Introspection, or metacognition, is the capacity to reflect on our own thoughts and behaviours. Here, we investigated how one specific metacognitive ability develops in adolescence, a period of life associated with the emergence of self-concept and enhanced self-awareness. We employed a task that dissociates objective performance on a visual task from metacognitive ability in a group of 56 participants aged between 11 and 41 years. Metacognitive ability improved significantly with age during adolescence, was highest in late adolescence and plateaued going (...) into adulthood. Our results suggest that awareness of one’s own perceptual decisions shows a prolonged developmental trajectory during adolescence. (shrink)

Human behavior depends on the ability to effectively introspect about our performance. For simple perceptual decisions, this introspective or metacognitive ability varies substantially across individuals and is correlated with the structure of focal areas in prefrontal cortex. This raises the possibility that the ability to introspect about different perceptual decisions might be mediated by a common cognitive process. To test this hypothesis, we examined whether inter-individual differences in metacognitive ability were correlated across two different perceptual tasks where individuals made judgments (...) about different and unrelated visual stimulus properties. We found that inter-individual differences were strongly correlated between the two tasks for metacognitive ability but not objective performance. Such stability of an individual’s metacognitive ability across different perceptual tasks indicates a general mechanism supporting metacognition independent of the specific task. (shrink)

Contrasting brain states when subjects are aware compared to unaware of a presented stimulus has allowed researchers to isolate candidate neural correlates of consciousness. Here we propose that an important next step in this research program is to investigate, perhaps paradoxically, brain states that covary with reports of absences of awareness. Specifically, we propose that in order to distinguish content-specific and content-invariant neural correlates of consciousness, a distinction needs to be made between the neural correlates of awareness of stimulus absence, (...) and the neural correlates of absence of awareness. We ground this distinction in higher-order computational models of consciousness, where the state of higher-order nodes is invariant to the specific contents of awareness. To map the different levels of these models to neurophysiological correlates, we suggest two empirical approaches – inverted designs and two-dimensional awareness reports – in which reports about awareness and stimulus presence can be dissociated. (shrink)

Wagering contingent on a previous decision, or post-decision wagering, has recently been proposed to measure conscious awareness. Whilst intuitively appealing, it remains unclear whether economic context interacts with subjective confidence and how such interactions might impact on the measurement of awareness. Here we propose a signal detection model which predicts that advantageous wagers placed on the identity of preceding stimuli are affected by loss aversion, despite stimulus visibility remaining constant. This pattern of predicted results was evident in a psychophysical task (...) where we independently manipulated perceptual and economic factors. Changes in wagering behaviour induced by changes in wager size were largely driven by changes in criterion, consistent with the model. However, for near-threshold stimuli, a reduction in wagering efficiency was also evident, consistent with an apparent but potentially illusory decrease in awareness of the stimulus. These findings challenge an assertion that post-decision wagering provides a direct index of subjective awareness. (shrink)

Metacognition is the capacity to evaluate the success of one's own cognitive processes in various domains; for example, memory and perception. It remains controversial whether metacognition relies on a domain-general resource that is applied to different tasks or if self-evaluative processes are domain specific. Here, we investigated this issue directly by examining the neural substrates engaged when metacognitive judgments were made by human participants of both sexes during perceptual and memory tasks matched for stimulus and performance characteristics. By comparing patterns (...) of fMRI activity while subjects evaluated their performance, we revealed both domain-specific and domain-general metacognitive representations. Multivoxel activity patterns in anterior prefrontal cortex predicted levels of confidence in a domain-specific fashion, whereas domain-general signals predicting confidence and accuracy were found in a widespread network in the frontal and posterior midline. The demonstration of domain-specific metacognitive representations suggests the presence of a content-rich mechanism available to introspection and cognitive control. (shrink)

The scientific study of consciousness emerged as an organized field of research only a few decades ago. As empirical results have begun to enhance our understanding of consciousness, it is important to find out whether other factors, such as funding for consciousness research and status of consciousness scientists, provide a suitable environment for the field to grow and develop sustainably. We conducted an online survey on people’s views regarding various aspects of the scientific study of consciousness as a field of (...) research. 249 participants completed the survey, among which 80% were in academia, and around 40% were experts in consciousness research. Topics covered include the progress made by the field, funding for consciousness research, job opportunities for consciousness researchers, and the scientific rigor of the work done by researchers in the field. The majority of respondents (78%) indicated that scientific research on consciousness has been making progress. However, most participants perceived obtaining funding and getting a job in the field of consciousness research as more difficult than in other subfields of neuroscience. Overall, work done in consciousness research was perceived to be less rigorous than other neuroscience subfields, but this perceived lack of rigor was not related to the perceived difficulty in finding jobs and obtaining funding. Lastly, we found that, overall, the global workspace theory was perceived to be the most promising (around 28%), while most non-expert researchers (around 22% of non-experts) found the integrated information theory (IIT) most promising. We believe the survey results provide an interesting picture of current opinions from scientists and researchers about the progresses made and the challenges faced by consciousness research as an independent field. They will inspire collective reflection on the future directions regarding funding and job opportunities for the field. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

