Transcript A dilemma for the extended mind

Status of conjunctive neurons
Read from p. 88.
Are higher-order conjunctive neurons
amodal symbols?
What determines what they activate and
how the results will be read?
Change Blindness (Inattentional
Blindness)
Significant changes during saccades go
unnoticed.
Colors of hats worn by men in a picture –
even the heads themselves – can switch
and 70% of these go unnoticed (Grimes)
Is this a matter of information being lost
during the saccade?
Flicker paradigm
Hypothesis: the blank screen masks the
change by disrupting processing at every
location on the retina.
The retina does not keep track of the
location (thus the features) of any
particular object.
Mud splash paradigm
Create local movements by adding spots to
the image as it changes.
The changes produce local transients, but
performance is still not great.
Maybe the mud splash is directing attention
away from the changes.
Attention
This may be necessary, but not sufficient.
67% of subjects failed to detect changes in
an actor through a simple change in
action.
Experiment using a “student,” asking for
directions.
Results are interesting because the level of
change detection depends partly on
motivation, whether the subjects are likely
to care about the person asking directions.
Performance significantly better when
confederate and subjects are in the same
peer group.
Is it a matter of encoding for
content over detail?
Memory for pictures of scenes: False
positives when form is reversed.
Subjects study pictures: Some contain
inconsistent objects. Changes in these
objects are more likely to be noticed. This
content is more likely to be noticed and
encoded.
Movie-makers’ lore
Eye gaze in movie editing: people are better
at change detection when they disrupt
ways of tracking interpersonal dynamics
(by tracking eye gaze).
Consistent with the attention requirement.
Situated cognition and Extended
Cognition
Is there a broader moral with regard to
situated cognition?
Earlier argument (in connection with
Ballard):
If the external information plays the same
role as internal information (ready to be
used in cognitive processing), then it’s
cognitive in the same sense as the internal
stuff.
Or maybe:
It seems like we’re visually conscious of
external detail.
Consciousness is right (that is, what seems
like part of consciousness really is).
Thus, the detail is part of our mental state.
We do not represent the details internally.
So, the mental state extends into the
environment (the details are “represented”
by the external world itself).
Role of Internal Abstract
Representations
If Simons and Levin are correct, the internal
system is keeping tabs of objects in terms
of general categories or roles (and the
relations between them).
Does this give the internal system a
privileged role?
Narrative Comprehension
Gernsbacher and associates (and others –
e.g., Daneman and Carpenter) have
shown that an individual’s ability to
comprehend written material is highly
correlated with her ability to comprehend
spoken-language material, as well as
narratives presented only with pictures.
In addition
Subjects
--Mark the same episode structure
--make the same inferences
--and in free recall emphasize, elaborate, and omit
the same details
--Moreover, similar areas of parietal cortex are
distinctively active.