Motion, identity and the bias toward agency

Sciences of Observation

Multiple sciences have converged, in the past two decades, on a hitherto mostly unremarked question: what is observation? Here, I examine this evolution, focusing on three sciences: physics, especially quantum information theory, developmental biology, especially its molecular and “evo-devo” branches, and cognitive science, especially perceptual psychology and robotics. I trace the history of this question to the late 19th century, and through the conceptual revolutions of the 20th century. I show how the increasing interdisciplinary focus on the process of extracting information from an environment provides an opportunity for conceptual unification, and sketch an outline of what such a unification might look like.

Rethinking Social Cognition in Light of Psychosis: Reciprocal Implications for Cognition and Psychopathology

The positive symptoms of psychosis largely involve the experience of illusory social actors and yet our current measures of social cognition, at best, only weakly predict their presence. We review evidence to suggest that the range of current approaches in social cognition is not sufficient to explain the fundamentally social nature of these experiences. We argue that social agent representation is an important organising principle for understanding social cognition and that alterations in social agent representation may be a factor in the formation of delusions and hallucination in psychosis. We evaluate the feasibility of this approach in light of clinical and non-clinical studies, developmental research, cognitive anthropology and comparative psychology. We conclude with recommendations for empirical testing of specific hypotheses and how studies of social cognition could more fully capture the extent of social reasoning and experience in both psychosis and more prosaic mental states.

Disrupted development and imbalanced function in the global neuronal workspace: a positive-feedback mechanism for the emergence of ASD in early infancy

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is increasingly being conceptualized as a spectrum disorder of connectome development. We review evidence suggesting that ASD is characterized by a positive feedback loop that amplifies small functional variations in early-developing sensory-processing pathways into structural and functional imbalances in the global neuronal workspace. Using vision as an example, we discuss how early functional variants in visual processing may be feedback-amplified to produce variant object categories and disrupted top-down expectations, atypically large expectation-to-perception mismatches, problems re-identifying individual people and objects, socially inappropriate, generally aversive emotional responses and disrupted sensory-motor coordination. Viewing ASD in terms of feedback amplification of small functional variants allows a number of recent models of ASD to be integrated with neuroanatomical, neurofunctional and genetic data.

On the other hand: Increased cortical activation to human versus mechanical hands in infants

There is a large body of work demonstrating that infants are sensitive to the distinction between human and mechanical entities from the early months of life, and have different expectations for the way these entities move and interact. The current work investigates the extent to which the functional organization of the immature brain reflects these early emerging sensitivities. Infants aged 8months watched two kinds of hands (human or mechanical) engage in two kinds of events (one with a functional outcome and one without). Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), we assessed hemodynamic activation in the left and right temporal and temporal-occipital cortex in response to these events. The neuroimaging data revealed a significantly greater increase in activation in the right middle-posterior temporal cortex to events executed by the human than the mechanical hand; the event in which the hand engaged (function or non-function) did not significantly influence hemodynamic responses. In comparison, the left middle-temporal cortex showed significantly greater activation to events executed by the human than mechanical hand, but only when the events were functionally relevant. That is, the left middle-posterior temporal cortex responded selectively to human (as compared to mechanical) agents, but only in the context of functionally relevant actions on objects. These results reveal that the immature brain is functionally specialized to support infants' processing of human and non-human agents as distinct entities. These results also shed light on the cognitive and cortical mechanisms that guide infants' learning about agentive action and object function.