Cognition and Perception Commons^™

Caterpillars, Consciousness And The Origins Of Mind, Arthur S. Reber

Animal Sentience

A novel framework for the origins of consciousness and mind, the Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC), is presented. The model is based on a simple, perhaps radical axiom: subjectivity is an inherent feature of particular kinds of organic form. Experiential states, including those denoted as "mind" and "consciousness," are present in the most primitive species. The model has several conceptual and empirical virtues, among them: (a) it (re)solves the problem of how minds are created by brains ─ also known as the "Hard Problem" (Chalmers 1995) ─ by revealing that the apparent difficulty results from a category error, (b) it …

Why Animals Are Persons, Tony Cheng

Animal Sentience

Rowlands’s case for attributing personhood to lower animals is ultimately convincing, but along the way he fails to highlight several distinctions that are crucial for his argument: Personhood vs. personal identity; the first person vs. its mental episodes; and pre-reflective awareness in general vs. one specific case of it.

A Model For Attention-Driven Judgements In Type Theory With Records, Simon Dobnik, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

This paper makes three contributions to the discussion on the applicability of Type Theory with Records (TTR) to embodied dialogue agents. First, it highlights the problem of type assignment or judgements in practical implementations which is resource intensive. Second, it presents a judgement control mechanism, which consists of grouping of types into clusters or states by their thematic relations and selection of types following two mechanisms inspired by the Load Theory of selective attention and cognitive control (Lavie et al., 2004), that addresses this problem. Third, it presents a computational framework, based on Bayesian inference, that offers a basis for …

Are Animals Persons?, Mark Rowlands

Animal Sentience

It is orthodox to suppose that very few, if any, nonhuman animals are persons. The category “person” is restricted to self-aware creatures: humans (above a certain age) and possibly some of the great apes and cetaceans. I argue that this orthodoxy should be rejected, because it rests on a mistaken conception of the kind of self-awareness relevant to personhood. Replacing this with a sense of self-awareness that is relevant requires us to accept that personhood is much more widely distributed through the animal kingdom.

Insects Have The Capacity For Subjective Experience, Colin Klein, Andrew B. Barron

Animal Sentience

To what degree are non-human animals conscious? We propose that the most meaningful way to approach this question is from the perspective of functional neurobiology. Here we focus on subjective experience, which is a basic awareness of the world without further reflection on that awareness. This is considered the most basic form of consciousness. Tellingly, this capacity is supported by the integrated midbrain and basal ganglia structures, which are among the oldest and most highly conserved brain systems in vertebrates. A reasonable inference is that the capacity for subjective experience is both widespread and evolutionarily old within the vertebrate lineage. …

Cross-Species Mind-Reading, Stevan Harnad

Animal Sentience

We can never be sure anyone else is sentient. But we can be sure enough in the case of other people, nonhuman primates, mammals, birds, fish, lower vertebrates and invertebrates as to make scepticism academic and otiose (not to mention monumentally cruel). The only genuinely uncertain kinds of cases are jellyfish, microbes and plants. The rest is not about whether but what they are feeling.

My Orgasms Cannot Be Traded Off Against Others’ Agony, Stevan Harnad

Animal Sentience

Only I can calculate my own welfare as net pleasure minus pain. No one else can do that calculation for me – nor for a population, and especially not averaging across some individuals’ pleasure and other individuals’ pain. Pain and pleasure are incommensurable and only pain matters morally. To maximize welfare is to minimize pain.

In Praise Of Fishes: Précis Of What A Fish Knows (Balcombe 2016), Jonathan Balcombe

Animal Sentience

Our relationship to fishes in the modern era is deeply problematic. We kill and consume more of them than any other group of vertebrates. At the same time, advances in our knowledge of fishes and their capabilities are gaining speed. Fish species diversity exceeds that of all other vertebrates combined, with a wide range of sensory adaptations, some of them (e.g., geomagnetism, water pressure and movement detection, and communication via electricity) alien to our own sensory experience. The evidence for pain in fishes (despite persistent detractors) is strongly supported by anatomical, physiological and behavioral studies. It is likely that fishes …

