The Structure of Experience, the Nature of the Visual, and Type 2 Blindsight

Fiona Macpherson  
University of Glasgow

Unlike those with type 1 blindsight, people who have type 2 blindsight have some sort of consciousness of the stimuli in their blindfield. What is the nature of that consciousness? Is it visual experience? I address these questions by considering whether we can establish the existence of any structural—necessary—features of visual experience. I argue that it is very difficult to establish the existence of any such features. In particular, I investigate whether it is possible to visually, or more generally perceptually, experience form or movement at a distance from our body, without experiencing colour. The traditional answer, advocated by Aristotle, and some other philosophers, up to and including the present day, is that it is not and hence colour is a structural feature of visual experience. I argue that there is no good reason to think that this is impossible, and provide evidence from four cases—sensory substitution, achomatopsia, phantom contours and amodal completion—in favour of the idea that it is possible. If it is possible then one important reason for rejecting the idea that people with type 2 blindsight do not have visual experiences is undermined. I suggest further experiments that could be done to help settle the matter.

Tang poetry redefines the limits of implicit learning

Zoltan Dienes  
University of Sussex

Implicit learning research has identified a number of structures that adults can unconsciously learn, including chunks and fixed patterns of repetition. Language and music appear to involve structures more complex, indeed higher than finite state, for example symmetry structures that are simply generated by recursive rules (e.g. centre embedded, cross serial dependency structures). The implicit learning of such structures by adults presents an interesting challenge to existing models of implicit learning, such as the SRN. We build on our earlier work in music and movement, by looking at symmetries in the tonal structure of Chinese poetry. We show that people can acquire unconscious knowledge of both cross serial dependencies and centre embeddings in tonal poetry, with the former being easier than the latter. The unconscious status of the structural knowledge was confirmed by subjective measures. We also show that people can generalize their unconscious knowledge from being trained on strings of a certain length to test strings of a different length, suggesting learning of the symmetry itself rather than fixed long distance associations. We also show the SRN can model many of the details of this learning.

Linking Perception and Understanding

Mike Beaton 
University of the Basque Country

Alva Noë’s sensorimotor theory of perception tries to explain perception in terms of understanding. So does John McDowell’s conceptualism. Kant also famously argued that what we can only perceive what we can understand. One objection to ‘we-can-only-experience-what-we-understand’ views is that they seem to entail that we can never learn anything new. By means of exploring and responding to this objection, I will explain more of what it means for experience to involve understanding in the sensorimotor theory of perception.

Can metaphor processing move to a large and empirical scale?

Yorick Wilks  
Florida Institute of Human and Machine Cognition

The talk describes part of the current US effort on metaphor recognition and interpretation, and in particular the CMU/IHMC project METAL. The paper also presents an experimental algorithm to detect conventionalised metaphors implicit in the lexical data in a resource like WordNet, where metaphors are coded into the senses and so would never be detected by any algorithm based on the violation of preferences, since there would always be a constraint satisfied by such senses, We report an implementation of this algorithm, which was implemented first with Wordnet and the (limited) preference constraints in VerbNet. We then transformed WordNet in a systematic way so as to produce far more extensive constraints based on its content, and with this data we reimplemented the detection algorithm and got a substantial improvement in recall. We suggest that this algorithm could contribute to the core detection pipeline of the METAL project at CMU. The new WordNet data is of wider significance because it also produces adjective constraints, unlike any existing lexical resource, and can be applied to any language with a WordNet for it.

Sharing Ideas: Can designing artefacts to support collaboration help us understand what collaboration is?

Nicola Yuill  
University of Sussex

I will describe recent work from the Children and Technology lab on designing environments to support collaboration: ‘‘coordinated, synchronous activity that is the result of a continued attempt to construct and maintain a shared conception of a problem” (Teasley and Roschelle, 1993). I then ask how we know children are collaborating, illustrated by examples of short video clips. Does sharing attention, acting contingently or imitating a partner’s action constitute collaboration? Can children with autism and limited communication be judged as collaborating? Methods of promoting and then coding collaboration used in our studies have operated at very different levels of granularity, from overall ratings to much more molecular measures of joint engagement. That poses a theoretical question. Do we need to look at collaboration as a ‘meeting of minds’ or does the social interaction itself constitute social cognition, as suggested by proponents of embodied cognition? A disclaimer: this talk will not present a single well-formulated view from an informed understanding of dynamical systems but as the title suggests, is also a request to share ideas. To adapt the title of Wilson & Golonka’s (2013) paper on embodiment: Perhaps collaboration is not what you think it is.

