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SCIENCE & CONSCIOUSNESS REVIEW
SCI-CON.ORG NEWSLETTER
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June 13, 2004

ARTICLES IN THIS ISSUE
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1. SCR Feature - How do you persist when your molecules don't?, McCrone
2. Postnote on the WRCM Workshop in Memphis
3. News - Link proved between senses and memory 4. Splitting the
spotlight of visual attention
5. Article - Natural-Born Dualists
6. Capturing Attention When Attention "Blinks"
7. Multiple Spotlights of Attentional Selection in Human Visual Cortex
8. News - Most of us are poor judges of our own abilities
9. News - Quoth the raven
10. Book Review - "Do Animals Think?"
11. New Journal - Consciousness and Cognition
12. New Journal - Journal of Consciousness Studies
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1. How do you persist when your molecules don't?
John McCrone
Original to SCR
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It is an extraordinary fact that we maintain functional constancy of
all kinds, in perception, personal identity, etc. -- in the face of
rapid turnover of some of the most important neuronal regions. John
McCrone examines this in our latest article.

Read More: http://www.sci-con.org/articles/20040601.html
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2. Postnote on the WRCM Workshop in Memphis
SCR Staff
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Thanks to all who attended the Workshop on the Role of Consciousness
in Memory. We all had a great time and we hope to have all of the
presentations online in the next couple of weeks.

http://www.cs.memphis.edu/~wrcm/kspeakers.html [Abstracts]
http://www.cs.memphis.edu/~wrcm/program.html [Presentations]
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3. Link proved between senses and memory Nature.com
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Brtish researchers report show that memories are scattered across the
brain's sensory centres and that if one of the senses is stimulated to
evoke a memory, other sensory memories are also triggered.

"That's the beauty of our memory system," he says. "Imagine a nice day
on the beach. The smell of sun lotion, the friends you were with, the
beer you were drinking; any of these could trigger memories of the
whole thing."

Read More: http://www.nature.com/nsu/040524/040524-12.html
http://www.nature.com/doifinder/10.1038/nature01960
[original article from Neuron]
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4. Splitting the spotlight of visual attention
Frank Tong
Princeton University
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Can the brain attend to more than a single location at one time? In
this issue of Neuron, McMains and Somers report psychophysical and
fMRI evidence showing that subjects can attend to two separate
locations concurrently and that divided spatial attention leads to
separate zones of attentional enhancement in early visual cortex.

Read More: http://tinyurl.com/2rqaa [ScienceDirect]
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5. Natural Born Dualists
Paul Bloom
Edge.org
************************* Paul Bloom of Yale University and Edge.org
explores the development of mind-body dualism in children. He argues
that even babies start off with this intuitive mind-body split. Like
almost everything on edge.org, it is extremely readable and accessable
to non-scientific audiences.

Read More: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bloom04/bloom04_index.html
[text]
http://www.edge.org/video/dsl/bloom.html [Quicktime movie of
the same]
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6. Capturing Attention When Attention "Blinks"
Serena Wee, Fook K. Chua
National University of Singapore
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Four experiments addressed the question of whether attention may be
captured when the visual system is in the midst of an attentional
blink (AB). Participants identified 2 target letters embedded among
distractor letters in a rapid serial visual presentation sequence. In
some trials, a square frame was inserted between the targets; as the
only geometric object in the sequence, it constituted a singleton.
Capture effects obtained when the AB was most severe and when it was
over were compared. There were 3 main results. First, capture occurred
even when the AB was crippling, suggesting that a singleton
exogenously engaged attention even when processing of a previous
target was continuing apace. Second, when the singleton contained the
key target feature, capture effects were clearly manifest. Third, even
when the singleton did not possess the key target feature, it still
succeeded in capturing attention, although the effects were both
feeble and fleeting.

Read More: http://tinyurl.com/2c9pr [ScienceDirect]
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7. Multiple Spotlights of Attentional Selection in Human Visual Cortex
Stephanie A. McMains1, David C. Somers
Boston University
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Spatially directed attention strongly enhances visual perceptual
processing. The metaphor of the "spotlight" has long been used to
describe spatial attention; however, there has been considerable
debate as to whether spatial attention must be unitary or may be split
between discrete regions of space. This question was addressed here
through functional MR imaging of human subjects as they performed a
task that required simultaneous attention to two briefly displayed and
masked targets at locations separated by distractor stimuli. These
data reveal retinotopically specific enhanced activation in striate
and extrastriate visual cortical representations of the two attended
stimuli and no enhancement at the intervening representation of
distractor stimuli. This finding of two spotlights was obtained within
a single cortical hemisphere and across the two hemispheres. This
provides direct evidence that spatial attention can select, in
parallel, multiple low-level perceptual representations.

