Category: NYU

Finessing the Bored Monkey Problem Ned Block1,* By recording from microelectrodes in monkey prefrontal cortex (PFC), researchers have decoded the contents of conscious perception in cognitive areas (lateral prefrontal cortex) in conditions in which perceptions are not determined by the stimulus, binocular rivalry, and flash suppression [1–4]. As I noted in my recent Trends in…

2.1 ‘The’ purpose of perception Turning now to the issue of the title of Phillips’ and Firestone’s critique, I don’t think there is much of a disagreement. As I mentioned in Chapter 2, perceptual adaptation operates via many different mechanisms. It is a network phenomenon and not merely a cellular phenomenon. It encompasses quite different…

Responses to my critics Ned Block 1. Adaptation, signal detection and the purposes of perception: reply to Ian Phillips and Chaz Firestone Ian Phillips and Chaz Firestone have written a wonderful article on the rationale for adaptation as an indicator of perception, and more generally, on the purpose of perception, full of insights and challenges. 1.1…

How Should We Understand the Distinction 0005464032.INDD 509 509 09-10-2022 11:32:13In paradigm cases, what happens when a perceptual representation is conceptualized is that it is broadcast in the global workspace. “On top of a deep hierarchy of specialized modules, a “global neuronal workspace,” with limited capacity, evolved to select a piece of information, hold it…

Iconic memory Immediately after the presentation of a stimulus, reverberating retinal activity especially in the rods and also activity in V1 grounds perceptual representation of low- level properties, what is often called “visual persistence” (Coltheart, 1980). As a result, for a few hundred ms, there is a genuine form of memory, “iconic memory,” that also represents…

With inhibition of return as with object- based attention, there is a gradient of effects within an object, with the strongest effect at the cued location within the object, and weaker effects in the same object but further away from the cue (Klein and Ivanoff, 2008). This shows integration of object- based effects with spatial effects,…

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Let’s Get Rid of the Concept of an Object File Ned Block In a typical vision textbook you will see the term “object file” defined as follows: “An object file is a visual representation that “sticks” to a moving object over time on the basis of how and where that object moves, and stores (and…

Ned Block Commentary/QuiltyDunn et al.: The best game in town 25 of the six core properties are observed in each of the few cognitive domains discussed in the paper: Three properties are demonstrated by implicit social cognition and four (the maximal number of cooccurring core properties) in the object-files case. Shall we conclude that only…

Box 2. Why double representation is problematic Trends in Cognitive Sciences As mentioned in the main text, standard versions of the higher-order approach have postulated two representations of a conscious perceptual content. For consciousness of a first-order representation of motion, the higher-order thought would be something like, ‘I myself am experiencing visual motion.’ The main…

WhatdoesdecodingfromthePFCrevealabout consciousness? Ned Block 1,* Disputes between rival theories of consciousness have often centered on whether perceptual contents can be decoded from the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Failures to decode from the PFC are taken to challenge ‘cognitive’ theories of consciousness such asthe global workspace theory and higher-order monitoring theories, and decoding successes have been taken…