Publications

Ouvrages publiés à titre de seul auteur

2020

Le dopage est-il éthique?

2009

Le libre examen 

2006

Naissance de la psychiatrie biologique

2005

Le matérialisme occulté et la genèse du « sensualisme »

1998

Spiritualisme et matérialisme au XIXe siècle

1993

Mechanisms of Implicit Learning

L'esprit-cerveau

Ouvrages publiés en collaboration

2019

IMPLICIT LEARNING: 50 Years On

Can we learn without knowing we are learning? To what extent is our behavior influenced by things we fail to perceive? What is the relationship between conscious and unconscious cognition? Implicit Learning: 50 Years On tackles these key questions, fifty years after the publication of Arthur Reber's seminal text. Providing an overview of recent developments in the field, the volume considers questions about the computational foundations of learning, alongside phenomena including conditioning, memory formation and consolidation, associative learning, cognitive development, and language learning. Featuring contributions from international researchers, the book uniquely integrates ‘Western' thinking on implicit learning with insights from a rich Russian research tradition. This approach offers an excellent opportunity to contrast perspectives, to introduce new experimental paradigms, and to contribute to ongoing debates about the very nature of implicit learning. Implicit Learning: 50 Years On is essential reading for students and researchers of consciousness, specifically those interested in implicit learning.

2017

ドーピングの哲学 (Philosophie du dopage — publication en langue japonaise)

2012

The Unity of Consciousness: Binding, Integration, and Dissociation

Consciousness has many elements, from sensory experiences such as vision, audition, and bodily sensation, to non-sensory aspects such as volition, emotion, memory, and thought. The apparent unity of these elements is striking; all are presented to us as experiences of a single subject, and all seem to be contained within a unified field of experience. But this apparent unity raises many questions. How do diverse systems in the brain co-operate to produce a unified experience? Are there conditions under which this unity breaks down? Is conscious experience really unified at all? In recent years, these questions have been addressed by researchers in many fields, including, neurophysiologists and computational modellers, neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, and philosophy.

2000

Le principe de précaution

LISTE DES AUTEURS: Henri BELVÈZE, chef d'unité à la direction générale pour la santé et la protection des consommateurs de la Commission européenne. Dominique BOURG, professeur des universités, Université de technologie de Troyes et CREIDD. Jacques DE GERLACHE, toxicologue, responsable de la communication et des affaires publiques du groupe Solvay en matière d'environnement et de santé. Nicolas DE SADELEER, directeur du Centre d'étude du droit de l'environnement aux FUSL, professeur invité à l'université Paris-Sud et à l'UCL. Jim DRATWA, mandataire du FNRS, Université libre de Bruxelles, Ecole des mines de Paris, Parlement européen (STOA). Olivier GODARD, directeur de recherche au CNRS, Laboratoire d'Econométrie de l'Ecole Polytechnique, Paris. Jean-Yves GOFFI, maître de conférences à l'Université Pierre Mendès France-Grenoble II où il enseigne la philosophie. Philippe LAMOTTE, journaliste au Vif/L'express. Co-auteur de Une réaction citoyenne (Bruxelles, Editions Luc Pire et Fondation roi Baudouin, 1997). Paul LANNOYE, député européen, président du Groupe des Verts/ALE au Parlement européen. Jean-Noël MISSA, chargé de cours à l'ULB, chercheur au FNRS, co-directeur du Centre de recherches interdisciplinaires en bioéthique (CRIB). Marc MORMONT, professeur de sociologie à la Fondation universitaire luxembourgeoise (Arlon-Belgique). Isabelle STENGERS, philosophe, chargée de cours associée à l'Université libre de Bruxelles Andrew STIRLING est professeur à l'Université du Sussex (SPRU, science and technology policy research). Franck TINLAND, professeur émérite de philosophie, Université Paul Valéry (Montpellier III). Jean-Pascal VAN YPERSELE, climatologue, chargé de cours à l'Université catholique de Louvain, membre du Conseil fédéral (belge) du développement durable. Edwin ZACCAÏ, chargé de cours et chercheur à l'IGEAT, co-directeur du Centre d'études du développement durable, Université libre de Bruxelles.

Ouvrages édités à titre de seul éditeur ou en collaboration

2022

A la recherche de la conscience

2019

Implicit Learning: Fifty years on

2015

Biologie et devenir technologique de l'homme / Biology and the technological future of man, Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences. Biologies, volume 338, Issues 8-9, p. 521-633.

Encyclopédie du transhumanisme et du posthumanisme

Les préfixes de l'humain sont nombreux (ab- in-, para-, pré-, post-, proto-, sub-, sur-, trans-humain…). Ils invitent à réfléchir à la nature, aux limites et aux transformations de l'être humain ainsi qu'aux réactions intellectuelles et émotionnelles suscitées. Le trans/posthumanisme concerne toutes les techniques matérielles d'augmentation ou d'amélioration (physique, cognitive, émotionnelle) de l'homme, une perspective volontiers située dans le prolongement de l'humanisme progressiste des Lumières. Mais l'homme « amélioré ou augmenté » - « transformé » - pourrait s'éloigner toujours davantage des conditions de l'homme naturel « cultivé » ordinaire. Le transhumanisme risque de verser, brutalement ou imperceptiblement, dans le posthumanisme, référant à des entités qui, bien que « escendant » de l'homme, seraient aussi étrangères à celui-ci que l'espèce humaine est éloignée des formes de vie paléontologiques. Le posthumanisme flirte avec le nihilisme et l'imagination apocalyptique.Aux franges les plus audacieuses de la bioéthique, l'Encyclopédie n'écarte pas plus qu'elle ne focalise les questions éthiques. Elle englobe, sans les confondre, l'analyse conceptuelle, l'extrapolation technoscientifique et l'imagination spéculative. La première partie « Philosophie et éthique » est consacrée au débat philosophique relatif au trans/posthumanisme. Les entrées reflètent le vocabulaire conceptuel propre aux principaux auteurs trans/posthumanistes et à leurs critiques directs. La deuxième partie « Technoscience et médecine d'amélioration » parcourt les références actuelles aux sciences et aux techniques biomédicales inhérentes à la problématique transhumaniste. Elle distingue entre ce qui se fait, pourra probablement se faire ou relève du domaine de la projection spéculative et imaginaire.La troisième partie « Techniques, arts et science-fiction » est centrée autour des échanges entre technosciences et créations artistiques, spécialement l'imaginaire de la science-fiction où les thèmes post/transhumanistes sont fortement représentés.

2012

Les philosophes et le futur

Depuis la Renaissance et les débuts de la Modernité, puis toujours davantage aux 18ème, 19ème et 20ème siècles, le thème du futur n'a cessé de gagner en importance et en visibilité, quoique sous des formes très diverses et ambivalentes. Comment les philosophes - en particulier, les philosophes modernes et contemporains - ont-ils réfléchi cette insistance croissante et comment des philosophies antérieures ont-elles abordé ou ignoré le futur? Le fil directeur des conférences du Colloque « Les Philosophes et le Futur » (Université Libre de Bruxelles, du 27 au 29 avril 2011) fut d'interpeller des philosophes sur la question du futur. S'ils en parlent, qu'en disent-ils et comment évaluer aujourd'hui ce qu'ils en disent? S'ils n'en parlent pas, comment expliquer ce silence et qu'en penser aujourd'hui ? Il s'agit, bien entendu, de la problématique plus globale de la temporalité, mais en focalisant le thème du futur dans l'économie des pensées philosophiques. Ce Colloque a été organisé en l'honneur du Professeur Gilbert Hottois. Le « futur » a été un thème de recherche constamment au centre de ses intérêts: il habite l'ensemble de ses écrits.

L'idéologie du progrès face à la tourment du post-modernisme.

Les articles rassemblés dans cet ouvrage sont le fruit d'un colloque multidisciplinaire, dont l'ambition était de s'interroger sur la notion de « progrès », mise à mal par la postmodernité et perçue de façon plurielle, dans un monde de plus en plus globalisé.L'idéologie du progrès, centrée autour de l'essor des sciences et des techniques - comprenant le développement économique et social, l'affirmation d'un certain nombre de libertés et de droits fondamentaux -, est, en effet, fréquemment remise en question, tout comme sa volonté universaliste. Pour comprendre cette situation, il a semblé utile de retracer son évolution, d'en dégager les valeurs et de comprendre les reproches dont elle fait l'objet. Les contributions d'auteurs d'Amérique du Sud, d'Asie et d'Afrique permettent également d'entrevoir le sens qu'est donné à l'idée de « progrès » dans des contextes non occidentaux.Le doute dans le progrès, cette « tourmente » postmoderniste, mérite également qu'on en esquisse l'origine et l'histoire, à travers des domaines de recherche extrêmement variés. Mieux comprendre ce concept pourra, peut-être, aider à trouver les pistes d'un souffle nouveau en faveur du progrès.

2011

Philosophie du dopage

2009

The Oxford Companion to Consciousness

« Enhancement » : éthique et philosophie de la médecine d'amélioration

Réflexions sur la bioéthique

2008

Les maladies mentales

L'Envers de la raison

2007

Brain and Consciousness

2003

The Unity of Consciousness

2002

Implicit Learning and Consciousness

Les traitements des maladies de l'âme et du cerveau

Nouvelle Encyclopédie de Bioéthique

2001

Fourth International Conference on Cognitive Modeling

Proceedings of the AISB'01 Symposium on Nonconscious Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial

Nouvelle encyclopédie de bioéthique

2000

Proceedings of the fourth Annual Meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness

1999

Neurosciences

De l'eugénisme d'Etat à l'eugénisme privé, Etudes historiques et philosophiques

Matière pensante

1997

Current Directions in Implicit Learning

Proceedings of the 50th Anniversary Meeting of the Belgian Psychological Society

1996

Le devoir d'expérimenter

Le devoir d'expérimenter

1991

Philosophie de l'esprit et sciences du cerveau

Parties d'ouvrages collectifs

A paraître

Anti-humanisme

Anomal

Fin de l'histoire

Canguilhem Georges

Mort de l'homme

Normal/pathologique

Surhomme

Superman

Santé/maladie

Tératologie

2023

Bioéthique et science-fiction : zoom sur la pensée de Gilbert Hottois

2022

Transhumanisme et amélioration des performances sportives: un point de vue éthique et philosophique

Gilbert Hottois et la science fiction: une introduction

2021

De la technoscience chez Gilbert Hottois: une introduction

2019

La question du dopage : une analyse philosophique

THE MIND IS DEEP

Empirically, the central characteristic of unconscious processing is the observation that an agent's behaviour is influenced by knowledge of which it remains unaware. Connectionist models have provided genuine insights into how knowledge can influence processing without access—a hallmark of unconscious processing—and of how change can accrue as a result of mere information processing—a hallmark of the phenomena of implicit learning. An important consequence of the fact that long-term knowledge in connectionist networks accrues in connection weights as a mandatory consequence of information processing is that connectionist models capture, without any further assumptions, two of the most important characteristics of implicit learning, namely the fact that learning is incidental and mandatory, and the fact that the resulting knowledge is difficult to express. Numerous theories of consciousness have been proposed over the last twenty years. Global Workspace Theory (GWT) is the most consensual account of the functional characteristics of consciousness.

CAN WE PLAY SPACE INVADERS UNCONSCIOUSLY? (A: PROBABLY NOT)

Associative learning is the acquisition of knowledge about the relationships between environmental features. The main objective of this study is to contribute to the ongoing debate that opposes associative and inferential theories of learning. According to inferential theories, learning is the result of inferences and reasoning on propositional representations. As a consequence, awareness of a rule always precedes the corresponding behavioral changes. According to associative theories, however, learning involves the gradual updating of the associative strength between the mental representations of the stimuli. On this view, consciousness is not mandatory for learning to take place. To test these contrasted predictions, we studied how behavior and consciousness change over the course of learning. Participants played a “Space Invaders” game in which they had to repeatedly press the spacebar to destroy Martian spaceships to prevent them from landing on Earth. Occasionally, they also had to avoid shooting at a protective Martian shield, which reflected back laser shots if fired upon, hence resulting in an immediate and massive invasion. Unbeknownst to participants, the shield's occurrence was announced by cryptic signals (in Experiment 1, sounds and signs written in a Martian alphabet; in Experiment 2, sounds in Martian language), the signification of which was not conveyed to participants. In Experiment 1, during learning, participants also had to report, after each block, whether they believed their performance had improved and how they thought they had managed to improve it. In Experiment 2, participants had to help a control tower decide whether the shield would appear or not. We obtained measures of both the behavioral manifestation of associative learning (by recording bar-pressing rates before the occurrence of the shield) and its availability to awareness. Results suggest that participants learn the task in a gradual manner, as bar-pressing rate decreased after the presentation of the predicting cryptic signal. In Experiment 1, analysis of the verbal reports indicates that although some participants use intentional strategies and explicit rules to perform the task, some also exhibit learning of the association through their behavioral responses while remaining unable to describe the rule verbally. In Experiment 2, we observed that attention and the quality of representation between two events have an effect on learning: learning becomes conscious faster if participants learn intentionally and if the associated events are actually presented. In closing, we discuss the extent to which these results constitute evidence of unconscious associative learning and whether they are congruent with a dual-process learning theory.

2018

Dis, c'est quoi le transhumanisme? (Préface)

La question de l'avenir de l'homme : approches historiques et prospectives.

2017

Dopage Comprendre et prévenir (Postface)

Parlons bioéthique

Causes and consequences of the belief in free will

2016

Intérêts et limites de la réalité virtuelle en revalidation neuropsychologique

De l'échec de la politique antidopage

2015

Implicit learning of non-adjacent contingencies: A graded, dissociative account.

Biotechnology and the Future of Sport: A Scenario

How can we measure awareness? An overview of current methods

Prolongation de la vie

Dopage

2014

Les menaces venant de l'espace:une introduction

On the other side of the Mirror

2013

Dialogo sobre bioética (con Margarita Boladeras)

"La tentation psychochirurgicale" —La leucotomie en Belgique dans les années 1940 et 1950

Conscious and unconscious cognition: A graded, dynamic perspective

2012

Futur de l'homme et philosophie transhumaniste

Progrès de la biomédecine et futur de l'homme: la question de la prolongation de la vie

L'idéal de l'ingénieur en biomédecine et la question de l'amélioration de l'humain

2011

Dopage, médecine d'amélioration et avenir du sport

Progrès et amélioration

Psychosurgery and physical brain manipulation

Soigner les criminels ?

Disentangling perceptual and motor sequence learning in amnesic patients: the motor component revisited

2009

Implicit motor learning in discrete and continuous tasks

Can one learn implicitly, that is, without conscious awareness of what it is that one learns? Daily life is replete with situations where our behavior is seemingly influenced by knowledge to which we have little access. Riding a bicycle, playing tennis or driving a car, all involve mastering complex sets of motor skills, yet we are at a loss when it comes to explaining exactly how we perform such physical feats. Thus, while it is commonly accepted and hence unsurprising that we have little access to the cognitive processes involved in mental operations, it also appears that knowledge itself can remain inaccessible to report yet influence behavior. Reber, who coined the expression “implicit learning” in 1967, defined it as “the process whereby people learn without intent and without being able to clearly articulate what they learn” (Cleeremans, Destrebecqz, & Boyer, 1998). The research described in this chapter is positioned at the confluence of two different domains: Implicit Learning on the one hand, and Skill Acquisition on the other. The two domains have remained largely independent from each other, but their intersection nevertheless constitutes a field of primary import: the implicit motor learning field. The hallmark of implicit motor learning is the capacity to acquire skill through physical practice without conscious recollection of what elements of performance have improved. Unfortunately, studies dealing with implicit motor learning are not very abundant (Pew, 1974; Magill & Hall, 1989; Wulf & Schmidt, 1997; Shea, Wulf, Whitacre, & Park, 2001). These studies provide an apparently straightforward demonstration of the possibility of unconsciously learning the structure of a complex continuous task in a more efficient way than explicit learning allows. Nevertheless, other evidence seems to challenge this view. Indeed, recent studies (Chambaron, Ginhac, Ferrel-Chapus & Perruchet, 2006; Ooteghem, Allard, Buchanan, Oates & Horak, 2008) suggest that taking advantage from the repetition of continuous events may not be as easy as previous research leads us to believe. Indeed, these studies have suggested that sequence learning in continuous tracking tasks might be artefatctually driven by peculiarities of the experimental material rather than by implicit sequence learning per se. Consequently, a central goal of this chapter will be to reconcile these discrepant results so as to better characterize the conditions in which implicit motor learning occurs. Moreover, understanding what facilitates or prevents learning of regularities in motor tasks will be useful both in sport and in motor rehabilitation fields.

Bewusstsein

Computational Correlate of Consciousness

Connectionist Models

Implicit memory and implicit learning

Implicit learning and implicit memory both refer to the nonconscious effects that prior information processing may exert on subsequent behavior. Memory for a past event is implicit when it influences ongoing behavior in the absence of conscious recollection of that event. Learning is implicit when people are found to have become sensitive to the regularities shared by a stimulus domain in the absence of a correlated ability to report on the acquired knowledge. Both domains are characterized by continuing definitional, methodological, and theoretical debates about the nature of the differences between information processing with and without awareness. © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Spock

Quantitative and qualitative differences between implicit and explicit sequence learning

Que peut-on espérer d'une théorie neuroscientifique de la conscience

Les fondements neuroscientifiques de la psychopathologie 

Introduction

Actualité de la bioéthique

Le libre examen 

2008

La psychopharmacologie et la naissance de la psychiatrie biologique

Le sujet en tant que fiction et déplacement chez Canguilhem 

Introduction 

Santé, folie et vérité aux XIXe et XXe siècles 

2007

Computational Models of Implicit Learning

2006

L'homme recombiné

2005

L'unité de la conscience

Mémoire et associationnisme

A quoi pense Herbert Feigl ?

2003

Temporal effects in sequence learning

Models of Implicit learning

Cerebral correlates of memory consolidation during human sleep

2002

Implicit learning and consciousness

Ethics of Experimentation on Human beings

2001

Conscious and unconscious processes in cognition

Une histoire intellectuelle de l'Université libre de Bruxelles

2000

ADN recombinant et bioéthique

Is it safe to push the green button?

1999

From state eugenics to private eugenics

La description des lois de la conscience

Introduction à l'eugénisme

L'individu n'est rien, l'espèce est tout

Les localisations cérébrales

Het statuut van het menseliyk embryo in vitro

Histoire du concept de réflexe

Matière pensante

Le matérialisme de la médecine physiologique de Broussais et le déisme de sa profession de foi

1998

Implicit Sequence Learning

1997

Principles for implicit learning

Psychosurgery and physical brain manipulation

Les systèmes matérialistes des philosophes et des médecins sur l'âme de l'homme

Recherche clinique et recherche expérimentale en neurologie au vingtième siècle

Une critique positive du chapitre 2 de Matière et mémoire de Bergson

La théorie bergsonienne du cerveau-organe de l'action

1996

Ethique de l'expérimentation humaine

Les greffes expérimentales dans le cerveau de l'homme

Ethique de l'expérimentation humaine

Ethique de la psychochirurgie

1995

Graded State Machines

1994

The representation of structure in sequence prediction tasks

Mort du cerveau et état végétatif chronique

1993

Le cerveau, l'ordinateur et les modèles de la conscience

La philosophie face aux données neuroscientifiques de la vision des couleurs

1991

Learning the structure of event sequences

Les interprétations philosophiques des recherches sur les êtres au cerveau divisé

1990

The role of partial matches in comprehension

Philosophie matérialiste des émotions et recherches neuroscientifiques

Articles dans des revues avec comité de lecture

A paraître

Age-related differences in prospective memory performance: a new virtual laboratory task simulating naturalistic setting

Le commun entre la terre et l'espace: avenir de l'humain, risques existentiel et conquête spatiale/Lo común entre la tierra y el espacio: futuro humano, riesgos existenciales y conquista del espacio

L'éthique des “ Parties prenantes ” 

2024

Minimal exposure durations reveal visual processing priorities for different stimulus attributes

Human vision can detect a single photon, but the minimal exposure required to extract meaning from stimulation remains unknown. This requirement cannot be characterised by stimulus energy, because the system is differentially sensitive to attributes defined by configuration rather than physical amplitude. Determining minimal exposure durations required for processing various stimulus attributes can thus reveal the system's priorities. Using a tachistoscope enabling arbitrarily brief displays, we establish minimal durations for processing human faces, a stimulus category whose perception is associated with several well-characterised behavioural and neural markers. Neural and psychophysical measures show a sequence of distinct minimal exposures for stimulation detection, object-level detection, face-specific processing, and emotion-specific processing. Resolving ongoing debates, face orientation affects minimal exposure but emotional expression does not. Awareness emerges with detection, showing no evidence of subliminal perception. These findings inform theories of visual processing and awareness, elucidating the information to which the visual system is attuned.

Unconscious Perception of Vernier Offsets

The comparison between conscious and unconscious perception is a cornerstone of consciousness science. However, most studies reporting above-chance discrimination of unseen stimuli do not control for criterion biases when assessing awareness. We tested whether observers can discriminate subjectively invisible offsets of Vernier stimuli when visibility is probed using a bias-free task. To reduce visibility, stimuli were either backward masked or presented for very brief durations (1-3 milliseconds) using a modern-day Tachistoscope. We found some behavioral indicators of perception without awareness, and yet, no conclusive evidence thereof. To seek more decisive proof, we simulated a series of Bayesian observer models, including some that produce visibility judgements alongside type-1 judgements. Our data are best accounted for by observers with slightly suboptimal conscious access to sensory evidence. Overall, the stimuli and visibility manipulations employed here induced mild instances of blindsight-like behavior, making them attractive candidates for future investigation of this phenomenon.

Predicting the bodily self in space and time

To understand how the human brain distinguishes itself from external stimulation, it was examined if motor predictions enable healthy adult volunteers to infer self-location and to distinguish their body from the environment (and other agents). By uniquely combining a VR-setup with full-body motion capture, a full-body illusion paradigm (FBI) was developed with different levels of motion control: (A) a standard, passive FBI in which they had no motion control; (B) an active FBI in which they made simple, voluntary movements; and (C) an immersive game in which they real-time controlled a human-sized avatar in third person. Systematic comparisons between measures revealed a causal relationship between (i) motion control (prospective agency), (ii) self-other identification, and (iii) the ability to locate oneself. Healthy adults could recognise their movements in a third-person avatar and psychologically align with it (action observation); but did not lose a sense of place (self-location), time (temporal binding), nor who they are (self/other). Instead, motor predictions enabled them to localise their body and to distinguish self from other. In the future, embodied games could target and strengthen the brain's control networks in psychosis and neurodegeneration; real-time motion simulations could help advance neurorehabilitation techniques by fine-tuning and personalising therapeutic settings.

Radical associationism: Back to the future, or fast forward to the past?

Tests for consciousness in humans and beyond

Which systems/organisms are conscious? New tests for consciousness (‘C-tests') are urgently needed. There is persisting uncertainty about when consciousness arises in human development, when it is lost due to neurological disorders and brain injury, and how it is distributed in nonhuman species. This need is amplified by recent and rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI), neural organoids, and xenobot technology. Although a number of C-tests have been proposed in recent years, most are of limited use, and currently we have no C-tests for many of the populations for which they are most critical. Here, we identify challenges facing any attempt to develop C-tests, propose a multidimensional classification of such tests, and identify strategies that might be used to validate them.

Integrative experiments require a shared theoretical and methodological basis

Creating an integrated design space can be successful only if researchers agree on how to define and measure a certain phenomenon of interest. Adversarial collaborations and mathematical modeling can aid in reaching the necessary level of agreement when researchers depart from different theoretical perspectives.

A construct-first approach to consciousness science

We propose a new approach to consciousness science that instead of comparing complex theoretical positions deconstructs existing theories, takes their central assumptions while disregarding their auxiliary hypotheses, and focuses its investigations on the main constructs that these central assumptions rely on (like global workspace, recurrent processing, metarepresentation). Studying how these main constructs are anchored in lower-level constructs characterizing underlying neural processing will not just offer an alternative to theory comparisons but will also take us one step closer to empirical resolutions. Moreover, exploring the compatibility and possible combinations of the lower-level constructs will allow for new theoretical syntheses. This construct-first approach will improve our ability to understand the commitments of existing theories and pave the way for moving beyond them.

2023

Insight and non-insight problem solving: A heart rate variability study

Occasionally, problems are solved with a sudden Aha! moment (insight), while the mundane approach to solving problems is analytical (non-insight). At first glance, non-insight appears to depend on the availability and taxation of cognitive resources to execute the step-by-step approach, whereas insight does not, or to a lesser extent. However, this remains debated. To investigate the reliance of both solution types on cognitive resources, we assessed the involvement of the prefrontal cortex using vagally mediated heart rate variability (vmHRV) as an index. Participants (N = 68) solved 70 compound remote associates word puzzles solvable with insight and non-insight. Before, during, and after solving the word puzzles, we measured the vmHRV. Our results showed that resting-state vmHRV (trait) showed a negative association with behavioural performance for both solution types. This might reflect inter-individual differences in inhibitory control. As the solution search requires one to think of remote associations, inhibitory control might hamper rather than aid this process. Furthermore, we observed, for both solution types, a vmHRV increase from resting-state to solution search (state), lingering on in the post-task recovery period. This could mark the increase of prefrontal resources to promote an open-minded stance, essential for divergent thinking, which arguably is crucial for this task. Our findings suggest that, at a general level, both solution types share common aspects. However, a closer analysis of early and late solutions and puzzle difficulty suggested that metacognitive differentiation between insight and non-insight improved with higher trait vmHRV, and that a unique association between trait vmHRV and puzzle difficulty was present for each solution type.

