Philosophy of Cognitive Science, Misc

There is some consensus among orthodox category theorists that the concept of adjoint functors is the most important concept contributed to mathematics by category theory. We give a heterodox treatment of adjoints using heteromorphisms that parses an adjunction into two separate parts. Then these separate parts can be recombined in a new way to define a cognate concept, the brain functor, to abstractly model the functions of perception and action of a brain. The treatment uses relatively simple category theory and (...) is focused on the interpretation and application of the mathematical concepts. (shrink)

Our understanding of implicit bias and how to measure it has yet to be settled. Various debates between cognitive scientists are unresolved. Moreover, the public’s understanding of implicit bias tests continues to lag behind cognitive scientists’. These discrepancies pose potential problems. After all, a great deal of implicit bias research has been publicly funded. Further, implicit bias tests continue to feature in discourse about public- and private-sector policies surrounding discrimination, inequality, and even the purpose of science. We aim to do (...) our part by reconstructing some of the recent arguments in ordinary language and then revealing some of the operative norms or values that are often hidden beneath the surface of these arguments. This may help the public learn more about the science of implicit bias. It may also help both laypeople and scientists reflect on the values, interests, and stakeholders involved in establishing, justifying, and communicating scientific research. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that neuroscience not only is not complemented, but rather is positively undermined, by the substantive commitments of materialist philosophers of mind. Thus, we can have neuroscience or "neurophilosophy" but not both. Since neuroscience is a real science, to the extent that it is in tension with materialistic neurophilosophy, the latter should be abandoned and the former retained.

Despite the harmful impact of conspiracy theories on the public discourse, there is little agreement about their exact nature. Rather than define conspiracy theories as such, we focus on the notion of conspiracy belief. We analyse three recent proposals that identify belief in conspiracy theories as an effect of irrational reasoning. Although these views are sometimes presented as competing alternatives, they share the main commitment that conspiracy beliefs are epistemically flawed because they resist revision given disconfirming evidence. However, the three (...) views currently lack the formal detail necessary for an adequate comparison. In this paper, we bring these views closer together by exploring the rationality of conspiracy belief under a probabilistic framework. By utilising Michael Strevens’ Bayesian treatment of auxiliary hypotheses, we question the claim that the irrationality associated with conspiracy belief is due to a failure of belief revision given disconfirming evidence. We argue that maintaining a core conspiracy belief can be perfectly Bayes-rational when such beliefs are embedded in networks of auxiliary beliefs, which can be sacrificed to protect the more central ones. We propose that the irrationality associated with conspiracy belief lies not in a flawed updating method according to subjective standards but in a failure to converge towards well-confirmed stable belief networks in the long run. We discuss a set of initial reasoning biases as a possible reason for such a failure. Our approach reconciles previously disjointed views, while at the same time offering a formal platform for their further development. (shrink)

This is a long-abandoned draft, written in 2013, of what was supposed to be a paper for an edited collection (one that, in the end, didn't come together). The paper "Group Minds and Natural Kinds" descends from it.

In the 17th century, Hobbes stated that we reason by addition and subtraction. Historians of logic note that Hobbes thought of reasoning as “a ‘species of computation’” but point out that “his writing contains in fact no attempt to work out such a project.” Though Leibniz mentions the plus/minus character of the positive and negative copulas, neither he nor Hobbes say anything about a plus/minus character of other common logical words that drive our deductive judgments, words like ‘some’, ‘all’, ‘if’, (...) and ‘and’, each of which actually turns out to have an oppositive, character that allows us, “in our silent reasoning,” to ignore its literal meaning and to reckon with it as one reckons with a plus or a minus operator in elementary algebra or arithmetic. These ‘logical constants’ of natural language figure crucially in our everyday reasoning. Because Hobbes and Leibniz did not identify them as the plus and minus words we reason with, their insight into what goes on in ‘ratiocination’ did not provide a guide for a research program that could develop a +/- logic that actually describes how we reason deductively. I will argue that such a +/- logic provides a way back from modern predicate logic—the logic of quantifiers and bound variables that is now ‘standard logic’—to an Aristotelian term logic of natural language that had been the millennial standard logic. (shrink)

