Enacting Productive Dialogue: Addressing the Challenge that Non-Human Cognition Poses to Collaborations Between Enactivism and Heideggerian Phenomenology

This chapter uses one particular proposal for interdisciplinary collaboration – in this case, between early Heideggerian phenomenology and enactivist cognitive science – as an example of how such partnerships may confront and negotiate tensions between the perspectives they bring together. The discussion begins by summarising some of the intersections that render Heideggerian and enactivist thought promising interlocutors for each other. It then moves on to explore how Heideggerian enactivism could respond to the challenge of reconciling the significant differences in the ways that each discourse seeks to apply the structures it claims to uncover

Decreased mental time travel to the past correlates with default-mode network disintegration under lysergic acid diethylamide

This paper reports on the effects of LSD on mental time travel during spontaneous mentation. Twenty healthy volunteers participated in a placebo-controlled crossover study, incorporating intravenous administration of LSD (75 μg) and placebo (saline) prior to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Six independent, blind judges analysed mentation reports acquired during structured interviews performed shortly after the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans (approximately 2.5 h post-administration). Within each report, specific linguistic references to mental spaces for the past, present and future were identified. Results revealed significantly fewer mental spaces for the past under LSD and this effect correlated with the general intensity of the drug’s subjective effects. No differences in the number of mental spaces for the present or future were observed. Consistent with the previously proposed role of the default-mode network (DMN) in autobiographical memory recollection and ruminative thought, decreased resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) within the DMN correlated with decreased mental time travel to the past. These results are discussed in relation to potential therapeutic applications of LSD and related psychedelics, e.g. in the treatment of depression, for which excessive reflection on one’s past, likely mediated by DMN functioning, is symptomatic

Flexible planning in ravens?

Across two different contexts, Kabadayi and Osvath found that ravens preferentially selected items that could be used to obtain future rewards. Do these results demand a rethink of the evolution of flexible planning, or are there leaner alternative explanations for the performance of ravens

Delayed self-recognition in children with autism spectrum disorder.

This study aimed to investigate temporally extended self-awareness (awareness of one’s place in and continued existence through time) in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), using the delayed self-recognition (DSR) paradigm (Povinelli et al., Child Development 67:1540–1554, 1996). Relative to age and verbal ability matched comparison children, children with ASD showed unattenuated performance on the DSR task, despite showing significant impairments in theory-of-mind task performance, and a reduced propensity to use personal pronouns to refer to themselves. The results may indicate intact temporally extended self-awareness in ASD. However, it may be that the DSR task is not an unambiguous measure of temporally extended self-awareness and it can be passed through strategies which do not require the possession of a temporally extended self-concept

Prospective object search in dogs: mixed evidence for knowledge of What and Where

We investigated whether two dogs that had been specially trained to retrieve objects by their names were able to integrate information about the identity (What) as well as the location (Where) of those objects so that they could plan their search accordingly. In a first study, two sets of objects were placed in two separate rooms and subjects were asked to retrieve the objects, one after the other. Both dogs remembered the identity of the objects as they reliably retrieved the correct objects. One of the dogs was also able to integrate information about the object’s location as he chose the correct location in which the object had been placed. Further investigation of the second dog’s behavior revealed that she followed a more stereotyped search strategy. Despite this variation in performance, this study provides evidence for the memory of What and Where in a domestic dog and shows the prospective use of such information in a search task

A Neural Framework for Organization and Flexible Utilization of Episodic Memory in Cumulatively Learning Baby Humanoids

