Attention, working memory, and phenomenal experience of WM content: memory levels determined by different types of top-down modulation

Life motion signals modulate visual working memory

Previous research has demonstrated that biological motion (BM) cues can induce a reflexive attentional orienting effect, a phenomenon referred to as social attention. However, it remains undetermined whether BM cues can further affect higher-order cognitive processes, such as visual working memory (WM). By combining a modified central pre-cueing paradigm with a traditional WM change detection task, the current study investigated whether the walking direction of BM, as a non-predictive central cue, could modulate the encoding process of WM. Results revealed a significant improvement in WM performance for the items appearing at the location cued by the walking direction of BM. The observed effect disappeared when the BM cues were shown inverted, or when the critical biological characteristics of the cues were removed. Crucially, this effect could be extended to upright feet motion cues without global configuration, reflecting the key role of local BM signals in modulating WM. More importantly, such a BM-induced modulation effect was not observed with inanimate motion cues, although these cues can also elicit attentional effects. Our findings suggest that the attentional effect induced by life motion signals can penetrate to higher-order cognitive processes, and provide compelling evidence for the existence of "life motion detector" in the human brain from a high-level cognitive function perspective.

Inferential Integrity and Attention

How should we define inferential reasoning in high-level cognition? Can non-conscious representations guide or even determine high-level cognition? If so, what are the properties of such non-conscious representations? Two contemporary debates on high-level cognition center on these issues. The first concerns the possibility of cognitive penetration, or the degree and extent to which high-level cognition influences or determines low-level cognition. The second focuses on the epistemic status of conscious cognition, and on whether or not non-conscious cognition could play a similar, albeit not as fundamental, justificatory role as conscious cognition. This latter issue is at the heart of the question concerning the epistemic status of conscious awareness. This paper focuses on the epistemic standard required for inference, or inferential reasoning, to count as justificatory. The debates on the epistemic status of consciousness and cognitive penetration typically assume such a standard because high-level cognition is associated with rationality, inferentially structured thought, and the epistemic responsibility one has for the conclusions drawn through one’s inferences. The paper proposes an account of inferential-attention that explains how cognitive penetration of non-phenomenally conscious cognition and perception is possible, and why there are unconscious processes that should be considered as essential components of high-level cognition. Sections “Defining Inference” and “Accuracy Constraints: The Agency-First Account of Inference” provide a theoretical framework for understanding the multiple criteria that an adequate account of inference and rational thought must satisfy. Sections “Attention: High- and Low-Level Inferential Cognition in Various Domains” and “Advantages Concerning Rule-Following and Rationality: Not Necessarily-Phenomenal Inferential Reasoning” articulate the inferential-attention account and explain how it meets the descriptive and normative criteria for epistemic responsibility and rationality. In particular, section “Attention: High- and Low-Level Inferential Cognition in Various Domains” defends an agential interpretation of inferential-attention, which offers a resolution of the tension between conservative or consciousness-based approaches to inference and liberal approaches that allow for types of unconscious or subdoxastic processes. An agency condition on inference explains how inference is a psychological process under the control of the agent, and at the same time, it satisfies the normative condition that an inference should be responsive to reasons or evidence by being cognitively available for personal level assessment and evaluation. The key is to identify this kind of epistemic agency with attention. Section “Advantages Concerning Rule-Following and Rationality: Not Necessarily-Phenomenal Inferential Reasoning” compares this inferential-attention account with an influential agential account of inference based on conscious intuition, and it argues that the former account is preferable. This section also demonstrates the significance of inferential-attention in higher cognition, even when it is non-phenomenally conscious.

Surviving threats: neural circuit and computational implications of a new taxonomy of defensive behaviour

Research on defensive behaviour in mammals has in recent years focused on elicited reactions; however, organisms also make active choices when responding to danger. We propose a hierarchical taxonomy of defensive behaviour on the basis of known psychological processes. Included are three categories of reactions (reflexes, fixed reactions and habits) and three categories of goal-directed actions (direct action-outcome behaviours and actions based on implicit or explicit forecasting of outcomes). We then use this taxonomy to guide a summary of findings regarding the underlying neural circuits.