Sentience As Moral Consideration And Disvalue In Nature, Daniel Dorado

Animal Sentience

In recent work Ng assumes that it is good to engage in activities aimed at promoting ecosystem conservation. The only way Ng can derive this from the axiology he assumes (the view that wellbeing is the only intrinsically valuable or disvaluable thing) would be to assume that ecosystem conservation would benefit the individuals involved. This can be so as long as value prevails over disvalue in the target environments. Ng seems to assume this is indeed the case, but he does not explain why, and it is a claim that goes against the conclusions he has argued for previously (Ng …

Changing Attitudes Towards Animals In The Wild And Speciesism, Oscar Horta

Animal Sentience

I argue that despite Ng’s claim that we should postpone the defense of those animals that live in the wild, we do have reasons to start spreading concern for them now. We can do it by (i) changing public attitude by heightening awareness of speciesism, by which we will also challenge animal exploitation; and (ii) by disseminating information about the situation of animals in the wild.

The Development Of White Asian Categorization: Contributions From Skin Color And Other Physiognomic Cues, Yarrow Dunham, Ron Dotsch, Amelia R. Clark, Elena V. Stepanova

Faculty Publications

We examined the development of racial categorizations of faces spanning the European–East Asian (“White–Asian”) categorical continuum in children between the ages of four and nine as well as adults. We employed a stimulus set that independently varied skin color and other aspects of facial physiognomy, allowing the contribution of each to be assessed independently and in interaction with each other. Results demonstrated substantial development across this age range in children’s ability to draw on both sorts of cue, with over twice as much variance explained by stimulus variation in adults than children. Nonetheless, children were clearly sensitive to both skin …

Editorial: The Temporal Dynamics Of Cognitive Processing, Timothy M. Ellmore, Peter F. Dominey, John F. Magnotti

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Using The Visual World Paradigm To Study Retrieval Interference In Spoken Language Comprehension, Irina A. Sekerina, Luca Campanelli, Julie A. Van Dyke

Publications and Research

The cue-based retrieval theory (Lewis et al., 2006) predicts that interference from similar distractors should create difficulty for argument integration, however this hypothesis has only been examined in the written modality. The current study uses the Visual World Paradigm (VWP) to assess its feasibility to study retrieval interference arising from distractors present in a visual display during spoken language comprehension. The study aims to extend findings from Van Dyke and McElree (2006), which utilized a dual-task paradigm with written sentences in which they manipulated the relationship between extra-sentential distractors and the semantic retrieval cues from a verb, to the spoken …

Open-Minded Religiosity: Investigating The Link Between Religious Commitment And Thinking Style, Carl W. Sallee

Honors Projects

This study examined the relationship between religious commitment and thinking styles. Participants (n = 195) completed self-report measures of religious commitment, contextualism, Authoritarianism-Conservatism-Traditionalism (ACT - conceptualized as social attitudes/beliefs), and Open-Minded Cognition (OMC - conceptualized as a cognitive style). A marginally significant direct link was observed. Furthermore, when controlling for Contextualism, the strength of the negative link between SRF and OMC increased non-significantly. When controlling for ACT, mediation analysis revealed that the relationship between SRF and OMC was more indirect (via shared variance with ACT) than direct. Moderation analyses did not reveal significant results. Results tentatively suggest a negative …

On The Screen, In The Mind: An Erp Investigation Into The Interaction Between Visuo-Spatial Information And Spatial Language During On-Line Processing, Emily Zane

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project used Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to explore neurophysiological brain responses to prepositional phrases involving concrete and abstract reference nouns (e.g., "plate" and "moment", respectively) after the presentation of objects with varying spatial features. Prepositional phrases were headed by in or on and were either matching (e.g., "in the plate/moment") or mismatching (e.g., "on the plate/moment"). Conjunction phrase matches and fillers were also presented. Before half of the concrete-phrase items, a photographic depiction of the reference noun was presented. In these photographs, objects were displayed in a way that was either more appropriate for in or for on. Similarly, before …

