1.30 Registration
2.00 Welcome from Professor Barry Smith (Director, IP, School of Advanced Study)
Chair: Prof Uta Frith (UCL)
2.15 Sir Jonathan Miller
On the Move
3.30 Prof Vicki Bruce (Psychology, Newcastle upon Tyne)
Face Fallacies
4.45 Tea
5.15 Patrick Hughes (Reverspective Ltd, London)
Paradoxymoron
6.30 Reception in Jessel Room

Fri 24 May, Room G22/26, ground floor

Morning Chair: Prof Chris Frith (UCL)
9.30 Prof Marina Wallace (Central Saint Martins)
The Paradox of Representation
10.45 Coffee
11.15 Prof Thomas Papathomas (Rutgers)
Masks and reverspectives: ambiguity in depth inversion illusions

12.30 Lunch (own arrangements)

Afternoon Chair: Dr Ophelia Deroy (IP)
1.45 Prof Michael Martin (UCL)
3.00 Prof Andrew Parker (Physiology, Anatomy & Genetics, Oxford)
Edges, Knives and the Warring parties
4.15 Tea
4.45 Dr Francois Quiviger (Warburg, School of Advanced Study)
Visual representations of non-visual sensations in early modern painting
6.00 Close

REGISTRATION (essential)
To register please send a message to philosophy@sas.ac.uk with “Pictorial Paradoxes 23-24 May” as the subject header. In the message please state in the following format:

1. Surname, Forename
2. Your fees category
3. Any affiliation (current staff and students should state department and/or course)

FEES (includes all teas and reception):
£10 CURRENT STAFF AND STUDENTS OF UOL PHILOSOPHY & IP INDIVIDUAL MEMBERS
£20 STAFF AND STUDENTS OF OTHER PHILOSOPHY DEPTS
£40 STANDARD
All fees will be taken at the conference venue and you will only be contacted in advance if there is a query with your registration.

Abstract: Consciousness is central to the human condition, furnishing us with phenomenal awareness of the external world and the ability to reflect upon our own thoughts and experiences. Almost half our communication concerns the contents of our thoughts and experiences. The shared language we use to do this obscures the recent realization that there is substantial variability in how different people experience the same physical environment. Moreover, key aspects of this variability in conscious experience are heritable, suggesting a conscious phenotype with adaptive significance. In this talk I will explore the nature of individual differences in conscious perception and their neural basis, focusing on both structure and function of the human brain.

HOW VISION SUCCEEDS IN AN UNKNOWN WORLD

Dale Purves
Duke University, Durham, NC, USA
Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School, Singapore

Abstract
Photo-sensors cannot measure the parameters that define reality, thus excluding information about the physical world from the mechanisms of biological vision. Nonetheless, the behavior of humans and other visual animals is routinely successful. The purpose of the talk is to consider how this feat is accomplished, and what the apparent strategy implies about vision and other brain functions.

Dale Purves is Professor of Neurobiology, Psychology and Brain Sciences, and Philosophy at Duke University, and is presently the Director of the Neuroscience and Behavioral Disorders Program at the Duke-NUS Graduate School in Singapore. He came to Duke in 1990 as the founding chair of the Department of Neurobiology at Duke Medical Center and was subsequently Director of Duke’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. He earned his B.A. from Yale and his M.D. from Harvard Medical School. Purves was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1989 for his work on neural development and synaptic plasticity; however, his research over the last 15 years years has sought to explain why we see and hear what we do, focusing on the visual perception of brightness, color, form, and motion, and the auditory perception of music and speech. His books include Principles of Neural Development (with Jeff Lichtman; Sinaur,1985) Body and Brain (Harvard,1988); Neural Activity and the Growth of the Brain (Cambridge, 1992); Why We See What we Do (with Beau Lotto; Sinauer, 2003); Perceiving Geometry (with Catherine Howe; Springer 2005); Why We See What we Do Redux (Sinauer, 2011) and Brains: How they Seem to Work (Financial Times Press, 2011). He is also lead author on the textbooks Neuroscience, Fifth Edition (Sinauer, 2011) and Principles of Cognitive Neuroscience, Second Edition (Sinauer, 2012). More information, access to publications and a complete CV are available at www.purveslab.net.

Abstract: The beneficial consequences of perceiving and integrating information across different sensory systems have been profusely described in recent literature. For example, we often find it easier to hear someone at a noisy party when we can see their face or, can react more accurately to the blare of a siren if we can also see the ambulance. Multisensory phenomena like these have been extensively studied in the laboratory, but often under conditions where attention can be easily focused on the critical stimuli. However, these focused attention conditions are very different from most everyday life environments, where many relevant and irrelevant sensory events can co-occur within a short time window and perhaps at close locations in space. What is more, multisensory coincidences may occur at completely unexpected moments and places. In these cases, segregation, selection and, the detection of true inter-sensory coincidences from spurious correlations are essential to be able to benefit from multisensory integration. But, is multisensory integration robust to attentionally demanding situations? I will present the results of recent studies from our laboratory that address precisely this issue by looking at the interplay between attention and multisensory integration. These studies span across various domains of perception where multisensory integration plays a paramount role. In the domain of audio-visual integration of speech, I will show examples of how selective attention can modulate behavioural and physiological expressions of multisensory integration. In the domain of temporal processing, I will illustrate how expectation to different points in time can alter the way information is bound across sensory modalities. Finally, in the domain of body representation, I will present some studies that attempt to track how the perception (and perhaps awareness) of touch in space unfolds as information from different modalities is orchestrated through integration. Altogether, the (modest) conclusion of this talk is that multisensory integration cannot be understood without its interplay with attention systems, and that this interplay may lead to have radically different perceptions of otherwise similar sensory combinations.

