Nicholas Shea

In discussions about the distinctive features of conscious, personal-level as opposed to sub-personal level representations, it is sometimes proposed that conscious, personal-level representations and information processing are special in that one is aware of them. This enables, the proposal continues, the monitoring and control of one’s own cognition, i.e., it…

A very common suggestion on the distinctive property of conscious, personal-level representations is that they are available in a “central workspace” in the mind/brain, which is thought to be an area across which the different specialist sensory and conceptual systems that are assumed to make up the mind can communicate…

Psychologists often hold that personal-level, conscious processing is crucial for the performance of logical reasoning (e.g., Smith and DeCoster 2000; Lieberman et al. 2002; De Wall et al. 2008; Lieberman 2009). There is experimental support for this. For instance, De Neys (2006) presented subjects with logically valid arguments that had false…

It is a common assumption in philosophy and the cognitive sciences that information processing involving conscious, personal-level representations is required for spontaneous, deliberate action. If so, is it a distinctive feature of such representations that they are needed for spontaneous actions? To motivate an affirmative answer, theorists often invoke ‘blind-sight’,…

Some theorists hold that personal-level, conscious visual representations are for object recognition whereas unconscious visual information is employed for the control of movements. A study by Króliczak, Heard, Goodale, and Gregory (2006) lends support to this view. They used the hollow-face illusion, in which one looks at a hollow mask…

A preliminary issue for the project is to characterise the difference between the personal level and subpersonal levels. We don’t need to take this to be a clear or hard-and-fast distinction. ‘Personal level’ is just shorthand for having one or more of a number of more sophisticated features that we…

The project is about two things. The first is the nature of representational content in some simple systems that make use of representations. Here the focus is largely on representations invoked in information processing explanations in cognitive science. For example, in cognitive science we explain a person’s rapid choices between…