Read More: http://tinyurl.com/3gmfj
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8. Most of us poor judges of our own abilities
Katherine Burson
University of Michigan
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Most of us believe we can accurately gauge how our personal
performance and abilities stack up against our peers, but new research
suggests that we are in fact poor judges of our own comparative talents.
Researchers from the University of Michigan Business School, Duke
University and the University of Chicago report that people at all
skill levels, including both top achievers and poor performers, show
similar degrees of inaccuracy and bias in making interpersonal
comparisons.
These errors in judgment are tied to perceptions about the difficulty
of an assigned task. When the task seems hard, top achievers
underestimate their standing relative to their peers, resulting in
less accurate predictions. When a task appears to be easy, poor
performers overestimate their relative standing, making their
predictions less accurate.

Read More:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-05/uom-mou052804.php
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9. Quoth the raven
Economist.com
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New research in the Proceedings of the Royal Society exploring theory
of mind and agenthood in birds measured by response to a human gaze.
Response and following a gaze is considered to be a base measure of
theory of mind in humans children. (Failure at this is often a sign
of autism.) It was found that all birds were able to follow the gaze
of the experimenters. Furthermore, some birds went to investigate
whatever the experimenters were staring at.

Read More: http://tinyurl.com/3gjnx [Economist.com]
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10. "Do Animals Think?" by Clive Wynne
Reviewed by Stan Persky
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The answer to the title question of Clive Wynne's book, Do Animals
Think?, is: Not very much. I mention this right off the bat not only
to dispel unnecessary suspense but because Wynne, a University of
Florida psychology prof and the author of an earlier textbook on
animal cognition, writes so charmingly about the behaviour of
honeybees, bats, pigeons, and dolphins that one almost forgets that
for considerable stretches of Do Animals Think? he says very little
about thinking at all.

>> SCR: This is worth reading if nothing else for the highly
entertaining remarks regarding Thomas Nagel's "What Is It Like to Be a
Bat?"


Read More: http://tinyurl.com/2afjt
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11. New issue of Consciousness and Cognition
Volume 12, Issue 2
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* Russell Epstein; Consciousness, art, and the brain: Lessons from
Marcel Proust
* David Galin; Aesthetic experience: Marcel Proust and the
neo-Jamesian structure of awareness
* Donald Dryden; Memory, imagination, and the cognitive value of the arts
* L. Coward and Ron Sun; Criteria for an effective theory of
consciousness and some preliminary attempts
* Jing Zhu; Locating volition
* Justin Feinstein; From sensory processes to conscious perception
* Diane Zizak; Implicit preferences: The role(s) of familiarity in the
structural mere exposure effect
* Daniel Levin; No pause for a brief disruption: Failures of visual
awareness during ongoing events
* Kielan Yarrow; Action, arousal, and subjective time
* Larry Cahill; The influence of sex versus sex-related traits on
long-term memory for gist and detail from an emotional story
* Fredick Travis; Psychological and physiological characteristics of a
proposed object-referral/self-referral continuum of self-awareness *
Matthew Brown; In sight but out of mind: Do competing views test the
limits of perception without awareness?
* Matthew Erdelyi; Comments on commentaries: Kihlstrom, Bachmann,
Reingold, and Snodgrass
* Papers to Appear in Forthcoming Issues
Read More: http://tinyurl.com/ytmqd [ScienceDirect]
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12. New issue of Journal of Consciousness Studies
Volume 11, No. 3-4
Special Feature: Art and the Brain Part III
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* Joseph A. Goguen & Erik Myin; Editorial Introduction
* Mari Tervaniemi & Elvira Brattico; From Sounds to Music: Towards
Understanding the Neurocognition of Musical Sound Perception
* Bruce F. Katz; A Measure of Musical Preferance
* Neus Barrantes-Vidal; Creativity and Madness Revisited from Current
Psychological Perspectives
* Ivar Hagendoorn; Some Speculative Hypotheses about the Nature and
Perception of Dance and Choreography
* Erich Harth; Art and Reductionism
* Joseph A. Goguen; Musical Qualia, Context, Time and Emotion
* Amy Ione; Klee and Kandinsky: Polyphonic Painting, Chromatic Chords
and Synaesthesia
* Vijay Iyer; Improvisation, Temporality and Embodied Experience
* Borgo D; The Play of Meaning and the Meaning of Play in Jazz

Read More: http://tinyurl.com/3xgmz [Ingenta.com]
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Science and Consciousness Review <http://www.sci-con.org>

--
___________________
Thomas Zoëga Ramsøy

*** Neuropsychologist, cand.psych (MA)
*** PhD student, Junior Research Fellow

Homepage: http://www.ramsoy.dk
E-mail: thomasr@...

Danish Research Centre for Magnetic Resonance
MR-dept., section 340
Copenhagen University Hospital, Hvidovre
Kettegaards Allé 30
2650 Hvidovre
Denmark

Managing Editor
Science & Consciousness Review
http://www.sci-con.org