What determines the neural response to snakes in the infant brain? A systematic comparison of color and grayscale stimuli

Snakes and primates have coexisted for thousands of years. Given that snakes are the first of the major primate predators, natural selection may have favored primates whose snake detection abilities allowed for better defensive behavior. Aligning with this idea, we recently provided evidence for an inborn mechanism anchored in the human brain that promptly detects snakes, based on their characteristic visual features. What are the critical visual features driving human neural responses to snakes is an unresolved issue. While their prototypical curvilinear coiled shape seems of major importance, it remains possible that the brain responds to a blend of other visual features. Coloration, in particular, might be of major importance, as it has been shown to act as a powerful aposematic signal. Here, we specifically examine whether color impacts snake-specific responses in the naive, immature infant brain. For this purpose, we recorded the brain activity of 6-to 11-month-old infants using electroencephalography (EEG), while they watched sequences of color or grayscale animal pictures flickering at a periodic rate. We showed that glancing at colored and grayscale snakes generated specific neural responses in the occipital region of the brain. Color did not exert a major influence on the infant brain response but strongly increased the attention devoted to the visual streams. Remarkably, age predicted the strength of the snake-specific response. These results highlight that the expression of the brain-anchored reaction to coiled snakes bears on the refinement of the visual system.

Learning from humans to build social cognition among robots

Self-organized groups of robots have generally coordinated their behaviors using quite simple social interactions. Although simple interactions are sufficient for some group behaviors, future research needs to investigate more elaborate forms of coordination, such as social cognition, to progress towards real deployments. In this perspective, we define social cognition among robots as the combination of social inference, social learning, social influence, and knowledge transfer, and propose that these abilities can be established in robots by building underlying mechanisms based on behaviors observed in humans. We review key social processes observed in humans that could inspire valuable capabilities in robots and propose that relevant insights from human social cognition can be obtained by studying human-controlled avatars in virtual environments that have the correct balance of embodiment and constraints. Such environments need to allow participants to engage in embodied social behaviors, for instance through situatedness and bodily involvement, but, at the same time, need to artificially constrain humans to the operational conditions of robots, for instance in terms of perception and communication. We illustrate our proposed experimental method with example setups in a multi-user virtual environment.

Dissociation between conscious and unconscious processes as a criterion for sentience

Based on the literature on human consciousness, we suggest that to demonstrate sentience in a system, one needs to demonstrate both conscious and unconscious processing in the system. Major theories of consciousness require the existence of both conscious and unconscious processes. Contrasting effects of conscious and unconscious processes have been successfully used in human studies and have begun being applied in animal sentience research as well.

Editorial: Methodological issues in consciousness research

Plant sentience: Getting to the roots of the problem

Segundo-Ortin's (2023) target article invites us to consider the possibility that plants can experience subjectively felt states. We discuss this speculation on the basis of the functional neurobiology of consciousness. We suggest that demonstrating plant sentience would require that we identify not only behaviors analogous to those exhibited by sentient creatures, but also the functional analogues of the mechanisms causing such behaviors. The lack of clear evidence for any kind of integration between self-states, self-movement, environmental states, memory, or affective communication within plants suggests that plant sentience remains an admittedly fascinating, but ultimately merely provocative speculation.

2022

Validity of the Empatica E4 wristband to estimate resting-state heart rate variability in a lab-based context

Éloge de Gilbert Hottois

Aha! under pressure: The Aha! experience is not constrained by cognitive load

The Aha! moment- the sudden insight sometimes reached when solving a vexing problem- entails a different problem-solving experience than solution retrieval reached by an analytical, multistep strategy (i.e., non- insight). To date, the (un)conscious nature of insight remains debated. We addressed this by studying insight under cognitive load. If insight and non-insight problem solving rely on conscious, effortful processes, they should both be influenced by a concurrent cognitive load. However, if unconscious processes characterize insight, cognitive load might not affect it at all. Using a dual-task paradigm, young, healthy adults (N =106) solved 70 word puzzles under different cognitive loads. We confirmed that insight solutions were more often correct and received higher solution confidence. Importantly, as cognitive load increased, non-insight solutions became less frequent and required more solution time, whereas insightful ones remained mostly unaffected. This implies that insight problem solving did not compete for limited cognitive resources

Consciousness matters: phenomenal experience has functional value

'Why would we do anything at all if the doing was not doing something to us?' In other words: What is consciousness good for? Here, reversing classical views, according to many of which subjective experience is a mere epiphenomenon that affords no functional advantage, we propose that subject-level experience-'What it feels like'-is endowed with intrinsic value, and it is precisely the value agents associate with their experiences that explains why they do certain things and avoid others. Because experiences have value and guide behaviour, consciousness has a function. Under this hypothesis of 'phenomenal worthiness', we argue that it is only in virtue of the fact that conscious agents 'experience' things and 'care' about those experiences that they are 'motivated' to act in certain ways and that they 'prefer' some states of affairs vs. others. Overviewing how the concept of value has been approached in decision-making, emotion research and consciousness research, we argue that phenomenal consciousness has intrinsic value and conclude that if this is indeed the case, then it must have a function. Phenomenal experience might act as a mental currency of sorts, which not only endows conscious mental states with intrinsic value but also makes it possible for conscious agents to compare vastly different experiences in a common subject-centred space-a feature that readily explains the fact that consciousness is 'unified'. The phenomenal worthiness hypothesis, in turn, makes the 'hard problem' of consciousness more tractable, since it can then be reduced to a problem about function.

Modelling the simultaneous encoding/serial experience theory of the perceptual moment: a blink of meta-experience

One way to understand a system is to explore how its behaviour degrades when it is overloaded. This approach can be applied to understanding conscious perception by presenting stimuli in rapid succession in the 'same' perceptual event/moment. In previous work, we have identified a striking dissociation during the perceptual moment, between what is encoded into working memory [Lag-1 sparing in the attentional blink (AB)] and what is consciously perceived (Lag-1 impairing in the experiential blink). This paper links this dissociation to what, taking inspiration from the metacognition literature, could be called meta-experience; i.e. how the ability to track and comment on one's visual experience with subjectivity ratings reflects objective performance. Specifically, we provide evidence that the information (in bits) associated with an encoding into working memory decouples from the experiential reflection upon that perceptual/encoding event and that this decoupling is largest when there is the greatest perceptual overload. This is the meta-experiential blink. Meta-experiential self-observation is common to many computational models, including connectionist interpretations of consciousness, Bayesian observers and the readout-enhanced simultaneous type/serial token (reSTST) model. We assess how our meta-experiential blink data could be modelled using the concept of self-observation, providing model fits to behavioural and electroencephalogram responses in the reSTST model. We discuss the implications of our computational modelling of parallel encoding but serial experience for theories of conscious perception. Specifically, we (i) inform theories of Lag-1 sparing during the AB and (ii) consider the implications for the global workspace theory of conscious perception and higher-order theories of consciousness.

Implicit and explicit learning of socio-emotional information in a dynamic interaction with a virtual avatar

Implicit learning (IL) deals with the non-conscious acquisition of structural regularities from the environment. IL is often deemed essential for acquiring regularities followed by social stimuli (e.g., other persons' behavior), hence is hypothesized to play a role in typical social functioning. However, our understanding of how this process might operate in social contexts is limited for two main reasons. First, while IL is highly sensitive to the characteristics of the surface stimuli upon which it operates, most IL studies have used surface stimuli with limited social validity (e.g., letters, symbols, etc.). Second, while the social environment is dynamic (i.e., our behaviors and reactions influence those of our social partners and vice-versa), the bulk of IL research employed noninteractive paradigms. Using a novel task, we examine whether IL is involved in the acquisition of regularities from a dynamic interaction with a realistic real-life-like agent. Participants (N = 115) interacted with a cinematic avatar that displayed different facial expressions. Their task was to regulate the avatar's expression to a specified level. Unbeknownst to them, an equation mediated the relationship between their responses and the avatar's expressions. Learning occurred in the task, as participants gradually increased their ability to bring the avatar in the target state. Subjective measures of awareness revealed that participants acquired both implicit and explicit knowledge from the task. This is the first study to show that IL operates in interactive situations upon socially relevant surface stimuli, facilitating future investigations of the role that IL plays in (a)typical social functioning.

Theory as adversarial collaboration

2021

Distinct motivations to seek out information in healthy individuals and problem gamblers

As massive amounts of information are becoming available to people, understanding the mechanisms underlying information-seeking is more pertinent today than ever. In this study, we investigate the underlying motivations to seek out information in healthy and addicted individuals. We developed a novel decision-making task and a novel computational model which allows dissociating the relative contribution of two motivating factors to seek out information: a desire for novelty and a general desire for knowledge. To investigate whether/how the motivations to seek out information vary between healthy and addicted individuals, in addition to healthy controls we included a sample of individuals with gambling disorder—a form of addiction without the confound of substance consumption and characterized by compulsive gambling. Our results indicate that healthy subjects and problem gamblers adopt distinct information-seeking “modes”. Healthy information-seeking behavior was mostly motivated by a desire for novelty. Problem gamblers, on the contrary, displayed reduced novelty-seeking and an increased desire for accumulating knowledge compared to healthy controls. Our findings not only shed new light on the motivations driving healthy and addicted individuals to seek out information, but they also have important implications for the treatment and diagnosis of behavioral addiction.

The obedient mind and the volitional brain: A neural basis for preserved sense of agency and sense of responsibility under coercion

Milgram's classical studies famously suggested a widespread willingness to obey authority, even to the point of inflicting harm. Important situational factors supporting obedience, such as proximity with the victim, have been established. Relatively little work has focused on how coercion affects individual cognition, or on identifying the cognitive factors that underlie inter-individual differences in the tendency to yield to coercion. Here, we used fMRI to investigate the neural systems associated with changes in volitional processes associated with sense of agency and sense of responsibility under coercion. Participants either freely chose, or were instructed by the experimenter, to give mildly painful electric shocks to another participant, or to refrain from doing so. We have previously shown that coercion reduces temporal binding, which has been proposed as an implicit proxy measure of sense of agency. We tested how reduced agency under coercion related to differences in neural activity between free choice and coercion. In contrast to previous studies and to participants performing the task outside the MRI scanner, on average there was no effect of coercion on agency for participants in the scanner. However, greater activity in the medial frontal gyrus was reliably associated with greater agency under coercion. A similar association was found using explicit responsibility ratings. Our findings suggest that medial frontal processes, perhaps related to volition during action planning and execution, may help to preserve a sense of accountability under coercion. Further, participants who administered more shocks under free choice showed reduced activity during free choice trials in brain areas associated with social cognition. Possibly, this might reflect participants cognitively distancing themselves from the recipient of the shocks under free choice, whereas this was not observed under coercion.

HuGoS: a virtual environment for studying collective human behavior from a swarm intelligence perspective

Swarm intelligence studies self-organized collective behavior resulting from interactions between individuals, typically in animals and artificial agents. Some studies from cognitive science have also demonstrated self-organization mechanisms in humans, often in pairs. Further research into the topic of human swarm intelligence could provide a better understanding of new behaviors and larger human collectives. This requires studies with multiple human participants in controlled experiments in a wide variety of scenarios, where a rich scope of possible interactions can be isolated and captured. In this paper, we present HuGoS—‘Humans Go Swarming'—a multi-user virtual environment implemented using the Unity game development platform, as a comprehensive tool for experimentation in human swarm intelligence. We demonstrate the functionality of HuGoS with naïve participants in a browser-based implementation, in a coordination task involving collective decision-making, messaging and signaling, and stigmergy. By making HuGoS available as open-source software, we hope to facilitate further research in the field of human swarm intelligence.

The color phi phenomenon: Not so special, after all?

We show how anomalous time reversal of stimuli and their associated responses can exist in very small connectionist models. These networks are built from dynamical toy model neurons which adhere to a minimal set of biologically plausible properties. The appearance of a “ghost” response, temporally and spatially located in between responses caused by actual stimuli, as in the phi phenomenon, is demonstrated in a similar small network, where it is caused by priming and long-distance feedforward paths. We then demonstrate that the color phi phenomenon can be present in an echo state network, a recurrent neural network, without explicitly training for the presence of the effect, such that it emerges as an artifact of the dynamical processing. Our results suggest that the color phi phenomenon might simply be a feature of the inherent dynamical and nonlinear sensory processing in the brain and in and of itself is not related to consciousness.

The Aha! moment: Is insight a different form of problem solving?

In everyday life, we mainly solve problems with a conscious solution search (non-insight). However, sometimes a perplexing problem is resolved by a quantum leap in understanding. This phenomenon is known as the Aha! experience (insight). Although insight has a distinct phenomenological and behavioral signature, its driving mechanism remains debated. Weisberg (2015) proposed an integrated theory of insight arguing that insight, like non-insight, mainly depends on conscious, cognitive operations with restructuring as a distinguishing feature of insight. However, only if those operations lead to an impasse, insight is achieved through unconscious processes. We assessed some of the premises of this theory by asking participants (N = 42) to solve 70 word puzzles (CRAT) that can either be solved with insight or non-insight. For each puzzle, participants indicated word puzzle difficulty, solution confidence, solution suddenness, and the experiences of impasse and restructuring. As expected, participants reported higher suddenness of and confidence in insight solutions than non-insightful ones. Surprisingly, we could not corroborate the otherwise consistently reported higher solution accuracy and faster solution speed for insight. Crucially, as suggested by the integrated theory of insight, impasse was not a prerequisite for insight to occur. Although restructuring, indeed, preceded insight solutions more often, it seemed a more general problem-solving skill also applied for non-insight solutions. Moreover, early on, participants reported an increased experience of problem difficulty for puzzles later solved with insight. This ability to report on the solution search of insight demonstrates that, as proposed by the theory, insight involves conscious, cognitive operations.

Gilbert Hottois y la “Species Technica”

How using brain-machine interfaces influences the human sense of agency

Neural evidence of mirror self-recognition in the secondary somatosensory cortex of macaque: Observations from a single-cell recording experiment and implications for consciousness

Despite mirror self-recognition being regarded as a classical indication of self-awareness, little is known about its neural underpinnings. An increasing body of evidence pointing to a role of multimodal somatosensory neurons in self-recognition guided our investigation toward the secondary somatosensory cortex (SII), as we observed single-neuron activity from a macaque monkey sitting in front of a mirror. The monkey was previously habituated to the mirror, successfully acquiring the ability of mirror self-recognition. While the monkey underwent visual and somatosensory stimulation, multimodal visual and somatosensory activity was detected in the SII, with neurons found to respond to stimuli seen through the mirror. Responses were also modulated by self-related or non-self-related stimuli. These observations corroborate that vision is an important aspect of SII activity, with electrophysiological evidence of mirror self-recognition at the neuronal level, even when such an ability is not innate. We also show that the SII may be involved in distinguishing self and non-self. Together, these results point to the involvement of the SII in the establishment of bodily self-consciousness.

LIVE-streaming 3D images: A neuroscience approach to full-body illusions

Inspired by recent technological advances in the gaming industry, we used capture cards to create and LIVE-stream high quality 3D-images. With this novel technique, we developed a real-life stereoscopic 3D full-body illusion paradigm (3D projection). Unlike previous versions of the full-body illusion that rely upon unwieldy head-mounted displays, this paradigm enables the unobstructed investigation of such illusions with neuroscience methods (e.g., transcranial direct current stimulation, transcranial magnetic stimulation, electroencephalography, and near-infrared spectroscopy) and examination of their neural underpinnings. This paper has three aims: (i) to provide a step-by-step guide on how to implement 3D LIVE-streaming, (ii) to explain how this can be used to create a full-body illusion paradigm; and (iii) to present evidence that documents the effectiveness of our methods (de Boer et al., 2020), including suggestions for potential applications. Particularly significant is the fact that 3D LIVE-streaming is not GPU-intensive and can easily be applied to any device or screen that can display 3D images (e.g., TV, tablet, mobile phone). Therefore, these methods also have potential future clinical and commercial benefits. 3D LIVE-streaming could be used to enhance future clinical observations or educational tools, or potentially guide medical interventions with real-time high-quality 3D images. Alternatively, our methods can be used in future rehabilitation programs to aid recovery from nervous system injury (e.g., spinal cord injury, brain damage, limb loss) or in therapies aimed at alleviating psychosis symptoms. Finally, 3D LIVE-streaming could set a new standard for immersive online gaming as well as augmenting online and mobile experiences (e.g., video chat, social sharing/events).

2020

The response relevance of visual stimuli modulates the P3 component and the underlying sensorimotor network

The functional meaning and neural basis of the P3b component of ERPs are still under debate. One of the main issues is whether P3b reflects only stimulus-related processes (stimulus evaluation hypothesis) or response-related processes as well (stimulus-response or S-R link activation hypothesis). Here, we conducted an EEG experiment examining whether P3b may indeed reflect an S-R link activation, followed by an fMRI experiment in which we explored the brain areas and functional connectivity possibly constituting the neural basis of these sensorimotor links. In both experiments, two successive visual stimuli, S1 and S2, were presented with a 1 sec interval, and responses were defined either by S1 or S2, while participants responded only after S2 onset. The obtained EEG results suggest that P3b may be interpreted in terms of the S-R link activation account, although further studies are needed to disentangle P3-related activity from overlapping anticipatory activity. The obtained fMRI results showed that processing of the relevant S1 involved activation of a distributed postero-anterior sensorimotor network, and increased strength of functional connectivity within this network. This network may underlie activation of the S-R links, thus possibly also the P3b component, forming a bridging step between sensory encoding and response execution.

A causal role for the right angular gyrus in self-location mediated perspective taking

Recent theories suggest that self-consciousness, in its most elementary form, is functionally disconnected from the phenomenal body. Patients with psychosis frequently misattribute their thoughts and actions to external sources; and in certain out-of-body experiences, lucid states, and dreams body-ownership is absent but self-identification is preserved. To explain these unusual experiences, we hypothesized that self-identification depends on inferring self-location at the right angular gyrus (i.e., perspective-taking). This process relates to the discrimination of self-produced signals (endogenous attention) from environmental stimulation (exogenous attention). Therefore, when this mechanism fails, this causes altered sensations and perceptions. We combined a Full-body Illusion paradigm with brain stimulation (HD-tDCS) and found a clear causal association between right angular gyrus activation and alterations in self-location (perspective-taking). Anodal versus sham HD-tDCS resulted in: a more profound out-of-body shift (with reduced sense of agency); and a weakened ability to discriminate self from other perspectives. We conclude that self-identification is mediated in the brain by inferring self-location (i.e., perspective-taking). Self-identification can be decoupled from the bodily self, explaining phenomena associated with disembodiment. These findings present novel insights into the relationship between mind and body, and may offer important future directions for treating psychosis symptoms and rehabilitation programs to aid in the recovery from a nervous system injury. The brain's ability to locate itself might be the key mechanism for self-identification and distinguishing self from other signals (i.e., perspective-taking).

Delineating implicit and explicit processes in neurofeedback learning

Neurofeedback allows humans to self-regulate neural activity in specific brain regions and is considered a promising tool for psychiatric interventions. Recently, methods have been developed to use neurofeedback implicitly, prompting a theoretical debate on the role of awareness in neurofeedback learning. We offer a critical review of the role of awareness in neurofeedback learning, with a special focus on recently developed neurofeedback paradigms. We detail differences in instructions and propose a fine-grained categorization of tasks based on the degree of involvement of explicit and implicit processes. Finally, we review the methods used to measure awareness in neurofeedback and propose new candidate measures. We conclude that explicit processes cannot be eschewed in most current implicit tasks that have explicit goals, and suggest ways in which awareness could be better measured in the future. Investigating awareness during learning will help understand the learning mechanisms underlying neurofeedback learning and will help shape future tasks.

HuGoS: A Multi-user Virtual Environment for Studying Human-Human Swarm Intelligence

The research topic of human-human swam intelligence includes many mechanisms that need to be studied in controlled experiment conditions with multiple human subjects. Virtual environments are a useful tool to isolate specific human interactions for study, but current platforms support only a small scope of possible research areas. In this paper, we present HuGoS—‘Humans Go Swarming'—a multi-user virtual environment in Unity, as a comprehensive tool for experimentation in human-human swarm intelligence. We identify possible experiment classes for studying human collective behavior, and equip our virtual environment with sufficient features to support each of these experiment classes. We then demonstrate the functionality of the virtual environment in simple examples for three of the experiment classes: human collective decision making, human social learning strategies, and agent-level human interaction with artificial swarms, including robot swarms.

Do you need to be conscious to learn to be conscious?

The effect of military training on the sense of agency and outcome processing

Unconscious categorization of sub-millisecond complex images

Can people categorize complex visual scenes unconsciously? The possibility of unconscious perception remains controversial. Here, we addressed this question using psychophysical methods applied to unmasked visual stimuli presented for extremely short durations (in the μsec range) by means of a custom-built modern tachistoscope. Our experiment was composed of two phases. In the first phase, natural or urban scenes were either absent or present (for varying durations) on the tachistoscope screen, and participants were simply asked to evaluate their subjective perception using a 3-points scale (absence of stimulus, stimulus detection or stimulus identification). Participants' responses were tracked by means of two staircases. The first psychometric function aimed at defining participants' proportion of subjective detection responses (i.e., not having seen anything vs. having seen something without being able to identify it), while the second staircase tracked the proportion of subjective identification rates (i.e., being unaware of the stimulus' category vs. being aware of it). In the second phase, the same participants performed an objective categorization task in which they had to decide, on each trial, whether the image was a natural vs. an urban scene. A third staircase was used in this phase so as to build a psychometric curve reflecting the objective categorization performance of each participant. In this second phase, participants also rated their subjective perception of each stimulus on every trial, exactly as in the first phase of the experiment. Our main result is that objective categorization performance, here assumed to reflect the contribution of both conscious and unconscious trials, cannot be explained based exclusively on conscious trials. This clearly suggests that the categorization of complex visual scenes is possible even when participants report being unable to consciously perceive the contents of the stimulus.

Project DyAdd: Non-linguistic Theories of Dyslexia Predict Intelligence

Two themes have puzzled the research on developmental and learning disorders for decades. First, some of the risk and protective factors behind developmental challenges are suggested to be shared and some are suggested to be specific for a given condition. Second, language-based learning difficulties like dyslexia are suggested to result from or correlate with non-linguistic aspects of information processing as well. In the current study, we investigated how adults with developmental dyslexia or ADHD as well as healthy controls cluster across various dimensions designed to tap the prominent non-linguistic theories of dyslexia. Participants were 18-55-year-old adults with dyslexia (n = 36), ADHD (n = 22), and controls (n = 35). Non-linguistic theories investigated with experimental designs included temporal processing impairment, abnormal cerebellar functioning, procedural learning difficulties, as well as visual processing and attention deficits. Latent profile analysis (LPA) was used to investigate the emerging groups and patterns of results across these experimental designs. LPA suggested three groups: (1) a large group with average performance in the experimental designs, (2) participants predominantly from the clinical groups but with enhanced conditioning learning, and (3) participants predominantly from the dyslexia group with temporal processing as well as visual processing and attention deficits. Despite the presence of these distinct patterns, participants did not cluster very well based on their original status, nor did the LPA groups differ in their dyslexia or ADHD-related neuropsychological profiles. Remarkably, the LPA groups did differ in their intelligence. These results highlight the continuous and overlapping nature of the observed difficulties and support the multiple deficit model of developmental disorders, which suggests shared risk factors for developmental challenges. It also appears that some of the risk factors suggested by the prominent non-linguistic theories of dyslexia relate to the general level of functioning in tests of intelligence.

The SSVEP tool as a marker of subjective visibility

Snakes elicit specific neural responses in the human infant brain

Detecting predators is essential for survival. Given that snakes are the first of primates' major predators, natural selection may have fostered efficient snake detection mechanisms to allow for optimal defensive behavior. Here, we provide electrophysiological evidence for a brain-anchored evolved predisposition to rapidly detect snakes in humans, which does not depend on previous exposure or knowledge about snakes. To do so, we recorded scalp electrical brain activity in 7- to 10-month-old infants watching sequences of flickering animal pictures. All animals were presented in their natural background. We showed that glancing at snakes generates specific neural responses in the infant brain, that are higher in amplitude than those generated by frogs or caterpillars, especially in the occipital region of the brain. The temporal dynamics of these neural responses support that infants devote increased attention to snakes than to non-snake stimuli. These results therefore demonstrate that a single fixation at snakes is sufficient to generate a prompt and large selective response in the infant brain. They argue for the existence in humans of an inborn, brain-anchored mechanism to swiftly detect snakes based on their characteristic visual features.

Comparing self- and hetero- metacognition in the absence of verbal communication

The ability to infer how confident other people are in their decisions is crucial for regulating social interactions. In many cooperative situations, verbal communication enables one to communicate one's confidence and to appraise that of others. However, in many circumstances, people either cannot explicitly communicate their confidence level (e.g., in an emergency situation) or may be intentionally deceitful (e.g., when playing poker). It is currently unclear whether one can read others' confidence in the absence of verbal communication, and whether one can infer it as accurately as for one's own confidence. To explore these questions, we used an auditory task in which participants either had to guess the confidence of someone else performing the task or to judge their own confidence, in different conditions (i.e., while performing the task themselves or while watching themselves perform the task on a pre-recorded video). Results demonstrate that people can read the confidence someone else has in their decision as accurately as they evaluate their own uncertainty in their decision. Crucially, we show that hetero-metacognition is a flexible mechanism that relies on different cues according to the context. Our results support the idea that metacognition leverages the same inference mechanisms as those involved in theory of mind.

