What is the relation between emotion and consciousness? In their recent paper in TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences, Tsuchiya and Adolphs review recent studies that address this question. 

Focusing on domains where emotion and consciousness overlap and interact, Tsuchiya and Adolphs suggest that each (emotion and consciousness) is necessary for aspects of the other.  They follow the common view that emotion and consciousness result from neuronal activity in the brain and they argue that both emotion and consciousness depend on neural representations of one’s own body.  Moreover, Tsuchiya and Adolphs argue that these representations arise from structures in the brainstem and medial telencephalon that receive interoceptive information.  The authors believe that future work requires not only more data but also further theoretical development of the relevant concepts that are currently under investigation.

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The journal Biological Psychiatry has a special issue on the autism spectrum, its diagnosis and treatment.

It is a comprehensive yet diverse collection of multidisciplinary treatment of the issue, containing articles onautism and phenotypic homogeneity; cortical layering and thickness; cortical dysfunction; executive function and gaze fixation.

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It’s time for this year’s Illusion Contest.

The 2007 Contest Gala will be held in Sarasota, Florida (Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall) on Saturday, May 12th, 2007, during the week of the Vision Sciences Society (VSS) conference.

The 2006 annual contest, also held in Sarasota, Florida, was a huge success, which drew numerous accolades from attendees as well as international media coverage. The First, Second and Third Prize winners were Max Dursteler (Universitätsspital Zürich, Switzerland), Peter Tse (Dartmouth College, USA), and Gideon Caplovitz & Peter Tse (Dartmouth College, USA). To see the illusions, photo galleries and other highlights from the 2006 contest, go here.

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A new issue of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences is out.

Articles include topics such as

• introspective reports
• perception and action
• evolutionary autonomous agents

We here bring the TOCs and links

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The levels of a chemical released by the brain determine how detailed a memory will later be, according to researchers at UC Irvine.

The neurotransmitter acetylcholine, a brain chemical already established as being crucial for learning and memory, appears to be the key to adding details to a memory. In a study with rats, Norman Weinberger, research professor of neurobiology and behavior, and colleagues determined that a higher level of acetylcholine during a learning task correlated with more details of the experience being remembered. The results are the first to tie levels of acetylcholine to memory specificity and could have implications in the study and treatment of memory-related disorders.

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A new article is out describing how we use our senses to fill out the blanks when we are only provided with input from one modality. Talking in a phone is a good example. Here, we are only provided with the auditory input. In a new study, it seems that knowing the face of who you’re talking to helps recognizing the people you are talking to.

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Experiment reveals how expectation interferes with perception.

What colour are your bananas? Most people see a tinge of yellow even when the picture is grey. When we look at a banana, does our brain tell us it looks yellow, even if it isn’t? A recent study shows that it does.

Psychologists at the University of Giessen, Germany, report in Nature Neuroscience that our perception of an object’s colour depends on our memory of its typical colour.

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The second most read article in TICS (see previous headline) is a review (PDF) of studies from imaging genetics, the study of how genes make up our minds, as we have described here at SCR. Ahmad Hariri and Andrew Holmes reviews the evidence and discusses the implications of the genetic regulation of serotonin function on both brain function and behaviour in emotions.

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Do you think using a hands-free device makes it okay to talk on a cell phone while driving? Despite the well-intended laws requiring the use of hands-free devices, a driver’s performance is impaired when distracted by even the simplest tasks, whether or not both hands are on the steering wheel.

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In a Science publication, it is reported that “purchases of complex products were viewed more favorably when decisions had been made in the absence of attentive deliberation.”

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Can we do math unconsciously? A study by Rusconi et al. demonstrates that in a neglect patient, neglect does not prevent neglected numbers from accessing their representations in arithmetic networks. Doing simple math, like reading, seems to be highly automatic.

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How are false memories formed? Are they the result of imagination only, or a combination of newly perceived events and imagination? A study by Lyle and Johnson actually finds that perception might play a larger role than imagination

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For many years researchers in cognitive neurscience has known that episodic memory does not work like a tape recorder or a computer hard drive. Recollection of events is not a simple replay from a fixed store. Rather, episodic memory (and memory in general) is today seen as a dynamic – even fragile – reconstruction process. As a consequence, errors can happen, and they do. One of these kinds of recall errors are false memories. But what are the mechanisms behind false memories? Why do things go wrong? In a paper by Lampinen et al. false memories are studied experimentally. They shed light on two special features in false memories; borrowing and vividness.