In cognitive psychology there appears to be a creative tension between models that use connections of a network, and models that use rules for symbol manipulation. The idea of a connectionist network goes back to McCulloch & Pitts [1943] and Hebb [1949], and finds recent revival in the `parallel distributed processing' (PDP) models that have been extensively examined in the last few years (see e.g. Rumelhart et al. [1986]). In the intervening years, however, the predominant explanations of psychology have been (...) in terms of rules for the manipulation of symbolic structures (e.g. since Newell & Simon [1963]). Because of the tension between these different approaches (see e.g. Fodor & Pylyshyn [1988]), there is great interest in the formulation of `hybrid systems' which combine connectionist components with traditional symbolic processing. I attempt below to outline the general architecture of such a hybrid system. (shrink)

1. The Naturalistic Turn in Philosophy of Science 2. The Framework of Mechanistic Explanation: Parts, Operations, and Organization 3. Representing and Reasoning About Mechanisms 4. Mental Mechanisms: Mechanisms that Process Information 5. Discovering Mental Mechanisms 6 . Summary.

The Relevance of Cognitive Science to Teaching, Proceedings of the 6th International History, Philosophy & Science Teaching Conference (IHPST), Denver, Colorado, November 7-10, 2001. (PDF).

A friend of my sent me the address where this paper has been posted by Adam Frank. Reading it, I realized that more than 90% of the main ideas of this paper (about the mind-brain problem, quantum mechanics (microparticles-wave relationship, Schrodinger equation, probabilities, “perceiving subject in physics”, the idea about consciousness and Nagel, etc. etc.) are UNBELIEVABLE similar to my ideas from my paper 2005 or my book 2008!!!

This is indeed an auspicious time for Cognitive Science. I stand here before you this evening as the first Chair to give a presidential address to this austere body, to place on record before you what you are to accept as the Society's official view on the new science of the mind.

Several developments for diverse scientific goals, mostly in physics and physiology, had to take place, which eventually gave us fMRI as one of the central research paradigms of contemporary cognitive neuroscience. This technique stands on solid foundations established by the physics of magnetic resonance and the physiology of hemodynamics and is complimented by computational and statistical techniques. I argue, and support using concrete examples, that these foundations give rise to a productive theory-ladenness in fMRI, which enables researchers to identify and (...) control for the types of methodological and inferential errors. Consequently, this makes it possible for researchers to represent and investigate cognitive phenomena in terms of hemodynamic data and for experimental knowledge to grow independently of large scale theories of cognition. (shrink)

This chapter offers an indirect defence of the Evansian conception of egocentric space, by showing how it resolves a puzzle concerning the unity of egocentric spatial perception. The chapter outlines several common assumptions about egocentric perspectival structure and argues that a subject’s experience, both within and across her sensory modalities, may involve multiple structures of this kind. This raises the question of how perspectival unity is achieved, such that these perspectival structures form a complex whole, rather than merely disunified set (...) of individually, distinctively structured experiences. The shortcomings of variety of accounts are considered: switch accounts ; sensory accounts; transformation accounts; and ultimate accounts. These shortcomings are addressed by a further kind of account provided by the Evansian conception – an agentive account – according to which egocentrically structured experiences present the world in relation to parts of a single thing, the body as a dynamic unity. (shrink)

Philosophy of mind and cognitive science (e.g., Clark and Chalmers 1998; Clark 2010; Palermos 2014) have recently become increasingly receptive tothe hypothesis of extended cognition, according to which external artifacts such as our laptops and smartphones can—under appropriate circumstances—feature as material realisers of a person’s cognitive processes. We argue that, to the extent that the hypothesis of extended cognition is correct, our legal and ethical theorising and practice must be updated, by broadening our conception of personal assault so as to (...) include intentional harm towards gadgets that have been appropriately integrated. We next situate the theoretical case for extended personal assault within the context of some recent ethical and legal cases and close with some critical discussion. (shrink)

In order to investigate cognition fundamental assumptions must be made about what, in general terms, it is. In cognitive science it is usually assumed that cognition is computational and representational. There have been well known disputes over these assumptions, with rival claims that cognition is dynamical, situated and embodied. In this paper I emphasize the relations between cognition and control. I present a model of cognition that makes the claim that it is a form of high-order control, and I argue (...) that viewing cognition as high-order control could be a useful framework assumption for cognitive science. Cognition has many aspects and different concepts can emphasize different aspects of it. Computational and representational assumptions have been very productive, and dynamical and embodied assumptions have also been productive, though to a much lesser extent so far. Control, however, has received insufficient attention in cognition science. The model I propose is based on a point that few will dispute, namely that control of behavior is the ultimate function of cognition. Bringing this to the foreground can be productive by highlighting the ways in which cognition is structured in relation to this control function. If this perspective is valuable it will be because the control function has a highly structuring effect on cognition. As a result a control-based perspective will predict many features of cognition and yield a coherent, integrated picture. (shrink)