Comparing self- and hetero-metacognition in the absence of verbal communication

The ability to infer how confident other people are in their decisions is crucial for regulating social interactions. In many cooperative situations, verbal communication enables one to communicate one's confidence and to appraise that of others. However, in many circumstances, people either cannot explicitly communicate their confidence level (e.g., in an emergency situation) or may be intentionally deceitful (e.g., when playing poker). It is currently unclear whether one can read others' confidence in the absence of verbal communication, and whether one can infer it as accurately as for one's own confidence. To explore these questions, we used an auditory task in which participants either had to guess the confidence of someone else performing the task or to judge their own confidence, in different conditions (i.e., while performing the task themselves or while watching themselves perform the task on a pre-recorded video). Results demonstrate that people can read the confidence someone else has in their decision as accurately as they evaluate their own uncertainty in their decision. Crucially, we show that hetero-metacognition is a flexible mechanism that relies on different cues according to the context. Our results support the idea that metacognition leverages the same inference mechanisms as those involved in theory of mind.

The response relevance of visual stimuli modulate the P3 component and the underlying sensorimotor network

The functional meaning and neural basis of the P3b component of ERPs are still under debate. One of the main issues is whether P3b reflects only stimulus-related processes (stimulus evaluation hypothesis) or response-related processes as well (stimulus-response or S-R link activation hypothesis). Here, we conducted an EEG experiment examining whether P3b may indeed reflect an S-R link activation, followed by an fMRI experiment in which we explored the brain areas and functional connectivity possibly constituting the neural basis of these sensorimotor links. In both experiments, two successive visual stimuli, S1 and S2, were presented with a 1 sec interval, and responses were defined either by S1 or S2, while participants responded only after S2 onset. The obtained EEG results suggest that P3b may be interpreted in terms of the S-R link activation account, although further studies are needed to disentangle P3-related activity from overlapping anticipatory activity. The obtained fMRI results showed that processing of the relevant S1 involved activation of a distributed postero-anterior sensorimotor network, and increased strength of functional connectivity within this network. This network may underlie activation of the S-R links, thus possibly also the P3b component, forming a bridging step between sensory encoding and response execution.

Sensorimotor conflicts alter metacognitive and action monitoring

While sensorimotor signals are known to modulate perception, little is known about their influence on higher-level cognitive processes. Here, we applied sensorimotor conflicts while participants performed a perceptual task followed by confidence judgments. Results showed that sensorimotor conflicts altered metacognitive monitoring by decreasing metacognitive performance. In a second experiment, we replicated this finding and extended our results by showing that sensorimotor conflicts also altered action monitoring, as measured implicitly through intentional binding. In a third experiment, we replicated the same effects on intentional binding with sensorimotor conflicts related to the hand rather than to the trunk. However, effects of hand sensorimotor conflicts on metacognitive monitoring were not significant. Taken together, our results suggest that metacognitive and action monitoring may involve endogenous, embodied processes involving sensorimotor signals which are informative regarding the state of the decider.

Action information contributes to metacognitive decision-making

Metacognitive abilities allow us to adjust ongoing behavior and modify future decisions in the absence of external feedback. Although metacognition is critical in many daily life settings, it remains unclear what information is actually being monitored and what kind of information is being used for metacognitive decisions. In the present study, we investigated whether response information connected to perceptual events contribute to metacognitive decision-making. Therefore, we recorded EEG signals during a perceptual color discrimination task while participants were asked to provide an estimate about the quality of their decision on each trial. Critically, the moment participants provided their confidence judgments varied across conditions, thereby changing the amount of action information (e.g., response competition or response fluency) available for metacognitive decisions. Results from three experiments demonstrate that metacognitive performance improved when first-order action information was available at the moment metacognitive decisions about the perceptual task had to be provided. This behavioral effect was accompanied by enhanced functional connectivity (beta phase synchrony) between motor areas and prefrontal regions, exclusively observed during metacognitive decision-making. Our findings demonstrate that action information contributes to metacognitive decision-making, thereby painting a picture of metacognition as a process that integrates sensory evidence and information about our interactions with the world.

Learning to be conscious

Consciousness remains a formidable challenge. Different theories of consciousness have proposed vastly different mechanisms to account for phenomenal experience. Here, appealing to aspects of global workspace theory, higher-order theories, social theories, and predictive processing, we introduce a novel framework: the self-organizing metarerpresentational account (SOMA), in which consciousness is viewed as something that the brain learns to do. By this account, the brain continuously and unconsciously learns to redescribe its own activity to itself, so developing systems of metarepresentations that qualify target first-order representations. Thus, experiences only occur in experiencers that have learned to know they possess certain first-order states and that have learned to care more about certain states than about others. In this sense, consciousness is the brain's (unconscious, embodied, enactive, nonconceptual) theory about itself.

2019

Saving the Perruchet effect: A role for the strength of the association in associative learning

In a partial reinforcement schedule where a cue repeatedly predicts the occurrence of a target in consecutive trials, reaction times to the target tend to decrease in a monotonic fashion, while participants' expectancies for the target decrease at the same time. This dissociation between reaction times and expectancies—the so-called Perruchet effect—challenges the propositional view of learning, which posits that human conditioned responses result from conscious inferences about the relationships between events. However, whether the reaction time pattern reflects the strength of a putative cue-target link, or only non-associative processes, such as motor priming, remains unclear. To address this issue, we implemented the Perruchet procedure in a two-choice reaction time task and compared reaction time patterns in an Experimental condition, in which a tone systematically preceded a visual target, and in a Control condition, in which the onset of the two stimuli were uncoupled. Participants' expectancies regarding the target were recorded separately in an initial block. Reaction times decreased with the succession of identical trials in both conditions, reflecting the impact of motor priming. Importantly, reaction time slopes were steeper in the Experimental than in the Control condition, indicating an additional influence of the associative strength between the two stimuli. Interestingly, slopes were less steep for participants who showed the gambler's fallacy in the initial block. In sum, our results suggest the mutual influences of motor priming, associative strength, and expectancies on performance. They are in line with a dual-process model of learning involving both a propositional reasoning process and an automatic link-formation mechanism.

Lower Attentional Skills predict increased exploratory foraging patterns

When engaged in a search task, one needs to arbitrate between exploring and exploiting the environment to optimize the outcome. Many intrinsic, task and environmental factors are known to influence the exploration/exploitation balance. Here, in a non clinical population, we show that the level of inattention (assessed as a trait) is one such factor: children with higher scores on an ADHD (Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) questionnaire exhibited longer transitions between consecutively retrieved items, in both a visual and a semantic search task. These more frequent exploration behaviours were associated with differential performance patterns: children with higher levels of ADHD traits performed better in semantic search, while their performance was unaffected in visual search. Our results contribute to the growing literature suggesting that ADHD should not be simply conceived as a pure deficit of attention, but also as a specific cognitive strategy that may prove beneficial in some contexts.

Intentional binding as Bayesian cue combination: Testing predictions with trait individual differences

We investigated differences in intentional binding in high and low hypnotizable groups to explore two questions relating to (a) trait differences in the availability of motor intentions to metacognitive processes and (b) a proposed cue combination model of binding. An experience of involuntariness is central to hypnotic responding and may arise from strategically being unaware of one's intentions. Trait differences in the ability to respond to hypnotic suggestion may reflect differing levels of access to motor intentions. Intentional binding refers to the subjective compression of the time between an action and its outcome, indicated by a forward shift in the judged time of an action toward its outcome (action binding) and the backward shift of an outcome toward a causal action (outcome binding). Intentional binding is sensitive to intentional action without requiring explicit reflection upon agency. One way of explaining the sensitivity of intentional binding is to see it as a simple case of multisensory cue combination in which awareness of intentions increases knowledge of the timing of actions. Here we present results consistent with such a mechanism. In a contingent presentation of action and outcome events, low hypnotizable had more precise timing judgments of actions and also showed weaker action binding than highs. These results support the theory that trait hypnotizability is related to access to information related to motor intentions, and that intentional binding reflects the Bayesian combination of cross-modal cues.

The role of levels of processing in disentangling the ERP signatures of conscious visual processing

We aimed to distinguish electrophysiological signatures of visual awareness from other task-related processes through manipulating the level of processing of visual stimuli. During an event-related EEG experiment, 36 subjects performed either color (low-level condition) or magnitude (high-level condition) evaluations of masked digits. Participants also assessed subjective visibility of each stimulus using the Perceptual Awareness Scale (PAS). Mean amplitude of the components of interest was analyzed (VAN − 140-240 ms; LP − 380-480 ms) with weighted regression mixed model. In the VAN component time window the mean amplitude correlated with PAS rating in both conditions. Mean amplitude in the LP time window correlated with PAS ratings in the high-level condition, but not in the low-level condition. Our results support the temporal unfolding of ERP makers of conscious processing, with an early component reflecting the initial perceptual experience and a late component being a correlate of the conscious experience of non-perceptual information.

Should we control? The interplay between cognitive control and information integration in the resolution of the exploration-exploitation dilemma

In their daily decisions, humans and animals are often confronted with the conflicting choice of opting either for a rewarding familiar option (i.e., exploitation) or for a novel, uncertain option that may, however, yield a better reward in the near future (i.e., exploration). Despite extensive research, the cognitive mechanisms that subtend the manner in which humans solve this exploration-exploitation dilemma are still poorly understood. In this study, we challenge the popular assumption that exploitation is a global default strategy that must be suppressed by means of cognitive control mechanisms so as to enable exploratory strategies. To do so, we asked participants to engage in a challenging working memory task while performing repeated choices in a gambling task. Results showed that manipulating cognitive control resources exclusively hindered participants' ability to explore the environment in a directed, intentional manner. Moreover, under certain scenarios, adopting exploitative strategies was also dependent on the availability of cognitive control resources. Additional analyses using a recent computational model of information integration suggests that increasing cognitive load specifically interferes with the ability to combine reward and information in order to inform choices. Our results shed light on the cognitive mechanisms that underpin the resolution of the dilemma and provide a formal foundation through which to explore pathologies of goal-directed behavior.

Opportunities and challenges for a maturing science of consciousness

Scientific research on consciousness is critical to multiple scientific, clinical, and ethical issues. The growth of the field could also be beneficial to several areas including neurology and mental health research. To achieve this goal, we need to set funding priorities carefully and address problems such as job creation and potential media misrepresentation.

Consciousness (Unconsciously) designs itself

Here, I explore the idea that consciousness is something that the brain learns to do rather than an intrinsic property of certain neural states and not others. Starting from the assumption that neural activity is inherently unconscious, the question thus becomes: How does the brain learn to be conscious? I suggest that consciousness arises as a result of the brain's continuous attempts at predicting not only the consequences of its actions on the world and on other agents, but also the consequences of activity in one cerebral region on activity in other regions. By this account, the brain continuously and unconsciously learns to redescribe its own activity to itself, so developing systems of metarepresentations that characterize and qualify the target first-order representations. Such learned redescriptions, enriched by the emotional value associated with them, form the basis of conscious experience. Learning and plasticity are thus central to consciousness, to the extent that experiences only occur in experiencers that have learned to know they possess certain first-order states and have learned to care more about certain states than others. This is what I call the ‘radical plasticity thesis'. In a sense, thus, this is the enactive perspective, but turned both inwards and (further) outwards. Consciousness involves ‘signal detection on the mind'; the conscious mind is the brain's (non-conceptual, implicit) theory about itself.

Waving goodbye to contrast: Self-generated hand movements attenuate visual sensitivity

It is well known that the human brain continuously predicts the sensory consequences of its own body movements, which typically results in sensory attenuation. Yet, the extent and exact mechanisms underlying sensory attenuation are still debated. To explore this issue, we asked participants to decide which of two visual stimuli was of higher contrast in a virtual reality situation where one of the stimuli could appear behind the participants' invisible moving hand or not. Over two experiments, we measured the effects of such virtual occlusion on first-order sensitivity and on metacognitive monitoring. Our findings show that self-generated hand movements reduced the apparent contrast of the stimulus. This result can be explained by the active inference theory. Moreover, sensory attenuation seemed to affect only first-order sensitivity and not (second-order) metacognitive judgments of confidence.

2018

Sensorimotor conflicts alter metacognitive and action monitoring

While sensorimotor signals are known to modulate perception, little is known about their influence on higher-level cognitive processes. Here, we applied sensorimotor conflicts while participants performed a perceptual task followed by confidence judgments. Results showed that sensorimotor conflicts altered metacognitive monitoring by decreasing metacognitive performance. In a second experiment, we replicated this finding and extended our results by showing that sensorimotor conflicts also altered action monitoring, as measured implicitly through intentional binding. In a third experiment, we replicated the same effects on intentional binding with sensorimotor conflicts related to the hand rather than to the trunk. However, effects of hand sensorimotor conflicts on metacognitive monitoring were not significant. Taken together, our results suggest that metacognitive and action monitoring may involve endogenous, embodied processes involving sensorimotor signals which are informative regarding the state of the decider.

Does immersion or detachment facilitate healthy eating?

Many people would like to reduce indulging in unhealthy foods, but find it difficult to do so. Previous research shows that individuals eat smaller portions of unhealthy hedonic food if they first imagine the sensory properties of tempting food (sensory imagery; Cornil & Chandon, 2016). Similarly, they show less preference for such food if they think about food in a detached way (decentering; Papies, Barsalou, & Custers, 2012; Papies, Pronk, Keesman, & Barsalou, 2015). Given that these two mindsets are seemingly at odds with each other, we compared them across two studies to examine their effects on the preference for (Experiment 1) and consumption of (Experiment 2) hedonic healthy and unhealthy food. Although sensory imagery and decentering had largely different effects for preferences towards healthy and unhealthy foods, they had comparable effects on the consumption of both types of foods, serving to reduce the effects of consumption in participants affected by hunger and emotional eating. These results suggest that while sensory imagery and decentering are based on different mechanisms, they produce similar results when it comes to the consumption of hedonic food, regardless of how healthy the food is.

Spontaneous eyeblinks are sensitive to sequential learning.

Although sequential learning and spontaneous eyeblink rate (EBR) have both been shown to be tightly related to cerebral dopaminergic activity, they have never been investigated at the same time. In the present study, EBR, taken as an indirect marker of dopaminergic activity, was investigated in two resting state conditions, both before and after visuomotor sequence learning in a serial reaction time task (SRT) and during task practice. Participants' abilities to produce and manipulate their knowledge about the sequential material were probed in a generation task. We hypothesized that the time course of spontaneous EBR might follow the progressive decrease of RTs during the SRT session. Additionally, we manipulated the structure of the transfer blocks as well as their respective order, assuming that (1) fully random trials might generate a larger psychophysiological response than an unlearned but structured material, and (2) a second (final) block of transfer might give rise to larger effects given that the sequential material was better consolidated after further practice. Finally, we tentatively hypothesized that, in addition to their online version, spontaneous EBR recorded during the pre- and post-learning resting sessions might be predictive of (1) the SRT learning curve, (2) the magnitude of the transfer effects, and (3) performance in the generation task. Results showed successful sequence learning with decreased accuracy and increased reaction times (RTs) in transfer blocks featuring a different material (random trials or a structured, novel sequence). In line with our hypothesis that EBR reflects dopaminergic activity associated with sequential learning, we observed increased EBR in random trials as well as when the second transfer block occurred at the end of the learning session. There was a positive relationship between the learning curve (RTs) and the slope of EBR during the SRT session. Additionally, inter-individual differences in resting and real-time EBR predicted the magnitude of accuracy and RTs transfer effects, respectively, but they were not related to participants' performances during the generation task. Notwithstanding, our results suggest that the degree of explicit sequential knowledge modulates the association between the magnitude of the transfer effect in EBR and SRT performance. Overall, the present study provides evidence that EBR may represent a valid indirect psychophysiological correlate of dopaminergic activity coupled to sequential learning.

Only giving orders? An experimental study of the sense of agency when giving or receiving commands

In human societies, agents are assumed to experience being the author of their own actions. These basic motoric experiences of action are influenced by social hierarchies, leading to surprising and morally significant results. Here we ask whether, under coercion, the sense of agency and responsibility pass from the person who receives orders to the person who gives them. Volunteers took turns to play the roles of ‘commander', ‘agent' or ‘victim' in a task where the commander coerced the agent to deliver painful shocks to the ‘victim'. We used ‘intentional binding' as an implicit measure of sense of agency in both commanders and agents, in conditions of coercion and free-choice. We observed a reduced sense of agency when agents received coercive instructions, relative to when they freely chose which action to execute. We also found that sense of agency in the commanders was reduced when they coerced agents to administer the shock on their behalf, relative to when they acted by themselves. This last effect was associated with the commander's self-reported level on a psychopathy scale. Thus, coercion resulted in neither commander nor agent feeling agency for the effect of the action, as measured through implicit methods. Our results could have profound implications for social decision-making and social regulation of moral behaviour.

The impact of sleep deprivation on visual perspective taking.

Total sleep deprivation (TSD) is known to alter cognitive processes. Surprisingly little attention has been paid to its impact on social cognition. Here, we investigated whether TSD alters levels-1 and -2 visual perspective-taking abilities, i.e. the capacity to infer (a) what can be seen and (b) how it is seen from another person's visual perspective, respectively. Participants completed levels-1 and -2 visual perspective-taking tasks after a night of sleep and after a night of TSD. In these tasks, participants had to take their own (self trials) or someone else's (other trials) visual perspective in trials where both perspectives were either the same (consistent trials) or different (inconsistent trials). An instruction preceding each trial indicated the perspective to take (i.e. the relevant perspective). Results show that TSD globally deteriorates social performance. In the level-1 task, TSD affects the selection of relevant over irrelevant perspectives. In the level-2 task, the effect of TSD cannot be unequivocally explained. This implies that visual perspective taking should be viewed as partially state-dependent, rather than a wholly static trait-like characteristic.

Erratum: Publisher Correction: Learning the value of information and reward over time when solving exploration-exploitation problems (Scientific reports (2017) 7 1 (16919))

A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has been fixed in the paper.

Registered Replication Report: Dijksterhuis & van Knippenberg (1998)

Dijksterhuis and van Knippenberg (1998) reported that participants primed with an intelligentcategory (“professor”) subsequently performed 13.1% better on a trivia test than participantsprimed with an unintelligent category (“soccer hooligans”). Two unpublished replications of thisstudy by the original authors, designed to verify the appropriate testing procedures, observed asmaller difference between conditions (2-3%) as well as a gender difference: men showed theeffect (9.3% and 7.6%) but women did not (0.3% and -0.3%). The procedure used in thosereplications served as the basis for this multi-lab Registered Replication Report (RRR). A total of40 laboratories collected data for this project, with 23 laboratories meeting all inclusion criteria.Here we report the meta-analytic result of those 23 direct replications (total N = 4,493) of theupdated version of the original study, examining the difference between priming with professorand hooligan on a 30-item general knowledge trivia task (a supplementary analysis reportsresults with all 40 labs, N = 6,454). We observed no overall difference in trivia performancebetween participants primed with professor and those primed with hooligan (0.14%) and nomoderation by gender.

La revalidation neuropsychologique : Quid de la réalité virtuelle ?

Reversible Second­Order Conditional sequences in Incidental Sequence Learning tasks

In sequence learning tasks, participants' sensitivity to the sequential structure of a series of events often overshoots their ability to express relevant knowledge intentionally, as in generation tasks that require participants to produce either the next element of a sequence (inclusion) or a different element (exclusion). Comparing generation performance under inclusion and exclusion conditions makes it possible to assess the respective influences of conscious and unconscious learning. Recently, two main concerns have been expressed concerning such tasks. First, it is often difficult to design control sequences in such a way that they enable clear comparisons with the training material. Second, it is challenging to ask participants to perform appropriately under exclusion instructions, for the requirement to exclude familiar responses often leads them to adopt degenerate strategies (e.g., pushing on the same key all the time), which then need to be specifically singled out as invalid. To overcome both concerns, we introduce reversible second-order conditional (RSOC) sequences and show (a) that they elicit particularly strong transfer effects, (b) that dissociation of implicit and explicit influences becomes possible thanks to the removal of salient transitions in RSOCs, and (c) that exclusion instructions can be greatly simplified without losing sensitivity.

Social Cues Alter Implicit Motor Learning in a Serial Reaction Time Task

Learning is a central ability for human development. Many skills we learn, such as language, are learned through observation or imitation in social contexts. Likewise, many skills are learned implicitly, that is, without an explicit intent to learn and without full awareness of the acquired knowledge. Here, we asked whether performance in a motor learning task is modulated by social vs. object cues of varying validity. To address this question, we asked participants to carry out a serial reaction time (SRT) task in which, on each trial, people have to respond as fast and as accurately as possible to the appearance of a stimulus at one of four possible locations. Unbeknownst to participants, the sequence of successive locations was sequentially structured, so that knowledge of the sequence facilitates anticipation of the next stimulus and hence faster motor responses. Crucially, each trial also contained a cue pointing to the next stimulus location. Participants could thus learn based on the cue, or on learning about the sequence of successive locations, or on a combination of both. Results show an interaction between cue type and cue validity for the motor responses: social cues (vs. object cues) led to faster responses in the low validity (LV) condition only. Concerning the extent to which learning was implicit, results show that in the cued blocks only, the highly valid social cue led to implicit learning. In the uncued blocks, participants showed no implicit learning in the highly valid social cue condition, but did in all other combinations of stimulus type and cueing validity. In conclusion, our results suggest that implicit learning is context-dependent and can be influenced by the cue type, e.g., social and object cues.

2017

Learning the value of information and reward over time when solving exploration-exploitation problems.

To flexibly adapt to the demands of their environment, animals are constantly exposed to the conflict resulting from having to choose between predictably rewarding familiar options (exploitation) and risky novel options, the value of which essentially consists of obtaining new information about the space of possible rewards (exploration). Despite extensive research, the mechanisms that subtend the manner in which animals solve this exploitation-exploration dilemma are still poorly understood. Here, we investigate human decision-making in a gambling task in which the informational value of each trial and the reward potential were separately manipulated. To better characterize the mechanisms that underlined the observed behavioural choices, we introduce a computational model that augments the standard reward-based reinforcement learning formulation by associating a value to information. We find that both reward and information gained during learning influence the balance between exploitation and exploration, and that this influence was dependent on the reward context. Our results shed light on the mechanisms that underpin decision-making under uncertainty, and suggest new approaches for investigating the exploration-exploitation dilemma throughout the animal kingdom.

The levels of perceptual processing and the neural correlates of increasing subjective visibility

According to the levels-of-processing hypothesis, transitions from unconscious to conscious perception may depend on stimulus processing level, with more gradual changes for low-level stimuli and more dichotomous changes for high-level stimuli. In an event-related fMRI study we explored this hypothesis using a visual backward masking procedure. Task requirements ma- nipulated level of processing. Participants reported the magnitude of the target digit in the high- level task, its color in the low-level task, and rated subjective visibility of stimuli using the Perceptual Awareness Scale. Intermediate stimulus visibility was reported more frequently in the low-level task, confirming prior behavioral results. Visible targets recruited insulo-fronto-parietal regions in both tasks. Task effects were observed in visual areas, with higher activity in the low- level task across all visibility levels. Thus, the influence of level of processing on conscious perception may be mediated by attentional modulation of activity in regions representing fea- tures of consciously experienced stimuli.

Māori gene and epigenetics hypotheses: the temptation of population genetics

What do you believe in? French translation of the FAD-plus to assess beliefs in free will and determinism and its relation with religious practices and personality traits.

Hypnosis and top-down regulation of consciousness

Hypnosis is a unique form of top-down regulation in which verbal suggestions are capable of eliciting pronounced changes in a multitude of psychological phenomena. Hypnotic suggestion has been widely used both as a technique for studying basic science questions regarding human consciousness but also as a method for targeting a range of symptoms within a therapeutic context. Here we provide a synthesis of current knowledge regarding the characteristics and neurocognitive mechanisms of hypnosis. We review evidence from cognitive neuroscience, experimental psychopathology, and clinical psychology regarding the utility of hypnosis as an experimental method for modulating consciousness, as a model for studying healthy and pathological cognition, and as a therapeutic vehicle. We also highlight the relationships between hypnosis and other psychological phenomena, including the broader domain of suggestion and suggestibility and conclude by identifying the most salient challenges confronting the nascent cognitive neuroscience of hypnosis and outlining future directions for research on hypnosis and suggestion.

The power of suggestion: Posthypnotically Induced Changes in the Temporal Binding of Intentional Action Outcomes

The sense of agency is the experience of initiating and controlling one's voluntary actions and their outcomes. Intentional binding (i.e., when voluntary actions and their outcomes are perceived to occur closer together in time than involuntary actions and their outcomes) is increased in intentional action but requires no explicit reflection on agency. The reported experience of involuntariness is central to hypnotic responding, during which strategic action is experienced as involuntary. We report reduced intentional binding in a hypnotically induced experience of involuntariness, providing an objective correlate of reports of involuntariness. We argue that this reduced binding results from the diminished influence of motor intentions in the generation of the sense of agency when beliefs about whether an action is intended are altered. Thus, intentional binding depends on awareness of intentions. This finding shows that changes in metacognition of intentions affect perception.

Sure i'm sure: Prefrontal oscillations support metacognitive monitoring of decision making

Successful decision making critically involves metacognitive processes such as monitoring and control of our decision process. Metacognition enables agents to modify ongoing behavior adaptively and determine what to do next in situations in which external feedback is not (immediately) available. Despite the importance of metacognition for many aspects of life, little is known about how our metacognitive system operates or about what kind of information is used for metacognitive (second-order) judgments. In particular, it remains an open question whether metacognitive judgments are based on the same information as first-order decisions. Here, we investigated the relationship between metacognitive performance and first-order task performance by recording EEG signals while participants were asked to make a “diagnosis” after seeing a sample of fictitious patient data (a complex pattern of colored moving dots of different sizes). To assess metacognitive performance, participants provided an estimate about the quality of their diagnosis on each trial. Results demonstrate that the information that contributes to first-order decisions differs from the information that supports metacognitive judgments. Further, time-frequency analyses of EEG signals reveal that metacognitive performance is associated specifically with prefrontal theta-band activity. Together, our findings are consistent with a hierarchical model of metacognition and suggest a crucial role for prefrontal oscillations in metacognitive performance.

