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Full-Text Articles in Neuroscience and Neurobiology

The Divided Self: Internal Conflict In Literature, Philosophy, Psychology, And Neuroscience, Yulia Greyman Feb 2024

The Divided Self: Internal Conflict In Literature, Philosophy, Psychology, And Neuroscience, Yulia Greyman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thematic project examines the notion of self-division, particularly in terms of the conflict between cognition and metacognition, across the fields of philosophy, psychology, and, most recently, the cognitive and neurosciences. The project offers a historic overview of models of self-division, as well as analyses of the various problems presented in theoretical models to date. This work explores how self-division has been depicted in the literary works of Edgar Allan Poe, Don DeLillo, and Mary Shelley. It examines the ways in which artistic renderings alternately assimilate, resist, and/or critique dominant philosophical, psychological, and scientific discourses about the self and its …


Mechanisms Of Value-Biased Prioritization In Fast Sensorimotor Decision Making, Kivilcim Afacan-Seref Jan 2020

Mechanisms Of Value-Biased Prioritization In Fast Sensorimotor Decision Making, Kivilcim Afacan-Seref

Dissertations and Theses

In dynamic environments, split-second sensorimotor decisions must be prioritized according to potential payoffs to maximize overall rewards. The impact of relative value on deliberative perceptual judgments has been examined extensively, but relatively little is known about value-biasing mechanisms in the common situation where physical evidence is strong but the time to act is severely limited. This research examines the behavioral and electrophysiological indices of how value biases split-second perceptual decisions and the possible mechanisms underlying the process. In prominent decision models, a noisy but statistically stationary representation of sensory evidence is integrated over time to an action-triggering bound, and value-biases …


A Defense Of Pure Connectionism, Alex B. Kiefer Feb 2019

A Defense Of Pure Connectionism, Alex B. Kiefer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Connectionism is an approach to neural-networks-based cognitive modeling that encompasses the recent deep learning movement in artificial intelligence. It came of age in the 1980s, with its roots in cybernetics and earlier attempts to model the brain as a system of simple parallel processors. Connectionist models center on statistical inference within neural networks with empirically learnable parameters, which can be represented as graphical models. More recent approaches focus on learning and inference within hierarchical generative models. Contra influential and ongoing critiques, I argue in this dissertation that the connectionist approach to cognitive science possesses in principle (and, as is becoming …


The Fragmented Mind: Working Memory Cannot Implement Consciousness, Javier Gomez-Lavin Sep 2018

The Fragmented Mind: Working Memory Cannot Implement Consciousness, Javier Gomez-Lavin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In both philosophy and the sciences of the mind there is a shared commitment to the idea that there is a center—the seat of consciousness, the source of deliberation and reflection, and the core of personal identity—in the mind. My dissertation challenges this deeply entrenched view. I review the empirical literature on working memory, psychology’s best candidate for the workspace of the mind, and argue that it is not a natural kind and cannot inform these central cognitive processes. This deflationary view directly imperils many naturalistic theories of consciousness that rely on working memory, which are reviewed in this project. …


Ecologies Of Embodied Minds Embedded: Radical Romantic Perspectives On Architectures Of Technology, Sharmaine Browne Sep 2017

Ecologies Of Embodied Minds Embedded: Radical Romantic Perspectives On Architectures Of Technology, Sharmaine Browne

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores Romantic responses to the role of architectural technologies in the development of material being, consciousness, and culture by applying a critical approach in which I combine radical embodied cognitive theory, ecocritical perspectives, and a phenomenological lens to select Romantic texts written from 1789 to 1884 in response to industrial modernity. While scholarship has thoroughly explored technology as a cultural force which inevitably shapes consciousness, I propose that a slight shift of emphasis from technology’s external influence to the material internalization of its influence allows for new perspectives—particularly in light of recent proposals in cognitive philosophy which assert …


Strokes Of Existence: The Connection Of All Things, Mari Gorman Jan 2007

Strokes Of Existence: The Connection Of All Things, Mari Gorman

Graduate Student Publications and Research

Acted or real—and all life is real whether one is acting or not—the common denominator and consistent, ubiquitous reality of life and all behavior is that it manifests in the form of relationships on all scales. But what is a relationship? Until now, the answer to this question has not been sufficiently known. As a result of many years of empirical research that began with the aim of discovering what is going on in a gifted actor when s/he is playing a character that can be observed and experienced as a living, intuitive being, and based on the knowledge that …