According to Thomas Metzinger, many human cognitive processes in the waking state are spontaneous and are deprived of the experience of epistemic agency. He considers mind wandering as a paradigm example of our recurring loss of epistemic agency. I will enrich this view by extending the scope of the concept of epistemic agency to include cases of depressive rumination and creative cognition, which are additional types of spontaneous cognition. Like mind wandering, they are characterized by unique (...) phenomenal and functional properties that give rise to varying degrees of epistemic agency. The main claim of this paper will be that the experience of being an epistemic agent within a certain time frame is a relational phenomenon that emerges from the organism’s capacity to interact with its cognitive niche. To explore this relation, I develop a new framework that integrates phenomenological considerations on epistemic agency with a functional account of the reciprocal coupling of the embodied organism with its cognitive niche. This account rests upon dynamical accounts of strong embodied and embedded cognition and recent work on cognitive niche construction. Importantly, epistemic agency and organism-niche coupling are gradual phenomena ranging from weak to strong realizations. The emerging framework will be employed to analyze mind wandering, depressive rumination, and creative cognition as well as their commonalities and differences. Mind wandering and depressive rumination are cases of weak epistemic agency and organism-niche coupling. However, there are also important phenomenological, functional, and neuronal differences. In contrast, creative cognition is a case of strong epistemic agency and organism-niche coupling. By providing a phenomenological and functional analysis of these distinct types of spontaneous cognition, we can gain a better understanding of the importance of organism-niche interaction for the realization of epistemic agency. (shrink)

We examined spontaneous external offloading in a study requiring participants to plan the shortest route to connect locations on maps while satisfying ordering constraints. We manipulated map difficulty (low/high) and the possibility for participants to offload cognition by allowing/not allowing them to use a pen during planning (offloading/no offloading). Participants used more types of offloading strategies in the high (vs. low) difficulty maps and showed a better performance in the offloading (vs. no offloading) condition in the high difficulty (...) maps only. However, even in the low difficulty maps, cognition was offloaded, especially when participants solved the high difficulty maps first (perseveration effect). The use of offloading strategies and offloading-supported planning performance were positively related with visual search ability, while performance in the no offloading condition was positively related with spatial working memory. Findings show that offloading strategies are spontaneously deployed in a partly adaptive way in route planning on maps. (shrink)

Cognitive agency - the idea that our judgments and beliefs are manifestations of agency on our part - is a deeply entrenched aspect of our self-conception as persons. And yet it has proven hard to give a satisfying account of what such agency might consist in. In this paper I argue that getting clear about Kant’s notion of spontaneity might help us make progress in that debate. In particular, I argue that the very same assumption - namely, that agency must (...) be understood on the model of production - has been holding us back in both areas. (shrink)

The key point of Laurence BonJour’s coherentist conception of the justification of empirical knowledge is the coherentist concept of observation, which (a) postulates that there is a special class of cognitively spontaneous beliefs with which the system’s beliefs must cohere in order to be considered justified; (b) their reliability is determined within the system as a consequence of our generalization on a set of facts when a belief appears, and it is highly likely to be true, and it is (...) likely to appear in a situation in which it will be true; and (c) the subject has the ability to reflexively grasp the approximate content of his own belief system. Among the main sources of inspiration used by L. BonJour, one can find the conceptions of “language-entry transition” by W. Sellars and “truth-sufficiency” by W. Alston. Much of the material is devoted to arguing for the final argument for cognitively spontaneous beliefs. The review is a detailed analysis of the second part of L. BonJour’s book «The Structure of Empirical Knowledge» (chapters 5–6), dedicated to foundations for a coherentist theory of justification of empirical knowledge. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that there is some sort of tacit ’inference’ involved when we form the belief that intentional activity on the part of some (perhaps unidentified) person is causally relevant to the occurrence of some event. Against this "inferential model" of design belief formation I argue that in many ordinary cases we do not ’infer’ design beliefs at all, but that they form spontaneously and ’properly’ whenever certain conditions are met. This alternative model has a respectable historical precedent, (...) better matches our introspective judgments about design beliefs, and helps resolve a puzzling objection to the standard "fine-tuning" argument. (shrink)