Music And Language Development: Traits Of Nursery Rhymes And Their Impact On Children's Language Development, Ashley Lauren Gonzalez

Music

From birth--possibly even before birth--the amount and array of external stimuli profoundly affect a child’s cognitive and linguistic development. In addition to verbal communication from parent to child, singing proves to be an integral aid to a child’s development of speech and language, allegedly due to repetitions of words and rhythms. Nursery rhymes are, from infancy, among the most commonly presented forms of musical stimulus for children. The repetitive nature of the nursery rhymes undoubtedly supports language and speech development, but various characteristics of nursery rhymes, specifically pitch interval, meter, phrase length, contour, and harmony, also contribute substantially to the …

Minorities' Perceptions Of Child Protective Services, Vernae Elaine Hicks

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The study examined minority persons’ views and experiences with Child Protective Services (CPS) in the community. This study used a qualitative design with face‑to‑face interviews with 12 participants in the community. This study used the “Post‑Positivist” data analysis, which is qualitative in evaluation and explained each participant’s subjective reality.

The study found that most participants were satisfied with the results and were dissatisfied with the process in and of itself. Overall the study found that most participants felt that there was some sort of a disconnect with social workers in reference to cultural competency. Miscommunication between the social workers at …

Visual Code: Breaking The Binary, Jacob Johannesen, Andrew Adriance

Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies

This project seeks to create an accessible programming language that is more visually based. Although some solutions exist, namely MIT’s Scratch, nothing has caught up to the mobile age. This proj- ect aims to reframe creating a game or app into the context of tell- ing a story, putting character creation first. By researching sto- ry-telling and how people learn, and by applying technical and user interface design knowledge, this project intends to deliver a soft- ware solution that opens introductory coding education to more people.

User Interface Design Recommendations For Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (Suas), Camilo Jimenez, Caitlin L. Faerevaag, Florian Jentsch

International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics, and Aerospace

The number of small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS) has dramatically increased in recent years. As a consequence, the number of incidents involving manned and unmanned aircraft has soared. For this reason, the Federal Aviation Administration has released a notice of proposed rulemaking to delineate the operational limitations for sUAS. Many efforts have been introduced to regulate the operations of these systems and educate operators. Despite these efforts, there are no clear standards related to the type of information that should be available to operators, or how this information should be conveyed during flight operations. For this reason we present a …

Find Your Own Meaning In Life, David Chan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

‘Mortality saliency’ happens when a lovedone, friend or someone we know is suddenlystruck down by illness, and we start realisingafresh that life is fragile and want to live a lifeof meaning. A psychology professorsuggests how.

Bilingual Effects On Deployment Of The Attention System In Linguistically And Culturally Homogeneous Children And Adults, Sujin Yang, Hwajin Yang

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

We investigated the impact of early childhood and adulthood bilingualism on the attention system in a group of linguistically and culturally homogeneous children (5- and 6-year olds) and young adults. We administered the child Attention Network Test (ANT) to 63 English monolingual and Korean-English bilingual children and administered the adult ANT to 39 language- and culture-matched college students. Advantageous bilingual effects on attention were observed for both children and adults in global processing levels of inverse efficiency, response time, and accuracy at a magnitude more pronounced for children than for adults. Differential bilingualism effects were evident at the local network …

Exercises On Overcoming Perfectionist Tendencies, Jake Yoo

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

In my latest series, I investigate my neurotic perfectionist tendency through repetition of phrases that I understand to be true in my head, but have a problem with accepting it in my heart. This way, I am studying my personal biases and the way I perceive the world in order to break free from unwanted behaviors and process negative emotions. Louise Bourgeois is a historical precedence to my practice as whole, while the series functions similarly to Yayoi Kusama’s dot and net paintings—a psychological portrait achieved through continuous repetition of a few elements.

Selective Attention To Threat In People With Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A Meta-Analysis, Amberle Cusmano

Theses and Dissertations

People with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) show increased attention towards or away from threat in their environment; the current literature is divided on the direction of these effects. This meta-analysis aims to aggregate and examine if people with PTSD display selective attention to threat compared to people without PTSD.

