Neural correlates of modal displacement and discourse-updating under (un)certainty

ABSTRACTA hallmark of human thought is the ability to think about not just the actual world, but also about alternative ways the world could be. One way to study this contrast is through language. Language has grammatical devices for expressing possibilities and necessities, such as the words might or must. With these devices, called “modal expressions,” we can study the actual vs. possible contrast in a highly controlled way. While factual utterances such as “There is a monster under my bed” update the here-and-now of a discourse model, a modal version of this sentence, “There might be a monster under my bed,” displaces from the here-and-now and merely postulates a possibility. We used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to test whether the processes of discourse updating and modal displacement dissociate in the brain. Factual and modal utterances were embedded in short narratives, and across two experiments, factual expressions increased the measured activity over modal expressions. However, the localization of the increase appeared to depend on perspective: signal localizing in right temporo-parietal areas increased when updating others’ beliefs, while frontal medial areas seem sensitive to updating one’s own beliefs. The presence of modal displacement did not elevate MEG signal strength in any of our analyses. In sum, this study identifies potential neural signatures of the process by which facts get added to our mental representation of the world.

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Wakefulness fluctuations elicit behavioural and neural reconfiguration of awareness

10.1101/155705 ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Valdas Noreika ◽

Andrés Canales-Johnson ◽

Amy Johnson ◽

Aurina Arnatkevičiūtė ◽

Justin Koh ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Psychophysical Function ◽

Human Perception ◽

Perceptual Awareness ◽

Dynamic Changes ◽

Rapid Changes ◽

The World ◽

Neural Underpinnings ◽

Neural Mapping ◽

The Brain ◽

Neural Signatures

ABSTRACTMapping the reports of awareness and its neural underpinnings is instrumental to understand the limits of human perception. The capacity to become aware of objects in the world may be studied by suppressing faint target stimuli with strong masking stimuli, or – alternatively – by manipulating the level of wakefulness from full alertness to mild drowsiness. By combining these two approaches, we studied how perceptual awareness is modulated by decreasing wakefulness. We found dynamic changes in behavioural and neural signatures of conscious access in humans between awake and drowsy states. Behaviourally, we show a decrease in the steepness of the psychophysical function for conscious access in drowsy trials. Neural mapping showed delayed processing of target-mask interaction as the consciousness transition progressed, suggesting that the brain resolution of conscious access shifts from early sensory/perceptual to decision-making stages of processing. Once the goal to report the awareness of a target is set, the system behaviourally adapts to rapid changes in wakefulness, revealing the flexibility of the neural signatures of conscious access, and its suppression, to maintain performance.Significance statementMaintaining full alertness for long periods of time in attentionally demanding situations is challenging and may lead to a decrease in performance. We show the effect of wakefulness fluctuations on behaviour and brain dynamics that humans use to maintain performance. We reveal the neural strategies we have to cope with drowsiness by shifting the weights to more flexible brain processes and relaxing the precision of the decisions we take.

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Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction

10.1093/actrade/9780198794738.001.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Susan Blackmore

Keyword(s):

Neural Correlates ◽

Altered States Of Consciousness ◽

Altered States ◽

Short Introduction ◽

New Developments ◽

Brain Science ◽

States Of Consciousness ◽

The World ◽

Construction Of Self ◽

The Brain

Consciousness is ‘the last great mystery for science’. How can a physical brain create our experience of the world? What creates our identity? Do we really have free will? Could consciousness itself be an illusion? Exciting new developments in brain science are continuing these debates, and the field has now expanded to include biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers. Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction clarifies the potentially confusing arguments, and the major theories, whilst also outlining the amazing pace of neuroscience discoveries. Covering areas such as construction of self in the brain, mechanisms of attention, neural correlates of consciousness, and physiology of altered states of consciousness, it highlights the latest findings.

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L’information implicite entre économie d’effort et esquive du jugement critique

Faits de langues ◽

10.1163/19589514-05002013 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 50 (2) ◽

pp. 113-135

Author(s):

Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri ◽

Viviana Masia

Keyword(s):

Mental Representation ◽

Effective Means ◽

Persuasive Communication ◽

Brain Response ◽

Cognitive Constraints ◽

Political Propaganda ◽

Discursive Strategies ◽

Communicative Intention ◽

Discourse Model ◽

The Brain

Abstract The implicit transmission of contents in a message is one of the most effective means of persuasive communication. In both commercial and political propaganda, discursive strategies such as presuppositions, implicatures and topicalisations (which we propose to recast as implicit communicative devices) are frequently used. This trend may hinge on the fact that these strategies conceal the actual communicative intention of the speaker (implicature) or his responsibility for the truth of the content conveyed (presuppositions and topicalisations). The paper proposes a reflection on the use of presuppositions, implicatures and topicalisations to achieve persuasive aims in communication. A discussion will be devoted to the cognitive constraints underlying the brain response to the processing of these categories, as well as to their influence on the receiver’s mental representation of the discourse model.

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What you read versus what you know: Neural correlates of accessing context information and background knowledge in constructing a mental representation during reading.