Know Thyself: Well-Being and Subjective Experience

The study of subjective experience represents a significant challenge to cognitive scientists, but one that is beginning to be increasingly addressed. Subjectivity renders experience less amenable to traditional objective scientific measurements than other subject matter. Our authors believe that when seeking to understand the mind, subjectivity must ultimately be investigated and understood.

A higher-order theory of emotional consciousness

Emotional states of consciousness, or what are typically called emotional feelings, are traditionally viewed as being innately programmed in subcortical areas of the brain, and are often treated as different from cognitive states of consciousness, such as those related to the perception of external stimuli. We argue that conscious experiences, regardless of their content, arise from one system in the brain. In this view, what differs in emotional and nonemotional states are the kinds of inputs that are processed by a general cortical network of cognition, a network essential for conscious experiences. Although subcortical circuits are not directly responsible for conscious feelings, they provide nonconscious inputs that coalesce with other kinds of neural signals in the cognitive assembly of conscious emotional experiences. In building the case for this proposal, we defend a modified version of what is known as the higher-order theory of consciousness.

Working Memory Maintenance: Sustained Firing or Synaptic Mechanisms?

According to conventional views, holding information in working memory (WM) involves elevated and persistent neuronal firing. This has been challenged by models in which WM maintenance is implemented by activity-silent synaptic mechanisms. A new study suggests that both have a role, consistent with cognitive models positing several states of WM. However, do these states reflect the operation of attention or awareness?

Dissociating Perceptual Confidence from Discrimination Accuracy Reveals No Influence of Metacognitive Awareness on Working Memory

Visual awareness is hypothesized to be intimately related to visual working memory (WM), such that information present in WM is thought to have necessarily been represented consciously. Recent work has challenged this longstanding view by demonstrating that visual stimuli rated by observers as unseen can nevertheless be maintained over a delay period. These experiments have been criticized, however, on the basis that subjective awareness ratings may contain response bias (e.g., an observer may report no awareness when in fact they had partial awareness). We mitigated this issue by investigating WM for visual stimuli that were matched for perceptual discrimination capacity (d'), yet which varied in subjective confidence ratings (so-called relative blindsight). If the degree of initial subjective awareness of a stimulus facilitates later maintenance of that information, WM performance should improve for stimuli encoded with higher confidence. In contrast, we found that WM performance did not benefit from higher visual discrimination confidence. This relationship was observed regardless of WM load (1 or 3). Insofar as metacognitive ratings (e.g., confidence, visibility) reflect visual awareness, these results challenge a strong relationship between conscious perception and WM using a paradigm that controls for discrimination accuracy and is less subject to response bias (since confidence is manipulated within subjects). Methodologically, we replicate prior efforts to induce relative blindsight using similar stimulus displays, providing a general framework for isolating metacognitive awareness in order to examine the function of consciousness.

On Picturing a Candle: The Prehistory of Imagery Science

The past 25 years have seen a rapid growth of knowledge about brain mechanisms involved in visual mental imagery. These advances have largely been made independently of the long history of philosophical - and even psychological - reckoning with imagery and its parent concept 'imagination'. We suggest that the view from these empirical findings can be widened by an appreciation of imagination's intellectual history, and we seek to show how that history both created the conditions for - and presents challenges to - the scientific endeavor. We focus on the neuroscientific literature's most commonly used task - imagining a concrete object - and, after sketching what is known of the neurobiological mechanisms involved, we examine the same basic act of imagining from the perspective of several key positions in the history of philosophy and psychology. We present positions that, firstly, contextualize and inform the neuroscientific account, and secondly, pose conceptual and methodological challenges to the scientific analysis of imagery. We conclude by reflecting on the intellectual history of visualization in the light of contemporary science, and the extent to which such science may resolve long-standing theoretical debates.