이 글은 『장자』 포정해우(庖丁解牛) 이야기의 ‘신(神)’ 개념을 인지적으로 분석하여 장자 수양론에 내재한 인지적 특질을 밝히는 것이다. 최고의 정신상태(mentality)인 ‘신’은 인간의 인지 체계인 뜨거운 인지(hot cognition)와 차가운 인지(cold cognition)가 혼성하여 창발 되는 ‘인지적 자발성(cognitive spontaneity)’로 뇌의 인지 작용과 몸의 행동 양식이 가장 명징한 수준이다. 즉 이 연구는 ‘신’의 상태가 선험적·생득적인 것이 아니라 수양의 경험에서 만들어지는 것임을 인지적으로 해명하는 것이다.BR 수양 이전의 포정은 오직 감각 기관(hot cognition)으로만 소를 보는데, 3년 간의 도축 수양(cold cognition)을 통해 도축 기술을 완전히 신체화(embodiment) (...) 한다. 그 결과 더 이상 감각 기관에 얽매이지 않고 소를 ‘정신(神)’으로 대한다. 두 가지 인지 체계의 상호작용으로 최고의 자발적 상태인 ‘인공적인 뜨거운 인지(artificial hot cognition)’을 획득하는데, 장자는 이를 ‘신욕(神欲)’이라 했다. 새롭게 만들어진 뜨거운 인지가 몸과 감정으로 대표되는 기존의 뜨거운 인지와 다른 점은 고도의 분별 작용을 담당하는 차가운 인지를 경험하고 체화한 인지라는 것이다.BR 신욕을 따라 19년 동안 도축한 포정의 칼은 숫돌에 새로 간 칼과 같다. 인공적인 뜨거운 인지는 수많은 소의 개별 자연성을 인식하게 하고, 나의 자연성과 소의 자연성을 하나로 간주하게 한다. 그래서 포정은 자신의 자연성도 소의 자연성도 해치지 않는다. 포정은 인공적인 뜨거운 인지를 완전히 따르면서도, 여전히 뼈가 엉긴 곳이면 다시 분별하고 판단하는 차가운 인지에 의존한다. 도축의 수양을 통해 획득한 최고의 인지이자 제2의 본성인 ‘인공적인 뜨거운 인지’는 두 가지 인지 체계가 변화하는 상황에 가장 절묘하게 작동하는 것으로, 상황의 복잡성에 적절하게 대응하여 또 다른 균형점을 찾아가는 끊임없는 인지 작용의 과정이다. 즉 ‘인공적인 뜨거운 인지’의 작용이 곧 “緣督以爲經”의 중도(中道)이다. (shrink)

The resting-state human electroencephalogram power spectrum is dominated by alpha and theta oscillations, and also includes non-oscillatory broadband activity inversely related to frequency. Gratton proposed that alpha and theta oscillations are both related to cognitive control function, though in a complementary manner. Alpha activity is hypothesized to facilitate the maintenance of representations, such as task sets in preparation for expected task conditions. In contrast, theta activity would facilitate changes in representations, such as the updating of task sets in response to (...) unpredicted task demands. Therefore, theta should be related to reactive control, while alpha may be more relevant to proactive control. Less is known about the possible relationship between 1/f activity and cognitive control, which was analyzed here in an exploratory fashion. To investigate these hypothesized relationships, we recorded eyes-open and eyes-closed resting-state EEG from younger and older adults and subsequently tested their performance on a cued flanker task, expected to elicit both proactive and reactive control processes. Results showed that alpha power and 1/f offset were smaller in older than younger adults, whereas theta power did not show age-related reductions. Resting alpha power and 1/f offset were associated with proactive control processes, whereas theta power was related to reactive control as measured by the cued flanker task. All associations were present over and above the effect of age, suggesting that these resting-state EEG correlates could be indicative of trait-like individual differences in cognitive control performance, which may be already evident in younger adults, and are still similarly present in healthy older adults. (shrink)

