A twofold tale of one mind: revisiting REC's multi-storey story.

The Radical Enactive/Embodied view of Cognition, or REC, claims that all cognition is a matter of skilled performance. Yet REC also makes a distinction between basic and content-involving cognition, arguing that the development of basic to content-involving cognition involves a kink. It might seem that this distinction leads to problematic gaps in REC's story. We address two such alleged gaps in this paper. First, we identify and reply to the concern that REC leads to an "interface problem", according to which REC has to account for the interaction of two minds co-present in the same cognitive activity. We emphasise how REC's view of content-involving cognition in terms of activities that require particular sociocultural practices can resolve these interface concerns. The second potential problematic gap is that REC creates an unjustified difference in kind between animal and human cognition. In response, we clarify and further explicate REC's notion of content, and argue that this notion allows REC to justifiably mark the distinction between basic and content-involving cognition as a difference in kind. We conclude by pointing out in what sense basic and content-involving cognitive activities are the same, yet different. They are the same because they are all forms of skilled performance, yet different as some forms of skilled performance are genuinely different from other forms.

Is theory of mind a prerequisite for social interactions? A study in psychotic disorder.

BACKGROUND: A dominant idea is that impaired capacities for theory of mind (ToM) are the reasons for impairments in social functioning in several conditions, including autism and schizophrenia. In this paper, we present empirical evidence that challenges this influential assumption. METHODS: We conducted three studies examining the association between ToM and social functioning in participants diagnosed with a non-affective psychotic disorder and healthy individuals. We used both the experience sampling method, a structured diary technique collecting information in daily-life, and a standardised questionnaire to assess social functioning. Analysed data are part of Wave 1 and Wave 3 of the Genetic Risk and Outcome of Psychosis (GROUP) study. RESULTS: Results were highly consistent across studies and showed no significant association between the two constructs. CONCLUSIONS: These findings question the leading assumption that social cognition is a prerequisite for social functioning, but rather suggest that social cognition is possibly a result of basic social interactive capacities.

Reincarnating the Identity Theory.

The mind/brain identity theory is often thought to be of historical interest only, as it has allegedly been swept away by functionalism. After clarifying why and how the notion of identity implies that there is no genuine problem of explaining how the mental derives from something else, we point out that the identity theory is not necessarily a mind/brain identity theory. In fact, we propose an updated form of identity theory, or embodied identity theory, in which the identities concern not experiences and brain phenomena, but experiences and organism-environment interactions. Such an embodied identity theory retains the main ontological insight of its parent theory, and by invoking organism-environment interactions, it has powerful resources to motivate why the relevant identities hold, without posing further unsolvable problems. We argue that the classical multiple realization argument against identity theory is built on not recognizing that the main claim of the identity theory concerns the relation between experience and descriptions of experience, instead of being about relations between different descriptions of experience and we show how an embodied identity theory provides an appropriate platform for making this argument. We emphasize that the embodied identity theory we propose is not ontologically reductive, and does not disregard experience.

Psychotic reactivity to daily life stress and the dopamine system: a study combining experience sampling and [18F]fallypride positron emission tomography.

Stressful life events increase the risk for psychosis, and the subjective experience of stress related to daily life activities drives moment-to-moment variation in psychotic intensity. Positron emission tomography (PET) studies suggest that dopaminergic (DAergic) activity mediates the behavioral response to an experimental stressor. However, it is not known how alterations in this DAergic stress response relate to the subjective experience of stress in real life situations assessed in momentary assessment studies. This study combined [18F]fallypride PET with an Experience Sampling ambulatory assessment approach to examine the association between the prefrontal DAergic response to experimentally induced stress and real life psychotic reactivity to the subjective experience of stress in daily life. Healthy first-degree relatives of individuals with a psychotic disorder (N = 14) and healthy controls (N = 11) participated in (a) a psychosocial [18F]fallypride PET stress paradigm and (b) an experience sampling study, using a structured diary approach. Mixed multilevel random intercept models revealed that stress-induced [18F]fallypride displacement, indicative of DAergic activity, in ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) was associated with psychotic reactivity to daily life stress in the entire sample. Lower levels of [18F]fallypride displacement to stress predicted increased psychotic reactivity to daily life stress. This study combined PET neuroimaging with real life behavioral assessments in the investigation of psychotic symptoms; we showed decreased [18F]fallypride displacement to stress in VMPFC to be associated with increased psychotic reactivity to daily life stress. The preliminary evidence in this study demonstrates that it is possible to acquire a grasp on how brain function is associated with contextualized experience, which has relevance for neuroimaging studies in general.