Human behavior and thought often exhibit a familiar pattern of within group similarity and between group difference. Many of these patterns are attributed to cultural differences. For much of the history of its investigation into behavior and thought, however, cognitive science has been disproportionately focused on uncovering and explaining the more universal features of human minds—or the universal features of minds in general. -/- This entry charts out the ways in which this has changed over the past decades. It sketches (...) the motivation behind the cultural turn in cognitive science, and situates some of its central findings with respect to the questions that animate it and the debates that it has inspired. Woven throughout the entry are examples of how the cognitive science of culture, and especially its elevated concern with different forms of diversity and variation, continues to influence and be influenced by philosophers. -/- One cluster of philosophical work falls within the traditional subject matter of philosophy of science, in this case of the cognitive and social sciences. Philosophers have analyzed and assessed the methods and evidence central to the scientific study of cognition and culture, and have offered conceptual scrutiny, clarification, and synthesis. Research in a second vein sees philosophers themselves contributing more directly to cognitive scientific projects, (co)constructing theories, helping build computational models, even gathering empirical data. A third kind of work is naturalistic philosophy or philosophy of nature, wherein philosophers seek to use results from the cognitive science of culture to inform or transform debates over long-standing philosophical questions, including questions about the nature of philosophy and philosophical methodology itself. (shrink)

Linguistic intuitions are a central source of evidence across a variety of linguistic domains. They have also long been a source of controversy. This chapter aims to illuminate the etiology and evidential status of at least some linguistic intuitions by relating them to error signals of the sort posited by accounts of on-line monitoring of speech production and comprehension. The suggestion is framed as a novel reply to Michael Devitt’s claim that linguistic intuitions are theory-laden “central systems” responses, rather than (...) endorsed outputs of a modularized language faculty (the “Voice of Competence”). Along the way, it is argued that linguistic intuitions may not constitute a natural kind with a common etiology; and that, for a range of cases, the process by which intuitions used in linguistics are generated amounts to little more than comprehension. (shrink)

Cognitive archaeologists attempt to infer the cognitive and cultural features of past hominins and their societies from the material record. This task faces the problem of minimum necessary competence: as the most sophisticated thinking of ancient hominins may have been in domains that leave no archaeological signature, it is safest to assume that tool production and use reflects only the lower boundary of cognitive capacities. Cognitive archaeology involves selecting a model from the cognitive sciences and then assessing some aspect of (...) the material record through that lens. We give examples to show that background theoretical commitments in cognitive science that inform those models lead to different minimum necessary competence results. This raises an important question: what principles should guide us in selecting a model from the cognitive sciences? We outline two complementary responses to this question. The first involves using independent lines of evidence to converge on a particular capacity. This can then influence model choice. The second is a broader suggestion. Theoretical diversity is a good thing in science, but is only beneficial over a limited amount of time. According to recent modelling work, one way of limiting diversity is to introduce extreme priors. We argue that having a broad spectrum of views in the philosophy of cognitive science may actually help cognitive archaeologists address the problem of minimum necessary competence. (shrink)

An emerging body of research suggests that psychedelic experiences can change users’ religious or metaphysical beliefs. Here I explore issues concerning psychedelic-induced belief change via a critique of some recent arguments by Wayne Glausser. Two scientific studies seem to show that psychedelic experiences can convert atheists to belief in God, but Glausser holds that academic and popular discussions of these studies are misleading. I offer a different analysis of the relevant findings, attempting to preserve the insights of Glausser’s critique while (...) setting the record straight on some important points. For one thing, the studies provide stronger evidence for atheist deconversion than Glausser allows. For another, Glausser’s arguments against the “Metaphysical Belief Theory” of psychedelic therapy involve scientifically dubious claims and inferences. Finally, in evaluating this theory, we ought to focus on its strongest version, which posits belief shifts from metaphysical naturalism to non-naturalism, rather than from atheism to classical monotheism. (shrink)

Sometimes agents sincerely profess to believe a claim and yet act inconsistently with it in some contexts. In this paper, I focus on mismatch cases in the domain of religion. I distinguish between two kinds of representations: prompts and default states. Prompts are representations that must be salient to agents in order for them to play their belief-appropriate roles, whereas default states play these roles automatically. The need for access characteristic of prompts is explained by their vehicles: prompts are realized (...) in symbolic systems or even artifacts that make them inapt for automatic regulation of inference and behavior. I argue that some mismatch cases are explained by the fact that agents often report the contents of prompts when they report their beliefs, but behavior is controlled by prompts only when they are made salient to agents. I show that a number of otherwise puzzling findings in the cognitive science of religion, concerning belief intuitiveness, are illuminated by the distinction. (shrink)

Encyclopedia entry: http://www.sagepub.com/books/Book234813#tabview=title.