The intuitive experience of dreaming is that we “see” something with our mind’s eye and react to it. Indeed, dream formation conceptualizations have often focused on the visual image-to-verbal thought direction of causality, inspired by bottom-up models of perception. However, despite being experienced as external to us, the dream environment is internally generated, meaning that dreams are more like imagination than perception. Dream thoughts (experienced with a sense of agency or selfhood) also affect subsequent dream images (experienced as non-agentive or (...) external to one’s self). Thus, oneiric experiences are made up of reciprocal, continuous, moment-to-moment influences between the dream and the dreamer: visual images and verbal, abstract, or otherwise imageless thoughts. During wakefulness, a dreamlike cognitive processing dynamic of ever-changing meaningful image-thought-image momentary associations coupled with reduced agentive control of images may be present to a greater or lesser extent. Non-agentive visual images as a significant driving force in one’s spontaneous mental activity may relate to individual differences in fantasy proneness, suggestibility, dissociative absorption, or imagination tendencies. This feature carries implications for the field of spontaneous thought. Off-task thinking, or mind-wandering, are non-specific labels that may be used to denote internally generated mentation. Considering the tendency for dreamlike associations may represent a specific distinction, which may be relevant for understanding psychopathology. Whereas some individuals may find themselves distracted by abstract or semantic associations (e.g., verbal self-derogatory inner speech), others may find themselves drawn to intrusive—or alluring—visual images, which may interact significantly with their verbal thoughts and associations and even be experienced with decreased sense of agency. This may occur in obsessive-compulsive disorder, dissociative disorders, or maladaptive daydreaming, suggesting that clinicians need to pay attention to their clients’ spontaneous visual imagery. If a picture is worth a thousand words and seeing is believing, psychologists should be curious of how a visual thinking style may impact mental health. (shrink)

Although we are beginning to understand the neurocognitive processes that underlie the emergence of dreaming, what accounts for the bizarre phenomenology of dreams remains debated. I address this question by comparing dreaming with waking mind wandering and challenging previous accounts that utilize bizarreness to mark a sharp divide between conscious experiences in waking and sleeping. Instead, I propose that bizarreness is a common, non-deficient feature of spontaneous offline simulations occurring across the sleep-wake cycle and can be tied to the (...) specific characteristics of spontaneous thought as being dynamic, unconstrained, (hyper)associative and highly variable in content. Rather than misrepresenting waking reality, bizarreness can be employed to investigate the very building blocks of spontaneous cognition. The absence of bizarreness in thought processes is imposed by automatic and deliberate cognitive constraints. By contrast, thought and memory processes operating on their own without such constraints are inherently marked by different degrees and types of bizarreness. (shrink)

Previous research showed that people can make trait inferences from single behaviors described in sentences, without either intentions to do so or awareness of having done so. This suggested that these inferences might be automatic. By definition, “automatic” cognitive processes occur without intentions or awareness, without effort, and without using capacity-limited cognitive processing resources. Winter, Uleman, and Cunniff attempted to manipulate available cognitive capacity by varying the difficulty of the concurrent cognitive task. This did not affect unintended trait inferences, suggesting (...) that these are automatic by this criterion. But they had no direct measure of available cognitive capacity. In the present study, we added a probe reaction time measure of capacity to their procedure and extended the range of task difficulties. Earlier findings of trait inferences without intentions or awareness were replicated, but there was also evidence that the concurrent task interfered with the trait inference process. Hence, although trait inferences can be “spontaneous” , subjectively effortless, and difficult to disrupt with a concurrent task, they are not entirely automatic because they do use capacity-limited resources. These results also confirm that the cued-recall evidence for spontaneous trait inferences reflects important encoding and not merely retrieval phenomena. (shrink)