Extensive enactivism: why keep it all in?

Radical enactive and embodied approaches to cognitive science oppose the received view in the sciences of the mind in denying that cognition fundamentally involves contentful mental representation. This paper argues that the fate of representationalism in cognitive science matters significantly to how best to understand the extent of cognition. It seeks to establish that any move away from representationalism toward pure, empirical functionalism fails to provide a substantive "mark of the cognitive" and is bereft of other adequate means for individuating cognitive activity. It also argues that giving proper attention to the way the folk use their psychological concepts requires questioning the legitimacy of commonsense functionalism. In place of extended functionalism-empirical or commonsensical-we promote the fortunes of extensive enactivism, clarifying in which ways it is distinct from notions of extended mind and distributed cognition.

The sensory-discriminative and affective-motivational aspects of pain.

What is the difference between pain and standard exteroceptive perceptual processes, such as vision or audition? According to the most common view, pain constitutes the internal perception of bodily damage. Following on from this definition, pain is just like exteroceptive perception, with the only difference being that it is not oriented toward publicly available objects, but rather toward events that are taking place in/to one's own body. Many theorists, however, have stressed that pain should not be seen as a kind of perception, but rather that it should be seen as a kind of affection or motivation to act instead. Though pain undeniably has a discriminatory aspect, what makes it special is its affective-motivational quality of hurting. In this article, we discuss the relation between pain and perception, at both the conceptual and empirical levels. We first review the ways in which the perception of internal damage differs from the perception of external objects. We then turn to the question of how the affective-motivational dimension of pain is different from the affective-motivational aspects that are present for other perceptual processes. We discuss how these differences between pain and exteroceptive perception can account for the fact that the experience of pain is more subjective than other perceptual experiences.

Perception with compensatory devices: from sensory substitution to sensorimotor extension.

Sensory substitution devices provide through an unusual sensory modality (the substituting modality, e.g., audition) access to features of the world that are normally accessed through another sensory modality (the substituted modality, e.g., vision). In this article, we address the question of which sensory modality the acquired perception belongs to. We have recourse to the four traditional criteria that have been used to define sensory modalities: sensory organ, stimuli, properties, and qualitative experience (Grice, 1962), to which we have added the criteria of behavioral equivalence (Morgan, 1977), dedication (Keeley, 2002), and sensorimotor equivalence (O'Regan & Noë, 2001). We discuss which of them are fulfilled by perception through sensory substitution devices and whether this favors the view that perception belongs to the substituting or to the substituted modality. Though the application of a number of criteria might be taken to point to the conclusion that perception with a sensory substitution device belongs to the substituted modality, we argue that the evidence leads to an alternative view on sensory substitution. According to this view, the experience after sensory substitution is a transformation, extension, or augmentation of our perceptual capacities, rather than being something equivalent or reducible to an already existing sensory modality. We develop this view by comparing sensory substitution devices to other "mind-enhancing tools" such as pen and paper, sketchpads, or calculators. An analysis of sensory substitution in terms of mind-enhancing tools unveils it as a thoroughly transforming perceptual experience and as giving rise to a novel form of perceptual interaction with the environment.

Skill, corporality and alerting capacity in an account of sensory consciousness.

We suggest that within a skill-based, sensorimotor approach to sensory consciousness, two measurable properties of perceivers' interaction with the environment, "corporality" and "alerting capacity", explain why sensory stimulation is experienced as having a "sensory feel", unlike thoughts or memories. We propose that the notions of "corporality" and "alerting capacity" make possible the construction of a "phenomenality plot", which charts in a principled way the degree to which conscious phenomena are experienced as having a sensory quality.