This study uses three audit-specific ethical dilemmas to assess the level of ethical reasoning between Chinese accounting students (as proxies for new entrants to the auditing profession) and experienced auditors. A sample of U.S. accounting students is used as a base for comparison. Consistent with expectations based on particularly salient aspects of Chinese national culture, we find the Chinese students’ levels of ethical reasoning to be significantly lower than those of their U.S. counterparts in the two cases that invoked these (...) cultural attributes. In contrast, the Chinese students’ level of ethical reasoning is slightly higher than that of the U.S. students in the third, control case. We further find that the Chinese auditors’ levels of ethical reasoning are even lower than those of the Chinese students in two cases, while not being significantly different in the third. Together, these findings suggest that cross-national differences in auditors’ ethical reasoning depend on the nature of the ethical dilemma and caution against wholesale inferences about ethical reasoning levels in China. (shrink)

Kammerer and Frankish (this issue) propose an exciting new research programme on the computational form of introspective systems. Pursuing this goal requires measures that can isolate introspective capacity from response biases and first-order processes. I suggest that metacognitive psychophysics is well placed to meet this challenge, allowing the mapping of introspective architectures in humans, animals, and artificial systems.

In the past 20, years the impact of progressive educational theories have become influential in nurse education particularly in relation to partnership and empowerment between lecturers and students and the development of student autonomy. The introduction of these progressive theories was in response to the criticisms that nurse education was characterized by hierarchical and asymmetrical power relationships between lecturers and students that encouraged rote learning and stifled student autonomy. This article explores how the work of Michel Foucault can be mobilized (...) to think about autonomy in three different yet overlapping ways: as a historical event; as a discursive practice; and as part of an overall strategy to produce a specific student subject position. The implications for educational practice are that, rather than a site where students are empowered, nurse education is both a factory and a laboratory where new subjectivities are continually being constructed. This suggests that empowering practices and disciplinary practices uneasily co‐exist. Critical reflection needs to be directed not only at structural dimensions of power but also on ourselves as students and lecturers by asking a Foucauldian question: How are you interested in autonomy? (shrink)

Through the World Health Organization’s definition of midwifery, midwives are frequently heard to describe themselves as autonomous practitioners. In this article this notion is refuted. An overview of individual and collective autonomy is first presented to contextualize the subsequent discussion. Then the notion of autonomy in relation to midwifery practice in Scotland and New Zealand is critiqued through tracing the history of midwives and midwifery in these two countries. Issues relating to midwifery registration, medicalization of birth and consumerism are discussed. (...) Each of these categories is suggested as limiting to autonomous practice within midwifery. (shrink)

This study compared the family characteristics, victimization histories, and number of perpetration offenses of juvenile offenders who admitted to having had sex with animals to juvenile offenders who did not. The study found that 96% of the juveniles who had engaged in sex with nonhuman animals also admitted to sex offenses against humans and reported more offenses against humans than other sex offenders their same age and race. Those juveniles who had engaged in sex with animals were similar to other (...) sex offenders in that they also came from families with less affirming and more incendiary communication, lower attachment, less adaptability, and less positive environments. Those juveniles who had engaged in sex with animals reported victimization histories with more emotional abuse and neglect and a higher number of victimization events than other offenders. This would seem to indicate that sex with animals may be an important indicator of potential or co-occurring sex offenses against humans and may be a sign of severe family dysfunction and abuse that should be addressed in the arenas of psychological intervention, juvenile justice programs, and public policy. (shrink)

The US neutrino community gathered at the Workshop on the Intermediate Neutrino Program at Brookhaven National Laboratory February 4-6, 2015 to explore opportunities in neutrino physics over the next five to ten years. Scientists from particle, astroparticle and nuclear physics participated in the workshop. The workshop examined promising opportunities for neutrino physics in the intermediate term, including possible new small to mid-scale experiments, US contributions to large experiments, upgrades to existing experiments, R&D plans and theory. The workshop was organized into (...) two sets of parallel working group sessions, divided by physics topics and technology. Physics working groups covered topics on Sterile Neutrinos, Neutrino Mixing, Neutrino Interactions, Neutrino Properties and Astrophysical Neutrinos. Technology sessions were organized into Theory, Short-Baseline Accelerator Neutrinos, Reactor Neutrinos, Detector R&D and Source, Cyclotron and Meson Decay at Rest sessions.This report summarizes discussion and conclusions from the workshop. (shrink)