It is now conventional wisdom that conscious experience — or in Nagel’s canonical characterization, “what it is like to be” for an organism — is what makes the mind-body problem so intractable. By the same token, our current conceptions of the mind-body relation are inadequate and some conceptual development is urgently needed. Our overall aim in this paper is to make some progress towards that conceptual development. We first examine a currently neglected, yet fundamental aspect of consciousness. This aspect is (...) the spontaneity of consciousness, by which we mean its inner plasticity and inner purposiveness. We then sketch a “neurophenomenological” framework for thinking about the relationship between the spontaneity of consciousness and dynamic patterns of brain activity as studied in cognitive neuroscience. We conclude by proposing that the conscious mentality of sentient organisms or animals is active and dynamic, and that this “enactive” conception of consciousness can help us to move beyond the classical dichotomy between materialism and dualism. (shrink)

Dementia syndromes offer a unique opportunity to clarify some of the component processes of spontaneous expressions of memory proposed by the Barzykowski and Moulin model. By considering the model through the lens of memory disorders, I outline several important extensions to progress our understanding of these spontaneous cognitive phenomena.

The hypothetical approach to the supersensible developed by Kant in his three Critiques, exemplified by his analysis of the aesthetic and reflective judgment in his third Critique, with their principle fortuitous purposiveness, can be considered as the basis for a new foundation of metaphysics. According to Kant’s limitation of cognition to the realm of sense intuition, theoretical knowledge of God, the subject, things-in-themselves, transcendental ideas is impossible. This leads to a kind of “negative theology” of the highest principle and (...) the supersensible as a whole. The reasons are rooted in the character of propositional thought, which can only circumscribe a singular, supersensible reality by means of predicative sentences and discursive thought. Taking Kant’s lead, but in contrast to his terminology, I call really existent singularities, including the thinking, knowing, desiring, feeling unique individuals we know as human beings, spontaneities, in order to distinguish them from descriptive characteristics attributed to them by predicative thought. Kant’s “practico-dogmatic” account of the postulates of God and immortality of the soul, based on the “fact of freedom” and its connection to the moral imperative, ensure the possibility of the “highest good” as final aim of moral behaviour — but cannot satisfy our need for knowledge of the supersensible. To “lay the groundwork” for experience of our own self-conscious reality, the reality of others like ourselves, of things which transcend the boundaries of sense intuition, and of true reciprocity, a different method is needed, one which leads us “beyond being and thought” to the unconditional beginning of conditional reality. (shrink)

I examine a range of issues concerning Kant's conception of cognitive spontaneity. I consider whether we can cognize or know ourselves as spontaneous cognizers, and why Kant seems to regard the notion of cognitive spontaneity as less problematic than the idea of moral spontaneity. As an organizing theme of my discussion, I use an apparent tension between the A-edition and the B-edition of the first Critique. Against common interpretations, I argue that in the B-edition Kant does not revoke his (...) claim that we can cognize, and even know, that our noumenal selves are absolutely spontaneous cognitive agents. (shrink)

1 INSERM-CEA Unit 562, Cognitive Neuroimaging, Service Hospitalier Fre´de´ric Joliot, Orsay, France, 2 CNRS URA2182 Re´cepteurs and Cognition, Institut Pasteur, Paris, France.

According to the two-systems account of mindreading, our mature perspective-taking abilities are subserved by two distinct mindreading systems: a fast but inflexible, “implicit” system, and a flexible but slow “explicit” one. However, the currently available evidence on adult perspective-taking does not support this account. Specifically, both Level-1 and Level-2 perspective-taking show a combination of efficiency and flexibility that is deeply inconsistent with the two-systems architecture. This inconsistency also turns out to have serious consequences for the two-systems framework as a whole, (...) both as an account of our mature mindreading abilities and of the development of those abilities. What emerges from this critique is a conception of context-sensitive, spontaneous mindreading that may provide insight into how mindreading functions in complex social environments. This in turn offers a bulwark against skepticism about the role of mindreading in everyday social cognition. (shrink)

