•  41
    Peter Godfrey-Smith recently introduced the idea of representational ‘organization’. When a collection of representations form an organized family, similar representational vehicles carry similar contents. For example, where neural firing rate represents numerosity (an analogue magnitude representation), similar firing rates represent similar numbers of items. Organization has been elided with structural representation, but the two are in fact distinct. An under-appreciated merit of representati…Read more
  •  100
    Metacognition of Inferential Transitions
    Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    A thought process is an unfolding causal chain. Some thoughts cause others in virtue of their contents. Paradigmatic cases of personal level inference involve something more, some kind of appreciation or feeling that the conclusion follows from the premises. First- order processes are inadequate to account for the phenomenon. Attempts to capture the additional ingredient in terms of second-order beliefs have proven problematic. An intermediate position has, however, been overlooked. The extra in…Read more
  •  49
    A basic deep neural network (DNN) is trained to exhibit a large set of input–output dispositions. While being a good model of the way humans perform some tasks automatically, without deliberative reasoning, more is needed to approach human‐like artificial intelligence. Analysing recent additions brings to light a distinction between two fundamentally different styles of computation: content‐specific and non‐content‐specific computation (as first defined here). For example, deep episodic RL netwo…Read more
  •  38
    Ruth Millikan’s On Clear and Confused Ideas (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (2): 453-466. 2002.
    Those who know Millikan only for her teleosemantics will find the themes in this book new. And those who think of Millikan as primarily concerned with empirical questions of biology and psychology may be surprised by her range of influences. The book features figures like Wilfred Sellars, P. F. Strawson and Gareth Evans as prominently as any more recent naturalist thinkers.
  •  217
    The question of whether non-human animals are conscious is of fundamental importance. There are already good reasons to think that many are, based on evolutionary continuity and other considerations. However, the hypothesis is notoriously resistant to direct empirical test. Numerous studies have shown behaviour in animals analogous to consciously-produced human behaviour. Fewer probe whether the same mechanisms are in use. One promising line of evidence about consciousness in other animals deriv…Read more
  •  40
    Millikan’s consistency testers and the cultural evolution of concepts
    Evolutionary Linguistic Theory 5 (1): 79-101. 2023.
    Ruth Millikan has hypothesised that human cognition contains ‘consistency testers’. Consistency testers check whether different judgements a thinker makes about the same subject matter agree or conflict. Millikan’s suggestion is that, where the same concept has been applied to the world via two routes, and the two judgements that result are found to be inconsistent, that makes the thinker less inclined to apply those concepts in those ways in the future. If human cognition does indeed include su…Read more
  •  4
    The Global Workspace Needs Metacognition
    with Chris D. Frith
    Trends in Cognitive Sciences 27 (3): 560-571. 2019.
    The two leading cognitive accounts of consciousness currently available concern global workspace (a form of working memory) and metacognition. There is relatively little interaction between these two approaches and it has even been suggested that the two accounts are rival and separable alternatives. Here, we argue that the successful function of a global workspace critically requires that the broadcast representations include a metacognitive component.
  •  3
    Supra-personal cognitive control and metacognition
    with Annika Boldt, Dan Bang, Nick Yeung, Cecilia Heyes, and Chris D. Frith
    Trends in Cognitive Sciences 18 (4). 2014.
    The human mind is extraordinary in its ability not merely to respond to events as they unfold but also to adapt its own operation in pursuit of its agenda. This ‘cognitive control’ can be achieved through simple interactions among sensorimotor processes, and through interactions in which one sensorimotor process represents a property of another in an implicit, unconscious way. So why does the human mind also represent properties of cognitive processes in an explicit way, enabling us to think and…Read more
  •  45
    Representation in Cognitive Science by Nicholas Shea: Reply by the Author
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 92 270-273. 2022.
    It is a rare privilege to have such eminent and insightful reviewers. Their kind words about the book are much appreciated – perhaps more than they realise. And I'm grateful to all three for having read the book so constructively. Each has given me several things to think about. In the space available here I will focus on the objections that seem most critical. Robert Rupert argues that I rely on an overly narrow understanding of what the cognitive sciences explain (x1). Elisabeth Camp presses m…Read more
  •  23
    Knowing Ourselves Together: The Cultural Origins of Metacognition
    with Cecilia Heyes, Dan Bang, Christopher D. Frith, and Stephen M. Fleming
    Trends in Cognitive Sciences 24 (5): 349-362. 2020.
    Metacognition – the ability to represent, monitor and control ongoing cognitive processes – helps us perform many tasks, both when acting alone and when working with others. While metacognition is adaptive, and found in other animals, we should not assume that all human forms of metacognition are gene-based adaptations. Instead, some forms may have a social origin, including the discrimination, interpretation, and broadcasting of metacognitive representations. There is evidence that each of thes…Read more
  •  50
    Concepts as Plug & Play Devices
    Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 378 20210353. 2022.