Metacognition – the ability to represent, monitor and control ongoing cognitive processes – helps us perform many tasks, both when acting alone and when working with others. While metacognition is adaptive, and found in other animals, we should not assume that all human forms of metacognition are gene-based adaptations. Instead, some forms may have a social origin, including the discrimination, interpretation, and broadcasting of metacognitive representations. There is evidence that each of these abilities depends on cultural learning and therefore that (...) cultural selectionmight shape humanmetacognition. The cultural origins hypothesis is a plausible and testable alternative that directs us towards a substantial new programme of research. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Rhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism, and: Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking after Cavell after WittgensteinRichard FlemingRhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism, by Walter Jost; 368 pp. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004, $55.00. Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking after Cavell after Wittgenstein, edited by Kenneth Dauber and Walter Jost; 353 pp. Evansville: Northwestern University Press, 2003, $29.95 paper.On the question of ordinary language criticism and (...) philosophy, "Who pleases whom?" Judging by many of the articles, essays, and books of the last decade the answer might be: almost nobody pleases anyone. Whether in appreciation or incomprehension of its importance and substance, renewed efforts at understanding, redirections of thinking, and disappointments and frustrations with the [End Page 209] subject-matter are prevalent when ordinary language is the topic of discussion. These two recent books tend to strengthen this assessment. Rhetorical Investigations is a sustained effort to "revisit" and "rethink" grammatical (conceptual) reflections on ordinary language and literature; and in so doing provide a "reinvention" of characteristics of literary theory through an extensive and detailed consideration of the work of Robert Frost. Although sometimes overreaching in its efforts (particularly when discussing logic), it imaginatively uses rhetoric and ordinary language concerns as a means of direction and focus for new, explanatory discussions in literary—philosophical analysis. Ordinary Language Criticism (part of the general series, "Rethinking Theory," edited by Gary Saul Morson) is a diverse and uneven collection of fifteen articles concerning and using ordinary language interests, several of which (R. M. Berry, Garry L. Hagberg, Richard Eldridge, Gerald L. Bruns) valuably repay the diligence needed to discover them in 350 plus pages. The text includes an editors' introduction that voices the wish to "return criticism to its grounds in the 'ordinary' or natural language we all speak" and (unsuccessfully but lustily) pronounces and explains "ordinary language criticism" as a new yet traditional area of study. ("New" in that it takes "as its point of departure" the ordinary language philosophy of Wittgenstein, and "traditional" in that "all criticism is really ordinary language criticism.") The editors further undertake in this introduction the endeavor to sketch something of a program for the book, meant to show connected promptings among the various writings, whereas the specific authors themselves settle down quickly and separately to a critical work at hand without particular references to each other. Both of these texts, like others in this field of study before, valuably raise questions and apprehensions of what use there is in talk about ordinary language. The best of such material provides provocations for thinking that are to be found nowhere else. The worst of such books and articles is that they prejudice sensible people against the study of the ordinary.Can one conceive of something to say about these two books that the authors and the current readers haven't already heard or of which they can be profitably reminded? It certainly would not be wise to presume such a grand stand. This is a large question to which only a small answer might be given here. Setting aside the perhaps undiscussable differences of what we each see of primary importance in the primary texts and how best to read them, one issue and difference of understanding, specific and plain enough to state briefly, perhaps usefully does arise. It is a lack of a clear sense of the "ordinary," its distinctiveness, its implications; and thereby a continuation of many of the confusions that have inhabited philosophical and literary writing before and after Wittgenstein turned his attention to the matter. Is this not partly why frustrations of understanding, disagreements in thinking, and displeasures in discussion remain pervasive and unrelenting?This difficulty and difference with such work can only prove worthwhile introducing, however, against a background of agreement over the centrality [End Page 210] of a cluster of issues, of which three might be specified: a first agreement concerns the sensitivity or fear that something is being missed or remains unintelligible in the culture about the ordinary; a respect for the ordinary is a needed, often unnoticed beginning of our reflections. Rhetorical Investigations importantly develops its analyses from such a perspective (Jost's... (shrink)

