A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away: How temporal are episodic contents?

A prominent feature of mental event (i.e. ‘episodic’) simulations is their temporality: human adults can generate episodic representations directed towards the past or the future. The ability to entertain event representations with different temporal orientations allows these representations to play various cognitive roles. Here, we investigated how the temporal orientation of imagined events relates to the contents (i.e. ‘what is happening’) of these events. Is the temporal orientation of an episode part of its contents? Or are the processes for assigning temporality to an event representation distinct from those generating its contents? In three experiments (N = 360), we asked participants to generate and later recall a series of imagined events differing in (1) location (indoors vs. outdoors), (2) time of day (daytime vs. nighttime), (3) temporal orientation (past vs. future), and (4) weekday (Monday vs. Friday). We then tested to what extent successful recall of episodic content (i.e. (1) and (2)) would predict recall of temporality and/or weekday information. Results showed that while recall of temporal orientation was predicted by content recall, weekday recall was not. However, temporal orientation was only weakly integrated with episodic contents. This finding suggests that episodic simulations are unlikely to be intrinsically temporal in nature. Instead, similar to other forms of temporal information, temporal orientation might be determined from such contents by reconstructive post-retrieval processes. These results have implications for how the human ability to ‘mentally travel’ in time is cognitively implemented.

Memory Disjunctivism: a Causal Theory

Relationalists about episodic memory must endorse a disjunctivist theory of memory-experience according to which cases of genuine memory and cases of total confabulation involve distinct kinds of mental event with different natures. This paper is concerned with a pair of arguments against this view, which are analogues of the ‘causal argument’ and the ‘screening off argument’ that have been pressed in recent literature against relationalist (and hence disjunctivist) theories of perception. The central claim to be advanced is that to deal with these two arguments, memory disjunctivists both can and should draw on resources that are standardly appealed to by rival common factor theories of episodic memory, and, in particular, to the idea that genuine memories and merely apparent ones are to be distinguished, at least in part, in terms of the distinctive ways in which they are caused. On the proposed view, there are substantive causal constraints associated both with cases of genuine memory and with cases of mere confabulation. The resulting theory thus tells us something important about the nature both of genuine memories and of mere confabulations, namely, that such experiences must be caused in certain distinctive ways and cannot occur except as the result of a distinctive sort of causal process. In addition, the theory enables the disjunctivist to offer a unified response to an important pair of arguments against her view.

Bernhard Riemann, the Ear, and an Atom of Consciousness

Why did Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866), arguably the most original mathematician of his generation, spend the last year of life investigating the mechanism of hearing? Fighting tuberculosis and the hostility of eminent scientists such as Hermann Helmholtz, he appeared to forsake mathematics to prosecute a case close to his heart. Only sketchy pages from his last paper remain, but here we assemble some significant clues and triangulate from them to build a broad picture of what he might have been driving at. Our interpretation is that Riemann was a committed idealist and from this philosophical standpoint saw that the scientific enterprise was lame without the “poetry of hypothesis”. He believed that human thought was fundamentally the dynamics of “mind-masses” and that the human mind interpenetrated, and became part of, the microscopic physical domain of the cochlea. Therefore, a full description of hearing must necessarily include the perceptual dimensions of what he saw as a single manifold. The manifold contains all the psychophysical aspects of hearing, including the logarithmic transformations that arise from Fechner’s law, faithfully preserving all the subtle perceptual qualities of sound. For Riemann, hearing was a unitary physical and mental event, and parallels with modern ideas about consciousness and quantum biology are made. A unifying quantum mechanical model for an atom of consciousness—drawing on Riemann’s mind-masses and the similar “psychons” proposed by Eccles—is put forward.

Causal Reasoning and Event Cognition as Evolutionary Determinants of Language Structure

The aim of this article is to provide an evolutionarily grounded explanation of central aspects of the structure of language. It begins with an account of the evolution of human causal reasoning. A comparison between humans and non-human primates suggests that human causal cognition is based on reasoning about the underlying forces that are involved in events, while other primates hardly understand external forces. This is illustrated by an analysis of the causal cognition required for early hominin tool use. Second, the thinking concerning forces in causation is used to motivate a model of human event cognition. A mental representation of an event contains two vectors representing a cause as well as a result but also entities such as agents, patients, instruments and locations. The fundamental connection between event representations and language is that declarative sentences express events (or states). The event structure also explains why sentences are constituted of noun phrases and verb phrases. Finally, the components of the event representation show up in language, where causes and effects are expressed by verbs, agents and patients by nouns (modified by adjectives), locations by prepositions, etc. Thus, the evolution of the complexity of mental event representations also provides insight into the evolution of the structure of language.

Social inferences from physical evidence via Bayesian event reconstruction

Human Theory of Mind is typically associated with the ability to infer mental states from observed behavior. In many cases, however, people can also infer the mental states of agents whose behavior they cannot see, based on the physical evidence left behind. We hypothesized that this capacity is supported by a form of mental event reconstruction. Under this account, observers derive social inferences by reconstructing the agents' behavior, based on the physical evidence that revealed their presence. We present a computational model of this idea, embedded in a Bayesian framework for action understanding, and show that its predictions match human inferences with high quantitative accuracy. Our results shed light on how people infer others' mental states from indirect physical evidence and on people's ability to extract social information from the physical world.