Music, participation and interaction

Ian Cross  
Wolfson College Cambridge

When we engage with music, we do so in culturally-appropriate ways. In recent Western cultures, listening has become privileged as the culturally-appropriate mode of engagement, and emotion or aesthetic experience as the proper forms of our response to music; these conceptions have been the foci of most scientific research into our engagement with music. Music is thus conceived of and investigated as a medium for presentation or display, reflecting or embodying abstract structures that we experience affectively or aesthetically. But in many world cultures—including our own—music is an interactive, participatory medium that has many different social roles and cultural embeddings, and participation in music may have consequences that are not limited to the affective or aesthetic domains. I shall suggest that by conceiving of music as a primary human mode of interaction, and by situating this idea within recent research on the human capacity for complex interaction, we can develop novel and effective approaches to exploring and understanding music and its functions in human life.

I shall argue that "music" is most productively construed as a communicative medium that is cognate with, and complementary to, language in the form of speech; the behaviours, sounds and concepts that we can characterise as music and as speech reflect aspects of the human communicative toolkit that are optimised for somewhat different ends. While we can think of speech as a deployment of communicative resources that can be used to change the information about states of affairs in the world shared between members of a culture, from an interactionist perspective music constitutes a deployment of similar communicative resources that can elicit the sense that each participant has the same awareness of the world and of each other. This approach can can help to clarify relationships between music and language, in the form of speech; it can begin to resolve some of the implications of recent research that has shown aspects of music to have powerful effects on memory and social attitude; and its implication that music as a mode of interaction may possess humanly-generic properties provides us with new perspectives on the investigation of music beyond the bounds of western culture.

The role of inspiration in artistic creation

Takeshi Okada  
University of Tokyo

Inspiration is a process in which someone or something motivates people to do something, by giving new ideas or causing a particular emotion. Artwork often inspires people to participate in their own artistic expression. One of the situations in which artistic inspiration can be saliently seen is where people encounter with others’ work at a deep level such as copying others’ artwork.

Using three experiments , we investigated processes of artistic inspiration. The three experiments share a pre-post design. In Experiment 1, 30 non-art major undergraduates were assigned to one of the three groups: 1) create own drawing after copying a model drawing, 2) create a drawing in the model’s style after copying it, 3) create own drawing without copying a model. In Experiment 2, the style of the model drawing was manipulated (i.e., abstract style, semi-abstract style, academic style). In Experiment 3, the type of intervention was manipulated (i.e., copying artwork, watching artwork, verbal suggestion to create a different style of drawing, and control).

On Consciousness, A Natural Explanation

Hugh Noble  
University of Edinburgh

In this talk Hugh Noble will present an explanation of consciousness. He will address six questions and provide answers:

(1) What kind of thing is consciousness?
Answer - To be conscious is to have a physical procedure (or a collection of procedures), operating in the brain. These "being-conscious" procedures operate at the same time as other procedures which are not specifically associated with consciousness. Paradoxically, therefore, you cannot be conscious without, at the same time, operating also in an unconscious way.

(2) How does consciousness operate?
Answer - All these procedures (conscious and unconscious) make use of the same physical brain components. This talk will not be about the physical aspects of consciousness, however. The explanation offered will take the form of cognitive (or data processing) model.

(3) What does consciousness do? That is - what special behaviour does consciousness enable an organism to perform, which an unconscious organism is unable to perform? Answer - It can anticipate its own (selected) instinctive reactions to predictable events. By doing that it becomes able to predict its own future experience with more accuracy and further into the future.

(4) How did consciousness get to be the way it is?
Answer - As did all of aspects of our anatomy and physiology, it evolved. Consciousness is no more than a natural consequence of the evolutionary process which produced intelligence.

(5) How can a physical mechanism create a subjective experience?
Answer - The way the question is worded pressurises us to make the (false) assumption that the physical brain mechanism, and what some would describe as "an associated conscious state", are two separate entities or conditions. That, however, is not correct. Consciousness is not a static condition that pervades the whole brain at certain times. It is a specific and intensely active thing being performed by certain components within the brain mechanism. The physical mechanism of consciousness and what we call "a conscious, or subjective experience" are the SAME thing. (c/f thermodynamic theory and temperature). One does not create or engender the other. They are alternative ways of talking about a single phenomenon.