The standard philosophical and folk-psychological accounts of cognition and action credit us with too much spontaneity in our activities and projects. We are taken to be fundamentally active rather than reactive, to project our needs and aims and deploy our full supporting arsenal of cognitive instruments upon an essentially passive environment. The corrected point of view presented here balances this image of active agency with an appreciation of how we are also continually responding to the world, that is, to (...) the pragmatic situations that effectively select subsets of our cognitive resources to be at our disposal in generating responses. The result is a superseding of the standard Cognitive Integrationist picture by a model of a structurally divided mind, comprising a multiplicity of diverse and sometimes-conflicting standpoints, personas, and wills whose elicitation is a complex function of agent intentions and plans, the encountered environment, past experience, and temporal sequence. According to this model, the manifold stored representations constituting a person’s cognitive endowment do not form a single integrated network all equally ready for use. Cognition at any given moment is limited to drawing upon only a subset of one’s perspective, the perspect that is activated in accordance with the specific mental task or situation (the pragmatic context) that one perceives oneself to be facing. The system enlists the environmental context as trigger for practical and theoretical activity, based upon the agent’s prior experience. Though susceptible to certain kinds of error, and not inherently inclined toward innovative thinking, it enables the generally efficient use of our enormous cognitive endowments in conducting our lives in real time. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with adaptive learning and coordination processes. Implementing agent-based modeling techniques (Learning Classifier Systems, LCS), we focus on the twofold impact of cognitive and environmental complexity on learning and coordination. Within this framework, we introduce the notion of Adaptive Learning Agent with Rule-based Memory (ALARM), which is a particular class of Artificial Adaptive Agent (AAA, Holland and Miller 1991). We show that equilibrium is approached to a high degree, but never perfectly reached. We also demonstrate that memorization (...) and learning capacities depend upon the relative discordance between the cognitive complexity of agents' mental models and the degree of stability of the environment. (shrink)

Contrary to the target article's claims, social cognition research shows considerable learning (about other people) that is relatively automatic. Some of this learning is propositional (spontaneous trait inferences) and some is associative (spontaneous trait transference). Other dichotomies are also important. However conceived, human conditioning is not synonymous with human learning.

Ziran, an idea from ancient Daoism, defies easy translation into English but can almost be captured by the term "spontaneity." It means "self-causation," if "self" is understood as fundamentally plural, and "causation" is understood as sensitivity and responsiveness. Applying ziran to the fields of action theory, attention theory, and aesthetics, Brian Bruya uses easy-to-read, straightforward prose to show, step-by-step, how this philosophical concept from an ancient tradition can be used to advance theory today. Incorporated into contemporary philosophy of action, ziran (...) opens us to the notion of movement and action as self-organizing. Incorporated into contemporary cognitive science, ziran opens us to the possibility of effortless attention, contrary to the reigning paradigm. Incorporated into contemporary aesthetics, ziran opens us to a new category of art--somatic art--and a new, refined understanding of improvisation"-- Back cover. (shrink)

Scholars working in philosophy of action still struggle with the freedom/determinism dichotomy that stretches back to Hellenist philosophy and the metaphysics that gave rise to it. Although that metaphysics has been repudiated in current philosophy of mind and cognitive science, the dichotomy still haunts these fields. As such, action is understood as distinct from movement, or motion. In early China, under a very different metaphysical paradigm, no such distinction is made. Instead, a notion of self-caused movement, or spontaneity, is elaborated. (...) In this article a general conception of spontaneity from early Daoism is explained, detailing its constituent aspects. Similar notions appeared from time to time in Western philosophy, and these instances are pursued, exploring how their instantiations differed from Daoist spontaneity and why. Based on these approximate examples of spontaneity and on early Daoist spontaneity, new criteria are postulated for a plausible theory of action that dispenses with presuppositions that eventuate in a freedom/determinism dichotomy, and instead the possibility is offered of a general model of action that can be applied smoothly across current philosophical and cognitive scientific subdisciplines. (shrink)

