- Email: [email protected]
Self, other and memory: A preface
Consciousness and Cognition 19 (2010) 687–689
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Consciousness and Cognition journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
Editorial
Self, other and memory: A preface q
The key topics of this special issue are self-consciousness, understanding others and the role of memory, while the latter is especially investigated with respect to its relation to self-consciousness. It is furthermore a characteristic feature of this special issue that most of the papers are dedicated to an interdisciplinary research program combining the perspectives of philosophy, psychology, neurobiology and cognitive neuroscience. The issue of self-consciousness is firstly investigated concerning the feature of perspective taking (Kockler et al.). This empirical study is complemented by two studies that focus on embodiment: A basic constituent of bodily self-consciousness is surely the anchoring of self-related experiences in one’s own body image (Blanke et al.) and an interesting case is being made of language as being related to embodiment as well (Binkofski et al.). Then three articles are dealing with self-deception including some interconnected discussion (Greve & Wentura; Michel & Newen, Mele). Furthermore, a theoretical investigation of self-consciousness refers to the compositionality of our thoughts (Werning). Investigating the self is contrasted by an empirical study on the perception of others under specific influence of different cultural backgrounds (Bente et al.). With the article of Staniloiu et al. the volume widens the discussion to account for memory as well. Three empirical investigations help to improve our understanding of the role of memory while one theoretical account discusses a core thesis about memory: One important focus is the question what is necessary to establish individual self-consciousness over time (Staniloui et al.): this leads to a discussing of diachronic self-consciousness and autobiographic episodic memory. The development of episodic memory is the focus of the behavioral study of Perner et al. arguing that the ability of mental rotation of figures is initiating a switch from knowledge retrieval to episodic remembering. In addition to the distinction of episodic and semantic memory, Sauvage discusses convincing evidence to support the distinction between familiarity and recollection. The paper of Volz et al. is investigating our subjective experience of intuition as addressed by a fluency heuristic paradigm from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience. Finally, in a philosophical paper Vosgerau argues that, on the basis of a functionalist approach of mental representation, representations only have a specific content if they are actually in use, therefore, stored mental representations do not have a specific content. We shortly characterize the main claims of the papers: One feature of self-consciousness is the capacity to take different perspectives: closely related to an intact body image is our capacity to change perspectives in space. This already ‘‘classical” empirical approach to study spatial perspective taking has been investigated by Kockler et al. for the first time in dynamic environments. In their study ‘‘Visuospatial perspective taking in a dynamic environment” participants were asked to perform left–right-decisions in animated and static virtual environments, both from a first- and third-person-perspective. The results showed a significantly increased activation in the right posterior intraparietal sulcus in conditions in which a dynamic stimulus had to be observed and judged upon from a first-person-perspective. This special case of oneself being involved in object-directed action preparation is interpreted and discussed as the neural mechanism of ‘‘readiness for (re)action”. A very important approach to any cognitive function are disturbances of self-consciousness, this important and sometimes underestimated approach is employed by Blanke et al. in their contribution concerning bodily self-consciousness. The basic key assumption here is that the integration of multisensory bodily signals from the entire body is crucial for bodily self-consciousness. Not only empirically grounded, but also philosophically arguable they refer to a newly developed taxonomy that comprises the three different features of self-location, first person perspective, and self-identification and that allows to categorize body schema disturbances. The authors are focusing on illusory body perceptions of one’s own body as a particularly interesting disturbance of the body schema or body representation. Based on detailed clinical and neuroanatomical data the paper presents two interesting case reports with a disturbance of self-identification and shows their relevance for the neural mechanisms underlying bodily self-consciousness.
q
This article is part of a special issue of this journal on Self, Other and Memory.