Cumulatively developing robots offer a unique opportunity to reenact the constant interplay between neural mechanisms related to learning, memory, prospection, and abstraction from the perspective of an integrated system that acts, learns, remembers, reasons, and makes mistakes. Situated within such interplay lie some of the computationally elusive and fundamental aspects of cognitive behavior: the ability to recall and flexibly exploit diverse experiences of one’s past in the context of the present to realize goals, simulate the future, and keep learning further. This article is an adventurous exploration in this direction using a simple engaging scenario of how the humanoid iCub learns to construct the tallest possible stack given an arbitrary set of objects to play with. The learning takes place cumulatively, with the robot interacting with different objects (some previously experienced, some novel) in an open-ended fashion. Since the solution itself depends on what objects are available in the “now,” multiple episodes of past experiences have to be remembered and creatively integrated in the context of the present to be successful. Starting from zero, where the robot knows nothing, we explore the computational basis of organization episodic memory in a cumulatively learning humanoid and address (1) how relevant past experiences can be reconstructed based on the present context, (2) how multiple stored episodic memories compete to survive in the neural space and not be forgotten, (3) how remembered past experiences can be combined with explorative actions to learn something new, and (4) how multiple remembered experiences can be recombined to generate novel behaviors (without exploration). Through the resulting behaviors of the robot as it builds, breaks, learns, and remembers, we emphasize that mechanisms of episodic memory are fundamental design features necessary to enable the survival of autonomous robots in a real world where neither everything can be known nor can everything be experienced

Impaired Competence for Pretense in Children with Autism: Exploring Potential Cognitive Predictors.

Lack of pretense in children with autism has been explained by a number of theoretical explanations, including impaired mentalising, impaired response inhibition, and weak central coherence. This study aimed to empirically test each of these theories. Children with autism (n=60) were significantly impaired relative to controls (n=65) when interpreting pretense, thereby supporting a competence deficit hypothesis. They also showed impaired mentalising and response inhibition, but superior local processing indicating weak central coherence. Regression analyses revealed that mentalising significantly and independently predicted pretense. The results are interpreted as supporting the impaired mentalising theory and evidence against competing theories invoking impaired response inhibition or a local processing bias. The results of this study have important implications for treatment and intervention

Spontaneous and deliberate future thinking: A dual process account

© 2019 Springer Nature.This is the final published version of an article published in Psychological Research, licensed under a Creative Commons Attri-bution 4.0 International License. Available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-019-01262-7.In this article, we address an apparent paradox in the literature on mental time travel and mind-wandering: How is it possible that future thinking is both constructive, yet often experienced as occurring spontaneously? We identify and describe two ‘routes’ whereby episodic future thoughts are brought to consciousness, with each of the ‘routes’ being associated with separable cognitive processes and functions. Voluntary future thinking relies on controlled, deliberate and slow cognitive processing. The other, termed involuntary or spontaneous future thinking, relies on automatic processes that allows ‘fully-fledged’ episodic future thoughts to freely come to mind, often triggered by internal or external cues. To unravel the paradox, we propose that the majority of spontaneous future thoughts are ‘pre-made’ (i.e., each spontaneous future thought is a re-iteration of a previously constructed future event), and therefore based on simple, well-understood, memory processes. We also propose that the pre-made hypothesis explains why spontaneous future thoughts occur rapidly, are similar to involuntary memories, and predominantly about upcoming tasks and goals. We also raise the possibility that spontaneous future thinking is the default mode of imagining the future. This dual process approach complements and extends standard theoretical approaches that emphasise constructive simulation, and outlines novel opportunities for researchers examining voluntary and spontaneous forms of future thinking.Peer reviewe

Wild chacma baboons (Papio ursinus) remember single foraging episodes

This study was supported by grants from Zürcher Hochschulverein, Schweizerische Akademie für Naturwissenschaften, Stiftung Thyll-Dürr, and Stiftung Annemarie Schindler, to R.N.Understanding animal episodic-like memory is important for tracing the evolution of the human mind. However, our knowledge about the existence and nature of episodic-like memory in non-human primates is minimal. We observed the behaviour of a wild male chacma baboon faced with a trade-off between protecting his stationary group from aggressive extra-group males and foraging among five out-of-sight platforms. These contained high-priority food at a time of natural food shortage. In 10 morning and eight evening trials, the male spontaneously visited the platforms in five and four different sequences, respectively. In addition, he interrupted foraging sequences at virtually any point on eight occasions, returning to the group for up to 2 h. He then visited some or all of the remaining platforms and prevented revisits to already depleted ones, apparently based on his memory for the previous foraging episode about food value, location, and time. Efficient use of memory allowed him to keep minimal time absent from his group while keeping food intake high. These findings support the idea that episodic-like memory offers an all-purpose solution to a wide variety of problems that require flexible, quick, yet precise decisions in situations arising from competition for food and mates in wild primates.PostprintPeer reviewe