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"Mental representation."
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The world in the head
The World in the Head collects the best of Robert Cummins' papers on mental representation and psychological explanation. Running through these papers are a pair of themes: that explaining the mind requires functional analysis, not subsumption under \"psychological laws\", and that the propositional attitudes--belief, desire, intention--and their interactions, while real, are not the key to understanding the mind at a fundamental level. Taking these ideas seriously puts considerable strain on standard conceptions of rationality and reasoning, on truth-conditional semantics, and on our interpretation of experimental evidence concerning cognitive development, learning and the evolution of mental traits and processes. The temptation to read the structure of mental states and their interactions off the structure of human language is powerful and seductive, but has created a widening gap between what most philosophers and social scientists take for granted about the mind, and the framework we need to make sense what an accelerating biology and neuroscience are telling us about brains. The challenge for the philosophy of mind is to devise a framework that accommodates these developments. This is the underlying motivation for the papers in this collection.
Book
Modeling human intuitions about liquid flow with particle-based simulation
Humans can easily describe, imagine, and, crucially, predict a wide variety of behaviors of liquids-splashing, squirting, gushing, sloshing, soaking, dripping, draining, trickling, pooling, and pouring-despite tremendous variability in their material and dynamical properties. Here we propose and test a computational model of how people perceive and predict these liquid dynamics, based on coarse approximate simulations of fluids as collections of interacting particles. Our model is analogous to a \"game engine in the head\", drawing on techniques for interactive simulations (as in video games) that optimize for efficiency and natural appearance rather than physical accuracy. In two behavioral experiments, we found that the model accurately captured people's predictions about how liquids flow among complex solid obstacles, and was significantly better than several alternatives based on simple heuristics and deep neural networks. Our model was also able to explain how people's predictions varied as a function of the liquids' properties (e.g., viscosity and stickiness). Together, the model and empirical results extend the recent proposal that human physical scene understanding for the dynamics of rigid, solid objects can be supported by approximate probabilistic simulation, to the more complex and unexplored domain of fluid dynamics.
Journal Article
Reliable misrepresentation and tracking theories of mental representation
It is a live possibility that certain of our experiences reliably misrepresent the world around us. I argue that tracking theories of mental representation (e.g. those of Dretske, Fodor, and Millikan) have difficulty allowing for this possibility, and that this is a major consideration against them.
Journal Article
Dark and magical places : the neuroscience of navigation
\"An illuminating examination of how the brain helps us to understand and navigate space-and why, sometimes, it doesn't work the way it should. Navigation is one of the most complex tasks our brains perform. And we do it countless times a day-as we drive across town to the airport, or traverse the maze of a supermarket, or walk within our own homes. But why is it that some people are lost on their own street and others can seamlessly navigate a new city after visiting it once? Fueled by his own spatial shortcomings, Christopher Kemp describes the brain regions that orient us in space and the specialized neurons-place cells and grid cells-that do it. He explains how the brain plans routes, recognizes landmarks, and makes sure we leave a room through a door instead of a painting. Along the way, he meets the scientists trying to understand the mental maps of modern humans, and Neanderthals, and lost people everywhere. Dark and Magical Places is an informed and entertaining journey into the mysteries of the mind\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The structure of lay-concepts within the fear spectrum revealed using emotional verbal fluency
Given the fact that natural language analysis can distinguish constituents of mental constructs, the present research was designed to investigate the structure of concepts related to the broad spectrum of emotions comprising worry, fear, anxiety, and panic, which in this article is referred to as the ‘fear spectrum’. A new technique presented here is based on a word association task and enables a description of the structure of emotion concepts. The technique is a variant of a verbal fluency task, i.e. emotional verbal fluency technique. Two studies have been conducted: the first to examine the cognitive structure of concepts within the fear spectrum (n = 280, 150 women, 130 men) and the second to confirm the stability of word association in the fear tasks and differentiation of the fear concepts in relation to trait anxiety and dogmatism (n = 190, 100 women, 90 men). A hierarchical clustering analysis, based on the linguistic material, i.e. words produced by the participants for the task of anxiety, was performed to present in what way the emotional verbal fluency technique can be applied to explore the structure of emotional concepts. According to our results, there is a relatively constant tendency in producing semantic clusters (emotional word association) among lay people. Moreover, produced clusters allow to describe the structure and to differentiate lay-concepts within the fear spectrum, such as worry, fear, anxiety, panic [respectively in Polish: obawa, lęk, strach, panika].
Journal Article
Unconscious Fantasy and Emotion Schema
In the clinical situation, there are both verbal and non-verbal interactions. Patients express themselves, whether in words or otherwise, in direct or disguised ways, whether consciously or unconsciously. Such conscious or unconscious ideas and feelings are related to personal desires, relationships with important people in their present or past life, or in the transference relationship. These ideas and feelings are organized in the brain/mind as emotion schemas. Wilma Bucci argues that emotion schemas derive from subsymbolic and symbolic processes, which may be conscious or unconscious. It is important to note that the term “emotion schema,” is used much less frequently than the term “mental representation.” Since too many people consider the term “mental representation” a static concept, the term “emotion schema” can be a shorthand for “emotionally infused mental representation.” This paper proposes that the construct of unconscious fantasy overlaps with that of emotion schema. The importance of priming phenomena between the members of the therapeutic dyad is discussed. Each person’s unconscious fantasy can serve as a prime for the other.
Journal Article
The Eye Pupil Adjusts to Imaginary Light
If a mental image is a rerepresentation of a perception, then properties such as luminance or brightness should also be conjured up in the image. We monitored pupil diameters with an infrared eye tracker while participants first saw and then generated mental images of shapes that varied in luminance or complexity, while looking at an empty gray background. Participants also imagined familiar scenarios (e.g., a \"sunny sky\" or a \"dark room\") while looking at the same neutral screen. In all experiments, participants' eye pupils dilated or constricted, respectively, in response to dark and bright imagined objects and scenarios. Shape complexity increased mental effort and pupillary sizes independently of shapes' luminance. Because the participants were unable to voluntarily constrict their eyes' pupils, the observed pupillary adjustments to imaginary light present a strong case for accounts of mental imagery as a process based on brain states similar to those that arise during perception.
Journal Article