The influence of (Dis)belief in free will on immoral behavior

One of the hallmarks of human existence is that we all hold beliefs that determine how we act. Amongst such beliefs, the idea that we are endowed with free will appears to be linked to prosocial behaviors, probably by enhancing the feeling of responsibility of individuals over their own actions. However, such effects appear to be more complex that one might have initially thought. Here, we aimed at exploring how induced disbeliefs in free will impact the sense of agency over the consequences of one's own actions in a paradigm that engages morality. To do so, we asked participants to choose to inflict or to refrain from inflicting an electric choc to another participant in exchange of a small financial benefit. Our results show that participants who were primed with a text defending neural determinism - the idea that humans are a mere bunch of neurons guided by their biology - administered fewer shocks and were less vindictive toward the other participant. Importantly, this finding only held for female participants. These results show the complex interaction between gender, (dis)beliefs in free will and moral behavior.

2016

Sure I'm sure: Prefrontal oscillations support metacognitive monitoring of decision-making

Successful decision-making critically involves metacognitive processes such as monitoring and control of our decision process. Metacognition enables agents to adaptively modify on-going behavior and to determine what to do next in situations where external feedback is not (immediately) available. Despite the importance of metacognition for many aspects of life, little is known about how our metacognitive system operates or about what kind of information is used for metacognitive (second-order) judgments. In particular, it remains an open question whether metacognitive judgments are based on the same information as first-order decisions.Here, we investigated the relationship between metacognitive performance and first-order task performance by recording EEG signals while participants were asked to make a “diagnosis” after seeing a sample of fictitious patient data (a complex pattern of colored moving dots of different sizes). In order to assess metacognitive performance, participants provided an estimate about the quality of their diagnosis on each trial.Results demonstrate that the information that contributes to first-order decisions differs from the information that supports metacognitive judgments. Further, time frequency analyses of electroencephalographic signals reveal that metacognitive performance is specifically associated with prefrontal theta band activity. Together, our findings are in line with a hierarchical model of metacognition, and suggest a crucial role for prefrontal oscillations in metacognitive performance.

Spontaneous eyeblinks during breaking continuous flash suppression are associated with increased detection times

An eyeblink has a clear effect on low-level information processing because it temporarily occludes all visual information. Recent evidence suggests that eyeblinks can also modulate higher level processes (e.g., attentional resources), and vice versa. Despite these putative effects on different levels of information processing, eyeblinks are typically neglected in vision and in consciousness research. The main aim of this study was to investigate the timing and the effect of eyeblinks in an increasingly popular paradigm in consciousness research, namely breaking continuous flash suppression (b-CFS). Results show that participants generally refrain from blinking during a trial, that is, when they need to detect a suppressed stimulus. However, when they do blink during a trial, we observed a sharp increase in suppression time. This suggests that one needs to control for blinking when comparing detection times between conditions that could elicit phasic changes in blinking.

Registered Replication Report: Strack, Martin, & Stepper (1988)

According to the facial feedback hypothesis, people's affective responses can be influenced by their own facial expression (e.g., smiling, pouting), even when their expression did not result from their emotional experiences. For example, Strack, Martin, and Stepper (1988) instructed participants to rate the funniness of cartoons using a pen that they held in their mouth. In line with the facial feedback hypothesis, when participants held the pen with their teeth (inducing a “smile”), they rated the cartoons as funnier than when they held the pen with their lips (inducing a “pout”). This seminal study of the facial feedback hypothesis has not been replicated directly. This Registered Replication Report describes the results of 17 independent direct replications of Study 1 from Strack et al. (1988), all of which followed the same vetted protocol. A meta-analysis of these studies examined the difference in funniness ratings between the “smile” and “pout” conditions. The original Strack et al. (1988) study reported a rating difference of 0.82 units on a 10-point Likert scale. Our meta-analysis revealed a rating difference of 0.03 units with a 95% confidence interval ranging from −0.11 to 0.16.

The sense of agency as tracking control

Does sense of agency (SoA) arise merely from action-outcome associations, or does an additional real-time process track each step along the chain? Tracking control predicts that deviant intermediate steps between action and outcome should reduce SoA. In two experiments, participants learned mappings between two finger actions and two tones. In later test blocks, actions triggered a robot hand moving either the same or a different finger, and also triggered tones, which were congruent or incongruent with the mapping. The perceived delay between actions and tones gave a proxy measure for SoA. Action-tone binding was stronger for congruent than incongruent tones, but only when the robot movement was also congruent. Congruent tones also had reduced N1 amplitudes, but again only when the robot movement was congruent. We suggest that SoA partly depends on a real-time tracking control mechanism, since deviant intermediate action of the robot reduced SoA over the tone.

Unconscious associative learning with conscious cues

Despite extensive research, the very existence of unconscious learning in humans remains much debated. Skepticism arises chiefly from the difficulty in assessing the level of awareness of the complex associations learned in classical implicit learn- ing paradigms. Here, we show that simple associations between colors and motion directions can be learned unconsciously. In each trial, participants had to report the motion direction of a patch of colored dots but unbeknownst to the participants, two out of the three possible colors were always associated with a given direction/response, while one was uninformative. We confirm the lack of awareness by using several tasks, fulfilling the most stringent criteria. In addition, we show the cru- cial role of trial-by-trial feedback, and that both the stimulus-response (motor) and stimulus-stimulus (perceptual) associa- tions were learned. In conclusion, we demonstrate that simple associations between supraliminal stimulus features can be learned unconsciously, providing a novel framework to study unconscious learning.

Ecological assessment of divided attention

The ability to perform two tasks simultaneously has become increasingly important as attention-demanding technologies have become more common in daily life. This type of attentional resources allocation is commonly called "divided attention". Because of the importance of divided attention in natural world settings, substantial efforts have been made recently so as to promote an integrated, realistic assessment of functional abilities in dual-task paradigms. In this context, virtual reality methods appear to be a good solution. However to date, there has been little discussion on validity of such methods. Here, we offer a comparative review of conventional tools used to assess divided attention and of the first virtual reality studies (mostly from the field of road and pedestrian safety). The ecological character of virtual environments leads to a better understanding of the influence of dualtask settings and also makes it possible to clarify issues such as the utility of hands-free phones. After discussing the theoretical and clinical contributions of these studies, we discuss the limits of virtual reality assessment, focusing in particular: (i) on the challenges associated with lack of familiarity with new technological devices; (ii) on the validity of the ecological character of virtual environments; and (iii) on the question of whether the results obtained in a specific context can be generalized to all dual-task situations typical of daily life. To overcome the limitations associated with virtual reality, we propose: (i) to include a standardized familiarization phase in assessment protocols so as to limit the interference caused by the use of new technologies; (ii) to systematically compare virtual reality performance with conventional tests or real-life tests; and (iii) to design dual-task scenarios that are independent from the patient's expertise on one of the two tasks. We conclude that virtual reality appears to constitute a useful tool when used in combination with more conventional tests.

Objective and subjective measures of cross-situational learning

Statistical learning is often considered to be automatic and implicit, but little is known about the extent to which the resulting representations are available to conscious awareness. In the present study, we focus on whether the knowledge acquired in statistical learning of word-referent pairs is available to conscious control. Using a cross-situational learning paradigm, adult participants were first exposed to a set of pictures associated with auditorily presented words. Immediately thereafter, they were exposed to a second set of word-picture pairs. After the exposure phase, learning and conscious accessibility to the acquired knowledge were measured by using an adaptation of the Process Dissociation Procedure (Jacoby, 1991): two recognition tasks that only differed by instructions. In the Inclusion task, participants were instructed to accept all the correct associations (either from the first or the second set) and reject all the incorrect associations. In the Exclusion task, they had to accept all the correct associations from one of the sets and reject both the correct associations from the other set as well as all incorrect associations. Moreover, binary confidence judgments were recorded after each trial. Results show that participants were able to control the acquired knowledge. However, confidence judgments revealed that participants correctly identified the learned associations even when they claimed to guess, suggesting that cross-situational learning involves a mixture of both conscious and unconscious influences.

Coercion changes the sense of agency in the human brain

People may deny responsibility for negative consequencesof their actions by claiming that they were‘‘only obeying orders.'' The ‘‘Nuremberg defense'' offersone extreme example, though it is often dismissedas merely an attempt to avoid responsibility.Milgram's classic laboratory studies reported widespreadobedience to an instruction to harm, suggestingthat social coercion may alter mechanisms ofvoluntary agency, and hence abolish the normalexperience of being in control of one's own actions.However, Milgram's and other studies relied ondissembling and on explicit measures of agency,which are known to be biased by social norms.Here, we combined coercive instructions to administerharm to a co-participant, with implicit measuresof sense of agency, based on perceived compressionof time intervals between voluntary actionsand their outcomes, and with electrophysiologicalrecordings. In two experiments, an experimenterordered a volunteer to make a key-press action thatcaused either financial penalty or demonstrablypainful electric shock to their co-participant, therebyincreasing their own financial gain. Coercionincreased the perceived interval between actionand outcome, relative to a situation where participantsfreely chose to inflict the same harms. Interestingly,coercion also reduced the neural processing ofthe outcomes of one's own action. Thus, people whoobey orders may subjectively experience their actionsas closer to passive movements than fullyvoluntary actions. Our results highlight the complexrelation between the brain mechanisms thatgenerate the subjective experience of voluntary actionsand social constructs, such as responsibility.

Dissociating perception from action during conscious and unconscious conflict adaptation

The detection of a conflict between relevant and irrelevant information on a given trial typically results in a smaller conflict effect on the next trial. This sequential effect has been interpreted as an expression of cognitive control implemented to resolve conflict. In this context, 2 different but related issues have received increasing attention in the literature. The first issue is whether the detection of motor conflict is necessary to induce cognitive control or, alternatively, whether the detection of perceptual conflict is sufficient. The second issue concerns whether awareness of the conflict is necessary to induce cognitive control. Here, we address both issues in a single design. Our reaction-time (RT) results indicate that conflict-driven control is domain-specific. The detection of perceptual conflict on the previous trial selectively reduces perceptual conflict on the next trial. Similarly, the detection of motor conflict on the previous trial selectively reduces motor conflict on the next trial. For errors, adaptive control seemed to be more general: The detection of perceptual or motor conflict on the previous trial reduced the frequency of errors on response-conflict trials. Furthermore, unconsciously triggered conflict adaptation was observed, but not systematically. Results on errors provide some evidence that sensitivity to an unconscious conflict on the previous trial reduces the frequency of errors on the current trial. For RT analyses however, unconscious conflict appeared not to be sufficient to induce cognitive control. This pattern of results is in line with previous studies examining the role of consciousness in conflict adaptation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved)

‘Free Will': Are we all equal ? A dynamical perspective of the conscious intention to move

In their seminal (1983) study, Libet and colleagues suggested that awareness of one's intention to act has a postdictive character in that it occurs long after cerebral activity leading to action has been initiated. Crucially, Libet et al. further suggested that the time window (6200 ms) between the conscious experience of the intention to act and the action itself offers people the possibility of “vetoing” the unfolding action. This raises the question of whether there are individual differences in the duration of this “veto window” and which components of the readiness potential (RP) and the lateral- ized readiness potential (LRP) explain this variability. It has been reported that some psychiatric diseases lead to shorter intervals between conscious intentions and actions. However, it is unclear whether such patients suffer from impair- ment of the sense of volition, thus experiencing voluntary movements as involuntary, or whether voluntary inhibition of action is actually reduced, since conscious intention occurs later. We had two aims in the present paper. First, we aimed at clarifying the role of consciousness in voluntary actions by examining the relation between the duration of the veto window and impulsivity. Second, we sought to examine different components of the RP and LRP waveforms so as to attempt to explain observed variability in W judgments. Our results indicate (1) that impulsive people exhibit a shorter delay between their intention and the action than non-impulsive people, and (2) that this difference can hardly be attrib- uted to a difference in time perception. Electroencephalography indicated that the rate of growth of the RP is relevant to explain differences in W judgments, since we observed that the RP at the moment of conscious intention is lower for people with late conscious intention than for people with early conscious intention. The onset and the intercept of these waveforms were less interpretable. These results bring new light on the role that consciousness plays in voluntary action.

2015

Le sport de compétition, laboratoire de la médecine d'amélioration: analyse éthique et philosophique de la question du dopage

El deporte de competición, laboratorio de la medicina del mejoramiento: análisis ético y filosófico del problema del dopaje

Impact of Acute Sleep Deprivation on Sarcasm Detection.

There is growing evidence that sleep plays a pivotal role on health, cognition and emotional regulation. However, the interplay between sleep and social cognition remains an uncharted research area. In particular, little is known about the impact of sleep deprivation on sarcasm detection, an ability which, once altered, may hamper everyday social interactions. The aim of this study is to determine whether sleep-deprived participants are as able as sleep-rested participants to adopt another perspective in gauging sarcastic statements. At 9am, after a whole night of sleep (n = 15) or a sleep deprivation night (n = 15), participants had to read the description of an event happening to a group of friends. An ambiguous voicemail message left by one of the friends on another's phone was then presented, and participants had to decide whether the recipient would perceive the message as sincere or as sarcastic. Messages were uttered with a neutral intonation and were either: (1) sarcastic from both the participant's and the addressee's perspectives (i.e. both had access to the relevant background knowledge to gauge the message as sarcastic), (2) sarcastic from the participant's but not from the addressee's perspective (i.e. the addressee lacked context knowledge to detect sarcasm) or (3) sincere. A fourth category consisted in messages sarcastic from both the participant's and from the addressee's perspective, uttered with a sarcastic tone. Although sleep-deprived participants were as accurate as sleep-rested participants in interpreting the voice message, they were also slower. Blunted reaction time was not fully explained by generalized cognitive slowing after sleep deprivation; rather, it could reflect a compensatory mechanism supporting normative accuracy level in sarcasm understanding. Introducing prosodic cues compensated for increased processing difficulties in sarcasm detection after sleep deprivation. Our findings support the hypothesis that sleep deprivation might damage the flow of social interactions by slowing perspective-taking processes.

Avant-propos

"biology and the future of man", 18-24 septembre 1974 : l'histoire d'un devenir

This article sketches the context of the 1960s and 1970s during which was held in Paris in 1974 the international conference "Biology and the future of man", and shows by this reminder that the Paris conference was a precursor moment in Europe in terms of academic answers to ethical questions that were emerging in the USA. At its extent, the Paris conference was a pioneer in the history of "bioethics" and "environmental ethics".

Does level of processing affect the transition from unconscious to conscious perception?

Recently, Windey, Gevers, and Cleeremans (2013) proposed a level of processing (LoP) hypothesis claiming that the transition from unconscious to conscious perception is influenced by the level of processing imposed by task requirements. Here, we carried out two experiments to test the LoP hypothesis. In both, participants were asked to classify briefly presented pairs of letters as same or different, based either on the letters' physical features (a low-level task), or on a semantic rule (a high-level task). Stimulus awareness was measured by means of the four-point Perceptual Awareness Scale (PAS). The results showed that low or moderate stimulus visibility was reported more frequently in the low-level task than in the high-level task, suggesting that the transition from unconscious to conscious perception is more gradual in the former than in the latter. Therefore, although alternative interpretations remain possible, the results of the present study fully support the LoP hypothesis.

Prolongation de la vie et médecine d'amélioration

The Temporal Dynamic of Automatic Inhibition of Irrelevant Actions

Motor inhibition can occur even without conscious perception and any voluntary effort. Although it is now clear that such an inhibitory process needs time to unfold, its exact temporal dynamic remains to be elucidated. Therefore, the present study aims to examine the impact of various temporal factors on automatic motor inhibition using the masked priming task. Results shows that this process can be modulated by any factor that introduces time between the mask onset and the execution of target response, whether it stems from a purely external origin (mask-target SOA), a purely internal origin (spontaneous reaction time [RT] fluctuations), or a mix of both (RT fluctuations from the target sequence). Moreover, when the external temporal factor could not determine the direction of prime influence, the RT fluctuations had the strongest impact on the priming effect. These RT fluctuations are plausibly because of spontaneous trial-to-trial changes from more impulsive and error-prone decisions to more cautious and accurate decisions to the target. Indeed, both accuracy and speed were equally required during the task, but both requirements are impossible to achieve perfectly in every trial. This suggests that fluctuations in the level of caution in voluntary decisions can modulate unconscious and involuntary motor inhibition.

Consciousness as a graded and an all-or-none phenomenon: A conceptual analysis

The issue whether consciousness is a graded or an all-or-none phenomenon has been and continues to be a debate. Both contradictory accounts are supported by solid evidence. Starting from a level of processing framework allowing for states of partial awareness, here we further elaborate our view that visual experience, as it is most often investigated in the literature, is both graded and all-or-none. Low-level visual experience is graded, whereas high-level visual experience is all-or-none. We then present a conceptual analysis starting from the notion that consciousness is a general concept. We specify a number of different subconcepts present in the literature on consciousness, and outline how each of them may be seen as either graded, all-or-none, or both. We argue that such specifications are necessary to lead to a detailed and integrated understanding of how consciousness should be conceived of as graded and all-or-none.

The relationship between human agency and embodiment

Humans regularly feel a sense of agency (SoA) over events where the causal link between action and outcome is extremely indirect. We have investigated how intermediate (here, a robotic hand) events that intervene between action and outcome may alter SoA, using intentional binding measures. The robotic hand either performed the same movement as the participant (active congruent), or performed a similar movement with another finger (active incongruent). Binding was significantly reduced in the active incongruent relative to the active congruent condition, suggesting that altered embodiment influences SoA. However, binding effects were comparable between a condition where the robot hand made a congruent movement, and conditions where no robot hand was involved, suggesting that intermediate and embodied events do not reduce SoA. We suggest that human sense of agency involves both statistical associations between intentions and arbitrary outcomes, and an effector-specific matching of sensorimotor means used to achieve the outcome.

Rapid Serial Auditory Presentation: a new measure of statistical learning in speech segmentation

The Rapid Serial Visual Presentation procedure is a method widely used in visual perception research. In this paper we propose an adaptation of this method which can be used with auditory material and enables assessment of statistical learning in speech segmentation. Adult participants were exposed to an artificial speech stream composed of statistically defined trisyllabic nonsense words. They were subsequently instructed to perform a detection task in a Rapid Serial Auditory Presentation (RSAP) stream in which they had to detect a syllable in a short speech stream. Results showed that reaction times varied as a function of the statistical predictability of the syllable: second and third syllables of each word were responded to faster than first syllables. This result suggests that the RSAP procedure provides a reliable and sensitive indirect measure of auditory statistical learning.

Assessing segmentation processes by click detection: online measure of statistical learning, or simple interference?

Statistical learning can be used to extract the words from continuous speech. Gómez, Bion, and Mehler (Language and Cognitive Processes, 26, 212-223, 2011) proposed an online measure of statistical learning: They superimposed auditory clicks on a continuous artificial speech stream made up of a random succession of trisyllabic nonwords. Participants were instructed to detect these clicks, which could be located either within or between words. The results showed that, over the length of exposure, reaction times (RTs) increased more for within-word than for between-word clicks. This result has been accounted for by means of statistical learning of the between-word boundaries. However, even though statistical learning occurs without an intention to learn, it nevertheless requires attentional resources. Therefore, this process could be affected by a concurrent task such as click detection. In the present study, we evaluated the extent to which the click detection task indeed reflects successful statistical learning. Our results suggest that the emergence of RT differences between within- and between-word click detection is neither systematic nor related to the successful segmentation of the artificial language. Therefore, instead of being an online measure of learning, the click detection task seems to interfere with the extraction of statistical regularities.

New frontiers in the rubber hand experiment: when a robotic hand becomes one's own

The rubber hand illusion is an experimental paradigm in which participants consider a fake hand to be part of their body. This paradigm has been used in many domains of psychology (i.e., research on pain, body ownership, agency) and is of clinical importance. The classic rubber hand paradigm nevertheless suffers from limitations, such as the absence of active motion or the reliance on approximate measurements, which makes strict experimental conditions difficult to obtain. Here, we report on the development of a novel technology—a robotic, user- and computer-controllable hand—that addresses many of the limitations associated with the classic rubber hand paradigm. Because participants can actively control the robotic hand, the device affords higher realism and authenticity. Our robotic hand has a comparatively low cost and opens up novel and innovative methods. In order to validate the robotic hand, we have carried out three experiments. The first two studies were based on previous research using the rubber hand, while the third was specific to the robotic hand. We measured both sense of agency and ownership. Overall, results show that participants experienced a “robotic hand illusion” in the baseline conditions. Furthermore, we also replicated previous results about agency and ownership.

Different effects of executive and visuospatial working memory on visual consciousness

Consciousness and working memory are two widely studied cognitive phenomena. Although they have been closely tied on a theoretical and neural level, empirical work that investigates their relation is largely lacking. In this study, the relationship between visual consciousness and different working memory components is investigated by using a dual-task paradigm. More specifically, while participants were performing a visual detection task to measure their visual awareness threshold, they had to concurrently perform either an executive or visuospatial working memory task. We hypothesized that visual consciousness would be hindered depending on the type and the size of the load in working memory. Results showed that maintaining visuospatial content in working memory hinders visual awareness, irrespective of the amount of information maintained. By contrast, the detection threshold was progressively affected under increasing executive load. Interestingly, increasing executive load had a generic effect on detection speed, calling into question whether its obstructing effect is specific to the visual awareness threshold. Together, these results indicate that visual consciousness depends differently on executive and visuospatial working memory.

2014

The reversal of perceptual and motor compatibility effects differs qualitatively between metacontrast and random-line masks

In masked priming tasks, participants typically respond faster to compatible than to incompatible primes, an effect that has been dubbed as the positive compatibility effect (PCE). However, when the interval between the prime and the mask is relatively long, responses are faster to incompatible than to compatible primes. This inversion is called the negative compatibility effect (NCE). Two main origins of the NCE have been proposed. The object-updating theory holds that when the masks share stimulus features with the primes, both perceptual and motor processes generate an NCE. As an example, for masks composed of overlaid left and right prime arrows, the NCE is thought to be positive priming induced by the arrow of the mask pointing in the opposite direction of the prime. In contrast, the motor inhibition theories hold that the origin of the NCE is purely motor and can be demonstrated when masks do not share features with primes. To test both hypotheses, the present study aims at delineating the respective contributions of perceptual and motor components of the NCE in the context of different types of masks. Consistent with the object-updating hypothesis, we found both perceptual and motor NCEs at the long SOA with metacontrast masks (with internal contours corresponding to left and right overlaid arrows). Consistent with the motor inhibition hypothesis, we found motor NCE but no perceptual NCE at the long SOA with random-line masks (containing no prime features). The study thus suggests that the origin of the NCE depends on the type of mask.

Connecting conscious and unconscious processing

Consciousness remains a mystery—“a phenomenon that people do not know how to think about—yet” (Dennett, 1991, p. 21). Here, I consider how the connectionist perspective on infor- mation processing may help us progress toward the goal of understanding the computational prin- ciples through which conscious and unconscious processing differ. I begin by delineating the conceptual challenges associated with classical approaches to cognition insofar as understanding unconscious information processing is concerned, and to highlight several contrasting computa- tional principles that are constitutive of the connectionist approach. This leads me to suggest that conscious and unconscious processing are fundamentally connected, that is, rooted in the very same computational principles. I further develop a perspective according to which the brain con- tinuously and unconsciously learns to redescribe its own activity itself based on constant interac- tion with itself, with the world, and with other minds. The outcome of such interactions is the emergence of internal models that are metacognitive in nature and that function so as to make it possible for an agent to develop a (limited, implicit, practical) understanding of itself. In this light, plasticity and learning are constitutive of what makes us conscious, for it is in virtue of our own experiences with ourselves and with other people that our mental life acquires its subjective char- acter. The connectionist framework continues to be uniquely positioned in the Cognitive Sciences to address the challenge of identifying what one could call the “computational correlates of con- sciousness” (Mathis & Mozer, 1996) because it makes it possible to focus on the mechanisms through which information processing takes place.

Impaired decision-making under risk in individuals with alcohol dependence.

Alcohol dependence is associated with poor decision-making under ambiguity, that is, when decisions are to be made in the absence of known probabilities of reward and loss. However, little is known regarding decisions made by individuals with alcohol dependence in the context of known probabilities (decision under risk). In this study, we investigated the relative contribution of these distinct aspects of decision-making to alcohol dependence.

Different subjective awareness measures demonstrate the influence of visual identification on perceptual awareness ratings

We compare four subjective awareness measures in the context of a visual identification task and investigate quantitative differences in terms of scale use and correlation with task performance. We also analyse the effect of identification task decisions on subsequent subjective reports. Results show that awareness ratings strongly predict accuracy for all scale types, although the type of awareness measure may influence the reported level of perceptual awareness. Surprisingly, the overall relationship between awareness ratings and performance was weaker when participants rated their awareness before providing identification responses. Furthermore, the Perceptual Awareness Scale was most exhaustive only when used after the identification task, whereas confidence ratings were most exhaustive when used before the identification task. We conclude that the type of subjective measure applied may influence the reports on visual awareness. We also propose that identification task decisions may affect subsequent awareness ratings.