A striking feature of the latest version of Dennett’s ‘big picture’ of the evolution of life and mind is frequent reference to ‘affordances’. An affordance is, roughly, a possibility for action for a creature in an environment. Given more than one possibility for action, a good question is: what will the creature actually do? I argue that affordances pose a problem of selection, and that a good general solution to this problem of mind-design is to implement a system of preferences.

Shadmehr and Ahmed’s book is a welcome extension of optimal foraging theory and neuroeconomics, achieved by integrating both with parameters relating to effort and rate of movement. Their most persuasive and prolific data comes from saccades, where times before and after decision are reasonably determinate. Skeletal movements are less likely to exhibit such tidy temporal organisation.

The ‘extended mind’ thesis asserts that cognitive processes are not bound by the skull or even skin of biological individuals, but actively incorporate environmental structures such as symbols, tools, artifacts, media, cultural practices, norms, groups, or institutions. By distributing cognition across space, time, and people in canny ways, we circumvent or overcome the biological limitations of our brains. Human beings are creative, albeit opportunistic experts in cognitive ‘self-transcendence.’ This entry surveys discussions of EM in philosophy of mind and cognitive science (...) which point to this overarching theme. (shrink)

The present book is the revised version of my Ph.D. Thesis “A Philosophical Study of the Concept of Mind (with special reference to Rene Descartes, David Hume and Gilbert Ryle)”. I have selected three thinkers Rene Descartes, David Hume and Gilbert Ryle to discuss their ideas on the nature of mind. All the above thinkers have relevance in cognitive science and philosophy of mind by their conceptions about the mind and problems they have raised. We have used analysis as a (...) methodology of this work and concluded that we should adopt an integrated and collective approach of cognitive science to study the nature of mind. In the end of the book, glossary of the philosophy of mind also added, which terms frequently I used in this work. (shrink)

The paper defends a version of the perceptual account of bodily feelings, according to which having a feeling is feeling something about one’s body. But it rejects the idea, familiar in the work of William James, that what one feels when one has a feeling is something biological about one’s body. Instead it argues that to have a bodily feeling is to feel an apparent bodily indication of something – a bodily appearance. Being aware of what one’s body is apparently (...) indicating to one is being aware of something about one’s body, but the focus of attention is on what is apparently being indicated, which is not something about one’s body. This is one way of making sense of the idea in contemporary phenomenology that the body is conspicuous in feelings that do not take the body as an object of awareness. Bodily inclinations are apparent indications of what one is going to do, and it is argued that feeling one’s bodily inclinations constitutes an important class of bodily feelings – e.g. feeling like crying or feeling like being sick. Such inclinations are often felt through a process of resisting them. Bodily inclinations also have some intentionality, albeit quite limited, and this goes some way towards explaining Peter Goldie’s concept of feelings towards. (shrink)

In summaries of “best practices” for pedagogy, one typically encounters enthusiastic advocacy for metacognition. Some researchers assert that the body of evidence supplied by decades of education studies indicates a clear pedagogical imperative: that if one wants their students to learn well, one must implement teaching practices that cultivate students’ metacognitive skills. -/- In this dissertation, I counter that education research does not impose such a mandate upon instructors. We lack sufficient and reliable evidence from studies that use the appropriate (...) research design to validate the efficacy of metacognitive skill-building interventions (not just evaluate their relationship to learning outcomes). I argue that improved academic outcomes following these interventions aren’t necessarily mediated by increased metacognitive skills; rather, enhanced student performance can be accounted for by other factors that accompany metacognitive training, particularly the explicit provision of domain-specific knowledge. -/- On the way to this conclusion, I elaborate some complications and controversies surrounding “metacognition.” This is a sprawling and nebulous construct, which makes generalizations about its pedagogical value dubious from the outset. Moreover, it is unclear the extent to which the end goal of metacognitive skill-building (cognitive self-mastery, involving knowledge of and control over our own minds) is even possible, given our mental architecture; some cognitive scientists allege that we are subject to phenomenological illusions which make this seem more achievable than it actually is. -/- I also attempt to provide an account of how metacognitive skill-building could receive glowing endorsements from educators and education researchers, even though its conceptual and empirical underpinnings are flimsy. The error theory I offer identifies two major factors that may foster belief in the efficacy of metacognitive training: goalpost-shifting around the objective of such efforts, and motivated reasoning in defense of the desirable conclusion that educators can significantly reshape students’ minds and unlock their intellectual potential through simple pedagogical interventions. (shrink)

