1. Brief history of attention The problem of attention is the problem of selecting for active processing certain aspects of our physical environment (e.g., objects) or some ideas in our mind (which are stored in our memory). This problem is one of the oldest and most central issues in psychological science. Many great minds have wrestled with the definition of attention. In 1890, William James ...

A system which is to count as minded must represent its environment and must act in pursuit of its goals as those representations make it right to act; or at least it must do this in favourable conditions. But a system may comply with representation-related constraints, simply because that is how it is designed at the subpersonal level to function. Or it may comply for that reason together with...

Interactive Visualization has been used to study scientific phenomena, analyze data, visualize information, and to explore large amounts of multi-variate data. It enables the human mind to gain novel insights by empowering the human visual system, encompassing the brain and the eyes, to discover properties that were previously unknown. While it is believed that the process of creating interacti...

This paper discusses theoretical issues concerning Vygotsky’s work that have remained unaddressed in the dominant interpretations of his work, either in the former Soviet psychology or in the dominant Western interpretations. This paper builds on interpretations of Vygotsky’s concepts oriented by the unity of emotional and cognitive processes and focused on the search for new psychical unities ...

While current artificial systems must be custom tailored to operate within a single domain of expertise, the human mind readily adapts to multiple domains. In moving toward artificial systems that display similar flexibility, we become interested in how efforts to learn about the mind can support the development of flexible artificial systems, and how the development of these systems can contri...

The work presents a psychodynamic, semiotic and dialogical model of affect and of the role it plays in sensemaking. The model is based on the following three general assumptions. A) Affective semiosis works in accordance to the dynamic unconscious which Freud conceptualized in terms of primary process. According to this interpretation, the unconscious is the mind’s homogenising way of functioni...

We describe a surprising developmental pattern across three different kinds of problems and age ranges. Younger learners are better than older ones at learning unusual abstract causal principles from evidence. We explore two factors that might contributecausal principles from evidence. We explore two factors that might contribute to this counter-­...

In Herbert Feigl’s “The “Mental” and the “Physical””, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 2:370-497, Feigl argues that the terms ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ are very poorly defined, and if we redefine them in a clear and careful way (which is how we started the class, after all) the problem “Is the mind matter?” is really “Are the concepts of introspective psychology – relating to the ph...

The human mind is one of our most compelling subjects of scientific inquiry—and perhaps our most elusive. Despite impressive biological advances, neuroscience has yet to produce a logical and empirical analysis of the mind that exhibits universal, objective explanatory power of human mental phenomena on both an individual and species level. This article first explores the limitations of the cur...

The following article reports on ideas about how to study consciousness that emerged during the course of the January 1992 Athens Symposium on Science and Consciousness, one of the principal aims of the meeting being as far as possible to escape from constraints on thinking about consciousness that might be imposed by conventional modes of thought. The first half of the report discusses in gene...