(6) Why is it that the "Mind-Body Duality" (as articulated by Descartes) is such a powerful and ubiquitous intuition?
Answer - Our intuition must create the (false) impression that the SELF is an observer, within or alongside the physical body, but not a part of it. Intuition has a specific job to do. If it were to represent itself (correctly) as an operational component within the mechanism of self-observation, it would run into impossible computational problems. Therefore, if it did not create the false impression of a mind-body separation, it would not be able to do its job properly.

Smell and Taste in Human-Computer Interaction: Understanding Human Experiences to Inform the Design of Interactive Systems

Marianna Obrist  
University of Sussex

Despite the fact that interactive technologies have permeated our environment (e.g., mobile, ubiquitous, social computing) and have become an essential part of our everyday life (e.g., work, leisure, education, health, etc.), the way we interact with them is still limited. Interactive systems stimulate dominantly our senses of vision and hearing, partly our sense of touch (e.g., vibration in mobile phones), while our senses of taste and smell are widely neglected and under-exploited in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research. Although neuroscientists are making good progress in unravelling the neural basis of these sensory modalities, the detailed phenomenology of subjective experiences in these modalities is only now beginning to develop. In this seminar, Marianna Obrist will talk about her research on multisensory experiences for interactive technologies. She will present insights from two studies on human experiences with smell and taste and their opportunities and implications for technology.

Obrist, M., Tuch, A., & Hornbæk, K. (to appear 2014). Opportunities for Odor: Experiences with Smell and Implications for Technology. Accepted full paper for CHI 2014.
Obrist, M., Comber, R., Subramanian, S., Piqueras-Fiszman, B., Velasco, C., & Spence, C. (to appear 2014). Temporal, Affective, and Embodied Characteristics of Taste Experiences: A Framework for Design. Accepted full paper for CHI 2014.

Short Bio:
Marianna Obrist is a Lecturer in Interaction Design at the University of Sussex, in the Department for Informatics, after she spent two years as a Marie Curie Post-Doc Fellow at Culture Lab at Newcastle University, UK. Previously, Marianna was Assistant Professor in the HCI & Usability Unit of the ICT&S Center at the University of Salzburg. The focal point of her research is user experiences, particularly multisensory user experiences with interactive systems. She was a leading researcher in several academic and industrial research projects concerned with user experience evaluations of a variety of interactive systems (e.g., mobile devices, TV, interactive TV, games/educational games, automotive interfaces, home and entertainment systems). Recently she explores the design spectrum for tactile, olfactory, and gustatory experiences for interactive technologies. More information: http://obrist.info/

Cancelled

Mark D'Inverno  
Goldsmiths

TBA

Liveness in Art and Technology Practices

Simon Penny  
University of California, Irvine

Simon is an interactive media artist who has a long history of building systems that attend to embodied experience and gesture. Through artistic and scholarly work, he explores dimensions of the fundamental problems encountered when machines for abstract mathematico-logical procedures are interfaced with cultural practices (such as aesthetic creation and reception) whose first commitment is to engineer persuasive perceptual immediacy and affect. These cultural practices mobilize sensibilities and non-propositional cognitive modalities alien to the technology and possibly incompatible with its structuring precepts: the kind of intelligence required by cultural practices involving handwork, bodywork and material engagement (crafts, “popular,” and “higher” art forms) is embodied, kinesthetic, and multi-modal.
In his digital art practice, Simon has attempted to find a way to integrate the intelligence modalities required for such 'bodywork' into alphanumeric logico-symbolic forms of expression. He has developed a critique of notions of intelligence reified in computer technologies, rooted in post-cognitivist conceptions of cognition, self and agency. His interactive digital art installations, such as Fugitive, Traces and Petit Mal, possess interfaces sensitive to sensorimotor modalities of aesthetic response. His current book project focuses on articulating a new aesthetic theory for interactive media, digital cultural practices, and the arts in general, deploying contemporary embodied and post-cognitivist perspectives to provide a language for the discussion of cultural practices which is aware of and attends to situated, embodied and enactive intelligences.