Cognitive and neural processes underlying visual creativity have attracted substantial attention. The current research uses a critical time point analysis to examine how spontaneous activity in the primary visual area is related to visual creativity. We acquired the functional magnetic resonance imaging data of 16 participants at the resting state and during performing a visual creative synthesis task. According to the CTPA, we then classified spontaneous activity in the PVA into critical time points, which reflect the most useful (...) and important functional meaning of the entire resting-state condition, and the remaining time points. We constructed functional brain networks based on the brain activity at two different time points and then subsequently based on the brain activity at the task state in a separate manner. We explore the relationship between resting-state and task-fMRI functional brain networks. Our results found that: the pattern of spontaneous activity in the PVA may associate with mental imagery, which plays an important role in visual creativity; in comparison with the RTPs-based brain network, the CTP-network showed an increase in global efficiency and a decrease in local efficiency; the regional integrated properties of the CTP-network could predict the integrated properties of the creative-network while the RTP-network could not. Thus, our findings indicated that spontaneous activity in the PVA at CTPs was associated with a visual creative task-evoked brain response. Our findings may provide an insight into how the visual cortex is related to visual creativity. (shrink)

Carruthers' "immediate availability" theory of consciousness is criticized on the grounds that it offers no reasonable alternative to asserting the metaphysical impossibility of spontaneous blindsight. In defense, Carruthers says he can admit a spontaneous blindsight that relies on unconscious behavioral cues, and deny only its possibility without such mechanisms. I argue: This involves him in an unwarranted denial of the possibility that conscious visual discrimination could depend on behavioral cues. We can conceive of blindsight without behavioral cuing; if (...) we can, then we should not accept Carruthers' denial of its metaphysical possibility without good reason. To warrant this denial it is not enough to hold that the concept of consciousness employed is purely "recognitional," and thus of no relevance to modal claims. The concept is not this cognitively primitive. (shrink)

Mental time travel is the ability to mentally project oneself backward in time to relive past experiences and forward in time to pre-live possible future experiences. Previous work has focused on MTT in its voluntary form. Here, we introduce the notion of involuntary MTT. We examined involuntary versus voluntary and past versus future MTT in a diary study. We found that involuntary future event representations—defined as representations of possible personal future events that come to mind with no preceding search attempts—were (...) as common as involuntary autobiographical memories and similar to them regarding cuing and subjective qualities. Future MTT involved more positive and idyllic representations than past MTT. MTT into the distant future/past involved more representations of cultural life script events than MTT into the immediate past/future. The findings are discussed in relation to cultural learning and MTT considered as a higher mental process. (shrink)

Spontaneous eye blinks are modulated around perceptual events. Our previous study, using a visual ambiguous stimulus, indicated that blink probability decreases before a reported perceptual switch. In the current study, we tested our hypothesis that an absence of blinks marks a time in which perceptual switches are facilitated in‐ and outside the visual domain. In three experiments, presenting either a visual motion quartet in light or darkness or a bistable auditory streaming stimulus, we found a co‐occurrence of blink rate (...) reduction with increased perceptual switch probability. In the visual domain, perceptual switches induced by a short interruption of visual input (blank) allowed an estimate of the timing of the perceptual event with respect to the motor response. This provided the first evidence that the blink reduction was not a consequence of the perceptual switch. Importantly, by showing that the time between switches and the previous blink was significantly longer than the inter‐blink interval, our studies allowed to conclude that perceptual switches did not happen at random but followed a prolonged period of nonblinking. Correspondingly, blink rate and switch rate showed an inverse relationship. Our study supports the idea that the absence or presence of blinks maps perceptual processes independent of the sensory modality. (shrink)