Slowed Temporal Disengagement From Ambiguous Information In Trait Anxiety, Tiffany Arango

Theses and Dissertations

We investigated the relation between trait anxiety and temporal disengagement from social and nonsocial affective information. Participants (n =54) completed a disengagement task and self-report questionnaires. Trait anxiety was associated with slower temporal disengagement from neutral nonsocial information, but did not predict above and beyond state anxiety.

Investigating The Nest Sanitation Hypothesis In A Rejecter Species: Is Sanitation A Proximate Link, Pre-Adaptation, Or By-Product Of Egg Ejection?, Alec B. Luro

Theses and Dissertations

Nest sanitation, a behavior similar in motor pattern to egg ejection, has been proposed repeatedly as a potential pre-adaptation to foreign egg ejection in avian brood parasites hosts. We found no support for the sanitation hypothesis--therefore we suggest egg ejection may have evolved independently of sanitation.

Virtual V1sion: A Collaborative Coding Project, Cheryl Olman

MODVIS Workshop

Virtual V1sion is a new idea for fostering modeling collaborations and data sharing. While still in its infancy, the ultimate goal is a website that hosts repositories for (1) interchangeable model elements, (2) datasets that can be fit/predicted by those models, and (3) educational modules that explain the background for both the models and the datasets. The scope of the modeling is limited to predictions of V1 responses, although not all computations represented by model elements in Virtual V1sion are required to be V1-intrinsic: a goal of the project is to provide a framework in which predictions for modulation by …

A Neural Circuit For Visual Information Spreading, Gregory Francis

MODVIS Workshop

I describe a neural circuit made of integrate-and-fire neurons that instantiates a mechanism for the spreading of visual information. The circuit is simple and operates at a reasonable time scale with reasonable parameter values. Slight alterations to the anatomy allow the circuit to spread information across surfaces (constrained by the surface boundaries) as for brightness and color effects or across a group/object (as for some attention effects).

Parametrically Constrained Lightness Model Incorporating Edge Classification And Increment-Decrement Neural Response Asymmetries, Michael E. Rudd

MODVIS Workshop

Lightness matching data from disk-annulus experiments has the form of a parabolic (2^nd-order polynomial) function when matches are plotted against annulus luminance on log-log axes. Rudd (2010) has proposed a computational cortical model to account for this fact and has subsequently (Rudd, 2013, 2014, 2015) extended the model to explain data from other lightness paradigms, including staircase-Gelb and luminance gradient illusions (Galmonte, Soranzo, Rudd, & Agostini, 2015). Here, I re-analyze parametric lightness matching data from disk-annulus experiments by Rudd and Zemach (2007) and Rudd (2010) for the purpose of further testing the model and to try to constrain …

Figure-Ground Organization Using 3d Symmetry, Aaron Michaux, Vijai Jayadevan, Edward Delp, Zygmunt Pizlo

MODVIS Workshop

We present a novel approach to object localization using mirror symmetry as a general purpose and biologically motivated prior. 3D symmetry leads to good segmentation because (i) almost all objects exhibit symmetry, and (ii) configurations of objects are not likely to be symmetric unless they share some additional relationship. Furthermore, psychophysical evidence suggests that the human vision system makes use symmetry in constructing 3D percepts, indicating that symmetry may be important in object localization. No general purpose approach is known for solving 3D symmetry correspondence in 2D camera images, because few invariants exist. Therefore, to test symmetry as a clustering …

A Mixture Model Demonstrates Use Of Distinct Strategies In A Global Motion Direction Task, Lanya Tianhao Cai, Benjamin T. Backus

MODVIS Workshop

Mixture models are well known in cognitive psychology, less so in vision. Are there cases where the data allow clear testing as to whether different strategies are employed in a task? Most psychophysical measurements manipulate a single staircase variable to map out a monotonic increasing function, but if performance is limited by different mechanisms over the range of the variable, classical fitting could be inappropriate. We present a data set and analyses that confirm the presence of two visual strategies addressing the same task, with the choice of strategies depending on the staircase variable. In a net-motion discrimination task, stimuli …