When a (precise) awareness measure became a (sketchy) introspective report

The graded and dichotomous nature of visual awareness

Is our visual experience of the world graded or dichotomous? Opposite pre-theoretical intuitions apply in different cases. For instance, when looking at a scene, one has a distinct sense that our experience has a graded character: one cannot say that there is no experience of contents that fall outside the focus of attention, but one cannot say that there is full awareness of such contents either. By contrast, when performing a visual detection task, our sense of having perceived the stimulus or not exhibits a more dichotomous character. Such issues have recently been the object of intense debate because different theoretical frameworks make different predictions about the graded versus dichotomous character of consciousness. Here, we review both relevant empirical findings as well as the associated theories (i.e. local recurrent processing versus global neural workspace theory). Next, we attempt to reconcile such contradictory theories by suggesting that level of processing is an often-ignored but highly relevant dimension through which we can cast a novel look at existing empirical findings. Thus, using a range of different stimuli, tasks and subjective scales, we show that processing low-level, non-semantic content results in graded visual experience, whereas processing high-level semantic content is experienced in a more dichotomous manner. We close by comparing our perspective with existing proposals, focusing in particular on the partial awareness hypothesis.

Nonconscious Learning From Crowded Sequences

Can people learn complex information without conscious awareness? Implicit learning—learning without awareness of what has been learned—has been the focus of intense investigation over the last 50 years. However, it remains controversial whether complex knowledge can be learned implicitly. In the research reported here, we addressed this challenge by asking participants to differentiate between sequences of symbols they could not perceive consciously. Using an operant-conditioning task, we showed that participants learned to associate distinct sequences of crowded (nondiscriminable) symbols with their respective monetary outcomes (reward or punishment). Overall, our study demonstrates that sensitivity to sequential regularities can arise through the nonconscious temporal integration of perceptual information.

On the other side of the mirror: Priming in cognitive and social psychology

Over the past several years, two largely separate traditions have collided, leading to controversy over claims about priming. We describe and contrast the main accounts of priming effects in cognitive and social psychology, focusing especially on the role of awareness. In so doing, we consider one of the core points of contention, claims about the effects of subliminal priming. Whereas cognitive psychologists often are interested in exploring how priming operates with and without awareness, social psychologists more commonly assume subliminality in order to bolster claims about the automaticity of priming. We discuss the criteria necessary to claim that a stimulus was processed entirely without awareness, noting the challenges in meeting those criteria. Finally, we identify three sources of conflict between the fields: awareness, replicability, and the nature of the underlying processes. We close by proposing resolutions for each of them.!

The effect of the cognitive demands of the distraction task on unconscious thought

The unconscious-thought effect occurs when distraction improves complex decision making. Recent studies suggest that this effect is more likely to occur with low- than high-demanding distraction tasks. We discuss implications of these findings for Newell & Shanks' (N&S's) claim that evidence is lacking for the intervention of unconscious processes in complex decision making.

Dissociating conscious and unconscious learning with objective and subjective measures

According to functionalist theories, consciousness can be defined by the functions that it serves and by the way it contributes to cognition. For example, when trying to establish dissociations between conscious and unconscious knowledge, conscious representations would be identified by the fact that they allow cognitive control or successful identification or recollection, assessed by verbal reports or forced-choice tasks. Even though the functionalist approach has brought about important dissociation results concerning conscious and unconscious cognition, critics emphasize that it does not account for the qualitative properties of conscious experience. Phenomenal theories are precisely based on the notion that conscious representations are such that it feels like something to have these representations. Thus, one way to assess conscious knowledge is to ask people, after they have produced a forced-choice response, to identify their mental states through the use of subjective confidence ratings, in which they discriminate between a complete guess and a response based on some feeling of knowing. However, these 2 approaches are not mutually exclusive. In this article, we review a series of studies showing that the joint use of objective judgments about some external stimuli and about one's own subjective knowledge concerning these stimuli, provides new insights into the putative dissociation between conscious and unconscious knowledge in learning.

Project DyAdd: Implicit learning in adult dyslexia and ADHD

In this study of the project DyAdd, implicit learning was investigated through two paradigms in adults (18-55 years) with dyslexia (n = 36) or with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD, n = 22) and in controls (n = 35). In the serial reaction time (SRT) task, there were no group differences in learning. However, those with ADHD exhibited faster RTs compared to other groups. In the artificial grammar learning (AGL) task, the groups did not differ from each other in their learning (i.e., grammaticality accuracy or similarity choices). Further, all three groups were sensitive to fragment overlap between learning and test-phase items (i.e., similarity choices were above chance). Grammaticality performance of control participants was above chance, but that of participants with dyslexia and participants with ADHD failed to differ from chance, indicating impaired grammaticality learning in these groups. While the main indices of AGL performance, grammaticality accuracy and similarity choices did not correlate with the neuropsychological variables that reflected dyslexia-related (phonological processing, reading, spelling, arithmetic) or ADHD-related characteristics (executive functions, attention), or intelligence, the explicit knowledge for the AGL grammar (i.e., ability to freely generate grammatical strings) correlated positively with the variables of phonological processing and reading. Further, SRT reaction times correlated positively with full scale intelligence quotient (FIQ). We conclude that, in AGL, learning difficulties of the underlying rule structure (as measured by grammaticality) are associated with dyslexia and ADHD. However, learning in AGL is not related to the defining neuropsychological features of dyslexia or ADHD. Instead, the resulting explicit knowledge relates to characteristics of dyslexia. © 2013 The International Dyslexia Association.

2013

Repeating a strongly masked stimulus increases priming and awareness.

Previous studies [Marcel, A. J. (1983). Conscious and unconscious perception: Experiments on visual masking and word recognition. Cognitive Psychology, 15(2), 197-237; Wentura, D., & Frings, C. (2005). Repeated masked category primes interfere with related exemplars: New evidence for negative semantic priming. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 31(1), 108-120] suggested that repeatedly presenting a masked stimulus improves priming without increasing perceptual awareness. However, neural theories of consciousness predict the opposite: Increasing bottom-up strength in such a paradigm should also result in increasing availability to awareness. Here, we tested this prediction by manipulating the number of repetitions of a strongly masked digit. Our results do not replicate the dissociation observed in previous studies and are instead suggestive that repeating an unconscious and attended masked stimulus enables the progressive emergence of perceptual awareness.

Sleep-dependent neurophysiological processes in implicit sequence learning.

Behavioral studies have cast doubts about the role that posttraining sleep may play in the consolidation of implicit sequence learning. Here, we used event-related fMRI to test the hypothesis that sleep-dependent functional reorganization would take place in the underlying neural circuits even in the possible absence of obvious behavioral changes. Twenty-four healthy human adults were scanned at Day 1 and then at Day 4 during an implicit probabilistic serial RT task. They either slept normally (RS) or were sleep-deprived (SD) on the first posttraining night. Unknown to them, the sequential structure of the material was based on a probabilistic finite-state grammar, with 15% chance on each trial of replacing the rules-based grammatical (G) stimulus with a nongrammatical (NG) one. Results indicated a gradual differentiation across sessions between RTs (faster RTs for G than NG), together with NG-related BOLD responses reflecting sequence learning. Similar behavioral patterns were observed in RS and SD participants at Day 4, indicating time- but not sleep-dependent consolidation of performance. Notwithstanding, we observed at Day 4 in the RS group a diminished differentiation between G- and NG-related neurophysiological responses in a set of cortical and subcortical areas previously identified as being part of the network involved in implicit sequence learning and its offline processing during sleep, indicating a sleep-dependent processing of both regular and deviant stimuli. Our results suggest the sleep-dependent development of distinct neurophysiological processes subtending consolidation of implicit motor sequence learning, even in the absence of overt behavioral differences.

La révolution des psychotropes : des espoirs déçus?

Implicit gambling attitudes in problem gamblers: positive but not negative implicit associations.

Implicit attitudes (associations) are involved in the generation of substance use behaviors. However, little is known about the role of this automatic cognitive processing in deregulated behaviors without substance use, such as abnormal gambling. This study examined whether problem gamblers exhibit both positive and negative implicit attitudes toward gambling-related stimuli.

The perception of visual emotion: Comparing different measures of awareness

Here, we explore the sensitivity of different awareness scales in revealing conscious reports on visual emotion perception. Participants were exposed to a backward masking task involving fearful faces and asked to rate their conscious awareness in perceiving emotion in facial expression using three different subjective measures: confidence ratings (CRs), with the conventional taxonomy of certainty, the perceptual awareness scale (PAS), through which participants categorize " raw" visual experience, and post-decision wagering (PDW), which involves economic categorization. Our results show that the CR measure was the most exhaustive and the most graded. In contrast, the PAS and PDW measures suggested instead that consciousness of emotional stimuli is dichotomous. Possible explanations of the inconsistency were discussed. Finally, our results also indicate that PDW biases awareness ratings by enhancing first-order accuracy of emotion perception. This effect was possibly a result of higher motivation induced by monetary incentives. © 2012 Elsevier Inc..

Subjective visibility depends on level of processing

Is visual awareness graded or binary? Experimental work has provided support for both possibilities, leading to two coexisting but contradictory theoretical accounts. Here we pro- pose a promising candidate factor through which to integrate both accounts: the depth of stimulus processing required by the task. We compared color identification (a low-level task) with numerical judgements (a high-level task) performed on the very same colored number stimuli. Psychophysical curves were analyzed for both objective discrimination performance and subjective visibility ratings on a trial-by trial basis. We observed a graded relationship between stimulus duration and visibility in the low-level task, but a more non-linear relationship in the high-level task. Both patterns of results have previously been consistently associated with the graded and the dichotomous account, respectively. Follow-up experiments that manipulate the level of processing can further unify previously inconsistent results, thus integrating two major theories of visual awareness.

Iowa Gambling Task (IGT): twenty years after - gambling disorder and IGT.

The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) involves probabilistic learning via monetary rewards and punishments, where advantageous task performance requires subjects to forego potential large immediate rewards for small longer-term rewards to avoid larger losses. Pathological gamblers (PG) perform worse on the IGT compared to controls, relating to their persistent preference toward high, immediate, and uncertain rewards despite experiencing larger losses. In this contribution, we review studies that investigated processes associated with poor IGT performance in PG. Findings from these studies seem to fit with recent neurocognitive models of addiction, which argue that the diminished ability of addicted individuals to ponder short-term against long-term consequences of a choice may be the product of an hyperactive automatic attentional and memory system for signaling the presence of addiction-related cues (e.g., high uncertain rewards associated with disadvantageous decks selection during the IGT) and for attributing to such cues pleasure and excitement. This incentive-salience associated with gambling-related choice in PG may be so high that it could literally "hijack" resources ["hot" executive functions (EFs)] involved in emotional self-regulation and necessary to allow the enactment of further elaborate decontextualized problem-solving abilities ("cool" EFs). A framework for future research is also proposed, which highlights the need for studies examining how these processes contribute specifically to the aberrant choice profile displayed by PG on the IGT.

Placebo-suggestion modulates conflict resolution in the Stroop Task

Here, we ask whether placebo-suggestion (without any form of hypnotic induction) can modulate the resolution of cognitive conflict. Naïve participants performed a Stroop Task while wearing an EEG cap described as a “brain wave” machine. In Experiment 1, participants were made to believe that the EEG cap would either enhance or decrease their color perception and performance on the Stroop task. In Experiment 2, participants were explicitly asked to <italic>imagine</italic> that their color perception and performance would be enhanced or decreased (non-hypnotic imaginative suggestion). We observed effects of placebo-suggestion on Stroop interference on accuracy: interference was decreased with positive suggestion and increased with negative suggestion compared to baseline. Intra-individual variability was also increased under negative suggestion compared to baseline. Compliance with the instruction to imagine a modulation of performance, on the other hand, did not influence accuracy and only had a negative impact on response latencies and on intra-individual variability, especially in the congruent condition of the Stroop Task. Taken together, these results demonstrate that expectations induced by a placebo-suggestion can modulate our ability to resolve cognitive conflict, either facilitating or impairing response accuracy depending on the suggestion’s contents. Our results also demonstrate a dissociation between placebo-suggestion and non-hypnotic imaginative suggestion

De la leucotomie à la stimulation électrique profonde : aspects historiques et éthiques de la psychochirurgie

Biodiversité, philosophie transhumaniste et Avenir de l'homme

Biodiversidad, filosofia transhumanista y el futuro del hombre

2012

Decision making under ambiguity but not under risk is related to problem gambling severity.

The aim of the present study was to examine the relationship between problem gambling severity and decision-making situations that vary in two degrees of uncertainty (probability of outcome is known: decision-making under risk; probability of outcome is unknown: decision-making under ambiguity). For this purpose, we recruited 65 gamblers differing in problem gambling severity and 35 normal controls. Decision-making under ambiguity was assessed with the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) and the Card Playing Task (CPT). Decision-making under risk was assessed with the Coin Flipping Task (CFT) and the Cups Task. In addition, we included an examination of two working memory components (verbal storage and dual tasking). Results show that problem gamblers performed worse than normal controls on both ambiguous and risky decision-making. Higher problem gambling severity scores were associated with poorer performance on ambiguous decision-making tasks (IGT and CPT) but not decision-making under risk. Additionally, we found that dual task performance correlated positively with decision-making under risk (CFT and Cups tasks) but not with decision-making under ambiguity (IGT and CPT). These results suggest that impairments in decision-making under uncertain conditions of problem gamblers may represent an important neurocognitive mechanism in the maintenance of their problem gambling.

Lateralized implicit sequence learning in uni- and bi-manual conditions.

It has been proposed that the right hemisphere (RH) is better suited to acquire novel material whereas the left hemisphere (LH) is more able to process well-routinized information. Here, we ask whether this potential dissociation also manifests itself in an implicit learning task. Using a lateralized version of the serial reaction time task (SRT), we tested whether participants trained in a divided visual field condition primarily stimulating the RH would learn the implicit regularities embedded in sequential material faster than participants in a condition favoring LH processing. In the first study, half of participants were presented sequences in the left (vs. right) visual field, and had to respond using their ipsilateral hand (unimanual condition), hence making visuo-motor processing possible within the same hemisphere. Results showed successful implicit sequence learning, as indicated by increased reaction time for a transfer sequence in both hemispheric conditions and lack of conscious knowledge in a generation task. There was, however, no evidence of interhemispheric differences. In the second study, we hypothesized that a bimanual response version of the lateralized SRT, which requires interhemispheric communication and increases computational and cognitive processing loads, would favor RH-dependent visuospatial/attentional processes. In this bimanual condition, our results revealed a much higher transfer effect in the RH than in the LH condition, suggesting higher RH sensitivity to the processing of novel sequential material. This LH/RH difference was interpreted within the framework of the Novelty-Routinization model [Goldberg, E., & Costa, L. D. (1981). Hemisphere differences in the acquisition and use of descriptive systems. Brain and Language, 14(1), 144-173] and interhemispheric interactions in attentional processing [Banich, M. T. (1998). The missing link: the role of interhemispheric interaction in attentional processing. Brain and Cognition, 36(2), 128-157].

Impaired Metacognitive Capacities in Individuals with Problem Gambling.

Impaired insight into behavior may be one of the clinical characteristics of pathological gambling. In the present study, we tested whether the capacity to evaluate accurately the quality of one's own decisions during a non-gambling task was impaired in problem gamblers. Twenty-five problem gamblers and 25 matched healthy participants performed an artificial grammar-learning paradigm, in which the quality of choice remains uncertain throughout the task. After each trial of this task, participants had to indicate how confident they were in the grammaticality judgements using a scale ranging from 1 (low confidence) to 7 (high confidence). Results showed that (i), problem gamblers' performance on the grammaticality test was lower than controls'; (ii) there was a significant correlation between grammaticality judgments and confidence for control participants, which indicates metacognitive insight and the presence of conscious knowledge; (iii) this correlation was not significant in problem gamblers, which suggests a disconnection between performance and confidence in this group. These findings suggest that problem gamblers are impaired in their metacognitive abilities on a non-gambling task, which suggests that compulsive gambling is associated with poor insight as a general factor. Clinical interventions tailored to improve metacognition in gambling could be a fruitful avenue of research in order to prevent pathological gambling.

Subjective measures of consciousness in artificial grammar learning task

Consciousness can be measured in various ways, but different measures often yield different conclusions about the extent to which awareness relates to performance. Here, we compare five different subjective measures of awareness in the context of an artificial grammar learning task. Participants (N= 217) expressed their subjective awareness of rules using one of five different scales: confidence ratings (CRs), post-decision wagering (PDW), feeling of warmth (FOW), rule awareness (RAS), and continuous scale (SDS). All scales were equally sensitive to conscious knowledge. PDW, however, was affected by risk aversion, and both RAS and SDS applied different minimal criteria for rule awareness. CR seems to capture the largest range of consciousness, but failed to indicate unconscious knowledge with the guessing criterion. We close by discussing the theoretical implications of scale sensitivity and propose that CR's unique features enable (in conjunction with RAS and FOW) a finer assessment of subjective states of awareness. © 2012 Elsevier Inc.

The influence of articulatory suppression on the control of implicit sequence knowledge

The present study investigated the consciousness-control relationship by suppressing the possibility to exert executive control on incidentally acquired knowledge. Participants first learned a sequence of locations through a serial reaction time (SRT) task. Next, to assess the extent to which the incidentally acquired knowledge was available to executive control, they were asked both to generate the learned sequence under inclusion instructions, and then to avoid the generation of the learned sequence under exclusion instructions. We manipulated the possibility for participants to recruit control processes in the generation task in three different conditions. In addition to a control condition, participants generated sequences under inclusion and exclusion concurrently with either articulatory suppression or foot tapping. In a final recognition task, participants reacted to old vs. new short sequences (triplets), and judged, for each sequence, whether it had been presented before or not. Results suggest that articulatory suppression specifically impairs exclusion performance by interfering with inner speech. Because participants were nevertheless able to successfully recognize fragments of the training sequence in the recognition task, this is indicative of a dissociation between control and recognition memory. In other words, this study suggests that executive control and consciousness might not be associated in all circumstances.

Higher order thoughts in action: Consciousness as an unconscious re-description process

Metacognition is usually construed as a conscious, intentional process whereby people reflect upon their own mental activity. Here, we instead suggest that metacognition is but an instance of a larger class of representational re-description processes that we assume occur unconsciously and automatically. From this perspective, the brain continuously and unconsciously learns to anticipate the consequences of action or activity on itself, on the world and on other people through three predictive loops: an inner loop, a perception-action loop and a self-other (social cognition) loop, which together form a tangled hierarchy.We ask what kinds of mechanisms may subtend this form of enactive metacognition. We extend previous neural network simulations and compare the model with signal detection theory, highlighting that while the latter approach assumes that both type I (objective) and type II (subjective, metacognition-based) decisions tap into the same signal at different hierarchical levels, our approach is closer to dual-route models in which it is assumed that the re-descriptions made possible by the emergence of meta-representations occur independently and outside of the firstorder causal chain.We close by reviewing relevant neurological evidence for the idea that awareness, self-awareness and social cognition involve the same mechanisms. © 2012 The Royal Society.

Subliminal behavioral priming: It is all in the mind, but whose mind?

Amorçage comportemental : produit de l'esprit, mais de l'esprit que qui au juste ? Il est nécessaire de mettre à jour le paradigme d'amorçage comportemental : le comportement des participants peut en effet être influencé par des déterminants non conscients, mais les attentes des expérimentateurs jouent aussi un rôle certain. L'amorçage comportemental, technique par laquelle le comportement est altéré par l'induction d'influences subconscientes fait date en psychologie. Mais, une étude récente montre que les déterminants de cette situation sont différents de ce qui était typiquement admis : les attentes des expérimentateurs jouent également un rôle crucial dans l'expression de l'effet d'amorçage. Ces résultats sont présentés dans l'édition du 18 janvier du journal PLoS One http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0029081. L'étude conduite par Stéphane Doyen et ses collaborateurs de l'Université Libre de Bruxelles avait pour objectif la réplication d'une expérience princeps d'amorçage comportemental réalisée pour la première fois en 1996. Au cours de celle-ci, les auteurs testèrent si mener subconsciemment des participants à penser au concept de vieillesse entrainerait une diminution subséquente de leur vitesse de marche. Ces participants s'étaient portés volontaires pour participer à une simple tâche de mise en bon ordre des phrases mélangées comportant toutes un mot de nature particulière. Pourtant, la mesure retenue ici par les expérimentateurs était la vitesse à laquelle ceux-ci marchaient lorsqu'ils quittaient le laboratoire. Ces chercheurs ont montré que ces mots de nature particulière, relatifs au concept de vieillesse, avaient amorcé chez ces participants ce même concept et les avaient amenés à marcher plus lentement. Cependant, dans cette nouvelle étude, les chercheurs de l'Université Libre de Bruxelles ont trouvé que cet effet d'amorçage n'était présent que lorsque les croyances des expérimentateurs étaient modifiées de telle sorte qu'ils attendent à observer une marche ralentie chez les sujets qu'ils testent. Les auteurs de l'étude insistent sur le fait qu'il ne s'agit pas uniquement d'un effet de prévision créatrice, mais plutôt de la démonstration de l'intégration d'informations contextuelles subtiles dans la régulation de nos comportements sociaux automatiques, telle que les attentes des expérimentateurs, qui, de concours avec l'amorçage initié par les phrases mélangées on altéré le comportement des participants.

The validity of d' measures.

Subliminal perception occurs when prime stimuli that participants claim not to be aware of nevertheless influence subsequent processing of a target. This claim, however, critically depends on correct methods to assess prime awareness. Typically, d' ("d prime") tasks administered after a priming task are used to establish that people are unable to discriminate between different primes. Here, we show that such d' tasks are influenced by the nature of the target, by attentional factors, and by the delay between stimulus presentation and response. Our results suggest that the standard d' task is not a straightforward measure of prime visibility. We discuss the implications of our findings for subliminal perception research.

Low Hopes, High Expectations

This article revisits two classical issues in experimental methodology: experimenter bias and demand characteristics. We report a content analysis of the method section of experiments reported in two psychology journals (Psychological Science and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology), focusing on aspects of the procedure associated with these two phenomena, such as mention of the presence of the experimenter, suspicion probing, and handling of deception. We note that such information is very often absent, which prevents observers from gauging the extent to which such factors influence the results. We consider the reasons that may explain this omission, including the automatization of psychology experiments, the evolution of research topics, and, most important, a view of research participants as passive receptacles of stimuli. Using a situated social cognition perspective, we emphasize the importance of integrating the social context of experiments in the explanation of psychological phenomena. We illustrate this argument via a controversy on stereotype-based behavioralpriming effects.

Impulsive action but not impulsive choice determines problem gambling severity.

Impulsivity is a hallmark of problem gambling. However, impulsivity is not a unitary construct and this study investigated the relationship between problem gambling severity and two facets of impulsivity: impulsive action (impaired ability to withhold a motor response) and impulsive choice (abnormal aversion for the delay of reward).

Impaired Self-Awareness in Pathological Gamblers.

Lack of self-awareness of one's decisions remains an understudied and elusive topic in the addiction literature. The present study aimed at taking a first step towards addressing this difficult subject through the use of a combination of behavioral procedures. Here, we explored the association between a metacognitive process (the ability to reflect and evaluate the awareness of one's own decision) and poor performance on the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) in a group of pathological gamblers (PG; n = 30), and in a comparison group (n = 35). This metacognitive process was assessed during the IGT with the post-decision wagering procedure, while a number of potential confounds (i.e., reward/loss sensitivity, dual-tasking) were controlled for. Results showed that: (1) Initial performance enhancement of the control group on IGT occurred without explicit knowledge of the task, thus confirming its implicit character; (2) compared to controls, performance of PG on the IGT failed to increase during the task; (3) taking into account increased reward sensitivity and decreased loss sensitivity as well as poorer dual-tasking in pathological gamblers, PG tended to exhibit a bias in evaluating their own performance on the IGT by maximizing their wagers independently of selecting advantageous decks. Our findings suggest that biased metacognition may affect pathological gamblers, leading to disadvantageous post-decision wagering, which is in turn linked to impaired decision making under ambiguity. Perhaps this deficit reflects the impaired insight and self-awareness that many addicts suffer from, thus providing a novel approach for capturing and measuring this impairment, and for investigating its possible causes.

Belgian norms for the Waterloo-Stanford Group C (WSGC) Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility.

ABSTRACT:Belgian norms of the Waterloo-Stanford Group C Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility (WSGC) are presented. A French translation of the WSGC was administered to 150 Belgium college students between October and December 2009. Belgium has 2 main linguistic groups, Dutch and French speakers. The present translation was conceived for all French-speaking populations. Score distribution, item analysis, and reliability of the WSGC are presented and compared to the normative sample of the WSGC. The results were also compared with 2 North American norms (University of Connecticut and Seton Hall University) and a Portuguese (translated) norm. The findings show that normative data from the French (Belgium) sample are in line with the reference samples. The only significant difference was the lower proportion of participants scoring within the high range of hypnotic suggestibility on the WSGC.

When fake becomes truth: placebo-suggestion modulates conflict adaptation in the Stroop Task

Manipulating attentional load in sequence learning through random number generation

Implicit learning is often assumed to be an effortless process. However, some artificial grammar learning and sequence learning studies using dual tasks seem to suggest that attention is essential for implicit learning to occur. This discrepancy probably results from the specific type of secondary task that is used. Different secondary tasks may engage attentional resources differently and therefore may bias performance on the primary task in different ways. Here, we used a random number generation (RNGRNGRNG) task, which may allow for a closer monitoring of a participant's engagement in a secondary task than the popular secondary task in sequence learning studies: tone counting (TCTC). In the first two experiments, we investigated the interference associated with performing RNG concurrently with a serial reaction time (SRTSRT) task. In a third experiment, we compared the effects of RNGRNGRNG and TCTC. In all three experiments, we directly evaluated participants' knowledge of the sequence with a subsequent sequence generation task. Sequence learning was consistently observed in all experiments, but was impaired under dual-task conditions. Most importantly, our data suggest that RNG is more demanding and impairs learning to a greater extent than TCTC. Nevertheless, we failed to observe effects of the secondary task in subsequent sequence generation. Our studies indicate that RNG is a promising task to explore the involvement of attention in the SRTSRT task.

