Max Seeger - 24/06/2013 - 3 pm

Max Seeger is a visiting student at the Institute, and a PhD student at the Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf.

Title: "Authorship of Thoughts in Thought Insertion"
Date, Time, Place: 28/06/2013, 3pm, Salle de Réunion du Pavillon Jardin
Abstract: In thought insertion, a pathological phenomenon often found in schizophrenia, subjects experience thoughts which they claim not to be their own. This claim raises a conceptual puzzle: isn’t it outright incoherent to claim that one has a thought which is not one’s own? According to the standard view, we can give a coherent meaning to the claim by taking subjects to deny agency or authorship for the thought, while acknowledging ownership. However, very little has been said so far on what it is exactly to be the author of a thought. As a result, there is a tension in the debate. On the one hand, the debate proceeds on the assumption that subjects of inserted thoughts make a mistake in denying authorship; in other words, subjects are the authors of these thoughts. On the other hand, mental authorship is often compared to intentional (bodily) agency and hence construed as intentional or deliberate thinking. But given that inserted thoughts are typically not entertained intentionally, this view implies the contrary of the first assumption, namely that subjects are not the authors of inserted thoughts after all. I offer a solution to this tension by construing authorship in purely causal terms.

Sara Packalén - 21/06/2013 - 5 pm

Sara Packalén is a visiting student at the Institute, and a PhD student at Stockholm University. She will present a work she has developed together with Emma Wallin (Stockholm University).


Title: "Episodic memory and imagination"
Date, Time, Place: 21/06/2013, 5pm, Salle de Réunion du Pavillon Jardin
Abstract: The talk addresses the relationship between episodic memory and other kinds of experiential representation, in particular imagination. Episodic memory and (imagistic) imagination involves the same kind of inner representation. The only difference seems to be that memories, unlike imaginations, are about the past. A straightforward explanation of this is obtained if we assume that episodic memory is simply a kind of imagination, with the distinctive trait of being causally dependent on past experiences in an appropriate way. We consider a weak and a strong interpretation of this claim, and argue against both. Although it has some appeal, the view that episodic memory is a subcategory of imagination is ultimately mistaken. Imagination and episodic memory have some features in common, but episodic memory is not imagination.

Margaux Larre-Perez (the sequel) - 14/06/2013 - 3 pm

Margaux Larre-Perez (Institut Jean Nicod & LPP) will be our next speaker (for the second time this year). She is jointly supervised by Pierre Jacob and Thérèse Collins.

Title: "Stroop-like interference between structural and functional hand gestures within objects : Part II"
Date, Time, Place: 14/06/2013, 3pm, Salle de Réunion du Pavillon Jardin
Abstract: This talk is actually the follow-up of my last presentation given at the Doc'in Nicod in March (22/3). New data and theoretical implications for the study of hand gestures facilitation by visual objects will be presented.
Man-made objects elicit two kinds of hand gestures: structural (associated with the shape-based properties of objects) and functional (associated with their typical usage) hand gestures. We adapted a Stroop-like paradigm to assess whether they are both automatically activated when viewing an object and if they compete with each other. Participants learned to associate either a “clench” or a “poke” movement with a color, and then executed them in response to the color of pictures of objects associated with both actions. Objects were displayed either entirely or only partially colored, congruently or incongruently relative to the relationship between the color and the object part. Results show that planning any hand movement on an object is slower when attention is drawn to its functional part, suggesting that elicitation of hand gestures may depend on the allocation of visual attention.