Transcranial magnetic stimulation can cause measurable effects on neural activity and behavioral performance in healthy volunteers. In addition, TMS is increasingly used in clinical practice for treating various neuropsychiatric disorders. Unfortunately, TMS-induced effects show large intra- and inter-subject variability, hindering its reliability, and efficacy. One possible source of this variability may be the spontaneous fluctuations of neuronal oscillations. We present recent studies using multimodal TMS including TMS-EMG, TMS-tACS, and concurrent TMS-EEG-fMRI, to evaluate how individual oscillatory brain state affects TMS (...) signal propagation within targeted networks. We demonstrate how the spontaneous oscillatory state at the time of TMS influences both immediate and longer-lasting TMS effects. These findings indicate that at least part of the variability in TMS efficacy may be attributable to the current practice of ignoring oscillatory fluctuations during TMS. Ignoring this state-dependent spread of activity may cause great individual variability which so far is poorly understood and has proven impossible to control. We therefore also compare two technical solutions to directly account for oscillatory state during TMS, namely, to use tACS to externally control these oscillatory states and then apply TMS at the optimal brain state, or oscillatory state-triggered TMS. The described multimodal TMS approaches are paramount for establishing more robust TMS effects, and to allow enhanced control over the individual outcome of TMS interventions aimed at modulating information flow in the brain to achieve desirable changes in cognition, mood, and behavior. (shrink)

Humans have a flexible and accurate ability to coordinate their movement in time with external rhythms. However, it remains unclear when and how, during their development, human children acquire the ability to adjust tempo and control the timing of their movement toward others. A previous study suggested that such self-regulation of coordination develops at around 18 and 30 months after birth. In this study, we investigated the performance of 24-month-old children and compared their data with those of 18- and 30-month-olds (...) provided in our previous study. In the joint-drumming task, each child was enticed to drum under four conditions [partner: mother or robot; speed: 400 or 600 ms inter-stimulus-interval ]. The most pivotal test condition was the 600 ms ISI speed condition. We found that from the age of 24 months, children try to slow down their drumming tempo toward the 600 ms ISI speed condition, regardless of the drumming partner. On the other hand, significant timing control toward the onset of the 600 ms ISI condition was observed from the age of 30 months. This implies that both motor and cognitive mechanisms are required for flexible tempo adjustment and accurate synchronization and that these develop gradually among 18-, 24-, and 30-month-olds. (shrink)

Cultural forms are constrained by cognitive biases, and writing is thought to have evolved to fit basic visual preferences, but little is known about the history and mechanisms of that evolution. Cognitive constraints have been documented for the topology of script features, but not for their orientation. Orientation anisotropy in human vision, as revealed by the oblique effect, suggests that cardinal orientations, being easier to process, should be overrepresented in letters. As this study of 116 scripts shows, the orientation of (...) strokes inside written characters massively favors cardinal directions, and it is organized in such a way as to make letter recognition easier: Cardinal and oblique strokes tend not to mix, and mirror symmetry is anisotropic, favoring vertical over horizontal symmetry. Phylogenetic analyses and recently invented scripts show that cultural evolution over the last three millennia cannot be the sole cause of these effects. (shrink)

Philosophers seeking to formulate a philosophy of mind that offers an alternative to the cur-rently dominant reductionist positions frequently appeal to the Kantian thesis that the mind is essentially spontaneous. Yet it is far from clear what the content of this thesis is, and what recommends it. In this paper, I discuss this question and propose a new answer – one that makes better philosophical and textual sense of Kant’s own claims than I believe has hitherto been offered. I (...) do this by focusing on Kant’s claim that, in particular, the represen-tation of categorial unity is spontaneous, rather than receptive. What I call the Single Spe-cies View of Spontaneity locates the rationale for this thesis in the fact that all representa-tion of categorial unity takes place in judgment and that judgment must be conceived as spontaneous. Against this I argue that Kant accepts a Two Species View of Spontaneity, according to which categorial unity can be represented in acts other than judgment. I defend this view by giving an account of Kant’s motivation for regarding categorial unity as spon-taneous, which has both a negative and a positive component. The negative component shows that categorial unity could not be accounted for by a mind whose representational capacities are entirely receptive. The positive component argues that Kant’s conception of cognition as the non-accidental agreement of a representation with its object requires him to hold that the mind is capable of an exercise of spontaneity that is directly involved in sense-perception and, therefore, distinct from judgment. It thus emerges that, properly under-stood, Kant’s thesis about the spontaneity of the mind has a much wider scope and rests on very different grounds than is commonly believed. (shrink)

