The Effect of Culture on Load and Distractor Processing

The present study examined perceptual load capacity as a potential mechanism that may contribute to visual attention differences between East Asians and North Americans. Participants identified targets in a low or high load display while ignoring distractors that are compatible or incompatible with the target. Previous research suggests North Americans do not experience reaction time difference between compatible and incompatible trials under high load because high load uses up perceptual load capacity before distractors can be processed. If East Asians possess a higher perceptual load capacity than North Americans, they should be slower than North Americans to react in incompatible trials compared to compatible trials under high load. Results revealed that both cultural groups performed similarly, suggesting no cultural difference in perceptual load capacity. Results also revealed that East Asians were significantly slower under high load, but more accurate across all loads, than North Americans. Implications and limitations are discussed

Does self-construal shape automatic social attention?

We examined whether activating independent or interdependent self-construal modulates attention shifting in response to group gaze cues. European Canadians (Study 1) and East Asian Canadians (Study 2) primed with independence vs. interdependence completed a multi-gaze cueing task with a central face gazing left or right, flanked by multiple background faces that either matched or mismatched the direction of the foreground gaze. Results showed that European Canadians (Study 1) mostly ignored background gaze cues and were uninfluenced by the self-construal primes. However, East Asian Canadians (Study 2), who have cultural backgrounds relevant to both independence and interdependence, showed different attention patterns by prime: those primed with interdependence were more distracted by mismatched (vs. matched) background gaze cues, whereas there was no change for those primed with independence. These findings suggest activating an interdependent self-construal modulates social attention mechanisms to attend broadly, but only for those who may find these representations meaningful

Modular architectures and informational encapsulation: A dilemma

Amongst philosophers and cognitive scientists, modularity remains a popular choice for an architecture of the human mind, primarily because of the supposed explanatory value of this approach. Modular architectures can vary both with respect to the strength of the notion of modularity and the scope of the modularity of mind. We propose a dilemma for modular architectures, no matter how these architectures vary along these two dimensions. First, if a modular architecture commits to the informational encapsulation of modules, as it is the case for modularity theories of perception, then modules are on this account impenetrable. However, we argue that there are genuine cases of the cognitive penetrability of perception and that these cases challenge any strong, encapsulated modular architecture of perception. Second, many recent massive modularity theories weaken the strength of the notion of module, while broadening the scope of modularity. These theories do not require any robust informational encapsulation, and thus avoid the incompatibility with cognitive penetrability. However, the weakened commitment to informational encapsulation greatly weakens the explanatory force of the theory and, ultimately, is conceptually at odds with the core of modularity

RECONSIDERING MORAL PERCEPTION: THE DIALECTICAL EMERGENCE OF MORAL PERCEPTUAL CONTENTS DURING EXPERIENCE VIA COGNITIVE PENETRATION AND OPPRESSIVE SOCIALIZATION’S SUPPRESSION OF OUR ABILITY TO ‘SEE’ MORAL REASONS FOR HUMANIZATION AND LIBERATION

Moral perceptions occur when a subject makes an immediate discernment about the moral features of an occurrent experience. This project taxonomizes theories of moral perception into the following two camps: experientialism and judgementalism. I defend a version of experientialism, Moral Perceptual Orientation, by arguing that we, in addition to making moral judgments, have genuine perceptions with moral content during occurrent experience. I then go on to advance a framework for understanding how these perceptions are curated by our background beliefs by developing a view of dialectical consciousness. I do this by synthesizing Herbert Marcuse’s perspective on the epistemic subject with the Phenomenological division of Feminist Affect theory using Buddhist (Mahāyānan) moral psychology to account for the formation of those background beliefs, habits of thought, and affects which shape our moral perceptions. Lastly, I argue that oppressive modes of socialization can curate our moral perceptions by reproducing moral ignorance. This, in turn, perpetuates a form of moral blindness to moral reasons during occurrent experience, something which is a defining feature of our epistemic lives wherever domination and brutalization are valued, personally or structurally, over liberation and humanization

