Auditory and cross-modal attention for the cognitive access to objects

This article aims at studying how we track and identify objects on the basis of multimodal perception. It belongs to ‘procedural' theories according to which demonstrative identification depends on using procedures of perceptual attention (e.g., Campbell, 2002; Clark, 2000; Evans, 1982; Pylyshyn, 2003; Ullman, 1984). In contrast to prevalent views according to which demonstrative identification is primarily based on the orienting of visual attention to the target object itself (Campbell, 2002: 115-16), I shall investigate an alternative Crossmodal View. According to the Crossmodal View, demonstrative identification depends more fundamentally on crossmodal attention. I shall present an argument maintaining namely that perceivers routinely use the coordinating ability of crossmodal attention to retrieve the continuity and uniqueness of the spatiotemporal path of the target object of their identification acts. The analysis will focus on examples of crossmodal links between audition and vision

Tracking objects, Tracking agents

Animals and humans have to keep track of individuals in their environment, both in perception (sensorimotor tracking) and in cognition (e.g., spatio-temporal localization and linguistic reference via memory, communication and reasoning). Items that are typical targets for tracking are things such as stationary physical objects (e.g., rocks, plants, trees, buildings, or attached artifacts), moving physical objects (e.g., animals, certain artifacts) and human beings. All such items are located in a spatial environment, persist over time, and are – or at least closely related to, in the case of conspecifics' bodies – physical objects that respect non trivial objecthood criteria such as having cohesive parts, following continuous spatio-temporal paths, or possessing causal powers and dispositions. Perceptually tracking these objects through space and over time requires possessing sensorimotor systems (e.g., the oculomotor system, the visuo-haptic system or the auditory system) that can anchor into and smoothly pursue objects' properties. Nonetheless, one may suspect that tracking intentional agents (i.e. creatures to whom it is natural to attribute intentional states such as beliefs, plans, desires, and who may even participate in shared intentionality), as opposed to physical objects without mental states (i.e. objects which are not intentional agents) exploits or requires further abilities and strategies. In particular, at least for humans, tracking conspecifics amounts to tracking intentional agents. This raises the question of how the perceptual tracking of non-intentional objects relates to the keeping track of intentional agents. Here, we propose an extension and augmentation of recent work on object-tracking to the tracking of intentional agents. Based on the examination of the elementary procedures available for pursing agency, our principal suggestions are as follows. First, identifying intentional agents is significantly dependent upon the perceptual abilities of physical-object tracking, and might therefore be explained by the ‘object-file' hypothesis (this hypothesis is explained in section 3), which we suggest to use in the study of the tracking of intentional agents (section 4). In the most elementary case, humans track intentional agents as physical objects: they track such agents by tracking their bodies (section 5). Even though this kind of tracking is insufficient for keeping track of human individuals ‘as' intentional agents (and explaining their behavior with an intentional stance), it may suffice to explain a number of interacting and situated behaviors in social contexts with intentional agents. Second, however, tracking intentional agents ‘as' intentional agents requires additional capacities for detecting and understanding intentional states and certain further properties which creatures with such states can exhibit (section 6) – e.g., (ir/)rationality, and the capacity to participate in shared intentionality. We note, however, that tracking a human individual as an intentional agent may require an appeal to specific perceptual cues and may even recruit basic sensorimotor skills – such as the detection of biological motions – whose tracking might be independent of the understanding of conspecifics' mental states. For reasons of parsimony and computational economy, unless we have reason to think that there is a separate system devoted to tracking intentional agents, we should suppose that the same mechanism used to track physical objects is recruited for tracking intentional agents

Représenter l'espace des objets physiques: La thèse de la dépendance réciproque entre l'identification des objets et celle des lieux

Cet article a pour but de réfléchir à nouveaux frais à une thèse philosophique traditionnelle qui a une portée fondamentale pour toute étude de la cognition spatiale. Cette thèse articule les relations, au niveau de la pensée conceptuelle, entre nos représentations des objets physiques et celles des lieux qu'ils occupent, et établit l'existence d'une dépendance réciproque entre ces deux ensembles de représentations. Nous tenterons d'établir dans quelle mesure des recherches récentes en sciences cognitives permettent de réviser et de préciser cette thèse (que nous appellerons la ‘thèse de la dépendance réciproque'). Pour cela, nous commencerons par présenter son sens philosophique. Ensuite, nous examinerons des travaux théoriques et empiriques qui semblent pouvoir la remettre en cause, issus des recherches sur les capacités de représentation topographique de lieux et de référence déictique à des objets physiques. Notre conclusion est qu'en dépit du problème de circularité qu'elle pose au niveau conceptuel (l'identification des objets dépendant de celle des lieux, qui à son tour dépendrait de celle des objets), la thèse de la dépendance réciproque reste valable à ce même niveau. Les difficultés posées par la circularité sont surmontées dans la mesure où la représentation des objets et la représentation des lieux reposent sur la fonction d'accessibilité propre aux capacités déictiques et topographiques

Art et cognition: deux théories

Dans ce texte nous proposons, sous la forme d'une série de thèses, deux théories opposées de l'art, que nous appelons respectivement ‘théorie structurelle' et ‘théorie individualiste'. Ces deux théories sont relativement idéalisées par rapport aux positions effectivement occupées dans l'espace logique des débats théoriques sur l'art et la cognition. Elles représentent deux extrêmes parmi un spectre de positions possibles. Elles pourraient être tenues pour des pôles autour desquels organiser la discussion sur les rapports complexes entre les phénomènes artistiques et les sciences cognitives. Généralement, chaque thèse particulière garde un degré relativement important d'indépendance à l'égard des autres thèses et de la théorie à laquelle elle a été associée