Research on the specific features of daydreaming compared with mind-wandering and night dreaming is a neglected topic in the philosophy of mind and the cognitive neuroscience of spontaneous thought. The extant research either conflates daydreaming with mind-wandering (whether understood as task-unrelated thought, unguided attention, or disunified thought), characterizes daydreaming as opposed to mind-wandering (Dorsch, 2015), or takes daydreaming to encompass any and all “imagined events” (Newby-Clark & Thavendran, 2018). These dueling definitions obstruct future research on spontaneous thought, and (...) are insufficiently precise to guide empirical studies. They also fail to illuminate the phenomenal core of daydreaming, namely, its dreamlike qualities. Although daydreaming is related to both mind-wandering and narrative imagination, it is not reducible to either. We argue that daydreams are experiences of spontaneous, immersive imagination in the waking state. The main task of our investigation is to distinguish daydreaming, conceptually and phenomenologically, from mind-wandering, on the one hand, and night dreaming, on the other. Although daydream experiences can vary widely, we distinguish prototypical experiences of daydreaming from adjacent imaginative activity, including fleeting imagery and “focused daydreaming,” or crafted visualization. We consider our phenomenological analysis as preparatory work for conceptually distinguishing different spontaneous and imaginative states so that they can be investigated accordingly with questionnaires and qualitative methods. We argue that precision about the phenomenal character of daydreaming can guide neurophenomenological investigations, help delimit studies on individual variance in daydreaming features, and identify differences among daydreaming, mind-wandering, and night dreaming conceptually and phenomenologically, and possibly eventually in terms of neural correlates. (shrink)

Spontaneity – understood as an action of the mind or will that is not determined by a prior external stimulus – is a theme that resonates throughout Immanuel Kant's theoretical and practical philosophy. Though spontaneity and the concomitant notion of freedom lie at the foundation of many of Kant's most pivotal theses and arguments regarding cognition, judgment, and moral action, spontaneity and freedom themselves often remain cloaked in mystery, or accessible only via transcendental argument. This volume brings together a (...) distinguished group of scholars who explore the nature of freedom and spontaneity, the arguments Kant offers surrounding these concepts, and their place in Kant's larger philosophical system. The collection will be of interest to scholars interested in any aspect of Kant's philosophy, especially those who hope to gain a deeper insight into these fundamental Kantian ideas. (shrink)

Although the cognitive neurosciences are currently conducting research to determine the brain networks that are implicated in the production of ‘earworms’, my project seeks to address the technical nature of these abstract parasites that hears their spontaneous irruption in thought as both a product and source of contemporary capitalism’s aim to draw value from involuntary nervous activities. In this respect, I approach the earworm from a deliberately speculative perspective in order to conceptualize its appearance as a technical matter expressive (...) of the way historically ‘useless thinking’ (daydreaming, mind-wandering) is being imaginatively recuperated as a passive technology of the self. However, the earworm is a peculiar case of useless thinking, for its redundancy not only implicates it in the broader process of recuperation, but seems to realize a fatal tendency in sonic technics in ways that at once rely on, advance and disturb contemporary capitalism’s encroachment on human cognitive capacities. (shrink)

A hypnotic induction produces different patterns of spontaneous experiences across individuals. The magnitude and characteristics of these responses covary moderately with hypnotic suggestibility, but also differ within levels of hypnotic suggestibility. This study sought to identify discrete phenomenological profiles in response to a hypnotic induction and assess whether experiential variability among highly suggestible individuals matches the phenomenological profiles predicted by dissociative typological models of high hypnotic suggestibility. Phenomenological state scores indexed in reference to a resting epoch during hypnosis were (...) submitted to a latent profile analysis. The profiles in the derived four-class solution differed in multiple experiential dimensions and hypnotic suggestibility. Highly suggestible individuals were distributed across two classes that exhibited response patterns suggesting an inward attention subtype and a dissociative subtype. These results provide support for dissociative typological models of high hypnotic suggestibility and indicate that highly suggestible individuals do not display a uniform response to a hypnotic induction. (shrink)