Articulating the speed(s) of the Internet: the case of open source/free software

"The Internet is widely considered as a key factor of speeding up social and cultural change. It represents the merging of information and communication technologies and enables flows of information and capital, and communication and co-operation regardless of space and, possibly, time. The paper explores the example of Open Source/Free Software development, i.e. software development in self-organised projects based on a considerable share of voluntary work. Here, we find complex articulations of speeding up and slowing down technological development. Open Source/Free Software projects complement the logic of speeding up technological progress and of obsolescence with a reflexive logic of optionality, variety and sustainability which addresses the accessibility of technology and knowledge as a precondition for future creativity beyond markets and organisations." (author's abstract

How Music Makes Us Feel

According to folk psychology, instrumental music regularly elicits emotions in listeners. Philosophers and psychologists such as Kivy, Konecni and Zangwill have questioned the existence of these musically elicited emotions, arguing that instrumental music elicits moods or aesthetic judgments rather than emotions. I defend the folk psychological position against these skeptics. The first chapter sets up the debate surrounding musically elicited emotions, while chapters two and three defend the thesis that instrumental music elicits emotions against the critics’ arguments. Chapter four outlines the implications of this defense for a variety of fields

Human face and gaze perception is highly context specific and involves bottom-up and top-down neural processing

This review summarizes human perception and processing of face and gaze signals. Face and gaze signals are important means of non-verbal social communication. The review highlights that: (1) some evidence is available suggesting that the perception and processing of facial information starts in the prenatal period; (2) the perception and processing of face identity, expression and gaze direction is highly context specific, the effect of race and culture being a case in point. Culture affects by means of experiential shaping and social categorization the way in which information on face and gaze is collected and perceived; (3) face and gaze processing occurs in the so-called 'social brain'. Accumulating evidence suggests that the processing of facial identity, facial emotional expression and gaze involves two parallel and interacting pathways: a fast and crude subcortical route and a slower cortical pathway. The flow of information is bi-directional and includes bottom-up and top-down processing. The cortical networks particularly include the fusiform gyrus, superior temporal sulcus (STS), intraparietal sulcus, temporoparietal junction and medial prefrontal cortex

Explicating Emotions

In the course of their long intellectual history, emotions have been identified with items as diverse as perceptions of bodily changes (feeling tradition), judgments (cognitivist tradition), behavioral predispositions (behaviorist tradition), biologically based solutions to fundamental life tasks (evolutionary tradition), and culturally specific social artifacts (social constructionist tradition). The first objective of my work is to put some order in the mare magnum of theories of emotions. I taxonomize them into families and explore the historical origin and current credentials of the arguments and intuitions supporting them. I then evaluate the methodology of past and present emotion theory, defending a bleak conclusion: a great many emotion theorists ask "What is an emotion?" without a clear understanding of what counts as getting the answer right. I argue that there are two ways of getting the answer right. One is to capture the conditions of application of the folk term "emotion" in ordinary language (Folk Emotion Project), and the other is to formulate a fruitful explication of it (Explicating Emotion Project). Once we get clear on the desiderata of these two projects, we realize that several long-running debates in emotion theory are motivated by methodological confusions. The constructive part of my work is devoted to formulating a new explication of emotion suitable for the theoretical purposes of scientific psychology. At the heart of the Urgency Management System (UMS) theory of emotions I propose is the idea that an "umotion" is a special type of superordinate system which instantiates and manages an urgent action tendency by coordinating the operation of a cluster of cognitive, perceptual and motoric subsystems. Crucially, such superordinate system has a proper function by virtue of which it acquires a special kind of intentionality I call pragmatic. I argue that "umotion" is sufficiently similar in use to "emotion" to count as explicating it, it has precise rules of application, and it accommodates a number of central and widely shared intuitions about the emotions. My hope is that future emotion research will demonstrate the heuristic fruitfulness of the "umotion" concept for the sciences of mind

Mental content : consequences of the embodied mind paradigm

The central difference between objectivist cognitivist semantics and embodied cognition consists in the fact that the latter is, in contrast to the former, mindful of binding meaning to context-sensitive mental systems. According to Lakoff/Johnson's experientialism, conceptual structures arise from preconceptual kinesthetic image-schematic and basic-level structures. Gallese and Lakoff introduced the notion of exploiting sensorimotor structures for higherlevel cognition. Three different types of X-schemas realise three types of environmentally embedded simulation: Areas that control movements in peri-personal space; canonical neurons of the ventral premotor cortex that fire when a graspable object is represented; the firing of mirror neurons while perceiving certain movements of conspecifics. ..