Ingar Brinck

Abstract: To evaluate the explanation of change blindness in terms of misrepresentation and determine its role for Rosenthal’s higher-order thought theory of consciousness, we present an alternative account of change blindness that affords an independent outlook and provides a viable alternative. First we describe Rosenthal’s actualism and the notion of misrepresentation, then introduce change blindness and the explanation of it by misrepresentation. Rosenthal asserts that, in change blindness, the first-order state tracks the post-change stimulus, but the higher-order state misrepresents it. We propose the alternative that both post-change and pre-change content can be tracked by the first-order state, and that in change blindness the higher-order thought represents the pre-change state, resulting in a good-enough representation: true but not veridical. We compare the two explanations with respect to available data and analyse the principal theoretical claims. Discussing the rationale of the alternative account, we conclude that there is good reason to conceive of the mind as satisficing, geared towards reliability instead of truth-tracking, and guided by representations that are good enough as opposed to complete or corresponding to the facts. We end with some methodological remarks concerning the risk of cognitive biases in interdisciplinary research that brings together empirical and philosophical claims.

The article discusses the role of intuition for insight. Creativity provides heuristic solutions to problems that are intractable if approached in standard, algorithmic ways. Intuition is claimed to occur during the incubation phase and to crucially depend on embodied memory and unconscious processing of memories, such as reconstruction and recreation. Two suggestions as to how memory contributes to intuition, and by which processes are analysed and compared: Barsalou & Prinz’ and Langley & Jones’

To improvise together for the pure curiosity, joy, and beauty of it constitutes a central but often neglected ability of human beings. Integrating pragmatic, practical, and technical skills with conceptual understanding, improvisation is adaptive and collaborative. It seems made to counter the challenges of living in a fleeting present, unconstrained by physical and historical boundaries, and very likely has deep evolutionary roots. I present an account of joint improvisation in the performative arts based in reviews of empirical research in the cognitive sciences, phenomenology, neuroscience, and philosophy, using examples from modern dance and jazz music. The account may be used for generating cross-disciplinary hypotheses about improvisation for investigation within a multitude of fields and is meant to encourage interdisciplinary work and collaboration between practitioners and academic researchers. The major goal is to elucidate the interaction dynamics that underlies joint improvisation by considering the variety of processes that support sensorimotor, experiential, emotional, meta-cognitive, and collaborative forms of interaction and lead to the coordination and synchronization of behavior. I claim that improvisation is an intelligent cognitive skill associated with meta-awareness, open to monitoring and control. It involves both automatized and flexible behavior and can occur without conscious awareness. Improvising in principle is independent of verbal language and higher-order thought, but nevertheless profits from the presence of multiple converging processes.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the role of value uncertainty and value instability in decision-making that concerns morally controversial issues. Value uncertainty and value instability are distinguished from moral uncertainty, and several types of value uncertainty and value instability are defined and discussed. The relations between value uncertainty and value instability are explored, and value uncertainty is illustrated with examples drawn from the social sciences, medicine and everyday life. Several types of factor producing value uncertainty and/or value instability are then identified. They are grouped into three categories and discussed under the headings ‘value framing’, ‘ambivalence’ and ‘lack of self-knowledge’. The paper then discusses the role of value uncertainty in decision-making. The concluding remarks summarize what has been achieved and what remains to be done in this area.

A variant of the compatrison theory of metaphor is put forward. The main points are a theory of metaphor belongs to semantics, not pragmatics, a metaphorical statement is a similarity statement, usually comparing descriptions of objects, a metaphor is a constellation of words connected by a certain kind of relation - the metaphorical link, metaphors are not necessarily asymmetric, what expressions copunt as metaphors in a certain language has to do with the semantic fields of the language in question

Apperly's and Butterfill's theory about belief reasoning is taken as a starting-point for a discussion of how we make sense of other people's actions in real time. More specifically, the focus lies on how we can understand others' actions in terms of their epistemic states on an implicit level of processing. First, the relevant parts of Apperly's and Butterfill's theory are summarized. Then, their account of implicit theory of mind in terms of registration ascription and perceptual encountering is discussed and rejected. While accepting Apperly's and Butterfill's general epistemic account of belief reasoning, the author suggests that implicit theory of mind involves visuomotor, second-person pragmatic representations. Moreover, this presentation emphasizes the central place of interaction, claiming that perceptual intentions-to-interact are fundamental to social understanding. Via the mechanism of social attention, social intentions automatically prompt agents to share and exchange sensorimotor, pragmatic information.