1053-8100/$ - see front matter Ó 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2010.07.002
688
Editorial / Consciousness and Cognition 19 (2010) 687–689
On the background of such empirical evidence, the concept of embodied cognition has become one the leading frameworks in the study of cognitive processes in general. A very interesting and stimulating approach refers to the hypothesis that also language can be interpreted as embodied cognition. In the study ‘‘Grasping language – a short story on Embodiment.” the authors Binkofski et al. employ a new meta-analytic tool that allows to study neural mechanisms of cognitive functions across different studies. The key finding of cumulative evidence for the recruitment of the somatotopic activation of motor areas clearly supports this hypothesis of language as embodied cognitive faculty and emphasizes the role of sensorimotor areas during language processing. The discussion of self and embodiment is followed by a group of three papers on self-deception. There is few disagreement in the recent philosophical and psychological literature on self-deception about the fact that garden-variety selfdeception differs from stereotypical other-deception. What we call self-deception in everyday contexts can be explained within a framework of a unified self and does not require any partitioning of the self into different sub-centers of agency in order to enable mutual deception. But there is an intense debate about the role of motivational processes in self-deception which is the main focus of the contributions in this volume. Greve & Wentura assess two explanatory virtues that cognitive processes of self-immunization have with regard to selfdeception. The authors approach self-deception from the perspective of cognitive psychology. They draw on empirical evidence for unconscious processes of self-immunization they have provided in a series of studies. Via semantic priming tasks they have tracked automatic and sub-personal processes of self-immunization. On the basis of this evidence Greve & Wentura demonstrate how we balance stability and changes in our self-images in a self-serving way when the pleasure- and the reality-principle have clashed and need to be reconciled. As a sub-personal process, the authors show that self-immunization does not fall victim to the paradoxes of self-deception that arise on a personal level. Michel & Newen show in detail to which degree self-deception remains rational by providing a general model of self-deception that describes self-deception in a proper sense as pseudo-rational regulation of belief-systems. They distinguish self-deception from alternative forms of motivational influence on acceptance (in opposition to the position of Mele) which have been proposed in the recent philosophical literature such as motivational bias and pretense. Self-deceivers violate their own standards of belief-regulation by employing a dual standard of reasoning that remains opaque to them. Drawing on evidence from cognitive psychology on processes of self-immunization and dual rationality the authors demonstrate how self-deception against strong counter-evidence can be reconciled with the subject’s attaining belief-status for the target proposition. The question of belief-status is in the focus of Alfred Mele’s contribution. Mele has put forward an influential analysis which assumes that self-deceivers actually develop a belief of the target proposition. In contrast Robert Audi’s analysis claims that self-deceptive avowals are lacking belief-status. Mele provides evidence for the belief-view which has folk-intuition on its side. He has carried out two surveys that do not support Audi’s claim that a pre-theoretical understanding of the concept of ‘‘self-deception” includes the absence of belief. The results favor the opposite view. Concerning self-consciousness, Werning discusses the question whether it makes sense to presuppose a Cartesian inner self as the bearer of mental content. He argues that we need such an inner self without presupposing Descartes’ dualism. It is argued that the idea of an inner self is unavoidable if we accept two principles: the phenomenal transparency of experience and the semantic compositionality of conceptual content. It is assumed that self-awareness is a second-order state either in the domain of experience or in the domain of thought. In the former case self-awareness turns out empty if experience is transparent. In the latter, it can best be conceived of as a form of mental quotation. Since the only theory of quotation that is compositional is a phonological theory, we have to presuppose an inner self as the bearer of inner speech guaranteeing the compositionality of thought. An innovative transcultural study on the perception of nonverbal behavior that allows to study processes related to person perception and impression formation of others is presented by Bente et al. in their study ‘‘The Others. Universals and Cultural Specificities in the Perception of Status and Dominance from Nonverbal Behavior.” The authors employed a novel