Search results for "mind"

The experience of no experience Elevator UX and the role of unconscious experience

2013

Elevators are designed to facilitate the smooth and efficient transportation of people from one architectural floor to the next. If they work well, people should not think about the journey at all. Instead, their concentration should remain focused on the activity they were engaged in before entering the elevator usage interaction. In other words, if the design works properly, people should not consciously experience elevator interaction. This paper presents the issue of studying no (conscious) user experience. It takes a theoretical perspective to explain aspects of consciousness and embodiment. While most studies on user experience focus on remarkable and affective interaction experiences…

Default Semantics and the architecture of the mind

2011

In this paper, I explore the relationship between Relevance Theory and Jaszczolt's Default Semantics, framing this debate within the picture of massive modularity tempered by the idea of brain plasticity (Perkins, 2007). While Relevance Theory focuses on processing (see cognitive efforts and contextual effects interplay), Default Semantics focuses on types of sources from which addressees draw information and types of processes that interact in providing it. In particular, I argue that Relevance Theory interacts with default semantics by standardizing inferences which are ultimately compressed (to use a term by Bach, 1998) into a default semantics. I briefly discuss potential obstacles to t…

What Can Modularity of Mind Tell Us about the Semantics/Pragmatics Debate?

2010

In this paper I make connections between two domains of information, research on the semantics/pragmatics debate and on modularity of mind, in the hope that establishing connections and parallel structure may be fruitful in deepening knowledge of the interface between semantics and pragmatics. In particular I want to inquire if modularity of mind can help us move towards the resolution of important theoretical problems like Grice's circle, the cancellability of explicatures/implicatures, the analogy between perceptual enrichments and explicatures due to free enrichments, the routing problem for explicatures (do they strictly take input from implicatures?), and satisficing strategies in prag…

Methods for studying unconscious learning

2005

One has to face numerous difficulties when trying to establish a dissociation between conscious and unconscious knowledge. In this paper, we review several of these problems as well as the different methodological solutions that have been proposed to address them. We suggest that each of the different methodological solutions offered refers to a different operational definition of consciousness, and present empirical examples of sequence learning studies in which these different procedures were applied to differentiate between implicit and explicit knowledge acquisition. We also show how the use of a sensitive behavioral method, the process dissociation procedure, confers a distinctive adva…

2021

Abstract Pantomime has a long tradition in clinical neuropsychology of apraxia. It has been much more used by researchers and clinicians to assess tool-use disorders than real tool use. Nevertheless, it remains incompletely understood and has given rise to controversies, such as the involvement of the left inferior parietal lobe or the nature of the underlying cognitive processes. The present article offers a comprehensive framework, with the aim of specifying the neural and cognitive bases of pantomime. To do so, we conducted a series of meta-analyses of brain-lesion, neuroimaging, and behavioral studies about pantomime and other related tasks (i.e., real tool use, imitation of meaningless…

Phenomenal transparency and cognitive self-reference

2003

A representationalist analysis of strong first-person phenomena is developed (Baker 1998), and it is argued that conscious, cognitive self-reference can be naturalized under this representationalist analysis. According to this view, the phenomenal first-person perspective is a condition of possibility for the emergence of a cognitive first-person perspective. Cognitive self-reference always is reference to the phenomenal content of a transparent self-model. The concepts of phenomenal transparency and introspection are clarified. More generally, I suggest that the concepts of “phenomenal opacity” and “phenomenal transparency” are interesting instruments for analyzing conscious, self-represen…

The Family-Resemblances Framework for Mind-Wandering Remains Well Clad

2018

Christoff et al. [1] reject our family-resemblances framework for mind-wandering research [2] and instead seek to characterize mind-wandering with a necessary defining feature. As an example, they point to their ‘dynamic framework’ [3] that defines mind-wandering as thoughts that ‘proceed in a relatively free, unconstrained fashion.’ We outline three primary points of disagreement with their commentary and two points of clarification on the family-resemblances framework.

Commentary on Jakab's “Ineffability of Qualia”

2000

Zoltan Jakab has presented an interesting conceptual analysis of the ineffability of qualia in a functionalist and classical cognitivist framework. But he does not want to commit himself to a certain metaphysical thesis on the ontology of consciousness or qualia. We believe that his strategy has yielded a number of highly relevant and interesting insights, but still suffers from some minor inconsistencies and a certain lack of phenomenological and empirical plausibility. This may be due to some background assumptions relating to the theory of mental representation employed. Jakab's starting assumption is that there is no linguistic description of a given experience such that understanding t…

What can the concept of affective scaffolding do for us?

2020

The concept of affective scaffolding designates the various ways in which we manipulate the environment to influence our affective lives. In this article, I present a constructive critique of recent discussion on affective scaffolding. In Part 1, I summarize how the theories of situated mind and niche construction contribute to a multidimensional notion of scaffolding. In Part 2, I focus specifically on affective scaffolding and argue that current ambiguity over its distinctive criteria causes uncertainty as to how the concept can and should be used. In Part 3, I identify and examine two possible responses to the suggested state of conceptual ambiguity. The first, restrictive option is to k…

The self-organizing consciousness as an alternative model of the mind

2002

Through the concept of self-organizing consciousness (SOC), we posit that the dynamic of the mind stems from the recurrent interplay between the properties of conscious experiences and the properties of the world, hence making it unnecessary to postulate the existence of an unconscious mental level. In contrast, arguments are provided by commentators for the need for a functional level of organization located between the neural and the conscious. Other commentaries challenge us concerning the ability of our model to account for specific phenomena in the domains of language, reasoning, incubation, and creativity. The possibility of unconscious semantic access and other alleged instances of a…