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Drugs that rid people of terrifying memories could be a lifeline for many. But could they have a sinister side too?

“REMEMBER September 11, 2001, when you first heard the news about the World Trade Center attacks? Remember where you were when you saw those images? Now, think back to September 10. It was only one day before. Remember that day? Anything at all?”

Roger Pitman, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, is asking an updated version of the well-known Kennedy assassination question to make a telling point. While few of us can remember an ordinary day four years ago, for many of us the events of 11 September are indelibly etched on our minds. Pitman is demonstrating that the brain handles memories of traumatic or emotionally charged events in a different way to neutral ones – they are seared into the brain more deeply, and remembered for longer.

There’s a good reason why this might be. From an evolutionary perspective, it pays to attach special importance to emotionally charged events (…)

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NewScientist

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Abstract

The subject of this article is the frame problem, as conceived by certain cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind, notably Fodor for whom it stands as a fundamental obstacle to progress in cognitive science. The challenge is to explain the capacity of so-called informationally unencapsulated cognitive processes to deal effectively with information from potentially any cognitive domain without the burden of having to explicitly sift the relevant from the irrelevant. The paper advocates a global workspace architecture, with its ability to manage massively parallel resources in the context of a serial thread of computation, as an answer to this challenge. Analogical reasoning is given particular attention, since it exemplifies informational unencapsulation in its most extreme form. Because global workspace theory also purports to account for the distinction between conscious and unconscious information processing, the paper advances the tentative conclusion that consciousness may go hand-in-hand with a solution to the frame problem in the biological brain.

Cognition

Volume 98, Issue 2 , December 2005, Pages 157-176

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What makes a route appear longer? An experimental perspective on features, route segmentation, and distance knowledge

Petra Jansen-Osmann A1 and Bettina Berendt A2

A1 Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany

A2 Humboldt University Berlin, Berlin, Germany

Abstract:

Five experiments performed in a desktop virtual-reality setting investigated the influence of environmental features—that is, noticeable landmarks along the route—on distance estimation. Landmarks were of two types: Either they simply “filled” the route or they “filled” and also segmented it, thereby inducing a hierarchical structuring of the route. Previous research had left the question open of whether a filling or a segmenting feature leads to an overestimation of a distance along the route. Our experiments showed different results dependent on the kind of space: If an environment was learned from a route perspective, filling and segmenting environmental features led to overestimations of distances, while the segmenting of a route induced by a grouping of similar features did not. If the environment was learned from a map that afforded a survey perspective, route structuring induced through a segmenting feature or by phenomenal grouping led to an overestimation of distances, whereas features that merely filled the route did not.

The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology: Section A

Issue: Volume 58, Number 8 / 2005

Pages: 1390 – 1414

OPAL Alerting

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Discovering the function of phenomenal states remains a formidable scientific challenge. Research on consciously penetrable conflicts (e.g., “pain-for-gain” scenarios) and impenetrable conflicts (as in the pupillary reflex, ventriloquism, and the McGurk effect (H. McGurk & J. MacDonald, 1976() reveals that these states integrate diverse kinds of information to yield adaptive action. Supramodular interaction theory proposes that phenomenal states play an essential role in permitting interactions among supramodular response systems–agentic, independent, multimodal, information-processing structures defined by their concerns (e.g., instrumental action vs. certain bodily needs). Unlike unconscious processes (e.g., pupillary reflex), these processes may conflict with skeletal muscle plans, as described by the principle of parallel responses into skeletal muscle (PRISM). Without phenomenal states, these systems would be encapsulated and incapable of collectively influencing skeletomotor action. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2005 APA, all rights reserved)

Psychological Review

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Building on Claus Bundesens work on attention, this article presents an updated framework for his theory of visual attention.

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Despite the recent ‘Race for consciousness’, many neuro-scientific approaches have failed to use the concept of ‘attention’ as a guide to consciousness. In this review, John G. Taylor claims that consciousness can be more fruitfully regarded as created by processes arising from the movement of attention.

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Even if you do not see the fine graitings on a screen, it might cause alterations to how you experience a stimulus afterwards.

What you don’t see now will affect what you see next

Vision is not perfect. The human eye is only receptive to certain wavelengths. And, due to the relatively low temporal resolution of the eyes, you cannot see the flickering images on the TV screen. So, what you see right now is only a fragment of the total visual scene. But what if you were told that what you did not see previously has an impact on what you see now? Would you believe it?

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