methodology that allowed to study nonverbal behavior from different countries in a culture-fair manner by masking to ethnicity and culture, the results of which show that the processing of dominance cues is universal whereas evaluative responses to nonverbal behavior are culture-dependent. This study is an important contribution to the literature on person perception in general and on its cultural influences in particular. In a bundle of four papers memory dimensions are investigated in detail (Staniloiu et al., Perner et al., Sauvage; Vosgerau). From a clinical neuropsychological point of view, Staniloiu et al. study the interesting case ‘‘Psychogenic Amnesia – A Malady of the Constricted Self.” referring to autobiographical–episodic memory as key component of self-consciousness. Autobiographical–episodic memory is understood as the conjunction of subjective time, autonoetic consciousness and the experiencing self. Neurobiologically, the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system are assumed to play key roles. These brain regions appear to be particularly vulnerable to stress-induced brain and are therefore of relevance for disorders of the autobiographical memory like psychogenic amnesia that are linked to environmental influences. The aim of Perner et al. is to investigate the role of the ability of mental rotation for episodic memory. To do that they investigate the common development of children’s ability to ‘‘look back in time” (retrospection, episodic remembering) and to ‘‘look into the future” (prospection). They register free recall, as a measure of episodic remembering (i) with recall of visually experienced events and (ii) with recall of indirectly conveyed events. Quite unexpectedly, ‘‘mental rotators” were markedly worse on indirect items than ‘‘non-rotators”. They speculate that with the ability to rotate children switch from the ability of knowledge retrieval to episodic remembering.
Editorial / Consciousness and Cognition 19 (2010) 687–689
689
In her contribution ‘‘ROC in animals: uncovering the neural substrates of recollection and familiarity in episodic recognition memory.” Magdalena Sauvage focuses to the basic neurobiological mechanisms of episodic memory and explores the question whether familiarity and recollection are qualitatively distinct processes that in turn recruit different brain regions or whether they refer to the same process which would let us to assume that shared brain mechanisms are at work. Based on an animal model and innovative research methodologies she favours the view that familiarity and recollection are different processes, from a neurobiological point of view she provides data that lead to the conclusion that the hippocampus supports recollection, but not familiarity. Also related to recognition memory is the employment of simple heuristics that allows decision making on the ground of only sparse information. Volz et al. study the so-called fluency heuristic based on the relative speed with which two different objects are recognized in their study. ‘‘It just felt right: The neural correlates of the fluency heuristic.” Searching for the neural mechanisms of the fluency heuristic showed that the claustrum was recruited during fluency heuristic decisions suggesting that this brain region is responsible for the integration perceptual and memory elements into a conscious ‘‘Gestalt” and, hence, for the subjective experience of fluency. Vosgerau argues that any theory of content has to adopt a ‘‘functionalistic core” according to which representations are defined as substitutes in functions that describe the flexible behavior to be explained by the representation. The content of a representation can thus only be determined if the representation is ‘‘in use”. The stored entities in memory are not in use while they are stored, and hence cannot be assigned a specific content. The term ‘‘template” is introduced to describe stored entities in memory while activated memory is essentially in need of a construction process on the basis of the templates. Early versions of most of the papers were first presented at an international and interdisciplinary conference at the Hanse-Institute of Advanced Study in Delmenhorst (Germany) organized by the editors in summer 2009. This conference was a highlight of a series of ongoing interdisciplinary cooperations including the edition of this volume. We want to thank the VolkswagenStiftung and the Hanse-Institute of Advanced Study, especially its rector Reto Weiler who all supported the interdisciplinary endeavor, not only financially, but also intellectually. The peer-review process was managed at the University of Bochum with important organizational support by Robert Schütze. Finally, we would like to thank the management of the journal, Ann Barajas, and the main editor of the journal, William Banks, for helpful comments and encouraging support. Albert Newen Universität Bochum, Institut für Philosophie, Universitätsstr. 150, 44892 Bochum, Germany E-mail address: [email protected] Kai Vogeley University Hospital Cologne, Department of Psychiatry, Kerpener Str. 62, 50924 Cologne, Germany Christoph Michel Universität Bochum, Institut für Philosophie, Universitätsstr. 150, 44892 Bochum, Germany Available online 8 August 2010