The goal of the present deliverable is to provide a developmental analysis of attentional intersubjectivity, which, as we show below, is a more inclusive notion than the more commonly used term ‘joint attention’. The use of the term ‘joint attention’ is not consistent in the literature, sometimes referring to the general phenomenon when two or more subjects attend to the same target, sometimes to more reciprocal situations in which the subjects also are aware of attending to the same target. Most often solely visual attention has been described, but implicitly the descriptions have been thought to generalize to other modalities. The concepts introduced in this deliverable constitute an attempt to construct a coherent framework that will allow for distinguishing and comparing the range of behaviours that in the literature have been addressed as ‘joint attention’ behaviours. By attentional intersubjectivity we refer to the general case when two or more subjects simultaneously focus their attention on the same target. Attentional intersubjectivity will be further divided into types, according to which behaviours that are typically associated with attentional intersubjectivity occur during the interaction, and in which combinations. The result is that the over-all behaviour of the subjects during different types of attentional intersubjectivity differs. Our contentions are that: a) the types of attentional intersubjectivity identified in this report build on each other cumulatively and constitute different levels, and b) these levels correspond to evolutionary and developmental stages. In saying that the types are cumulative we mean that there is a progress by successive stages where each type is causally dependent on the type preceding it, and, furthermore, has increased in complexity as compared to previous types. While attentional intersubjectivity involves several perceptual modalities, for practical reasons, this study primarily concerns the visual modality. Our analysis is, however, intended also to be applicable to these other modalities.

In situations that require creative thinking, there is no well-known procedure for how to reach the goal, or the solution. Among other things, it is not clear how choices between outcomes are made, or when the search for a solution should terminate. The article focusses on the evaluation of solutions that are generated during the search. The general question concerns the standards according to which evaluation is made. Are they at all similar to those that are used in normal problem-solving? Another question relates to the stages of the processs during which evauation occurs. Is it during the whole process that evaluations are made, or only towards the end?

Imperative and declarative pointing are distinct kinds of communicative acts that rely on different cognitive capacities in the speakers. Declarative pointing is an important precursor to language, seen from both an evolutionary and a developmental perspective. Declarative pointing is functionally independent of affective intersubjectivity, yet it is intimately related to it in development. It is argued that declarative pointing once evolved because it allows for the mutual evaluation of joint objects of attention. Interaffectivity and joint attention to a distal object together constitute the prerequisites for using declarative pointing for the purpose of evaluation. Mutual evaluation has the benefits of enhancing co-operation and allowing for vicarious learning. It also makes possible the non-linguistic, active interrogation of others about their attitudes to jointly attended objects.

The present account explains which elements of the act of nonverbal reference are intersubjective, which major effects intersubjectivity has on the development of intentional communication and at what stages, and how intersubjectivity contributes to trigger the general capacity for nonverbal reference in the second year. First, intersubjectivity is analysed in terms of a mutual or individual, dyadic or triadic, sharing of experiences. It is then shown that nonverbal reference presupposes intersubjectivity relative to communicative-intent indicating and referential behaviour, and the modification of previous behaviour in response to communication failure. It is argued that different forms of intersubjectivity entail different types of communicative skills. A comprehensive analysis of data on various gaze-related intersubjective behaviour in young infants shows that interaffectivity and interattentionality enable referential skills early in development and together allow for complex behaviour, but also that early referential skills arise by other mechanisms than in nonverbal reference and their functions do not overlap. Reliable and consistent use of nonverbal reference occurs when interaffectivity and interattentionality coalesce with interintentionality, which affords general cognitive skills, and these capacities together permit a decontextualisation of communicative behaviour.

Comparative psychology is a strongly interdisciplinary field that shares many of its experimental methods and observational techniques with ethology and developmental psychology. The great variety of theories that comparative psychology evokes to explain behavior generates a wide array of exciting and potentially fruitful accounts, but is also problematic. It increases the risk of error in the forms of inconsistent background assumptions, conceptual misunderstandings, unfalsifiable hypotheses and incoherent explanations, which in spite of perhaps being minor by themselves will impede scientific progress in the long run. Moreover, similarly to psychology at large, comparative psychology tends to emphasize empirical investigations to the disadvantage of the analysis and development of theories and concepts. Consequently, disagreements that have their roots elsewhere than in methodology and experimental design do not receive sufficient attention. Furthermore, while evidence about biological evolution is notoriously hard to find, the methodology for comparing the capacities of different species is under continuous development. This forces comparative psychology to rely on the adequacy of the theoretical and conceptual framework to a greater extent than normally in the empirical sciences. In view of investigating the background of the problems that contemporary comparative psychology is facing, the present chapter examines central parts of the methodology and explanatory framework of comparative psychology as well as its global objective.

The starting-point of this talk is the question which are the objects of attention? The answer simply is that there are no objects of attention as such, i.e., no generic objects of attention. Instead several kinds of object of attention can be discerned troughout the attention process. Which kind will constitute the actual object of attention in a certain situation depends on the task that the subject is performing and on the level of analysis. I will substantiate this claim by giving an overview of the process that goes by the name of attention.

It is argued that the capacity to focus attention is crucial for intentional communication. Intentional communication is goal-intended; directed at changing mental states and as a consequence behaviour; about a referential object common to sender and recipient; and about objects that may be context-and referent-independent. Three different kinds of attention is discerned: scanning, attention attraction, and attention-focusing. The focus of attention can, depending on the abilities of the subject, be on objects or subjects that either are contextual or stable, and it can be individual or shared. For language use, subject-subject focusing along with shared attention are necessary. This does not require Gricean metarepresentations, but basically only attention contact between the subjects and behavioral co-ordination. Language use can be compared with tool use to bring out the characteristics that distinguish informational from intentional communication. The capacities required for tool use are in several cases similar to those required for language use. A basic similarity is that both activities are used as means to an end.