2011

Time course of attentional bias for gambling information in problem gambling.

There is a wealth of evidence showing enhanced attention toward drug-related information (i.e., attentional bias) in substance abusers. However, little is known about attentional bias in deregulated behaviors without substance use such as abnormal gambling. This study examined whether problem gamblers (PrG, as assessed through self-reported gambling-related craving and gambling dependence severity) exhibit attentional bias for gambling-related cues. Forty PrG and 35 control participants performed a change detection task using the flicker paradigm, in which two images differing in only one aspect are repeatedly flashed on the screen until the participant is able to report the changing item. In our study, the changing item was either neutral or related to gambling. Eye movements were recorded, which made it possible to measure both initial orienting of attention as well as its maintenance on gambling information. Direct (eye-movements) and indirect (change in detection latency) measures of attention in individuals with problematic gambling behaviors suggested the occurrence of both engagement and of maintenance attentional biases toward gambling-related visual cues. Compared to nonproblematic gamblers, PrG exhibited (a) faster reaction times to gambling-cues as compared to neutral cues, (b) higher percentage of initial saccades directed toward gambling pictures, and (c) an increased fixation duration and fixation count on gambling pictures. In the PrG group, measures of gambling-related attentional bias were not associated with craving for gambling and gambling dependence severity. Theoretical and clinical implications of these results are discussed.

Measuring consciousness: Task accuracy and awareness as sigmoid functions of stimulus duration

When consciousness is examined using subjective ratings, the extent to which processing is conscious or unconscious is often estimated by calculating task performance at the subjective threshold or by calculating the correlation between accuracy and awareness. However, both these methods have certain limitations. In the present article, we propose describing task accuracy and awareness as functions of stimulus intensity (thus obtaining an accuracy and an awareness curve) as suggested by Koch and Preuschoff (2007). The estimated lag between the curves describes how much stimulus intensity must increase for awareness to change proportionally as much as accuracy and the slopes of the curves are used to assess how fast accuracy and awareness increases and whether awareness is dichotomous. The method is successfully employed to assess consciousness characteristics on data from four different awareness scales. © 2011 Elsevier Inc.

Statistical learning of two artificial languages presented successively : How conscious

Statistical learning is assumed to occur automatically and implicitly, but little is known about the extent to which the representations acquired over training are available to conscious awareness. In this study, we focus on whether the knowledge acquired in a statistical learning situation is available to conscious control. Participants were first exposed to an artificial language presented auditorily. Immediately thereafter, they were exposed to a sec- ond artificial language. Both languages were composed of the same corpus of syllables and differed only in the transitional probabilities. We first determined that both languages were equally learnable (Experiment 1) and that participants could learn the two languages and differentiate between them (Experiment 2). Then, in Experiment 3, we used an adaptation of the Process-Dissociation Procedure (Jacoby, 1991) to explore whether participants could consciously manipulate the acquired knowledge. Results suggest that statistical informa- tion can be used to parse and differentiate between two different artificial languages, and that the resulting representations are available to conscious control.

Reduced attentional blink for gambling-related stimuli in problem gamblers.

Although there is considerable information concerning the attentional biases in psychoactive substance use and misuse, much less is known about the contribution of attentional processing in problem gambling. The aim of this study was to examine whether problem gamblers (PrG) exhibit attentional bias at the level of the encoding processing stage. Forty PrG and 35 controls participated in an attentional blink (AB) paradigm in which they were required to identify both gambling and neutral words that appeared in a rapid serial visual presentation. Explicit motivation (e.g., intrinsic/arousal, extrinsic, amotivation) toward the gambling cues was recorded. A diminished AB effect for gambling-related words compared to neutral targets was identified in PrG. In contrast, AB was similar when either gambling-related or neutral words were presented to controls. Furthermore, there was a significant positive correlation between the reduced AB for gambling-related words and the sub-score of intrinsic/arousal motivation to gamble in PrG. Such findings suggest that the PrG group exhibits an enhanced ability to process gambling-related information, which is associated with their desire to gamble for arousal reasons. Theoretical and clinical implications of these results are discussed.

Dopage sportif et médecine d'amélioration.

The reason that gives doping in sport a deeper philosophical and ethical dimension is the emergence of a new medical paradigm: enhancement medicine. The question of enhancing performance in sport has become part of a broader societal debate on human enhancement. The gradual blurriness of the boarders between therapeutic medicine and enhancement medicine constitutes the most spectacular and the most troublesome form of these modifications. In the contemporary biomedicine, the new medicines and technologies can be used not only to cure the patients but also to enhance human capacities. This evolution represents a paradigmatic change in the medical practice: it is not the mere restoration of health which is expected anymore, nor the promotion of health. What is required is the improvement of performance and the perfectibility of the human being, including in the field of sport. Competitive sport could become the main laboratory of enhancement medicine. The intersection of science and sport raises fundamental philosophical, ethical and policy issues that cannot be answered easily. The prohibition and the war on doping is not the only solution.

Human enhancement. Foreword.

Long-lasting effect of subliminal processes on cardiovascular responses and performance

Students were exposed to a priming task in which subliminal representations of the goal of studying were directly paired (priming-positive group) or not (priming group) to positive words. A control group without subliminal prime of the goal was added. Just after the priming task, students performed an easy or a difficult learning task based on their coursework. Participants in the priming-positive group performed better and had a stronger decrease of pulse transit time and pulse wave amplitude reactivity than participants of the two other groups, but only during the difficult condition. Results suggested that subliminal priming induces effortful behavior extending over twenty five minutes but only when the primes had been associated with visible positive words acting as a reward. These findings provide evidence that subliminal priming can have long-lasting effects on behaviors typical of daily life. © 2011 Elsevier B.V.

Contraindre pour le bien

Aim: The theme of " physical activity" and the " health of the very young" illustrates the ethical dilemma of Restraint for well-being. Current: In order to set out the possible ethical justifications of this constraint, we shall initially advance two diametrically opposed points of view: the opponents (Brohm, Partisans, Quel corps ?, Gleyse), and the partisans (Laure, Pes) of the idea whereby physical activity is intrinsically " virtuous" Secondly, the testimony of a very high level sportsman is invoked (Agassi) who was constrained to engage in intensive physical activity from the youngest age. Thirdly, using as a starting point the Principles of Biomedical Ethics (1979) by Beauchamp and Childress, we advance the ethical arguments (the principle of beneficence, paternalism...) which can underlie the fact of wishing to constrain the very young to pursue physical activity for their own good. © 2011 Elsevier Masson SAS.

La médecine doit-elle encourager le dopage ?

Effects of subliminal priming on nonconscious goal pursuit and effort-related cardiovascular response

Building on the work of Aarts and coworkers on nonconscious goal pursuit, the present studyinvestigates whether subliminal processes may motivate effortful behavior and perseverance to learn coursework. We exposed students to a priming task in which subliminal representation of the goal of studying was directly paired (priming-positive group) or not (priming group) to a positive word. There was also a control group without subliminal prime of the goal. Next, students performed a learning task based on their coursework. Participants in the priming-positive group exhibited across time on task a larger decrease of midfrequency band of heart rate variability and a larger decrease of the pulse transit time related to effort mobilization than participants in the control group and the priming group, respectively. These findings provide the first evidence that subliminal priming can induce a greater cardiovascular reactivity suggesting effortful behavior and perseverance when pursuing a simple goal typical of daily life.

Distinguishing three levels in explicit self-awareness

This paper focuses on the development of explicit self-awareness in children. Mirror self- recognition has been the most popular paradigm used to assess this ability in children. Nevertheless, according to Rochat (2003), there are, at least, three different levels of explicit self-awareness. We therefore designed three different self-recognition tasks, each corre- sponding to one of these levels (a mirror self-recognition task, a picture self-recognition task and a masked self-recognition task). We observed a decrease in performance across the three tasks. This supports a developmental scale in self-awareness. Besides, the masked self-recog- nition performance makes it possible to assess the final and the most sophisticated level of self-awareness, i.e. the external self. To our best knowledge, this task is the first attempt to evaluate the external self in preverbal children. Our results indicate that 22-month old children show awareness of their external self or, at least, that this ability is in the process of being acquired.

Conscious and unconscious reward cues can affect a critical component of executive control: (Un)conscious updating?

The radical plasticity thesis: How the brain learns to be conscious

In this paper, I explore the idea that consciousness is something that the brain learns to do rather than an intrinsic property of certain neural states and not others. Starting from the idea that neural activity is inherently unconscious, the question thus becomes: How does the brain learn to be conscious? I suggest that consciousness arises as a result of the brain's continuous attempts at predicting not only the consequences of its actions on the world and on other agents, but also the consequences of activity in one cerebral region on activity in other regions. By this account, the brain continuously and unconsciously learns to redescribe its own activity to itself, so developing systems of meta-representations that characterize and qualify the target firstorder representations. Such learned redescriptions, enriched by the emotional value associated with them, form the basis of conscious experience. Learning and plasticity are thus central to consciousness, to the extent that experiences only occur in experiencers that have learned to know they possess certain first-order states and that have learned to care more about certain states than about others. This is what I call the "Radical Plasticity Thesis." In a sense thus, this is the enactive perspective, but turned both inwards and (further) outwards. Consciousness involves "signal detection on the mind"; the conscious mind is the brain's (non-conceptual, implicit) theory about itself. I illustrate these ideas through neural network models that simulate the relationships between performance and awareness in different tasks. © 2011 Cleeremans.

Sport, enhancement and the inefficacy of the anti-doping policy

2010

Partial awareness distinguishes between measuring conscious perception and conscious content: Reply to Dienes and Seth

In their comment on Sandberg, Timmermans, Overgaard, and Cleeremans (2010), Dienes and Seth argue that increased sensitivity of the Perceptual Awareness Scale (PAS) is a consequence of the scale being less exclusive rather than more exhaustive. According to Dienes and Seth, this is because PAS may measure some conscious content, though not necessarily relevant conscious content, "If one saw a square but was only aware of seeing a flash of something, then one has not consciously seen a square." In this reply, we claim that there is a difference between conscious visual experience, which may be partial, and the resulting conscious content, which is conceptual. Whereas PAS measures the first, confidence judgments and post-decision wagering measure the second. © 2010 Elsevier Inc.

Experiencing more complexity than we can tell

The notion of unreportable conscious contents is misguidedly premised on the idea that access necessarily follows phenomenal representation. We suggest instead that conscious experience should be viewed as a constructive, dynamical process that involves representational redescription: The brain continuously and unconsciously performs signal detection on its own representations, so developing an understanding of itself that subtends conscious experience. Cases where phenomenality seems to overflow access are thus illusory and depend on interactions between task instructions and stimulus complexity. We support this perspective through recent evidence suggesting that properly graded, qualitative subjective reports appear to be exhaustive in revealing conscious knowledge.

Measuring consciousness: Is one measure better than the other?

What is the best way of assessing the extent to which people are aware of a stimulus? Here, using a masked visual identification task, we compared three measures of subjective awareness: The Perceptual Awareness Scale (PAS), through which participants are asked to rate the clarity of their visual experience; confidence ratings (CR), through which participants express their confidence in their identification decisions, and Post-decision wagering (PDW), in which participants place a monetary wager on their decisions. We conducted detailed explorations of the relationships between awareness and identification performance, looking to determine (1) which scale best correlates with performance, and (2) whether we can detect performance in the absence of awareness and how the scales differ from each other in terms of revealing such unconscious processing. Based on these findings we discuss whether perceptual awareness should be considered graded or dichotomous. Results showed that PAS showed a much stronger performance-awareness correlation than either CR or PDW, particularly for low stimulus intensities. In general, all scales indicated above-chance performance when participants claimed not to have seen anything. However, such above-chance performance only showed when we also observed a correlation between awareness and performance. Thus (1) PAS seems to be the most exhaustive measure of awareness, and (2) we find support for above-chance performance in the absence of subjective awareness, but such unconscious knowledge only contributes to performance when we observe conscious knowledge as well. Similarities and differences between scales are discussed in the light of consciousness theories and response strategies.

The influence of temporal factors on automatic priming and conscious expectancy in a simple reaction time task.

In a previous study, we reported a dissociation between subjective expectancy and motor behaviour in a simple associative learning task (Perruchet, Cleeremans, & Destrebecqz, 2006). According to previous conditioning studies (Clark, Manns, & Squire, 2001), this dissociation is observed when the to-be-associated events coterminate and thus overlap in time (a training regimen called delay conditioning), but not when they are separated by a temporal delay (trace conditioning). In this latter situation indeed, there tends to be a direct relationship between subjective expectancy and behaviour. In this study, we further investigated this issue in a series of experiments where conscious and unconscious components of performance were pitted against each other. In Experiments 1-3, participants performed a simple reaction time task in which a preparatory signal (a tone) either overlapped with or terminated earlier than the imperative stimulus (a visual target presented in 50% of the trials). After each response, participants also had to state how much they expected the imperative stimulus to be displayed on the next trial. Results indicate that reaction times tend to decrease when the tone is consistently followed by the visual target across successive trials, whereas conscious expectancy for the target decreases at the same time. Importantly, we systematically found that the temporal relationship between the tone and the target failed to influence performance. In a fourth experiment, we examined whether these results extend to a two-choice reaction time task. To our surprise, we observed a direct relationship between subjective expectancies and reaction time in that situation. We nevertheless observed that the introduction of a delay between the tone and the target had, once again, no effect on performance.

Is it better to think unconsciously or to trust your first impression?

According to unconscious thought theory, complex decisions are best made after a period of distraction assumed to elicit "unconscious thought." Here, the authors suggest instead that the superiority of decisions made after distraction results from the fact that conscious deliberation can deteriorate impressions formed on-line during information acquisition. The authors found that participants instructed to form an impression made better decisions after distraction than after deliberation, thereby replicating earlier findings. However, decisions made immediately were just as good as decisions made after distraction, which suggests (a) that people had already made their decision during information acquisition, (b) that deliberation without attention does not occur during distraction, and (c) that ruminating about one's first impression can deteriorate decision quality. Strikingly, in another condition that should have favored unconscious thought even more, deliberated decisions were better than immediate or distracted decisions. These findings were replicated in a field study. © The Author(s) 2010.

Action blindness in response to gradual changes.

The goal of this study is to characterize observers' abilities to detect gradual changes and to explore putative dissociations between conscious experience of change and behavioral adaptation to a changing stimulus. We developed a new experimental paradigm in which, on each trial, participants were shown a dot pattern on the screen. Next, the pattern disappeared and participants had to reproduce it. In some conditions, the target pattern was incrementally rotated over successive trials and participants were either informed or not of this change. We analyzed both awareness of the changes and the dynamics of behavioral adaptation, in a way that makes it possible to assess both variability and accuracy as they change over time. Results indicate a dissociation between change awareness and behavioral adaptation to the changes, and support the notion that unconscious representations of visual stimuli are more precise and detailed than previously suggested. We discuss the implications of these results for theories of change detection.

Optimizing subjective measures of consciousness.

Dienes and Seth (this issue) conclude that confidence ratings and post-decision wagering are two comparable and recommendable measures of conscious experience. In a recently submitted paper, we have however found that both methods are problematic and seem less suited to measure consciousness than a direct introspective measure. Here, we discuss the methodology and conclusions put forward by Dienes and Seth, and why we think the two experiments end up with so different recommendations.

Endogenous versus exogenous change

The goal of this study is to characterize observers' abilities to discriminate between endogenous (i.e., self-produced) and exogenous changes. To do so, we developed a new experimental paradigm. On each trial, participants were shown a dot pattern on the screen. Next, the pattern disappeared and participants were to reproduce it. Changes were surreptuously introduced in the stimulus, either by presenting participants anew with the dot pattern they had themselves produced on the previous trial (endogenous change) or by presenting participants with a slightly different dot pattern (exogenous changes). We analyzed awareness of the changes and behavioral adaptation to them in a dynamical manner. We observe (1) signal attenuation in the presence of endogenous change, (2) dissociation between self-attribution reports and behavioral effect of agency. We discuss the source of this sensitive attenuation as well as the relation between a minimal or core self and an extended, narrative or autobiographical self.

Know Thyself

Action, observation, et imagerie mentale d'une action

Partial awareness distinguishes between conscious perception and conscious content

Action, observation and mental imagery

Qui suis-je?

Partial awareness distinguishes between conscious perception and conscious

When evaluating a measure of awareness, two parameters are of key importance: exhaustiveness and exclusiveness (Reingold & Merikle, 1988). A measure is maximally exhaustive when it detects all conscious knowledge, and it is maximally exclusive when no unconscious knowledge is misclassified as conscious knowledge. In the study of Sandberg, Timmermans, Overgaard, and Cleeremans (2010), we tested three measures of awareness and concluded that since the Perceptual Aware- ness Scale (PAS) was the most sensitive measure, it was also the most exhaustive one, based on the fact that all three mea- sures were equally exclusive. In their comment on the study, Dienes and Seth (2010) dispute the paper's conclusion, arguing that asking participants to report on their visual experience in general instead of on their confidence in having responded correctly incurs the risk of misclassifying unconscious information as conscious. In other words, the higher sensitivity of PAS that Sandberg et al. (2010) observed is a consequence of the scale's weak exclusiveness rather than of its better exhaus- tiveness. According to Dienes and Seth, this is because PAS may reflect conscious contents that are irrelevant to performing the task. They write, ‘‘according to higher order thought theory, the content p of a mental state is conscious only if the par- ticipant is aware of the mental state as having content p (cf. Rosenthal, 2005). If one saw a square but was only aware of seeing a flash of something, then one has not consciously seen a square.” In this reply, we claim that there is a difference between conscious visual experience, which may be partial, and the resulting conscious content, which is conceptual and, at least in the sort of experimental paradigm we have used, dichotomous. Whereas PAS measures the first, confidence judg- ments and post-decision wagering measure the second, as such content forms the basis of participants' judgment knowledge.

The Grand Challenge fo Psychology

Peut-on parler de militantisme psychopharmacologique?

2009

Methodological pitfalls of the Unconscious Thought paradigm

According to Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT: Dijksterhuis & Nordgren, 2006), complex decisions are best made after a period of distraction assumed to elicit “unconscious thought”. Over three studies, respectively offering a conceptual, an identical and a methodologically improved replication of Dijksterhuis et al. (2006), we reassessed UTT's predictions and dissected the decision task used to demonstrate these predictions. We failed to find any evidence for the benefits of unconscious decision-making. By contrast, we found some evidence that conscious deliberation can lead to better decisions. Further, we identified methodological weaknesses in the UTT decision task: (a) attributes weighting was neglected although attributes were seen as different in importance; (b) the material was not properly counterbalanced; and (c) there was some confusion in the experimental instructions. We propose methodological improvements that address these concerns. Keywords: unconscious thought, conscious thought, decision-making.

Feature Bindings Are Maintained in Visual Short-Term Memory Without Sustained Focused Attention.

Does the maintenance of feature bindings in visual short-term memory (VSTM) require sustained focused attention? This issue was investigated in three experiments, in which memory for single features (i.e., colors or shapes) was compared with memory for feature bindings (i.e., the link between the color and shape of an object). Attention was manipulated during the memory retention interval with a retro-cue, which allows attention to be directed and focused on a subset of memory items. The retro-cue was presented 700 ms after the offset of the memory display and 700 ms before the onset of the test display. If the maintenance of feature bindings - but not of individual features - in memory requires sustained focused attention, the retro-cue should not affect memory performance. Contrary to this prediction, we found that both memory for feature bindings and memory for individual features were equally improved by the retro-cue. Therefore, this finding does not support the view that the sustained focused attention is needed to properly maintain feature bindings in VSTM.

Effects of Age and Practice in sequence learning

Computing Consciousness

Foreword

Et si le spectateur en savait plus qu'il ne le croit?

2008

Undetected changes in visible stimuli influence subsequent decisions

Change blindness-our inability to detect changes in a stimulus-occurs even when the change takes place gradually, without any disruption [Simons, D. J., Franconeri, S. L., & Reimer, R. L. (2000). Change blindness in the absence of a visual disruption. Perception, 29(10), 1143-1154]. Such gradual changes are more difficult to detect than changes that involve a disruption. Using this method, David et al. [David, E., Laloyaux, C., Devue, C., & Cleeremans, A. (in press). Change blindness to gradual changes in facial expressions. Psychologica Belgica] recently showed substantial blindness to changes that involve facial expressions of emotion. In this experiment, we show that people who failed to detect any change in the displays were (1) nevertheless influenced by the changing information in subsequent recognition decisions about which facial expression they had seen, and (2) that their confidence in their decisions was lower after exposure to changing vs. static displays. The findings therefore support the notion that undetected changes that occur in highly salient stimuli may be causally efficacious and influence subsequent behavior. Implications concerning the nature of the representations associated with undetected changes are discussed.

Measuring consciousness: relating behavioural and neurophysiological approaches.

The resurgent science of consciousness has been accompanied by a recent emphasis on the problem of measurement. Having dependable measures of consciousness is essential both for mapping experimental evidence to theory and for designing perspicuous experiments. Here, we review a series of behavioural and brain-based measures, assessing their ability to track graded consciousness and clarifying how they relate to each other by showing what theories are presupposed by each. We identify possible and actual conflicts among measures that can stimulate new experiments, and we conclude that measures must prove themselves by iteratively building knowledge in the context of theoretical frameworks. Advances in measuring consciousness have implications for basic cognitive neuroscience, for comparative studies of consciousness and for clinical applications.

Seeing without Seeing? Degraded Conscious Vision in a Blindsight Patient.

Blindsight patients, whose primary visual cortex is lesioned, exhibit preserved ability to discriminate visual stimuli presented in their "blind" field, yet report no visual awareness hereof. Blindsight is generally studied in experimental investigations of single patients, as very few patients have been given this "diagnosis". In our single case study of patient GR, we ask whether blindsight is best described as unconscious vision, or rather as conscious, yet severely degraded vision. In experiment 1 and 2, we successfully replicate the typical findings of previous studies on blindsight. The third experiment, however, suggests that GR's ability to discriminate amongst visual stimuli does not reflect unconscious vision, but rather degraded, yet conscious vision. As our finding results from using a method for obtaining subjective reports that has not previously used in blindsight studies (but validated in studies of healthy subjects and other patients with brain injury), our results call for a reconsideration of blindsight, and, arguably also of many previous studies of unconscious perception in healthy subjects.

Consciousness: the radical plasticity thesis.

In this chapter, I sketch a conceptual framework which takes it as a starting point that conscious and unconscious cognition are rooted in the same set of interacting learning mechanisms and representational systems. On this view, the extent to which a representation is conscious depends in a graded manner on properties such as its stability in time or its strength. Crucially, these properties are accrued as a result of learning, which is in turn viewed as a mandatory process that always accompanies information processing. From this perspective, consciousness is best characterized as involving (1) a graded continuum defined over "quality of representation", such that availability to consciousness and to cognitive control correlates with quality, and (2) the implication of systems of metarepresentations. A first implication of these ideas is that the main function of consciousness is to make flexible, adaptive control over behavior possible. A second, much more speculative implication, is that we learn to be conscious. This I call the "radical plasticity thesis"--the hypothesis that consciousness emerges in systems capable not only of learning about their environment, but also about their own internal representations of it.

How do we know what we are doing

Time is a fundamental dimension of consciousness. Many studies of the "sense of agency" have investigated whether we attribute actions to ourselves based on a conscious experience of intention occurring prior to action, or based on a reconstruction after the action itself has occurred. Here, we ask the same question about a lower level aspect of action experience, namely awareness of the detailed spatial form of a simple movement. Subjects reached for a target, which unpredictably jumped to the side on some trials. Participants (1) expressed their expectancy of a target shift during the upcoming movement, (2) pointed at the target as quickly and accurately as possible before returning to the start posiment to the target shift if required and (3) reproduced the spatial path of the movement they had just made, as accurately as possible, to give an indication of their awareness of the pointing movement. We analysed the spatial disparity between the initial and the reproduced movements on those with a target shift. A negative disparity value, or undershoot, suggests that motor awareness merely reflects a sluggish record of coordinated motor performance, while a positive value, or overshoot, suggests that participants' intention to point to the shifting target contributes more to their awareness of action than their actual pointing movement. Undershoot and overshoot thus measure the reconstructive (motoric) and the preconstuctive (intentional) aspects of action awareness, respectively. We found that trials on which subjects strongly expected a target shift showed greater overshoot and less undershoot than trials with lower expectancy. Conscious expectancy therefore strongly influences the experience of the detailed motor parameters of our actions. Further, a delay inserted either between the expectancy judgement and the pointing movement, or between the pointing movement and the reproduction of the movement, had no effect on visuomotor adjustment but strongly influenced action awareness. Delays during either interval boosted undershoots, suggesting increased reliance on a time-limited sensory memory for action. The experience of action is thus strongly influenced by prior thoughts and expectations, but only over a short time period. Thus, awareness of our actions is a dynamic and relatively flexible mixture of what we intend to do, and what our motor system actually does.

La Conscience

Naissance de la psychiatrie biologique

Avortement médical, liberté de conscience et éthique utilitariste

Philosophie, sciences médicales et fondements laïques au XIXe siècle 

2007

Consciousness and metarepresentation: a computational sketch.