    Research on concepts has focused on categorization. Categorization starts with a stimulus. Equally important are episodes that start with a thought. We engage in thinking to draw out new consequences from stored information, or to work out how to act. Each of the concepts out of which thought is constructed provides access to a large body of stored information. Access is not always just a matter of retrieving a stored belief (semantic memory). Often it depends on running a simulation. Simulation…Read more
  •  57
    Imagining the future self through thought experiments
    with K. Miyamoto and M. F. S. Rushworth
    Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 2023.
    The ability of the mind to conceptualize what is not present is essential. It allows us to reason counterfactually about what might have happened had events unfolded differently or had another course of action been taken. It allows us to think about what might happen – to perform 'Gedankenexperimente' (thought experiments) – before we act. However, the cognitive and neural mechanisms mediating this ability are poorly understood. We suggest that the frontopolar cortex (FPC) keeps track of and eva…Read more
  •  9
    A recent study has established that thinkers reliably engage in epistemic appraisals of concepts of natural categories. Here, five studies are reported which investigated the effects of different manipulations of category learning context on appraisal of the concepts learnt. It was predicted that dimensions of concept appraisal could be affected by manipulating either procedural factors or declarative factors. While known effects of these manipulations on metacognitive judgements such as categor…Read more
  •  16
    Representation in Cognitive Science by Nicholas Shea: Reply by the Author
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 92 (C): 270-273. 2022.
    It is a rare privilege to have such eminent and insightful reviewers. Their kind words about the book are much appreciated – perhaps more than they realise. And I'm grateful to all three for having read the book so constructively. Each has given me several things to think about. In the space available here I will focus on the objections that seem most critical. Robert Rupert argues that I rely on an overly narrow understanding of what the cognitive sciences explain (x1). Elisabeth Camp pre…Read more
  •  127
    Consciousness, Concepts and Natural Kinds
    with Tim Bayne
    Philosophical Topics 48 (1): 65-83. 2020.
    We have various everyday measures for identifying the presence of consciousness, such as the capacity for verbal report and the intentional control of behavior. However, there are many contexts in which these measures are difficult to apply, and even when they can be applied one might have doubts as to their validity in determining the presence/absence of consciousness. Everyday measures for identifying consciousness are particularly problematic when it comes to ‘challenging cases’—human infants…Read more
  •  62
    This paper reports the first empirical investigation of the hypothesis that epistemic appraisals form part of the structure of concepts. To date, studies of concepts have focused on the way concepts encode properties of objects and the way those features are used in categorization and in other cognitive tasks. Philosophical considerations show the importance of also considering how a thinker assesses the epistemic value of beliefs and other cognitive resources and, in particular, concepts. We de…Read more
  •  100
    Representation in Cognitive Science: Replies
    Mind and Language 35 (3): 402-412. 2020.
    In their constructive reviews, Frances Egan, Randy Gallistel and Steven Gross have raised some important problems for the account of content advanced by Nicholas Shea in Representation in Cognitive Science. Here the author addresses their main challenges. Egan argues that the account includes an unrecognised pragmatic element; and that it makes contents explanatorily otiose. Gallistel raises questions about homomorphism and correlational information. Gross puts the account to work to resolve a d…Read more
  •  713
    Metacognitive Development and Conceptual Change in Children
    Review of Philosophy and Psychology 11 (4): 745-763. 2020.
    There has been little investigation to date of the way metacognition is involved in conceptual change. It has been recognised that analytic metacognition is important to the way older children acquire more sophisticated scientific and mathematical concepts at school. But there has been barely any examination of the role of metacognition in earlier stages of concept acquisition, at the ages that have been the major focus of the developmental psychology of concepts. The growing evidence that even …Read more
  •  153
    Concept‐metacognition
    Mind and Language 35 (5): 565-582. 2019.
    Concepts are our tools for thinking. They enable us to engage in explicit reasoning about things in the world. Like physical tools, they can be more or less good, given the ways we use them – more or less dependable for categorisation, learning, induction, action-planning, and so on. Do concept users appreciate, explicitly or implicitly, that concepts vary in dependability? Do they feel that some concepts are in some way defective? If so, we metacognize our concepts. One example that has been st…Read more
  •  65
    Functionalist Interrelations Amongst Human Psychological States inter se, ditto for Martians
    In Joulia Smortchkova, Krzysztof Dołrega & Tobias Schlicht (eds.), What Are Mental Representations?, Oxford University Press. pp. 242-253. 2020.
