temporal interval but not at early (5–25 msec) or later (65–125 msec) stages of processing. Because the later time window of unconscious priming suppression has been proposed to interfere …


Unconscious Processing Of Unattended Features In Human Visual Cortex, Tatiana Aloi Emmanouil, Philip Burton, Tony Ro Mar 2013

Unconscious Processing Of Unattended Features In Human Visual Cortex, Tatiana Aloi Emmanouil, Philip Burton, Tony Ro

Publications and Research

Unconscious processing has been convincingly demonstrated for task-relevant feature dimensions. However, it is possible that the visual system is capable of more complex unconscious operations, extracting visual features even when they are unattended and task irrelevant. In the current study, we addressed this question by measuring unconscious priming using a task in which human participants attended to a target object's shape while ignoring its color. We measured both behavioral priming effects and priming-related fMRI activations from primes that were unconsciously presented using metacontrast masking. The results showed faster RTs and decreases in fMRI activation only when the primes were identical …


Effects Of Texture Component Orientation On Orientation Flow Visibility For 3-D Shape Perception, Michelle L. Fowler, Andrea Li Jan 2013

Effects Of Texture Component Orientation On Orientation Flow Visibility For 3-D Shape Perception, Michelle L. Fowler, Andrea Li

Publications and Research

In images of textured 3-D surfaces, orientation flows created by the texture components parallel to the surface slant play a critical role in conveying the surface slant and shape. This study examines the visibility of these orientation flows in complex patterns. Specifically, we examine the effect of orientation of neighboring texture components on orientation flow visibility. Complex plaids consisting of gratings equally spaced in orientation were mapped onto planar and curved surfaces. The visibility of the component that creates the orientation flows was quantified by measuring its contrast threshold (CT) while varying the combination of neighboring components present in the …