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Cognitive Psychology Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Cognitive Psychology

Heroic Consciousness, Scott T. Allison Sep 2019

Heroic Consciousness, Scott T. Allison

Heroism Science

This article describes heroic consciousness – how heroes perceive, experience, and think about the world. I describe the transformation of consciousness from its pre-heroic state to its heroic state. Pre-heroic consciousness is characterized by nescient and maladaptive thinking, dualism, separation, mono-rationality, and a naïve sense of empowerment. Heroic consciousness is exemplified by nondualism, unity, transrationality, and the wisdom of tempered empowerment. Heroic consciousness is achieved via three routes: (1) traversing the hero’s journey, (2) effective use of specific spiritual practices, and/or (3) participation in hero training programs. I discuss the implications of heroic consciousness for individual and global well-being.


Competitive Frontoparietal Interactions Mediate Implicit Inferences, Martijn E. Wokke, Tony Ro Jun 2019

Competitive Frontoparietal Interactions Mediate Implicit Inferences, Martijn E. Wokke, Tony Ro

Publications and Research

Frequent experience with regularities in our environment allows us to use predictive information to guide our decision process. However, contingencies in our environment are not always explicitly present and sometimes need to be inferred. Heretofore, it remained unknown how predictive information guides decision-making when explicit knowledge is absent and how the brain shapes such implicit inferences. In the present experiment, 17 human participants (9 females) performed a discrimination task in which a target stimulus was preceded by a predictive cue. Critically, participants had no explicit knowledge that some of the cues signaled an upcoming target, allowing us to investigate how …


Coupled Correlates Of Attention And Consciousness, Ravi Varkki Chacko May 2019

Coupled Correlates Of Attention And Consciousness, Ravi Varkki Chacko

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Introduction: Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs) have been shown to restore lost motor function that occurs in stroke using electrophysiological signals. However, little evidence exists for the use of BCIs to restore non-motor stroke deficits, such as the attention deficits seen in hemineglect. Attention is a cognitive function that selects objects or ideas for further neural processing, presumably to facilitate optimal behavior. Developing BCIs for attention is different from developing motor BCIs because attention networks in the brain are more distributed and associative than motor networks. For example, hemineglect patients have reduced levels of arousal, which exacerbates their attentional deficits. More …


The Unfolding Argument: Why Iit And Other Causal Structure Theories Cannot Explain Consciousness, Adrian Doerig, Aaron Schurger, Kathryn Hess, Michael H. Herzog May 2019

The Unfolding Argument: Why Iit And Other Causal Structure Theories Cannot Explain Consciousness, Adrian Doerig, Aaron Schurger, Kathryn Hess, Michael H. Herzog

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

How can we explain consciousness? This question has become a vibrant topic of neuroscience research in recent decades. A large body of empirical results has been accumulated, and many theories have been proposed. Certain theories suggest that consciousness should be explained in terms of brain functions, such as accessing information in a global workspace, applying higher order to lower order representations, or predictive coding. These functions could be realized by a variety of patterns of brain connectivity. Other theories, such as Information Integration Theory (IIT) and Recurrent Processing Theory (RPT), identify causal structure with consciousness. For example, according to …