    One job for theories of mental representation is to distinguish between different kinds of mental representation: beliefs, desires, intentions, perceptual states, etc. What makes a mental state a belief that p rather than a desire that p or a visual representation that p? Functionalism is a leading approach for doing so: for individuating mental states. Functionalism is designed to allow that psychological states can be multiply realized. Mark Sprevak has argued that, for a functionalist accoun…Read more
  •  110
    Metacognition and Abstract Concepts
    Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 373. 2018.
    The problem of how concepts can refer to or be about the non-mental world is particularly puzzling for abstract concepts. There is growing evidence that many characteristics beyond the perceptual are involved in grounding different kinds of abstract concept. A resource that has been suggested, but little explored, is introspection. This paper develops that suggestion by focusing specifically on metacognition—on the thoughts and feelings that thinkers have about a concept. One example of metacogn…Read more
  •  300
    Content in Simple Signalling Systems
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 69 (4): 1009-1035. 2018.
    Our understanding of communication and its evolution has advanced significantly through the study of simple models involving interacting senders and receivers of signals. Many theorists have thought that the resources of mathematical information theory are all that are needed to capture the meaning or content that is being communicated in these systems. However, the way theorists routinely talk about the models implicitly draws on a conception of content that is richer than bare informational co…Read more
  •  2111
    Representation in Cognitive Science
    Oxford University Press. 2018.
    How can we think about things in the outside world? There is still no widely accepted theory of how mental representations get their meaning. In light of pioneering research, Nicholas Shea develops a naturalistic account of the nature of mental representation with a firm focus on the subpersonal representations that pervade the cognitive sciences.
  •  20
    Review of Kim Sterelny: Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition (review)
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 57 (1): 259-266. 2006.
  •  23
    Learning rapidly about the relevance of visual cues requires conscious awareness
    with Eoin Travers and Chris D. Frith
    Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 71 (8). 2018.
    Humans have been shown capable of performing many cognitive tasks using information of which they are not consciously aware. This raises questions about what role consciousness actually plays in cognition. Here, we explored whether participants can learn cue-target contingencies in an attentional learning task when the cues were presented below the level of conscious awareness, and how this differs from learning about conscious cues. Participants’ manual (Experiment 1) and saccadic (Experiment 2…Read more
  •  69
    Conceptual representations in goal-directed decision making
    with Kristine Krug and Philippe N. Tobler
    Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience 8 (4): 418-428. 2008.
    Emerging evidence suggests that the long-established distinction between habit-based and goal-directed decision-making mechanisms can also be sustained in humans. Although the habit-based system has been extensively studied in humans, the goal-directed system is less well characterized. This review brings to that task the distinction between conceptual and nonconceptual representational mechanisms. Conceptual representations are structured out of semantic consituents - the use of which requires …Read more
  •  266
    Distinguishing Top-Down From Bottom-Up Effects
    In D. Stokes, M. Matthen & S. Biggs (eds.), Perception and Its Modalities, Oxford University Press. pp. 73-91. 2015.
    The distinction between top-down and bottom-up effects is widely relied on in experimental psychology. However, there is an important problem with the way it is normally defined. Top-down effects are effects of previously-stored information on processing the current input. But on the face of it that includes the information that is implicit in the operation of any psychological process – in its dispositions to transition from some types of representational state to others. This paper suggest…Read more
  •  217
    1. Introduction 2. Reward-Guided Decision Making 3. Content in the Model 4. How to Deflate a Metarepresentational Reading Proust and Carruthers on metacognitive feelings 5. A Deflationary Treatment of RPEs? 5.1 Dispensing with prediction errors 5.2 What is use of the RPE focused on? 5.3 Alternative explanations—worldly correlates 5.4 Contrast cases 6. Conclusion Appendix: Temporal Difference Learning Algorithms
  •  147
    Neural signalling of probabilistic vectors
    Philosophy of Science 81 (5): 902-913. 2014.
    Recent work combining cognitive neuroscience with computational modelling suggests that distributed patterns of neural firing may represent probability distributions. This paper asks: what makes it the case that distributed patterns of firing, as well as carrying information about (correlating with) probability distributions over worldly parameters, represent such distributions? In examples of probabilistic population coding, it is the way information is used in downstream processing so as to le…Read more
  •  48
    Model-based analyses: Promises, pitfalls, and example applications to the study of cognitive control
    with Rogier B. Mars, Nils Kolling, and Matthew F. S. Rushworth
    Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 65 (2): 252-267. 2012.
    We discuss a recent approach to investigating cognitive control, which has the potential to deal with some of the challenges inherent in this endeavour. In a model-based approach, the researcher defines a formal, computational model that performs the task at hand and whose performance matches that of a research participant. The internal variables in such a model might then be taken as proxies for latent variables computed in the brain. We discuss the potential advantages of such an approach for t…Read more