Extending the extended consciousness debate: perception, imagination, and the common kind assumption

For some, the states and processes involved in the realisation of phenomenal consciousness are not confined to within the organismic boundaries of the experiencing subject. Instead, the sub-personal basis of perceptual experience can, and does, extend beyond the brain and body to implicate environmental elements through one’s interaction with the world. These claims are met by proponents of predictive processing, who propose that perception and imagination should be understood as a product of the same internal mechanisms. On this view, as visually imagining is not considered to be world-involving, it is assumed that world-involvement must not be essential for perception, and thus internalism about the sub-personal basis is true. However, the argument for internalism from the unity of perception and imagination relies for its strength on a questionable conception of the relationship between the two experiential states. I argue that proponents of the predictive approach are guilty of harbouring an implicit commitment to the common kind assumption which does not follow trivially from their framework. That is, the assumption that perception and imagination are of the same fundamental kind of mental event. I will argue that there are plausible alternative ways of conceiving of this relationship without drawing internalist metaphysical conclusions from their psychological theory. Thus, the internalist owes the debate clarification of this relationship and further argumentation to secure their position.

Gaṅgeśa on Epistemic Luck

This essay explores a problem for Nyāya epistemologists. It concerns the notion of pramā. Roughly speaking, a pramā is a conscious mental event of knowledge-acquisition, i.e., a conscious experience or thought in undergoing which an agent learns or comes to know something. Call any event of this sort a knowledge-event. The problem is this. On the one hand, many Naiyāyikas accept what I will call the Nyāya Definition of Knowledge, the view that a conscious experience or thought is a knowledge-event just in case it is true and non-recollective. On the other hand, they are also committed to what I shall call Nyāya Infallibilism, the thesis that every knowledge-event is produced by causes that couldn’t have given rise to an error. These two commitments seem to conflict with each other in cases of epistemic luck, i.e., cases where an agent arrives a true judgement accidentally or as a matter of luck. While the Nyāya Definition of Knowledge seems to predict that these judgements are knowledge-events, Nyāya Infallibilism seems to entail that they aren’t. In this essay, I show that Gaṅgeśa Upādhyāya, the 14th century Naiyāyika, solves this problem by adopting what I call epistemic localism, the view that upstream causal factors play no epistemically significant role in the production of knowledge.

Knowledge Management in News Discourse: A Socio-and-Cognitive View

The article considers news discourse as one of the leading genres of the media sphere, of particular concern is the issue of ideologically biased news reports. It focuses on how ideology and knowledge are managed in news discourse production and comprehension. The theoretical perspective of the paper is the critical epistemic discourse analysis proposed by T.A. van Dijk. The paper considers mental representation of the event nominated in British and American mass media as "Russian spy poisoning". The author offers the issue that knowledge may be relative to the members and the criteria of different epistemic communities, and one of the strategies of persuasion is to define beliefs as knowledge of facts. The paper reveals the communicative function and pragmatic potential of epistemic modality and evidentiality in the ideological control of news discourse. It is argued that evidentials do not always come alone but may be part of complex evidential strategies. The author claims that the evidence-epistemic markers with the semantics of knowledge / possibility / probability / likelihood in mental representation of the event "Russian spy poisoning" aim at manipulating and misleading the addressee. The article is an initial step toward analyzing the role of knowledge and beliefs in the formation of mental event models in ideologically based news discourse.

The Brain Activation-based Sexual Image Classifier (BASIC): A sensitive and specific fMRI activity pattern for sexual image perception

Sexual stimuli processing is a key element in the repertoire of human affective and motivational states. Previous neuroimaging studies of sexual stimulus processing have revealed a complicated mosaic of activated regions, leaving unresolved questions about their sensitivity and specificity to sexual stimuli per se, generalizability across individuals, and potential utility as neuromarkers for sexual stimulus processing. In this study, data on sexual, negative, non-sexual positive, and neutral images from Wehrum et al. (2013) (N = 100) were re-analyzed with multivariate Support Vector Machine models to create the Brain Activation-based Sexual Image Classifier (BASIC) model. This model was tested for sensitivity, specificity, and generalizability in cross-validation (N = 100) and an independent test cohort (N = 18; Kragel et al. 2019). The BASIC model showed highly accurate performance (94-100%) in classifying sexual versus neutral or nonsexual affective images in both datasets. Virtual lesions and test of individual large-scale networks (e.g., ‘visual’ or ‘attention’ networks) show that these individual networks are neither necessary nor sufficient to capture sexual stimulus processing. These findings suggest that brain responses to sexual stimuli constitute a category of mental event that is distinct from general affect and involves multiple brain networks. It is, however, largely conserved across individuals, permitting the development of neuromarkers for sexual processing in individual persons. Future studies could assess performance of BASIC to a broader array of affective/motivational stimuli and link brain responses with physiological and subjective measures of sexual arousal.