We wake each morning to news on the glaring statistics of people infected by COVID-19 and others reportedly dying from complications thereto; the numbers are not receding in at least a number of countries across the world. It is hard to imagine a moment such as this that most of us have lived through in our life-time; but it is a reality and public challenge that we can neither ignore nor look away from. In what follows I will explore perspectives (...) on death from the Hindu tradition and the kinds of response—and solace or wisdom—afforded by the tradition to the angst and fears evoked by this pandemic situation. In concluding the discussion, I shall offer tentative reflections on how the Hindu perspective may be universalized, such as might invite conversations with therapists and care workers who may be seeking alternative resources to help expand the therapeutic space in more beneficent ways during the Covid-19 pandemic and its after-effects. (shrink)

Why do some people enjoy being afraid? A recent study by Andersen et al . found an inverted U-shaped relationship between fear and enjoyment, consistent with the theory that the pursuit of pleasurable fear is a form of play.

When perception is made the subject of philosophy, it is primarily understood as pre-theoretical sensual knowledge, and the question of its truth content becomes the focus of attention. In contrast, approaches that fall within the philosophy of embodiment quite rightly point out that perception is bodily anchored and closely linked to interests in action. The primacy of knowledge is therefore substituted by a primacy of praxis. This article aims to point out the blind spots that such a hegemony of the (...) practical entails. In a phenomenological way, it is to be shown that beside the aspect of instrumentality, perceptive situations are also experienced as pleasant or unpleasant as such. This points to the importance of the pathical character of perception. However, it is not a call to enthrone the primacy of affect instead of the primacy of practice. The paper concludes with a thought on the philosophy of pedagogy and education. Proceeding from that perceptive position, it is argued that film in particular offers a chance to apply the phenomenology of pathical perception to the field of intersubjectivity. (shrink)

In this paper, we introduce an enactive account of loving as participatory sense-making inspired by the “I love to you” of the feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray. Emancipating from the fusionist concept of romantic love, which understands love as unity, we conceptualise loving as an existential engagement in a dialectic of encounter, in continuous processes of becoming-in-relation. In these processes, desire acquires a certain prominence as the need to know more. We build on Irigaray’s account of love to present a phenomenology (...) of loving interactions and then our enactive account. Finally, we draw some implications for ethics. These concern language, difference, vulnerability, desire, and self-transformation. (shrink)

This special issue addresses the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological viewpoint, especially contemporary phenomenological research on selfhood. In the introduction, we first offer a brief survey of the various classic questions related to personal identity according to Locke’s initial proposal and sketch out key concepts and distinctions of the debate that came after Locke. We then characterize the types of approach represented by post-Hegelian, German and French philosophies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We argue that whereas the (...) Anglophone debates on personal identity were initially formed by the persistence question and the characterization question, the “Continental” tradition included remarkably intense debates on the individual or the self as being unique or “concrete,” deeply temporal and—as claimed by some philosophers, like Sartre and Foucault—unable to have any identity, if not one externally imposed. We describe the Continental line of thinking about the “self” as a reply and an adjustment to the post-Lockean “personal identity” question. These observations constitute the backdrop for our presentation of phenomenological approaches to personal identity. These approaches run along three lines: debates on the layers of the self, starting from embodiment and the minimal self and running all the way to the full-fledged concept of person; questions of temporal becoming, change and stability, as illustrated, for instance, by aging or transformative life-experiences; and the constitution of identity in the social, institutional, and normative space. The introduction thus establishes a structure for locating and connecting the different contributions in our special issue, which, as an ensemble, represent a strong and differentiated contribution to the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological perspective. (shrink)