Science fiction is often held up as a particularly philosophical genre. For, beyond actualising mind-experiment-like fantasies, science fiction films also commonly toy with speculative ideas, or else engineer encounters with the strange and unknown. Denis Villeneuve's Arrival is a contemporary science fiction film that does exactly this, by introducing Lovecraft-esque tentacular aliens whose arrival on Earth heralds in a novel, but ultimately paralysing, inhuman perspective on the nature of time and reality. This article shows how this cerebral film invites viewers (...) to confront a counterintuitive model of time that at once recalls and reposes what Gilles Deleuze called a “third synthesis” of time, and that which J. M. E. McTaggart named the a-temporal “C series” of “unreal” time. We finally suggest that Arrival's a-temporal conception of the future as having already happened can function as a key to understanding the fate of humanity as a whole as we pass from the anthropocene, in which humans have... (shrink)

ExcerptThis special issue of Telos focusing on the work of the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg aims to reinvigorate the critical engagement with his work in the English-speaking world by casting a new light on his thought and its fundamental concerns. The American reception of Blumenberg reached an initial high point in the late 1980s and 1990s with Robert M. Wallace's remarkable translation of three monumental volumes: The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1983), Work on Myth (1985), and The Genesis of (...) the Copernican World (1987). This reception often (though not exclusively) focused on the questions prompted by Blumenberg's contributions to…. (shrink)

The author criticises chapter 5 of r m hare's "the language of morals" in which hare tries to show why naturalism is "untenable." the author concludes that hare's analysis as well as the naturalists' "keep us from saying what we do say and want to say." (staff).

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Rhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism, and: Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking after Cavell after WittgensteinRichard FlemingRhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism, by Walter Jost; 368 pp. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004, $55.00. Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking after Cavell after Wittgenstein, edited by Kenneth Dauber and Walter Jost; 353 pp. Evansville: Northwestern University Press, 2003, $29.95 paper.On the question of ordinary language criticism and (...) philosophy, "Who pleases whom?" Judging by many of the articles, essays, and books of the last decade the answer might be: almost nobody pleases anyone. Whether in appreciation or incomprehension of its importance and substance, renewed efforts at understanding, redirections of thinking, and disappointments and frustrations with the [End Page 209] subject-matter are prevalent when ordinary language is the topic of discussion. These two recent books tend to strengthen this assessment. Rhetorical Investigations is a sustained effort to "revisit" and "rethink" grammatical (conceptual) reflections on ordinary language and literature; and in so doing provide a "reinvention" of characteristics of literary theory through an extensive and detailed consideration of the work of Robert Frost. Although sometimes overreaching in its efforts (particularly when discussing logic), it imaginatively uses rhetoric and ordinary language concerns as a means of direction and focus for new, explanatory discussions in literary—philosophical analysis. Ordinary Language Criticism (part of the general series, "Rethinking Theory," edited by Gary Saul Morson) is a diverse and uneven collection of fifteen articles concerning and using ordinary language interests, several of which (R. M. Berry, Garry L. Hagberg, Richard Eldridge, Gerald L. Bruns) valuably repay the diligence needed to discover them in 350 plus pages. The text includes an editors' introduction that voices the wish to "return criticism to its grounds in the 'ordinary' or natural language we all speak" and (unsuccessfully but lustily) pronounces and explains "ordinary language criticism" as a new yet traditional area of study. ("New" in that it takes "as its point of departure" the ordinary language philosophy of Wittgenstein, and "traditional" in that "all criticism is really ordinary language criticism.") The editors further undertake in this introduction the endeavor to sketch something of a program for the book, meant to show connected promptings among the various writings, whereas the specific authors themselves settle down quickly and separately to a critical work at hand without particular references to each other. Both of these texts, like others in this field of study before, valuably raise questions and apprehensions of what use there is in talk about ordinary language. The best of such material provides provocations for thinking that are to be found nowhere else. The worst of such books and articles is that they prejudice sensible people against the study of the ordinary.Can one conceive of something to say about these two books that the authors and the current readers haven't already heard or of which they can be profitably reminded? It certainly would not be wise to presume such a grand stand. This is a large question to which only a small answer might be given here. Setting aside the perhaps undiscussable differences of what we each see of primary importance in the primary texts and how best to read them, one issue and difference of understanding, specific and plain enough to state briefly, perhaps usefully does arise. It is a lack of a clear sense of the "ordinary," its distinctiveness, its implications; and thereby a continuation of many of the confusions that have inhabited philosophical and literary writing before and after Wittgenstein turned his attention to the matter. Is this not partly why frustrations of understanding, disagreements in thinking, and displeasures in discussion remain pervasive and unrelenting?This difficulty and difference with such work can only prove worthwhile introducing, however, against a background of agreement over the centrality [End Page 210] of a cluster of issues, of which three might be specified: a first agreement concerns the sensitivity or fear that something is being missed or remains unintelligible in the culture about the ordinary; a respect for the ordinary is a needed, often unnoticed beginning of our reflections. Rhetorical Investigations importantly develops its analyses from such a perspective (Jost's... (shrink)