When one is conscious of something, one is also conscious that one is conscious. Higher-Order Thought Theory [Rosenthal, D. (1997). A theory of consciousness. In N. Block, O. Flanagan, & G. Güzeldere (Eds.), The nature of consciousness: Philosophical debates. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press] takes it that it is in virtue of the fact that one is conscious of being conscious, that one is conscious. Here, we ask what the computational mechanisms may be that implement this intuition. Our starting point is Clark and Karmiloff-Smith's [Clark, A., & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1993). The cognizer's innards: A psychological and philosophical perspective on the development of thought. Mind and Language, 8, 487-519] point that knowledge acquired by a connectionist network always remains "knowledge in the network rather than knowledge for the network". That is, while connectionist networks may become exquisitely sensitive to regularities contained in their input-output environment, they never exhibit the ability to access and manipulate this knowledge as knowledge: The knowledge can only be expressed through performing the task upon which the network was trained; it remains forever embedded in the causal pathways that developed as a result of training. To address this issue, we present simulations in which two networks interact. The states of a first-order network trained to perform a simple categorization task become input to a second-order network trained either as an encoder or on another categorization task. Thus, the second-order network "observes" the states of the first-order network and has, in the first case, to reproduce these states on its output units, and in the second case, to use the states as cues in order to solve the secondary task. This implements a limited form of metarepresentation, to the extent that the second-order network's internal representations become re-representations of the first-order network's internal states. We conclude that this mechanism provides the beginnings of a computational mechanism to account for mental attitudes, that is, an understanding by a cognitive system of the manner in which its first-order knowledge is held (belief, hope, fear, etc.). Consciousness, in this light, thus involves knowledge of the geography of one own's internal representations - a geography that is itself learned over time as a result of an agent's attributing value to the various experiences it enjoys through interaction with itself, the world, and others.

Introduction to the special issue on 'Brain and Consciousness'.

Cognitive control of sequential knowledge in 2-year-olds: evidence from an incidental sequence-learning and -generation task.

Under incidental instructions, thirty-eight 2-year-olds were trained on a six-element deterministic sequence of spatial locations. Following training, subjects were informed of the presence of a sequence and asked to either reproduce or suppress the learned material. Children's production of the trained sequence was modulated by these instructions. When asked to suppress the trained sequence, the children were able to increase generation of paths that were not from the training sequence. Their performance was thus dependent on active suppression of knowledge, rather than on a random generation strategy. This degree of control in 2-year-olds stands in stark contrast to 3-year-olds' failure to control explicitly instructed rule-based knowledge (as measured by the dimensional-change card-sort task). We suggest that the incidental nature of a learning episode enables the acquisition of a more procedural form of knowledge with which this age group has more experience prior to the onset of fluent language.

Dans le cerveau d'Homer Simpson

Time, Action, Consciousness

Time plays a central role in consciousness, at different levels and in different aspects of information processing. Subliminal perception experiments demonstrate that stimuli presented too briefly to enter conscious awareness are nevertheless processed to some extent. Implicit learning, implicit memory, and conditioning studies suggest that the extent to which memory traces are available for verbal report and for cognitive control is likewise dependent on the time available for processing during acquisition. Differences in the time available for processing also determine not only the extent to which one becomes conscious of action, but also provides the basis for making attributions of authorship to experienced acts. In this paper, we offer a brief overview of these different findings and suggest that they can all be understood based on the fact that consciousness takes time. From this perspective, the availability of representations to conscious awareness depends on the quality of these representations - the extent to which they are strong, stable in time, and distinctive. High-quality representations occur when processes of global competition have had sufficient time to operate so as to make the system settle into the best possible interpretation of the input. Such processes implement global constraint satisfaction and critically depend on reentrant processing, through which representations can be further enriched by high-level constraints. We discuss these ideas in light of current theories of consciousness, emphasizing the fact that consciousness should be viewed as a process rather than as a static property associated with some states and not with others.

2006

Implicit change identification: a replication of Fernandez-Duque and Thornton (2003).

Using a simple change detection task involving vertical and horizontal stimuli, I. M. Thornton and D. Fernandez-Duque (2000) showed that the implicit detection of a change in the orientation of an item influences performance in a subsequent orientation judgment task. However, S. R. Mitroff, D. J. Simons, and S. L. Franconeri (2002) were not able to replicate this finding after correcting for confounds and thus attributed Thornton and Fernandez-Duque's results to methodological artifacts. Because Mitroff et al.'s failure to replicate might in turn have stemmed from several methodological differences between their study and those of Thornton and Fernandez-Duque (2000) and Fernandez-Duque and Thornton, the current authors set out to conduct a further replication in which they corrected all known methodological biases identified so far. The results suggest that implicit change detection indeed occurs: People's conscious decisions about the orientation of an item appear to be influenced by previous undetected changes in the orientation of other items in the display. Implications of this finding in light of current theories of visual awareness are discussed.

Dissociating the effects of automatic activation and explicit expectancy on reaction times in a simple associative learning task

After repeated associations between two events, E1 and E2, responses to E2 can be facilitated either because participants consciously expect E2 to occur after E1 or because E1 automatically activates the response to E2, or because of both. In this article, the authors report on 4 experiments designed to pit the influence of these 2 factors against each other. The authors found that the fastest responses to a target in a reaction time paradigm occurred when automatic activation was highest and conscious expectancy lowest. These results, when considered together with previous findings indicating that, under most conditions, the relation between expectancy and reaction times is in the opposite direction, are indicative of a reversed association-an interaction pattern that J. C. Dunn and K. Kirsner (1988) demonstrated to be the only one that unambiguously points to the involvement of independent processes.

First- and third-person approaches in implicit learning research

How do we find out whether someone is conscious of some information or not? A simple answer is "We just ask them"! However, things are not so simple. Here, we review recent developments in the use of subjective and objective methods in implicit learning research and discuss the highly complex methodological problems that their use raises in the domain.

Can amnesic patients learn without awareness?

Can associative learning take place without awareness? We explore this issue in a sequence learning paradigm with amnesic and control participants, who were simply asked to react to one of four possible stimuli on each trial. Unknown to them, successive stimuli occurred in a sequence. We manipulated the extent to which stimuli followed the sequence in a deterministic manner (noiseless condition) or only probabilistically so (noisy condition). Through this paradigm, we aimed at addressing two central issues: first, we asked whether sequence learning takes place in either condition with amnesic patients. Second, we asked whether this learning takes place without awareness. To answer this second question, participants were asked to perform a subsequent sequence generation task under inclusion and exclusion conditions, as well as a recognition task. Reaction times results show that amnesic patients learned the sequence only in the deterministic condition. However, they failed to be able to reproduce the sequence in the generation task. In contrast, we found learning for both sequence structures in control participants, but only control participants exposed to a deterministic sequence were successful in performing the generation task, thus suggesting that the acquired knowledge can be used consciously in this condition. Neither amnesic nor control participants showed correct old/new judgments in the recognition task. The results strengthen the claim that implicit learning is at least partly spared in amnesia, and the role of contextual information available for learning is discussed.

Change blindness to gradual changes in facial expression

Change blindness - our inability to detect changes in a stimulus - occurs even when the change takes place gradually, without disruption (Simons, Franconeri, & Reimer, 2000). Such gradual changes are more difficult to detect than changes that involve a disruption. In this experiment, we extend previous findings to the domain of facial expressions of emotions occurring in the context of a realistic scene. Even with changes occurring in central, highly relevant stimuli such as faces, gradual changes still produced high levels of change blindness: Detection rates were three times lower for gradual changes than for displays involving disruption, with only 15% of the observers perceiving the gradual change within a single trial. However, despite this high rate of change blindness, changes on faces were significantly better detected than colour changes occurring on non facial objects in the same scene.

2005

Implicit learning in a prediction task

Consciousness: converging insights from connectionist modeling and neuroscience.

Over the past decade, many findings in cognitive neuroscience have resulted in the view that selective attention, working memory and cognitive control involve competition between widely distributed representations. This competition is biased by top-down projections (notably from prefrontal cortex), which can selectively enhance some representations over others. This view has now been implemented in several connectionist models. In this review, we emphasize the relevance of these models to understanding consciousness. Interestingly, the models we review have striking similarities to others directly aimed at implementing 'global workspace theory'. All of these models embody a fundamental principle that has been used in many connectionist models over the past twenty years: global constraint satisfaction.

Processing abstract sequence structure

Constant interaction with a dynamic environment-from riding a bicycle to segmenting speech-makes sensitivity to the sequential structure of the world a fundamental dimension of information processing. Accounts of sequence learning vary widely, with some authors arguing that parsing and segmentation processes are central, and others proposing that sequence learning involves mere memorization. In this paper, we argue that sequence knowledge is essentially statistical in nature, and that sequence learning involves simple associative prediction mechanisms. We focus on a choice reaction situation introduced by Lee (1997), in which participants were exposed to material that follows a single abstract rule, namely that stimuli are selected randomly, but never appear more than once in a legal sequence. Perhaps surprisingly, people can learn this rule very well. Or can they? We offer a conceptual replication of the original finding, but a very different interpretation of the results, as well as simulation work that makes it clear how highly abstract dimensions of the stimulus material can in fact be learned based on elementary associative mechanisms. We conclude that, when relevant, memory is optimized to facilitate responding to events that have not occurred recently, and that sequence learning in general always involves sensitivity to repetition distance.

Real rules are conscious

In general, we agree with Pothos's claim that similarity and rule knowledge are best viewed as situated on the extreme points of a single representational continuum. However, we contend that a distinction can be made between "rule-like" and "rule-based" knowledge: Rule-based, symbolic knowledge is necessarily conscious when it is applied. Awareness thus provides a useful criterion for distinguishing between sensitivity to functional similarity and knowledge of symbolic rules.

Filling one gap by creating another one

The neural correlates of implicit and explicit sequence learning

In two H2(15)O PET scan experiments, we investigated the cerebral correlates of explicit and implicit knowledge in a serial reaction time (SRT) task. To do so, we used a novel application of the Process Dissociation Procedure, a behavioral paradigm that makes it possible to separately assess conscious and unconscious contributions to performance during a subsequent sequence generation task. To manipulate the extent to which the repeating sequential pattern was learned explicitly, we varied the pace of the choice reaction time task-a variable that is known to have differential effects on the extent to which sensitivity to sequence structure involves implicit or explicit knowledge. Results showed that activity in the striatum subtends the implicit component of performance during recollection of a learned sequence, whereas the anterior cingulate/mesial prefrontal cortex (ACC/MPFC) supports the explicit component. Most importantly, we found that the ACC/MPFC exerts control on the activity of the striatum during retrieval of the sequence after explicit learning, whereas the activity of these regions is uncoupled when learning had been essentially implicit. These data suggest that implicit learning processes can be successfully controlled by conscious knowledge when learning is essentially explicit. They also supply further evidence for a partial dissociation between the neural substrates supporting conscious and nonconscious components of performance during recollection of a learned sequence.

Intuitive decision making in complex situations

In this article, we explore the extent to which implicit learning is subtended by somatic markers, as evidenced by skin conductance measures. On each trial, subjects were asked to decide which "word" from a pair of "words" was the "correct" one. Unknown to the subjects, each "word" of a pair was constructed using a different set of rules (Grammar A and Grammar B). A (monetary) reward was given if the subject chose the "word" from Grammar A. Choosing the Grammar B word resulted in (monetary) punishment. Skin conductance was measured during each of 100 trials. After each set of 10 trials, the subjects were asked how they selected the "correct word." Task performance increased long before the subjects could even formulate a single relevant rule. In this preconceptual phase of the experiment, skin conductance was larger before incorrect than before correct choices. Thus, it was shown that artificial grammar learning is accompanied by a somatic marker, possibly "warning" the subject of the incorrect decision.

Computational correlates of consciousness.

Over the past few years numerous proposals have appeared that attempt to characterize consciousness in terms of what could be called its computational correlates: Principles of information processing with which to characterize the differences between conscious and unconscious processing. Proposed computational correlates include architectural specialization (such as the involvement of specific regions of the brain in conscious processing), properties of representations (such as their stability in time or their strength), and properties of specific processes (such as resonance, synchrony, interactivity, or information integration). In exactly the same way as one can engage in a search for the neural correlates of consciousness, one can thus search for the computational correlates of consciousness. The most direct way of doing is to contrast models of conscious versus unconscious information processing. In this paper, I review these developments and illustrate how computational modeling of specific cognitive processes can be useful in exploring and in formulating putative computational principles through which to capture the differences between conscious and unconscious cognition. What can be gained from such approaches to the problem of consciousness is an understanding of the function it plays in information processing and of the mechanisms that subtend it. Here, I suggest that the central function of consciousness is to make it possible for cognitive agents to exert flexible, adaptive control over behavior. From this perspective, consciousness is best characterized as involving (1) a graded continuum defined over quality of representation, such that availability to consciousness and to cognitive control correlates with properties of representation, and (2) the implication of systems of meta-representations.

2004

Le soi ou l'illusion d'une conscience unifiée

2003

Memory processing during human sleep as assessed by functional neuroimaging

Sleep is believed to participate in memory consolidation, possibly through off-line processing of recent memory traces. In this paper, we summarize functional neuroimaging data testing this hypothesis. First, sleep deprivation disrupts the processing of recent memory traces and hampers the changes in functional segregation and connectivity which underpin the gain in performance usually observed in subjects allowed to sleep on the first post-training night. Second, experience-dependent changes in regional brain activity occur during post-training sleep. These changes are shown to be related to the processing of high-level material and to be modulated by the amount of learning achieved during the training session. These changes do not involve isolated brain areas but entire macroscopic cerebral networks. These data suggest a role for sleep in the processing of recent memory traces.

Cerebral correlates of explicit sequence learning

Using positron emission tomography (PET) and regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) measurements, we investigated the cerebral correlates of consciousness in a sequence learning task through a novel application of the Process Dissociation Procedure, a behavioral paradigm that makes it possible to separately assess conscious and unconscious contributions to performance. Results show that the metabolic response in the anterior cingulate/mesial prefrontal cortex (ACC/MPFC) is exclusively and specifically correlated with the explicit component of performance during recollection of a learned sequence. This suggests a significant role for the ACC/MPFC in the explicit processing of sequential material. © 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Harder, better, stronger, faster

Learned material content and acquisition level modulate cerebral reactivation during posttraining rapid-eye-movements sleep

We have previously shown that several brain areas are activated both during sequence learning at wake and during subsequent rapid-eye-movements (REM) sleep (Nat. Neurosci. 3 (2000) 831-836), suggesting that REM sleep participates in the reprocessing of recent memory traces in humans. However, the nature of the reprocessed information remains open. Here, we show that regional cerebral reactivation during posttraining REM sleep is not merely related to the acquisition of basic visuomotor skills during prior practice of the serial reaction time task, but rather to the implicit acquisition of the probabilistic rules that defined stimulus sequences. Moreover, functional connections between the reactivated cuneus and the striatum - the latter being critical for implicit sequence learning - are reinforced during REM sleep after practice on a probabilistic rather than on a random sequence of stimuli. Our results therefore support the hypothesis that REM sleep is deeply involved in the reprocessing and optimization of the high-order information contained in the material to be learned. In addition, we show that the level of acquisition of probabilistic rules attained prior to sleep is correlated to the increase in regional cerebral blood flow during subsequent REM sleep. This suggests that posttraining cerebral reactivation is modulated by the strength of the memory traces developed during the learning episode. Our data provide the first experimental evidence for a link between behavioral performance and cerebral reactivation during REM sleep. © 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Ces zombies qui nous gouvernent

2002

The self-organized conundrum

Perruchet and Vinter stop short of fully embracing the implications of their own SOC framework, and hence end up defending an implausible perspective on consciousness. We suggest instead that consciousness should be viewed as a graded dimension defined over quality of representation. This graded perspective eliminates the most problematic aspects of the cognitive unconscious without denying its existence altogether.

Handlung und Bewusstsein

2001

Implicit learning out of the lab: the case of orthographic regularities.

Children's (Grades 1 to 5) implicit learning of French orthographic regularities was investigated through nonword judgment (Experiments 1 and 2) and completion (Experiments 3a and 3b) tasks. Children were increasingly sensitive to (a) the frequency of double consonants (Experiments 1, 2, and 3a), (b) the fact that vowels can never be doubled (Experiment 2), and (c) the legal position of double consonants (Experiments 2 and 3b). The latter effect transferred to never doubled consonants but with a decrement in performance. Moreover, this decrement persisted without any trend toward fading, even after the massive amounts of experience provided by years of practice. This result runs against the idea that transfer to novel material is indicative of abstract rule-based knowledge and suggests instead the action of mechanisms sensitive to the statistical properties of the material. A connectionist model is proposed as an instantiation of such mechanisms.

Experience-dependent changes in cerebral functional connectivity during human rapid-eye-movement sleep

One function of sleep is hypothesized to be the reprocessing and consolidation of memory traces (Smith, 1995; Gais et al., 2000; McGaugh, 2000; Stickgold et al., 2000). At the cellular level, neuronal reactivations during post-training sleep in animals have been observed in hippocampal (Wilson and McNaughton, 1994) and cortical (Amzica et al., 1997) neuronal populations. At the systems level, using positron emission tomography, we have recently shown that some brain areas reactivated during rapid-eye-movement sleep in human subjects previously trained on an implicit learning task (a serial reaction time task) (Maquet et al., 2000). These cortical reactivations, located in the left premotor area and bilateral cuneus, were thought to reflect the reprocessing--possibly the consolidation--of memory traces during post-training rapid-eye-movement sleep. Here, the experience-dependent functional connectivity of these brain regions is examined. It is shown that the left premotor cortex is functionally more correlated with the left posterior parietal cortex and bilateral pre-supplementary motor area during rapid-eye-movement sleep of subjects previously trained to the reaction time task compared to rapid-eye-movement sleep of untrained subjects. The increase in functional connectivity during post-training rapid-eye-movement sleep suggests that the brain areas reactivated during post-training rapid-eye-movement sleep participate in the optimization of the network that subtends subject's visuo-motor response. The optimization of this visuo-motor network during sleep could explain the gain in performance observed during the following day.

Can sequence learning be implicit?

Can we learn without awareness? Although this issue has been extensively explored through studies of implicit learning, there is currently no agreement about the extent to which knowledge can be acquired and projected onto performance in an unconscious way. The controversy, like that surrounding implicit memory, seems to be at least in part attributable to unquestioned acceptance of the unrealistic assumption that tasks are process-pure--that is, that a given task exclusively involves either implicit or explicit knowledge. Methods such as the process dissociation procedure (PDP, Jacoby, 1991) have been developed to overcome the conceptual limitations of the process purity assumption but have seldom been used in the context of implicit learning research. In this paper, we show how the PDP can be applied to a free generation task so as to disentangle explicit and implicit sequence learning. Our results indicate that subjects who are denied preparation to the next stimulus nevertheless exhibit knowledge of the sequence through their reaction time performance despite remaining unable (1) to project this knowledge in a recognition task and (2) to refrain from expressing their knowledge when specifically instructed to do so. These findings provide strong evidence that sequence learning can be unconscious.

L'orchestre neuronal et la musique de la conscience

Un heureux événement

2000

Experience-dependent changes in cerebral activation during human REM sleep

The function of rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep is still unknown. One prevailing hypothesis suggests that REM sleep is important in processing memory traces. Here, using positron emission tomography (PET) and regional cerebral blood flow measurements, we show that waking experience influences regional brain activity during subsequent sleep. Several brain areas activated during the execution of a serial reaction time task during wakefulness were significantly more active during REM sleep in subjects previously trained on the task than in non-trained subjects. These results support the hypothesis that memory traces are processed during REM sleep in humans.

Striatum forever, despite sequence learning variability: A random effect analysis of PET data

This PET study is concerned with the what, where, and how of implicit sequence learning. In contrast with previous studies imaging the serial reaction time (SRT) task, the sequence of successive locations was determined by a probabilistic finite-state grammar. The implicit acquisition of statistical relationships between serially ordered elements (i.e., what) was studied scan by scan, aiming to evidence the brain areas (i.e., where) specifically involved in the implicit processing of this core component of sequential higher-order knowledge. As behavioural results demonstrate between- and within-subjects variability in the implicit acquisition of sequential knowledge through practice, functional PET data were modelled using a random-effect model analysis (i.e., how) to account for both sources of behavioural variability. First, two mean condition images were created per subject depending on the presence or not of implicit sequential knowledge at the time of each of the 12 scans. Next, direct comparison of these mean condition images provided the brain areas involved in sequential knowledge processing. Using this approach, we have shown that the striatum is involved in more than simple pairwise associations and that it has the capacity to process higher-order knowledge. We suggest that the striatum is not only involved in the implicit automatization of serial information through prefrontal cortex-caudate nucleus networks, but also that it plays a significant role for the selection of the most appropriate responses in the context created by both the current and previous stimuli, thus contributing to better efficiency and faster response preparation in the SRT task. Hum. Brain Mapping 10:179-194, 2000. © 2000 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

Université libre de Bruxelles

Devoir expérimenter, devoir contrôler?

Consciousness

Editorial Statement

Neural correlates of consciousness of sequence knowledge: A novel application of the process dissociation procedure

Consciousness: mapping the theoretical landscape.

What makes us conscious? Many theories that attempt to answer this question have appeared recently in the context of widespread interest about consciousness in the cognitive neurosciences. Most of these proposals are formulated in terms of the information processing conducted by the brain. In this overview, we survey and contrast these models. We first delineate several notions of consciousness, addressing what it is that the various models are attempting to explain. Next, we describe a conceptual landscape that addresses how the theories attempt to explain consciousness. We then situate each of several representative models in this landscape and indicate which aspect of consciousness they try to explain. We conclude that the search for the neural correlates of consciousness should be usefully complemented by a search for the computational correlates of consciousness.

Striatum forever, despite sequence learning variability: A random effect analysis of PET data

This PET study is concerned with the what, where, and how of implicit sequence learning. In contrast with previous studies imaging the serial reaction time (SRT) task, the sequence of successive locations was determined by a probabilistic finite-state grammar. The implicit acquisition of statistical relationships between serially ordered elements (i.e., what) was studied scan by scan, aiming to evidence the brain areas (i.e., where) specifically involved in the implicit processing of this core component of sequential higher-order knowledge. As behavioural results demonstrate between- and within-subjects variability in the implicit acquisition of sequential knowledge through practice, functional PET data were modelled using a random-effect model analysis (i.e., how) to account for both sources of behavioural variability. First, two mean condition images were created per subject depending on the presence or not of implicit sequential knowledge at the time of each of the 12 scans. Next, direct comparison of these mean condition images provided the brain areas involved in sequential knowledge processing. Using this approach, we have shown that the striatum is involved in more than simple pairwise associations and that it has the capacity to process higher-order knowledge. We suggest that the striatum is not only involved in the implicit automatization of serial information through prefrontal cortex-caudate nucleus networks, but also that it plays a significant role for the selection of the most appropriate responses in the context created by both the current and previous stimuli, thus contributing to better efficiency and faster response preparation in the SRT task. (C) 2000 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

Le concept d'image dans les sciences neurologiques du XIXe siècle et son évolution dans les neurosciences contemporaines

1999

From state eugenics to private eugenics

Eugenics - or 'the cultivation of a race' - is a concept dating from the latter part of the 19th century. It preceded the new science of genetics by merely 25 years. Negative eugenics stressed especially the exclusion of negative characteristics and was associated with the practice and theory of radical eugenics between the two World Wars. In order to redress 'the decline of the race', reinforcement by positive eugenics was also advocated. After the atrocities committed by the Nazis there was a lull in the practice and discourse of eugenics. More recent technical advances in assisted reproduction techniques and the genome project, however, have revived the eugenics debate. State eugenics and eugenics as an individual choice ought to be distinguished.

Fishing with the wrong nets: How the implicit slips through the representational theory of mind

Dienes and Perner's target article is not a satisfactory theory of implicit knowledge because in endorsing the representational theory of knowledge, the authors also inadvertently accept that only explicit knowledge can be causally efficacious, and hence that implicit knowledge is an inert category. This conflation between causal efficacy, knowledge, and explicitness is made clear through the authors' strategy, which consists of attributing any observable effect to the existenee of representations that are as minimally explicit as needed to account for behavior. In contrast, we believe that causally efficacious and fully implicit knowledge exists, and is best embodied in frameworks that depart radically from classical assumptions.

Function, sufficiently constrained, implies form

Green's (1998) target article is an attack on most current connectionist models of cognition. Our commentary will suggest that there is an essential component missing in his discussion of modeling, namely, the idea that the appropriate level of the model needs to be specified. We will further suggest that the precise form (size, topology, learning rules, etc.) of connectionist networks will fall out as ever more detailed constraints are placed on their function.

Stability and explicitness: In defense of implicit representation

Correlating Consciousness

Formation et jeux de simulation

Reactivation during REM sleep of cerebral areas involved in an serial reaction time task

Left inferior frontal cortex is involved in probabilistic serial reaction time learning

Cerebral blood flow was estimated using positron emission tomography and H2015 infusions in 12 volunteers while they were trained on the probabilistic serial reaction time task developed by Jimenez, Mendez, and Cleeremans (1996). Participants' reaction times to predictable and nonpredictable stimuli showed increasing sensitivity to the probabilistic constraints set by previous elements of the sequence. Analysis by statistical parametric mapping showed a significant interaction between participants' performance and time effect in the left inferior frontal cortex. Our results provide the first evidence of this cerebral area being involved in the processing of contextual information in a probabilistic sequence learning task.

1998

The other hard problem: How to bridge the gap between symbolic and subsymbolic cognition

Implicit learning

Can we learn without awareness? While the current consensus is most likely to be `no', there is, however, considerable ongoing debate about the role that consciousness plays in cognition and about the nature of consciousness itself. In this article, we review recent advances in the field of implicit learning, based on three perspectives: empirical findings (including neuropsychological evidence), methodological issues, and theoretical positions (including computational models). The overall picture that emerges is complex and reflects a field that is very much in flux: while it seems undeniable that cognition involves some form of unconscious processing, it is as yet unclear how to best separate conscious and unconscious influences on learning, and how to best think about the status of the `cognitive unconscious'. We suggest that implicit learning is best construed as a complex form of priming taking place in continuously learning neural systems, and that the distributional knowledge so acquired can be causally efficacious in the absence of awareness that this knowledge was acquired or that it is currently influencing processing, that is, in the absence of metaknowledge.