Journal of Experimental Psychology General ◽

10.1037/xge0000764 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 149 (11) ◽

pp. 2084-2101

Author(s):

Marianne L. van Moort ◽

Dietsje D. Jolles ◽

Arnout Koornneef ◽

Paul van den Broek

Keyword(s):

Mental Representation ◽

Background Knowledge ◽

Neural Correlates ◽

Context Information

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Pelvic schwannoma

GYNECOLOGY ◽

10.26442/20795696.2020.5.200216 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 22 (5) ◽

pp. 84-86

Author(s):

Sergei P. Sinchikhin ◽

Sarkis G. Magakyan ◽

Oganes G. Magakyan

Keyword(s):

Auditory Nerve ◽

World Literature ◽

Morphological Study ◽

Clinical Observation ◽

Nerve Trunk ◽

Practical Case ◽

Surgical Volume ◽

The World ◽

Brain And Spinal Cord ◽

The Brain

Relevance.A neoplasm originated from the myelonic sheath of the nerve trunk is called neurinoma or neurilemmoma, neurinoma, schwannoglioma, schwannoma. This tumor can cause compression and dysfunction of adjacent tissues and organs. The most common are the auditory nerve neurinomas (1 case per 100 000 population per year), the brain and spinal cord neurinomas are rare. In the world literature, there is no information on the occurrences of this tumor in the pelvic region. Description.Presented below is a clinical observation of a 30-year-old patient who was scheduled for myomectomy. During laparoscopy, an unusual tumor of the small pelvis was found and radically removed. A morphological study allowed to identify the remote neoplasm as a neuroma. Conclusion.The presented practical case shows that any tumor can hide under a clinical mask of another disease. The qualification of the doctor performing laparoscopic myomectomy should be sufficient to carry out, if necessary, another surgical volume.

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Consciousness, law of nature, and nomological determinism

10.31219/osf.io/h5jsm ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Xiaoyang Yu

Keyword(s):

Free Will ◽

Important Thing ◽

Law Of Nature ◽

The World ◽

The Law ◽

The Brain

Nomological determinism does not mean everything is predictable. It just means everything follows the law of nature. And the most important thing Is that the brain and consciousness follow the law of nature. In other words, there is no free will. Without life, brain and consciousness, the world follows law of nature, that is clear. The life and brain are also part of nature, and they follow the law of nature. This is due to scientific findings. There are not enough scientific findings for consciousness yet. But I think that the consciousness is a nature phenomenon, and it also follows the law of nature.

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Exploring the abnormal signal transduction mediated internet addiction and gaming disorders

Current Signal Transduction Therapy ◽

10.2174/1574362415999201110101418 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 15 ◽

Author(s):

Bhumika Chauhan ◽

Sisir Nandi

Keyword(s):

Signal Transduction ◽

Internet Addiction ◽

Internet Gaming Disorder ◽

Online Data ◽

Abnormal Signal ◽

Internet Gaming ◽

The World ◽

Loss Of Appetite ◽

Sleeping Disorder ◽

The Brain

: The world is connected by the internet. It is very useful because we use Google to find out any new topic, to search new places, to quest updated research, and to get knowledge for learnng. The person around the world can communicate with each other through the Google video conference talk. Internet is frequently used in smartphones, laptops, desktop, and tablet. Excessive affinity towards internet-based online data collection, downloading pictures, videos, cyber relationships, and social media may produce addiction disorders followed by different symptoms such as behaviors change, mind disturbance, depression, anxiety, loss of appetite hyperactivity, sleeping disorder, headache, visual fatigueness, trafficking of memory, attention-deficit, loss of efficiency in work and social detachment which may be caused by an imbalance of neurotransmitters. This is very difficult to control because of abnormal signal transduction in the brain. The present study is an attempt to discuss internet addiction disorder (IAD), internet gaming disorder (IGD), and give awareness to society to get rid of this addiction.

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Presence, Environment, and Sound and the Role of Imagination

The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination, Volume 1 ◽

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190460167.013.33 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 667-681

Author(s):

Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard

Keyword(s):

Computer Games ◽

Virtual World ◽

Actual World ◽

Sensory Input ◽

The World ◽

Visual Dimension ◽

The Creation ◽

First Person Shooter ◽

Selection Of

Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard addresses the role of sound in the creation of presence in virtual and actual worlds. He argues that imagination is a central part of the generation and selection of perceptual hypotheses—models of the world in which we can act—that emerge from what Grimshaw-Aagaard calls the “exo-environment” (the sensory input) and the “endo-environment” (the cognitive input). Grimshaw-Aagaard further divides the exo-environment into a primarily auditory and a primarily visual dimension and he deals with the actual world of his own apartment and the virtual world of first-person-shooter computer games in order to exemplify how we perceptually construct an environment that allows for the creation of presence.

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A Sensibilist Explanation of Imaginative Resistance

Canadian Journal of Philosophy ◽

10.1017/can.2021.10 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-16

Author(s):

Nils Franzén

Keyword(s):

Actual World ◽

David Hume ◽

Recent Discussion ◽

Personal Taste ◽

Predicates Of Personal Taste ◽

Imaginative Resistance ◽

The World ◽

The Right ◽

Evaluative Terms ◽

The Way

Abstract This article discusses why it is the case that we refuse to accept strange evaluative claims as being true in fictions, even though we are happy to go along with other types of absurdities in such contexts. For instance, we would refuse to accept the following statement as true, even in the context of a fiction: (i) In killing her baby, Giselda did the right thing; after all, it was a girl. This article offers a sensibilist diagnosis of this puzzle, inspired by an observation first made by David Hume. According to sensibilism, the way we feel about things settles their evaluative properties. Thus, when confronted with a fictional scenario where the configuration of non-evaluative facts and properties is relevantly similar to the actual world, we refuse to go along with evaluative properties being instantiated according to a different pattern. It is the attitudes we hold in the actual world that fix the extension of evaluative terms, even in nonactual worlds. When engaging with a fiction, we (to some extent) leave our beliefs about what the world is like behind, while taking our emotional attitudes with us into the fiction. To substantiate this diagnosis, this paper outlines a sensibilist semantics for evaluative terms based on recent discussion regarding predicates of personal taste, and explains how, together with standard assumptions about the nature of fictional discourse, it makes the relevant predictions with respect to engagement with fictions.

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