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Consciousness and Cognition journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog
Editorial
Self, other and memory: A preface q
The key topics of this special issue are self-consciousness, understanding others and the role of memory, while the latter is especially investigated with respect to its relation to self-consciousness. It is furthermore a characteristic feature of this special issue that most of the papers are dedicated to an interdisciplinary research program combining the perspectives of philosophy, psychology, neurobiology and cognitive neuroscience. The issue of self-consciousness is firstly investigated concerning the feature of perspective taking (Kockler et al.). This empirical study is complemented by two studies that focus on embodiment: A basic constituent of bodily self-consciousness is surely the anchoring of self-related experiences in one’s own body image (Blanke et al.) and an interesting case is being made of language as being related to embodiment as well (Binkofski et al.). Then three articles are dealing with self-deception including some interconnected discussion (Greve & Wentura; Michel & Newen, Mele). Furthermore, a theoretical investigation of self-consciousness refers to the compositionality of our thoughts (Werning). Investigating the self is contrasted by an empirical study on the perception of others under specific influence of different cultural backgrounds (Bente et al.). With the article of Staniloiu et al. the volume widens the discussion to account for memory as well. Three empirical investigations help to improve our understanding of the role of memory while one theoretical account discusses a core thesis about memory: One important focus is the question what is necessary to establish individual self-consciousness over time (Staniloui et al.): this leads to a discussing of diachronic self-consciousness and autobiographic episodic memory. The development of episodic memory is the focus of the behavioral study of Perner et al. arguing that the ability of mental rotation of figures is initiating a switch from knowledge retrieval to episodic remembering. In addition to the distinction of episodic and semantic memory, Sauvage discusses convincing evidence to support the distinction between familiarity and recollection. The paper of Volz et al. is investigating our subjective experience of intuition as addressed by a fluency heuristic paradigm from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience. Finally, in a philosophical paper Vosgerau argues that, on the basis of a functionalist approach of mental representation, representations only have a specific content if they are actually in use, therefore, stored mental representations do not have a specific content. We shortly characterize the main claims of the papers: One feature of self-consciousness is the capacity to take different perspectives: closely related to an intact body image is our capacity to change perspectives in space. This already ‘‘classical” empirical approach to study spatial perspective taking has been investigated by Kockler et al. for the first time in dynamic environments. In their study ‘‘Visuospatial perspective taking in a dynamic environment” participants were asked to perform left–right-decisions in animated and static virtual environments, both from a first- and third-person-perspective. The results showed a significantly increased activation in the right posterior intraparietal sulcus in conditions in which a dynamic stimulus had to be observed and judged upon from a first-person-perspective. This special case of oneself being involved in object-directed action preparation is interpreted and discussed as the neural mechanism of ‘‘readiness for (re)action”. A very important approach to any cognitive function are disturbances of self-consciousness, this important and sometimes underestimated approach is employed by Blanke et al. in their contribution concerning bodily self-consciousness. The basic key assumption here is that the integration of multisensory bodily signals from the entire body is crucial for bodily self-consciousness. Not only empirically grounded, but also philosophically arguable they refer to a newly developed taxonomy that comprises the three different features of self-location, first person perspective, and self-identification and that allows to categorize body schema disturbances. The authors are focusing on illusory body perceptions of one’s own body as a particularly interesting disturbance of the body schema or body representation. Based on detailed clinical and neuroanatomical data the paper presents two interesting case reports with a disturbance of self-identification and shows their relevance for the neural mechanisms underlying bodily self-consciousness.
q
This article is part of a special issue of this journal on Self, Other and Memory.