Processing of contextual information during an implicit probabilistic sequence learning task: Left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex involvement

The other hard problem

De l'eugénisme d'Etat à l'eugénisme privé

De l'éthique individuelle à l'éthique collective

1997

Current directions in implicit learning

Sequence learning in a dual-stimulus setting

La psychochirurgie

La psychochirurgie

Le statut de l'embryon humain in vitro

La psychochîrurgie : Histoire d'une pratique expérimentale. Partie I : l'époque des pionniers (1935-1954)

La psychochirurgie : Histoire d'une pratique expérimentale Partie II : les nouvelles techniques de chirurgie stéréotaxique (1955-1997)

1996

Abstraction and implicit learning

From chicken squawking to cognition

Measures of awareness and of sequence knowledge

Comparing direct and indirect measures of sequence learning

Comparing the sensitivity of similar direct and indirect measures is proposed as the best way to provide evidence for unconscious learning. The authors apply this approach, first proposed by E. M. Reingold and P. M. Merikle (1988), to a choice reaction-time task in which the material is generated probabilistically on the basis of a finite-state grammar (A. Cleeremans, 1993). The data show that participants can learn about the structure of the stimulus material over training with the choice reaction-time task, but only to a limited extent - a result that is well predicted by the simple recurrent network model of A. Cleeremans and J. L. McClelland (1991). Participants can also use some of this knowledge to perform a subsequent generation task. However, detailed partial correlational analyses that control for knowledge as assessed by the generation task show that large effects of sequence learning are exclusively expressed through reaction time. This result suggests that at least some of this learning cannot be characterized as conscious.

1995

The beginning and the end of human life

No matter where you go, there you are

Matérialisme et neurosciences

Philosophie et sciences cognitives

Ethique de la Neurotransplantation

Informed consent in the field of brain surgery

L'éthique formelle de H.T. Engelhardt Jr

The beginning and the end of human life

1994

Awareness and abstraction are graded dimensions

1992

Sequence learning

Implicit learning of feature conjuctions: Representation and limits on learning

1991

Learning the structure of event sequences

Graded State Machines

1990

Parallel Distributed Processing

1989

Finite State Automata and Simple Recurrent Networks

1988

Relations entre performance et connaissances verbalisables dans le contrôle de processus

Several authors, using various situations pertaining as well to work as to the laboratory, have pointed out the existence of double dissociations between capacity to perform a given cognitive task and capacity to verbalize knowledge supposed to be necessary for the realization of this task. These results suggest that performance and verbalizations depend on specific cognitive processes, and lead to consider that two modes of treatment are available for the realization and learning of a task. The nature of the task would determine which mode of treatment is most efficient. In certain situations at least, process control would be better carried out implicitly. Various models proposed to account for these data are discussed, as well as their implications for work psychology.

Application de l'analyse typologique à l'étude de la performance lors d'un apprentissage

1986

Sleep electroencephalographic measures in primary major depressive disorder

Rôle des connaissances implicites dans le contrôle d'un système

Articles dans des revues sans comité de lecture

2020

What drive information-seeking in healthy and addicted behaviors

1998

L'esprit pluriel

Communications publiées lors de congrès ou colloques nationaux et internationaux

A paraître

La fin de l'histoire, l'épistémè et la technique

La réception de l'“ Histoire des religions ” de Goblet d'Alviella (1884-1887)

2018

Cognitive enhancement and doping in sport

The Exploration-Exploitation Dilemma as a Tool for Studying Addiction

2014

Developing new frontiers in the Rubber Hand Illusion: Design of an open source robotic hand to better understand prosthetics

2013

The inefficacy and adverse effects of anti-doping policy

2011

L'hommage à Ferrer 

Soins et privation de liberté sont-ils compatibles ?

L'image de Denis Diderot dans l'historiographie philosophique française du début du XIXe siècle

2010

Is unconscious thought a delayed first impression?

2009

Metacognitive networks and measures of consciousness

Chunking in serial reaction time tasks

To think or not to think

Three awareness scales predict performance in a visual identification task, and suggest no performance without awareness

«Enhancement» Introduction à l'éthique et à la philosophie de la médecine d'amélioration

2008

Is unconscious thought more efficient than conscious thought when choosing among complex alternatives?

Is unconscious thought more efficient than conscious thought when choosing among complex alternatives?

Is unconscious thought more efficient than conscious thought when choosing among complex alternatives?

To think or not to think that's the question

Naissance de la psychopharmacologie en Europe et aux Etats-Unis (1950-1970)

Franc-maçonnerie et philosophie dans les premières années de la Belgique indépendante

2006

The role of time in learning processes without awareness

Temporality, intention and consciousness of movement

Aux origines du principe de “ laïcité ”

2005

The role of time in learning processes without awareness

Consciousness, control, and ageing

Dynamics of memory and the process of consolidation

Dynamics of memory and the process of consolidation

2004

Sequence learning without awareness

Sequence learning without awareness

Ageing and the relationships between consciousness and control

Applying forward models to sequence learning

Effects of divided attention on controlled and automatic influences of memory in artificial grammar learning

2003

Exploring the role of inner speech in sequence learning

Cognitive control

Incidental learning of background scene context in a visual search task

Contextual cueing of visuo-spatial attention

Y a-t-il des textes "sacrés" en philosophie ? Le cas du marxisme aux confins du politique et du philosophique

2002

Learning without awareness

La polysémie du terme “ secte ” et son usage en histoire de la philosophie aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles

2001

Rules vs. statistics in implicit learning of biconditional grammars

2000

Rules versus statistics in biconditional grammar learning

Les courants de pensée spiritualiste et matérialiste à l'ULB au XIXe siècle

Une définition des termes

1999

Krausismo y psicología fisiológica en la Universidad libre de Bruselas en el siglo XIX

1998

The serial reaction time task

« L'émergence d'un matérialisme athée lors des Congrès internationaux d'étudiants de Liège (1865), Bruxelles (1867) et Gand (1868)

1997

Incremental sequence learning

1996

Incremental sequence learning

Connectionist vs. rule-based accounts of sequence learning

1995

Implicit learning in the presence of multiple cues

Abstraction and memory for instances in implicit learning

La notion de Dieu dans la pensée du Comte Goblet d'Alviella

1994

Direct and indirect measures of implicit learning

1993

Attention and awareness in sequence learning

Attention and awareness in sequence learning

1992

The representation of structure in explicit prediction tasks

1991

Implicit detection of event interdependencies, and a PDP model of the process

1990

Learning the structure of event sequences

1989

Learning sequential structure in simple recurrent networks

1987

Implicit processing in control tasks

Participations à des congrès et colloques internationaux

2022

Bioéthique et science-fiction: zoom sur la pensée de Gilbert Hottois

Performer, c'est dans les gènes?

Le sport et l'homme augmenté

Collective Intelligence and Transhumanism

Le cyborg et le transhumain

2021

Objectif Mars ? Utopie, échappatoire, étape utile pour le développement de l'humanité ?

2020

Du destin génétique au choix génétique. Réflexions sur l'eugénisme techno-libéral contemporain

2019

Respect: être humain et technologie médicale, La déontologie médicale aujourd'hui

Le dopage entre sport et génétique

Réflexions sur l'augmentation de l'humain par la technologie

L'augmentation de l'humain par la biomédecine: une approche philosophique

Modifier l'homme pour coloniser l'espace?

Gilbert Hottois: un penseur transhumaniste?

Transcendance noire. Gilbert Hottois et le transhumanisme

Gilbert Hottois et la species technica

Doping in sport: ethics and philosophy

Médecine d'amélioration: la question du dopage

Le transhumanisme

Futur de l'homme et biomédecine

Neurosciences, IA, conscience

Philosophie du dopage et valeurs du sport

L'homme face au transhumanisme

2018

Cerveau stimulé, esprit augmenté ?

L'utilisation de la psychochirurgie relève-t-elle de l'éthique?

Dopage cognitif, dopage sportif: approches philosophiques sur l'effacement des frontières entre le thérapeutique et le mélioratif en biomédecine

Transhumanisme & homme augmenté: vers un changement de paradigme

The Exploration-Exploitation Dilemma as a Tool for Studying Addiction.

How using brain-machine interfaces influences the human sense of agency

Histoire de la découverte des psychotropes (1952-1962)

The effect of military training on sense of agency

Recipe for Exploring the Unknown: Information Value, Cognitive Control and dACC as the Main Ingredient

Humanisme et transhumanisme face à la question de l'augmentation de l'humain

Ethics of enhancement

Cognitive enhancement and doping in sport

Enjeux éthiques et philosophiques des applications non-thérapeutiques des technosciences biomédicales et principe de précaution

L'esprit et le cerveau

De l'homme réparé à l'homme augmenté dans le domaine du sport

La médecine d'amélioration, quelles perspectives éthiques?

2017

Le dopage sportif,

IA, Transhumanisme et Augmentation de l'humain

Philosophie du dopage et valeurs du sport

Augmentation et amélioration de l'humain

Faut-il tuer le transhumanisme?

The effect of military training on sense of agency

L'expérimentation en psychiatrie biologique: une approche historique et éthique

The effect of military training on sense of agency

L'intelligence artificielle et le transhumanisme

Learning the value of information and reward over time when solving exploration-exploitation problems

Transhumanisme et prolongation de la vie

Pluralisme et médecine d'amélioration

L'idéologie transhumaniste

Introduction à la conférence"Fonctionnement et dysfonctionnements du système auditif : des gènes à la thérapie"

2016

Transhumanisme et médecine d'amélioration

Transhumanisme et médecine d'amélioration.

Les enjeux éthiques du transhumanisme

Le transhumanisme : doit-on avoir peur de ce que va devenir la science de demain ?

Tensions entre positions artificialiste et naturaliste sur la question du dopage

Philosophie du dopage

Coercion changes the sense of agency in the human brain

Neurological implants and artificial intelligence: a reasonable technology?”,

2015

Prothèses, médecine d'augmentation et limites de la philosophie naturaliste

Médecine dopante et transformation de l'homme

Les équipes mobiles, une mise en tension de la psychiatrie? Aspects historiques et philosophiques

El dopaje, laboratorio de la medicina de mejoramiento

The sense of agency as tracking control

Anticipation(s) : penser et agir avec le futur

La médecine d'amélioration et le risque de la performance

Technology, intervention and control of individuals

Pensée rationnelle, pensée émotionnelle. Introduction

Le dopage sportif

Bébés sur mesure

What is the basis of human associative learning?

2014

Addictions et dopage: une approche philosophique

Le coeur a ses raisons: neurologie de la décision

Philosophie du dopage et biomédecine contemporaine

Les enjeux éthiques et philosophiques de l'interdiction du dopage dans le sport

Free will : Are we all equal ?

‘Psychothérapie ou Chimiothérapie?'

« Biologie et devenir de l'homme": une introduction

Single-Category IAT, electromyography and attention: on the temporal dynamics and the control of automatic social behaviours.

Intentional binding with a robotic hand : how much agency is modulated by embodiment ?

Neurosciences, libre arbitre et responsabilité

Sport de compétition et dopage: un point de vue critique sur la politique de l'Agence mondiale antidopage (AMA)

Les aspects éthiques de la médecine d'amélioration

Le corps augmenté: une introduction philosophique

Learning to use a new virtual environment: a crucial phase for cognitive patients

Imagerie Motrice et interfaces cerveau-machine

Augmenter nos aptitudes physiques et cérébrales?

Intentional Binding with a robotic hand : to what extend is agency modulated by embodiment?

2013

Réflexions sur la naissance de la psychiatrie extrahospitalière à Bruxelles

The role of consciousness in statistical learning: conceptual and methodological issues

Etre ou ne pas être biobanqué?

The adverse effects of anti-doping policy

Décrypter le cerveau-Quelle évolution future de l'humanité?

Déterminisme et libre arbitre dans les neurosciences. Réponse à Patrick Haggard (London University)

Freedom in biological research: How to consider accidental or intentional risks for populations

Time course of attentional bias for gambling information in problem gambling.

Fluctuations of Reaction Time Modulate Automatic Inhibition of Masked Primes.

What is the basis of human associative learning?

The role of consciousness in statistical learning: Conceptual and methodological issues

2012

Aspects éthiques de la psychochirurgie des TOC

Des effets pervers de l'éthique de la conviction en matière de lutte antidopage

Les relations entre psychochirurgie et neurochirurgie de l'épilepsie

«Lance is still a hero: stop trying to control doping in sport»

La médecine d'amélioration et la question de la justice et de la vulnérabilité

L'apport de la psychiatrie biologique aux neurosciences (1950-1970)

Bioéthique et amélioration

Human biodiversity and enhancement technologies

Human enhancement and the brain-mind

"Sport et dopage"

Empirisme thérapeutique et psychochirurgie

Naissance de la psychopharmacologie

Guérir ou doper. réflexions sur la médecine d'amélioration

La biomédecine et le futur de l'homme

Placebo-suggestion modulates conflict adaptation in the Stroop task

Placebo-suggestion modulates conflict adaptation in the Stroop task

Nonconscious instrumental learning from crowded sequences

Subliminal Sequence Learning In Peripheral Vision.

2011

Eugénisme libéral et biotechnologies : aspects éthiques et philosophiques

Statistical learning in language acquisition : the impact of bilingualism

Aspects éthiques et philosophiques de la médecine d'amélioration

«Prédire, prévenir, changer: avenir ou utopies?»

Peut-on parler de militantisme psychopharmacologique?

Les nanotechnologies : vers un changement d'échelle éthique ?

Enseigner la bioéthique à l'Université libre de Bruxelles

The repeated masked paradigm or how to increase the awareness of a non-conscious stimulus.

Visual masking revisited: number of repetitions and voluntary attention modulate priming and conscious access of a masked stimulus.

Progrès et amélioration

Posthumanisme  et amélioration

Sport, dopage et médecine d'amélioration

La médecine doit-elle encourager le dopage ?

Futur de l'homme et philosophie transhumaniste

Les philosophes et le futur

2010

Des difficultés de l'historiographie de l'athéisme

Statistical Learning of two artificial languages presented successively : How conscious?

Une éthique de la recherche est-elle nécessaire ?

The Radical Plasticity Thesis

Apprendre a être conscient

Consciousness and free will

The reach of the unconscious

The Radical Plasticity Thesis

The reach of the unconscious

Le cerveau

The radical plasticity thesis

To think or not to think?

Learning to be conscious

Impact et limites de l'apprentissage implicite

Conscience et espace

Qu'est-ce-que la conscience?

Des neurones à l'esprit

Des neurones à l'esprit

La conscience dans tous ses états

L'empirisme en psychiatrie

Dopage, performance, amélioration

De l'amélioration des performances sportives 

Barrières d'espèces, posthumain et médecine d'amélioration 

Biotechnology and the Future of Sport

Soigner les criminels ?

L'idéal de l'ingénieur en biomédecine et la question de l'amélioration de l'humain

Contraindre pour le bien

2009

L'éthique appliquée

Modulation of the Stroop effect by means of non-hypnotic suggestion

Information, technique et liberté

L'ULB et le Libre Examen aujourd'hui

Consciousness and neuroscience

Measuring consciousness

How we learn to be conscious

Dissociations between action awareness and awareness in simple reaction time and in pointing tasks

Prise de decision et conscience

Learning to be conscious

The Radical Plasticity Thesis

Intuition, conscience, neurosciences & prise de décision

Consciousness

Consciousness

La conscience dans tous ses états

Computational theories of consciousness

Du subliminal à l'hypnose

Learning to be conscious

The role of pace and time in sequence learning

Subliminal behavioural priming

Les enjeux éthiques en génétique

Histoire orale de la psychiatrie biologique

Présentation du Code d'Ethique de la Recherche Scientifique en Belgique 

La Folie, son intégration dans la cité et son évolution au fil du temp

Recherches technoscientifiques sur l'être humain et éthique du futur

Définir la conscience

L'amélioration de l'être humain par de nouveaux dispositifs implantables et le respect de lintégrité du corps humain 

Ethique et déontologie

2008

Secret et mensonge dans le monde médical du XIXe siècle

Auguste Comte, le positivisme et la médecine

L'ULB et le Libre Examen aujourd'hui

What defines consciousness?

Conscious and unconscious processing

Mr. Spock's guide to Psychology

Consciousness and metarepresentation

Consciousness

Consciousness takes time

Consciousness and Control

Comment apprendre sans conscience nous fait apprendre à être conscients

Dialogue entre les Profs. A. Bazan et A. Cleeremans sur l'interface entre neurosciences cognitives et psychanalyse

La psychiatrie biologique au 20e siècle

De la découverte des médicaments psychotropes aux premières hypothèses sur les bases neurochimiques des maladies mentales

Traitements biologiques en psychiatrie

L'empirisme thérapeutique de la psychiatrie biologique (1920-1960)

Paul Janssen et la synthèse de l'haloperidol

2007

Libre pensée et libre examen

Comment sommes-nous conscients?

Learning to be conscious

Learning to be conscious

The radical plasticity thesis

Conscience et apprentissage

Learning and consciousness

Learning to be conscious

Learning and consciousness

Time, action, and consciousness

Learning to be conscious

Timing and aging in sequence learning

La psychiatrie biologique 

Modifier la nature humaine ?

2006

Avons-nous besoin de dieu(x) ?

The dynamics of consciousness: Temporal factors shape interactions between conscious and unconscious information processing

Learning and consciousness

Imaging Consciousness

Consciousness takes time

Being Virtual

Learning and consciousness

A la recherche des corrélats neuraux de la conscience

Corrélats neuraux des apprentissages avec et sans conscience

Les corrélats neuraux de la conscience

Comment apprendre sans conscience nous fait apprendre à être conscient

Consciousness as a tipping point

Conscious experience as the brain's unconscious understanding of itself

Naissance de la psychopharmacologie en Europe et aux Etats-Unis (1950-1960)

Neuroéthique et technologies d'amélioration du cerveau humain

2005

Le libre examen et ses enjeux contemporains

Implicit change detection

Change blindness and implicit change detection

Implicit change detection

Implicit change detection

Le libre examen

No role of motor responses in sequence learning tasks?

Implicit change detection

Consciousness, control and ageing

Deterministic and probabilistic sequence learning

Cognitive control and consciousness in the face of age

Processing non-adjacent contingencies

A dual connectionist model of meta-representation

Consciousness as a continuum

Principes généraux d'une théorie de la conscience

Introductory lecture

Consciousness as global constraint satisfaction

Being Virtual : A graded, dynamic perspective on the relationships between conscious and unconscious cognition

Entre mémoire et action

Objects between disciplines

Fonction de la narration dans les rapports entre bioéthique et philosophie

2004

La découverte des premiers neuroleptiques en France et en Belgique

Combien de neurones faut-il pour penser ?

Conscience et objectivité

Vieillissement cognitif normal et relation entre conscience et contrôle

Ageing and the relationship between consciousness and control

Ageing and the relationship between consciousness and control

Ageing and the relationship between consciousness and control

Automatic priming and conscious expectancy in a simple reaction time task

Behavioral, imaging and modelling studies of implicit sequence learning

Automatic priming and conscious expectancy in a simple reaction time task

Ce qui fait que nous sommes humains

Comment devenir un zombie intelligent

Being Virtual

The subtlety of gradedness

Conscious and unconscious learning

Learning and Consciousness

Conscience et contrôle

Consciousness

Conscience et apprentissage

2003

Des traitements biologiques en psychiatrie à l'étiologie des maladies mentales

La conscience de soi

Le savoir bioéthique

What can we expect from a neuroscientific theory of consciousness?

Bioethics and global health care

Philosophy of Consciousness

Consciousness

Learning-induced changes in regional cerebral activity and connectivity during REM sleep

Learning to be conscious

Conscience et contrôle

The search for the computational correlates of consciousness

The search for the computational correlates of consciousness

Attention and implicit learning

The search for the computational correlates of consciousness

Conciousness and cognitive control

2002

Herbert Feigl et l'inaccessibilité de l'esprit

Contextual Cueing of Visuo-Spatial Attention

Contrasting Explicit and Implicit Knowledge in Contextual Cueing of Visuo-Spatial Attention

Information-dependent cerebral reactivations during post-training REM sleep

Learning to be conscious

Learning and Consciousness

Implicit learning

A graded, dynamic perspective on consciousness

2001

Ethique et ADN recombinant

Auguste Comte et l'histoire des neurosciences

Evolution des théories associationnistes sur la mémoire de T. Ribot à J. Fuster

Jean-Jacques Rousseau et le niveau des sciences biologiques et médicales au XVIIIe siècle

Identifying the cerebral correlates of consciousness in sequence learning

Learning and Consciousness

Learning and Consciousness

Rules vs. Statistics

Learning and Consciousness

Behavioral, Neural, and Computational Correlates of Implicit and Explicit Learning

Learning and consciousness

Il y a-t-il une unité de la conscience?

Being Virtual

L'unité de la conscience

Learning and consciousness

Action and consciousness

2000

In quest of an efficient treatment in psychiatry

Matérialisme philosophique et matérialisme médical au XIXe siècle

Neural correlates of explicit sequence knowledge

Learning and consciousness

Learning and consciousness

Learning and consciousness

Consciousness and knowledge representation in sequence learning

Learning and consciousness

Sensitivity to abstract sequence structure

Learning and consciousness

1999

Le pacifisme est-il une valeur universelle ?

L'innovation

Evolution des thérapies biologiques en psychiatrie dans un institut bruxellois entre 1917 et 1960

Dissociating conscious and unconscious influences in sequence learning

Dissociating conscious and unconscious influences in sequence learning

Dissociating conscious and unconscious influences in sequence learning

Processing abstract structure

Apprendre un langage avec vos doigts

Learning language with your fingers

Consciousness and knowledge representation in sequence learning

Consciousness and knowledge representation in sequence learning

1998

Conscience et évolution

Emergence du concept d'image dans les sciences neurologiques au XIXe siècle et étude de l'évolution de ce concept dans les neurosciences contemporaines

Aux limites de la vie

Ethique, science et société

El krausismo a finales de los siglos XIX y XX (1898-1998)

Using the process dissociation procedure to measure implicit and explicit processes in a sequence learning task

Processing of contextual information during an implicit probabilistic sequence task

Implicit cognition

Is sequence learning (a) implicit? (b) automatic? (c) abstract? (d) none of the above?

Sequence learning

Bioéthique, développement durable et principe de précaution

1997

Le statut philosophique de l'embryon humain in vitro

Information Infrastructure for Ethics in Medecine

From zombies to Star Trek's commander Data

1996

Les doctrines matérialistes de l'âme face à la théorie cartésienne

The shadow theory of mind

Implicit cognition with the symbolic metaphor of mind

Implicit cognition with the symbolic metaphor of mind

Métaphores symboliques et connexionistes de l'esprit

1995

Les systèmes matérialistes des philosophes et des médecins sur l'âme de l'homme

The beginning and the end of human life: Historical and epistemological study of the concepts of life and death in connection with the mind-brain problem (in the 19th and 20th centuries)

Une critique positive du chapitre 2 de Matière et mémoire de Bergson

Ethique de la psychochirurgie

Ethique de l'expérimentation humaine

Les niveaux d'intégration de l'action

Principles for Implicit Learning

Implicit Learning

Beyond the SRN

Cinq principes pour l'apprentissage implicite

Abstraction and memory for instances in implicit learning

Recherche clinique et recherche expérimentale en neurologie au vingtième siècle

1994

Brain physical manipulation and individual personality

Libre examen, définitions, bilan et perspectives

Informed consent in the field of brain surgery

L'éthique formelle de H.T. Engelhardt Jr

L'émergence des sciences cognitives comme discipline de recherche

L'intentionnalité et les fonctions du cortex préfrontal

Explicit and implicit information in sequence learning

Exploring and interpreting dissociations in implicit learning

Connectionist networks as models of human sequence learning

Being explicit about implicit learning

Représentations et processus dans l'apprentissage implicite

1993

Le pluralisme éthique à l'hôpital

Les métaphores de l'Esprit

The psychology of connectionism

Attention and awareness in sequence learning

Attention and awareness in sequence learning

Attention and awareness in sequence learning

Attention and explicit knowledge in sequence learning

Mechanisms for implicit learning

1992

Le cerveau, l'ordinateur et les modèles de la conscience

Learning disjoint sequential contingencies

Sequence processing in human and artificial systems

1991

Mechanisms of implicit learning

1990

Unintentional learning of sequential structure

Modeling sequence learning with simple recurrent networks

Graded State Machines

1989

Learning sequential structure

Implicit learning of sequential structure in a CRT task

1988

Learning in simple recurrent networks

Learning in recurrent networks

1987

Modèles connexionnistes et apprentissage implicite

Associations et dissociations entre performance et connaissances verbalisables

Direction d'ouvrages: chapitres rédigés par des membres de l'ULB

2015

Préhumains et hominisation.

Science-fiction et cinéma

Hommes fossiles

2012

Penser l'avenir avec Spinoza

2009

Objective vs. subjective measures of consciousness

Science-fiction et diète de l'imagination philosophique

2001

Double effet = Double Effect

Écoterrorisme

Démographie

2000

Et si l'opinion avait parfois raison ?

Introduction

1999

Eugénisme et don de gamète

Aux frontières de l'eugénisme

1996

Les problèmes bioéthiques posés par l'investigation clinique chez les patients de soins intensifs

L'expérimentation en reproduction humaine

Les controverses de l'expérimentation animale

1991

Et si demain le cerveau ?

Direction d'actes de colloque: chapitres rédigés par des membres de l'ULB

1997

Do superior groups discriminate more?

1991

L'analyse de la cognition par la psychologie cognitive