Vincent Hayward (ISIR, Paris)
A World of Tactile illusions And What We Can Do With Them

ABSTRACT
During mechanical interaction with our environment, we have a perceptual experience that can be compare to audition or vision. The sense of touch is based on mechanics and on its infinite complexities. Feeling objects, like in vision and audition, relies on the solution of a vast inverse problem, which is at the root of many ambiguities. To make matters more interesting, there is mounting evidence that many percepts, such as shape, texture, rigidity, speed, size, and on on, can be elicited through multiple sensing modes that blur the boundaries traditionally erected between touch and kinesthesia. From these ambiguities many illusions can arise when provoked by staging the proper conditions. In our group, we strive to build equipment to study them and take advantage of them for practical purpose. Sometimes, we can come up with informative, or even predictive explanations.

Vincent Hayward (Dr.-Ing., 1981 Univ. de Paris XI) was Postoctoral Fellow then Visiting Assistant Professor (1982) at Purdue University, and joined CNRS, France, as Chargé de Recherches in 1983. In 1987, he joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at McGill University as assistant, associate and then full professor (2006). He was the Director of the McGill Center for Intelligent Machines from 2001 to 2004. Hayward is interested in haptic device design and in perception. He is on editorial board of the ACM Transactions on Applied Perception and just completed a term as associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Haptics, and is a Fellow of the IEEE. Hayward has published in Nature, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, Current Biology, as well as in numerous engineering journals.

Click here for the list of forthcoming seminars

Thursday Nov 1st (4-6pm):Georges Rey (Maryland) on Concept Nativism.

Wednesday Nov 7th (SPECIAL SCHEDULE: 4.30-6.30pm): Roi Cohen-Kadosh (Oxford) on Synaesthesia

Thursday Nov 22nd (4-6pm): Matt Nudds (Warwick), title to be confirmed

Thursday Dec 7th (4-6pm): Joelle Proust (Jean Nicod, Paris) on Noetic feelings

Thursday Dec 13th (LUNCHTIME 12.30pm-2.30pm): Josef Pavizi (Stanford)

Thursday Dec 13th (4p. – 5.30pm) Richard Samuels (Ohio) Scientific Inference and Ordinary Cognition: Fodor on Holism and Cognitive Architecture.

All the seminars will take place in R 243, Senate House, 2nd floor, Malet Street. Entrance via Senate House (exceptionally via Stewart House on Russell Square, on nov 1st)
Please email contact@thecenses.org to receive our announcements.

Investigating numerosity perception and its applications for studying development and clinical populations
David Aagten-Murphy
University of Florence, Italy

A common challenge, particularly in developmental or clinical testing, is ensuring subjects’ best performance throughout the experiment. Here we present several game-like paradigms, used for examining numerosity perception with typically-developing children and children with autism, designed to keep subjects attentive and motivated throughout testing. While these game-like interfaces can boost subject compliance, techniques such as adaptation still require monotonous repetition, a prohibitively large number of trials and prolonged fixation. Through a series of studies with adults, examining the psychophysical properties of number adaptation, we developed a rapid-adaptation paradigm whereby substantial adaptation can occur with adaptation periods as short as 1 s (compared with the typical 30–60s adaptation). This brief adaptation produces large effects in perceived numerosity that last over extended delays (10–20s) between adaptation and test, with measurable effects persisting for hours after initial adaptation. These results implicate a highly plastic mechanism for numerosity perception and suggest a quick and efficient paradigm for use in clinical testing of numerosity. Finally, in a preliminary fMRI study in adults we used this novel paradigm to investigate the impact that adaptation has on brain regions associated with numerosity.
Alan Johnston
Research Strategy Director, CoMPLEX
Professor of Psychology
Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences
University College London

Tel +44 (0)20 7679 5310 (x25310)

Imitation, skill learning, and conceptual thought: an embodied, developmental approach

It will be the goal of my talk to offer a strategy for moving from imitation to conceptual thought. After accepting that imitation plays a vital role in accounting for the facility with which human beings acquire abilities, I argue that successful task performance is notidentical to intelligent action. To move beyond first-order behavioral success, I suggest that the orientation that humans have toward the means of intentional actions, i.e., the orientation required for imitation, also drives us to perfect our skills in a way that produces fertile ground for florid thought. Specifically, I argue that the meanscentric orientation, when inverted onto itself, motivates skill refinement and, as such, allows us to reach the intermediate level of cognitive development. It is at this level, through the individuation and recombination of action elements, that we see a basic syntax of action arise and, with it, the characteristic features of intelligence emerge.

Recent scientific studies have shown that olfaction is not as secondary a sense as people believe. Olfaction has specific and privileged connections to emotion and memory and its importance in terms of attachment and recognition shows already in utero and, on the flip side, in the aging population and specific brain pathologies. Finally, the natural and cultural use of fragrances and olfactory cues in human communication is emerging as a new topic for scientific investigation.

Read more….