Category: NYU

Abstract Classic change blindness is the phenomenon where seemingly obvious changes that coincide with visual disruptions (such as blinks or brief blanks) go unnoticed by an attentive observer. Some early work into the causes of classic change blindness suggested that any pre-change stimulus representation is overwritten by a representation of the altered post-change stimulus, preventing…

Trends in Cognitive Sciences Letter Aphantasia as imagery blindsight Matthias Michel1,2, Jorge Morales3,4, Ned Block2 , and Hakwan Lau 5,6,7, * In a recent article in TiCS [1], Zeman provided a masterful and balanced review of aphantasia. However, in doing so, he might have been too generous to some accounts. Specifically, unlike Zeman, we consider…

Evidence Here is a simple initial question: how fast is the consolidation of information from perception into VWM? If there is a format discontinuity between the two systems, then there will be a translation 2 A related disagreement concerns whether VWM representations have a modality-specific format that relies on activation in visual areas (Harrison &…

Remnants of Perception: Comments on Block and the Function of Visual Working Memory Jake Quilty-Dunn (Rutgers) Word count: 3483 (text, incl. figure captions & footnotes) + 771 (references) T he Border Between Seeing and Thinking is an extraordinary achievement, the result of careful attention (and contribution) to both the science and philosophy of perception. The…

REFERENCE AND EPISTEMIC TRANSPARENCY Why, though, are the logical properties of referentially individuated thoughtswhether these be de re thoughts normally so-called, or thoughts involving Millian proper names-not knowable a priori? What makes these thoughts special in this regard? The answer, of course, is that the logical properties of referentially individuated thoughts fail to be a…

Consider an example. While still on Earth, Peter goes hiking in the mountains of northern New Zealand. Here he comes across Lake Taupo and is startled to see the famous tenor Luciano Pavarotti floating on its pristine waters. They talk amiably for a while and Peter goes off flushed with excitement. Understandably enough, this experience…

The Transparency of Mental Content INTRODUCTION Michael Dummett once wrote: It is an undeniable feature of the notion of meaning-obscure as that notion is-that meaning is transparent in the sense that, if someone attaches a meaning to each of two words, he must know whether these meanings are the same. As the surrounding discussion makes…

Wright on the judgement-dependence of meaning 29. Crispin Wright has written about the anti-reductionist conception that: [t]his somewhat flat-footed response to Kripke’s Sceptic may seem to provide a good example of loss of problems.’ … In fact, though, and on the contrary, I think the real problem posed by the Sceptical Argument is acute, and…

Optimal Dispositions 23. The literature supplies what is, in effect, a set of variations on a basic theme: M is the property of: being a disposition to apply (an expression) in a certain type of situation.52 The idea behind such proposals is that there is a certain set of circumstances-call them optimality conditions’-under which subjects…

IV. IRREALIST CONCEPTIONS OF MEANING 14. The argument against solitary language was supposed to flow from the adjusted understanding of sentence significance forced by the sceptical conclusion. The sceptical conclusion has it that it cannot literally be true of any symbol that it expresses a particular meaning: there is no appropriate fact for a meaning-attributing…