1053-8100/$ - see front matter Ó 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2010.07.002
688
Editorial / Consciousness and Cognition 19 (2010) 687–689
On the background of such empirical evidence, the concept of embodied cognition has become one the leading frameworks in the study of cognitive processes in general. A very interesting and stimulating approach refers to the hypothesis that also language can be interpreted as embodied cognition. In the study ‘‘Grasping language – a short story on Embodiment.” the authors Binkofski et al. employ a new meta-analytic tool that allows to study neural mechanisms of cognitive functions across different studies. The key finding of cumulative evidence for the recruitment of the somatotopic activation of motor areas clearly supports this hypothesis of language as embodied cognitive faculty and emphasizes the role of sensorimotor areas during language processing. The discussion of self and embodiment is followed by a group of three papers on self-deception. There is few disagreement in the recent philosophical and psychological literature on self-deception about the fact that garden-variety selfdeception differs from stereotypical other-deception. What we call self-deception in everyday contexts can be explained within a framework of a unified self and does not require any partitioning of the self into different sub-centers of agency in order to enable mutual deception. But there is an intense debate about the role of motivational processes in self-deception which is the main focus of the contributions in this volume. Greve & Wentura assess two explanatory virtues that cognitive processes of self-immunization have with regard to selfdeception. The authors approach self-deception from the perspective of cognitive psychology. They draw on empirical evidence for unconscious processes of self-immunization they have provided in a series of studies. Via semantic priming tasks they have tracked automatic and sub-personal processes of self-immunization. On the basis of this evidence Greve & Wentura demonstrate how we balance stability and changes in our self-images in a self-serving way when the pleasure- and the reality-principle have clashed and need to be reconciled. As a sub-personal process, the authors show that self-immunization does not fall victim to the paradoxes of self-deception that arise on a personal level. Michel & Newen show in detail to which degree self-deception remains rational by providing a general model of self-deception that describes self-deception in a proper sense as pseudo-rational regulation of belief-systems. They distinguish self-deception from alternative forms of motivational influence on acceptance (in opposition to the position of Mele) which have been proposed in the recent philosophical literature such as motivational bias and pretense. Self-deceivers violate their own standards of belief-regulation by employing a dual standard of reasoning that remains opaque to them. Drawing on evidence from cognitive psychology on processes of self-immunization and dual rationality the authors demonstrate how self-deception against strong counter-evidence can be reconciled with the subject’s attaining belief-status for the target proposition. The question of belief-status is in the focus of Alfred Mele’s contribution. Mele has put forward an influential analysis which assumes that self-deceivers actually develop a belief of the target proposition. In contrast Robert Audi’s analysis claims that self-deceptive avowals are lacking belief-status. Mele provides evidence for the belief-view which has folk-intuition on its side. He has carried out two surveys that do not support Audi’s claim that a pre-theoretical understanding of the concept of ‘‘self-deception” includes the absence of belief. The results favor the opposite view. Concerning self-consciousness, Werning discusses the question whether it makes sense to presuppose a Cartesian inner self as the bearer of mental content. He argues that we need such an inner self without presupposing Descartes’ dualism. It is argued that the idea of an inner self is unavoidable if we accept two principles: the phenomenal transparency of experience and the semantic compositionality of conceptual content. It is assumed that self-awareness is a second-order state either in the domain of experience or in the domain of thought. In the former case self-awareness turns out empty if experience is transparent. In the latter, it can best be conceived of as a form of mental quotation. Since the only theory of quotation that is compositional is a phonological theory, we have to presuppose an inner self as the bearer of inner speech guaranteeing the compositionality of thought. An innovative transcultural study on the perception of nonverbal behavior that allows to study processes related to person perception and impression formation of others is presented by Bente et al. in their study ‘‘The Others. Universals and Cultural Specificities in the Perception of Status and Dominance from Nonverbal Behavior.” The authors employed a novel methodology that allowed to study nonverbal behavior from different countries in a culture-fair