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Articles 1 - 7 of 7
Full-Text Articles in Neuroscience and Neurobiology
Consciousness As A Factor In Evolution, Kenneth A. Augustyn
Consciousness As A Factor In Evolution, Kenneth A. Augustyn
Michigan Tech Publications
What I call the mind began as a non-conscious robotic biochemical process control system in the very earliest forms of life. As life evolved, problems in control became more difficult and exceeded the computational capabilities of the organisms. Nature discovered a means of transcending computable physical processes resulting in non-computational subjective mental capabilities that, while still not conscious, had a degree of genuine autonomy from the physical world. These autonomous subjective wants and goals now affected the course of (but not the mechanism of) evolution. The integrated amalgam of robotic and transrobotic unconscious capabilities eventually gave rise to consciousness, which …
Special Issue On The Third Workshop On Biological Mentality, Kenneth A. Augustyn
Special Issue On The Third Workshop On Biological Mentality, Kenneth A. Augustyn
Michigan Tech Publications
The Third Workshop on Biological Mentality was held from September 23, 2019 to March 2, 2020 as a series of twenty-one Monday online conferencing sessions, each consisting of a talk followed by a Q&A discussion. Like the two previous workshops [1, 2], the objective of this workshop was to seek a deeper level of understanding the physical foundations of biological mentality (whether conscious or nonconscious).
Working Memory And Consciousness: The Current State Of Play, Marjan Persuh, Eric Larock, Jacob Berger
Working Memory And Consciousness: The Current State Of Play, Marjan Persuh, Eric Larock, Jacob Berger
Publications and Research
Working memory (WM), an important posit in cognitive science, allows one to temporarily store and manipulate information in the service of ongoing tasks. WM has been traditionally classified as an explicit memory system—that is, as operating on and maintaining only consciously perceived information. Recently, however, several studies have questioned this assumption, purporting to provide evidence for unconscious WM. In this article, we focus on visual working memory (VWM) and critically examine these studies as well as studies of unconscious perception that seem to provide indirect evidence for unconscious WM. Our analysis indicates that current evidence does not support an unconscious …
Eeg Investigation Of Mirror-Neuron Activity Before And After Conscious Perception Of Emotion In Faces, Katie Singsank
Eeg Investigation Of Mirror-Neuron Activity Before And After Conscious Perception Of Emotion In Faces, Katie Singsank
Summer Research
While it is theorized that the human Mirror Neuron System (MNS) is used in action understanding and interpretation, how mu-wave suppression varies throughout the process of becoming conscious of a human facial expression and perceiving it has not been investigated. In the current study, EEG mu-wave suppression was used as an index of MNS activity. Data were collected while subjects viewed a 6 second clip in which static visual noise lifted over a period of 3 seconds revealing either a sad or angry face below which participants were asked to indicate the emotion with a keyboard button press. The image …
Unconscious Neural Processing Differs With Method Used To Render Stimuli Invisible, Sergey V. Fogelson, Peter J. Kohler, Kevin J. Miller, Richard Granger, Peter U. Tse
Unconscious Neural Processing Differs With Method Used To Render Stimuli Invisible, Sergey V. Fogelson, Peter J. Kohler, Kevin J. Miller, Richard Granger, Peter U. Tse
Dartmouth Scholarship
Visual stimuli can be kept from awareness using various methods. The extent of processing that a given stimulus receives in the absence of awareness is typically used to make claims about the role of consciousness more generally. The neural processing elicited by a stimulus, however, may also depend on the method used to keep it from awareness, and not only on whether the stimulus reaches awareness. Here we report that the method used to render an image invisible has a dramatic effect on how category information about the unseen stimulus is encoded across the human brain. We collected fMRI data …
Implicitly Priming The Social Brain: Failure To Find Neural Effects, Katherine E. Powers, Todd F. Heatherton
Implicitly Priming The Social Brain: Failure To Find Neural Effects, Katherine E. Powers, Todd F. Heatherton
Dartmouth Scholarship
Humans have a fundamental need for social relationships. Rejection from social groups is especially detrimental, rendering the ability to detect threats to social relationships and respond in adaptive ways critical. Indeed, previous research has shown that experiencing social rejection alters the processing of subsequent social cues in a variety of socially affiliative and avoidant ways. Because social perception and cognition occurs spontaneously and automatically, detecting threats to social relationships may occur without conscious awareness or control. Here, we investigated the automaticity of social threat detection by examining how implicit primes affect neural responses to social stimuli. However, despite using a …
Iconic Memory Requires Attention, Marjan Persuh, Boris Genzer, Robert D. Melara
Iconic Memory Requires Attention, Marjan Persuh, Boris Genzer, Robert D. Melara
Publications and Research
Two experiments investigated whether attention plays a role in iconic memory, employing either a change detection paradigm (Experiment 1) or a partial-report paradigm (Experiment 2). In each experiment, attention was taxed during initial display presentation, focusing the manipulation on consolidation of information into iconic memory, prior to transfer into working memory. Observers were able to maintain high levels of performance (accuracy of change detection or categorization) even when concurrently performing an easy visual search task (low load). However, when the concurrent search was made difficult (high load), observers' performance dropped to almost chance levels, while search accuracy held at single-task …