The Brains blog is excited about the next Neural Mechanisms webinar this Friday. It is free. You can find information about how and when to join the webinar below or at the Neural Mechanisms website—where you can also join their mailing list to be notified of their webinars, webconferences, and more!
Unpredictable Predictions: Defining and measuring cognition
in predictive accounts of the mind
Ophelia Deroy (LMU Munich)
19 April 2019
h 15-17 – Greenwhich Mean Time
(Convert to your local time here)
Abstract. Distinguishing between perception and thought is a vacuous task. At least this is what most adopters of predictive coding accounts express. Here I want to argue for the opposite. Although I concur that perception can no longer be equated with strictly bottom-up processing, I argue that thought, in virtue of being at the top of the hierarchy, can be equated with a distinctive kind of process: It predicts but is not predicted by any other level. Using this argument and some recent collaborative experimental work on the much discussed example of racial biases in vision, I show why it makes a difference to the way we frame the issue of whether thought influences perception : What we have is a much more tractable and interesting problem of how much cognitive and metacognitive control we have over our perceptual biases.
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