manner by masking to ethnicity and culture, the results of which show that the processing of dominance cues is universal whereas evaluative responses to nonverbal behavior are culture-dependent. This study is an important contribution to the literature on person perception in general and on its cultural influences in particular. In a bundle of four papers memory dimensions are investigated in detail (Staniloiu et al., Perner et al., Sauvage; Vosgerau). From a clinical neuropsychological point of view, Staniloiu et al. study the interesting case ‘‘Psychogenic Amnesia – A Malady of the Constricted Self.” referring to autobiographical–episodic memory as key component of self-consciousness. Autobiographical–episodic memory is understood as the conjunction of subjective time, autonoetic consciousness and the experiencing self. Neurobiologically, the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system are assumed to play key roles. These brain regions appear to be particularly vulnerable to stress-induced brain and are therefore of relevance for disorders of the autobiographical memory like psychogenic amnesia that are linked to environmental influences. The aim of Perner et al. is to investigate the role of the ability of mental rotation for episodic memory. To do that they investigate the common development of children’s ability to ‘‘look back in time” (retrospection, episodic remembering) and to ‘‘look into the future” (prospection). They register free recall, as a measure of episodic remembering (i) with recall of visually experienced events and (ii) with recall of indirectly conveyed events. Quite unexpectedly, ‘‘mental rotators” were markedly worse on indirect items than ‘‘non-rotators”. They speculate that with the ability to rotate children switch from the ability of knowledge retrieval to episodic remembering.
Editorial / Consciousness and Cognition 19 (2010) 687–689
689
In her contribution ‘‘ROC in animals: uncovering the neural substrates of recollection and familiarity in episodic recognition memory.” Magdalena Sauvage focuses to the basic neurobiological mechanisms of episodic memory and explores the question whether familiarity and recollection are qualitatively distinct processes that in turn recruit different brain regions or whether they refer to the same process which would let us to assume that shared brain mechanisms are at work. Based on an animal model and innovative research methodologies she favours the view that familiarity and recollection are different processes, from a neurobiological point of view she provides data that lead to the conclusion that the hippocampus supports recollection, but not familiarity. Also related to recognition memory is the employment of simple heuristics that allows decision making on the ground of only sparse information. Volz et al. study the so-called fluency heuristic based on the relative speed with which two different objects are recognized in their study. ‘‘It just felt right: The neural correlates of the fluency heuristic.” Searching for the neural mechanisms of the fluency heuristic showed that the claustrum was recruited during fluency heuristic decisions suggesting that this brain region is responsible for the integration perceptual and memory elements into a conscious ‘‘Gestalt” and, hence, for the subjective experience of fluency. Vosgerau argues that any theory of content has to adopt a ‘‘functionalistic core” according to which representations are defined as substitutes in functions that describe the flexible behavior to be explained by the representation. The content of a representation can thus only be determined if the representation is ‘‘in use”. The stored entities in memory are not in use while they are stored, and hence cannot be assigned a specific content. The term ‘‘template” is introduced to describe stored entities in memory while activated memory is essentially in need of a construction process on the basis of the templates. Early versions of most of the papers were first presented at an international and interdisciplinary conference at the Hanse-Institute of Advanced Study in Delmenhorst (Germany) organized by the editors in summer 2009. This conference was a highlight of a series of ongoing interdisciplinary cooperations including the edition of this volume. We want to thank the VolkswagenStiftung and the Hanse-Institute of Advanced Study, especially its rector Reto Weiler who all supported the interdisciplinary endeavor, not only financially, but also intellectually. The peer-review process was managed at the University of Bochum with important organizational support by Robert Schütze. Finally, we would like to thank the management of the journal, Ann Barajas, and the main editor of the journal, William Banks, for helpful comments and encouraging support. Albert Newen Universität Bochum, Institut für Philosophie, Universitätsstr. 150, 44892 Bochum, Germany E-mail address: [email protected] Kai Vogeley University Hospital Cologne, Department of Psychiatry, Kerpener Str. 62, 50924 Cologne, Germany Christoph Michel Universität Bochum, Institut für Philosophie, Universitätsstr. 150, 44892 Bochum, Germany Available online 8 August 2010