The situation caused by the 2019 coronavirus disease has been representing a great source of concern and a challenge to the psychological well-being of many individuals around the world. For couples in particular, this extraordinary rise in concern, combined with the stress posed by the virus containment measures, such as prolonged cohabitation and lack of support networks, may have increased the likelihood of couple problems. At the same time, however, COVID-19 concerns may have been a stimulus to activate couples’ stress (...) management processes. A couple’s resource, which may have an important role in dealing with COVID-19 concerns and stress, is dyadic coping, i.e., the process through which partners face stress together. Drawing on a sample of 1,823 Italian individuals involved in a couple relationship, the current study tested a serial mediation model in which concerns about COVID-19 predicted psychological well-being, through both explicit stress communication and perceived partner dyadic coping responses. In addition, the study explored whether this dyadic coping process functioned the same way in satisfied and dissatisfied couples. Results showed that concerns about the situation related to COVID-19 significantly threatened individuals’ psychological well-being. However, these concerns positively predicted explicit stress communication, which in turn positively predicted perceived partner’s dyadic coping responses, which finally positively predicted psychological well-being. In addition, in the group of dissatisfied individuals, the association between explicit stress communication and perceived partners’ dyadic coping responses was not significant. The present study adds to the research on couples’ coping by testing for the first time the whole theoretical model of dyadic coping and does so during a global emergency situation. The study also suggests key components of preventive interventions for individuals in couples. (shrink)

While previous studies have suggested that there exists a relationship between obesity and executive function, the mechanisms and causal relationship between them remain unclear. There are important clinical implications of determining whether EF can predict and treat obesity. We conducted a multilevel meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials and longitudinal studies. Specifically, we investigate whether EF interventions have an effect on weight loss, whether baseline EF can be a predictor of future weight loss through obesity intervention, and whether early-life EF can (...) predict future weight loss. Eight RCTs and 17 longitudinal studies with a total of 11,393 participants were identified. We found that EF interventions may not have an effect on weight loss, baseline inhibition and delay discounting significantly predict future weight loss through obesity intervention, age moderates the relationship between working memory and weight loss through intervention, but not weight status, type of intervention, and percentage of female, and early life inhibition is a marginally significant predictor of future weight loss. Our results seem to support the assumption that the relationship between EF and obesity is not direct, and a higher-order factor, such as genes, may link obesity and EF. Building on the preliminary findings, further studies focusing on EF and obesity are needed in the future. (shrink)

This paper explores an emerging sub-field of both empirical bioethics and experimental philosophy, which has been called “experimental philosophical bioethics” (bioxphi). As an empirical discipline, bioxphi adopts the methods of experimental moral psychology and cognitive science; it does so to make sense of the eliciting factors and underlying cognitive processes that shape people’s moral judgments, particularly about real-world matters of bioethical concern. Yet, as a normative discipline situated within the broader field of bioethics, it also aims to contribute to substantive (...) ethical questions about what should be done in a given context. What are some of the ways in which this aim has been pursued? In this paper, we employ a case study approach to examine and critically evaluate four strategies from the recent literature by which scholars in bioxphi have leveraged empirical data in the service of normative arguments. (shrink)

Covid-19 lockdown restrictions constitute a population-wide “life-change event” disrupting normal daily routines. It was proposed that as a result of these lockdown restrictions, physical activity levels would likely decline. However, it could also be argued that lifestyle disruption may result in the formation of increased physical activity habits. Using a longitudinal design, the purpose of this study was to investigate changes in physical activity of different intensities, across individuals who differed in activity levels prior to lockdown restrictions being imposed, and (...) across three time periods: pre-, during- and post-lockdown. This study also examined the extent to which the experience of daily hassles explained any changes in physical activity. A convenience sample recruited through social media, provided data from an online survey administered during weeks 2–3 of a 5-week lockdown and 231 participants provided complete data again 6 weeks post-lockdown. Participants completed the International Physical Activity Questionnaire–Short Form and the Daily Hassles Scale. Results showed that vigorous and moderate intensity PA were significantly lower during- and post-lockdown compared to pre-lockdown in those individuals who had been highly active pre-lockdown. In contrast, for moderately active individuals pre-lockdown, vigorous and moderate intensity PA was significantly higher during-lockdown compared to pre-lockdown, and these increased levels of vigorous PA were maintained post-lockdown. Participants experienced daily hassles due to inner concerns, time pressures, family, and financial concerns to the same extent during- and post-lockdown. Those daily hassles had a small negative predictive effect on post-lockdown PA. It appears that to understand the effect of COVID-19 restrictions on PA, the activity status of individuals pre-lockdown needs to be taken into account. The daily hassles appeared to play a role in post-lockdown PA behavior, but future research should investigate why these results occurred. (shrink)