Evidence against functionalism from neuroimaging of the alien colour effect in synaesthesia.

Coloured hearing synaesthetes experience colours to heard words, as confirmed by reliability of self-report, psychophysical testing and functional neuroimaging data. Some also describe the 'alien colour effect' (ACE): in response to colour names, they experience colours different from those named. We have previously reported that the ACE slows colour naming in a Stroop task, reflecting cognitive interference from synaesthetically induced colours, which depends upon their being consciously experienced. It has been proposed that the hippocampus mediates such consciously experienced conflict. Consistent with this hypothesis, we now report that, in functional magnetic resonance imaging of the Stroop task, hippocampal activation differentiates synaesthetes with the ACE from those without it and from non-synaesthete controls. These findings confirm the reality of coloured hearing synaesthesia and the ACE, phenomena which pose major challenges to the dominant contemporary account of mental states, functionalism. Reductive functionalism identifies types of mental states with causal roles: relations to inputs, outputs and other states. However, conscious mental states, such as experiences of colour, are distinguished by their qualitative properties or qualia. If functionalism is applied to conscious mental states, it identifies the qualitative type of an experience with its causal role or function. This entails both that experiences with disparate qualitative properties cannot have the same functional properties, and that experiences with disparate functional properties cannot have the same qualitative properties. Challenges to functionalism have often denied the first entailment. Here, we challenge the second entailment on empirical grounds. In coloured hearing synaesthesia, colour qualia are associated with both hearing words and seeing surfaces; and, in the ACE, these two functions act in opposition to one another. Whatever its merits as an account of other mental states, reductive functionalism cannot be the correct account of conscious experiences.

Allocentric spatial memory in humans with hippocampal lesions.

An immersive virtual reality (IVR) system was used to investigate allocentric spatial memory in a patient (PR) who had selective hippocampal damage, and also in patients who had undergone unilateral temporal lobectomies (17 right TL and 19 left TL), their performance compared against normal control groups. A human analogue of the Olton [Olton (1979). Hippocampus, space, and memory. Behavioural Brain Science, 2, 315] spatial maze was developed, consisting of a virtual room, a central virtual circular table and an array of radially arranged up-turned 'shells.' The participant had to search these shells in turn in order to find a blue 'cube' that would then 'move' to another location and so on, until all the shells had been target locations. Within-search errors could be made when the participants returned to a previously visited location during a search, and between-search errors when they revisited previously successful, but now incorrect locations. PR made significantly more between-search errors than his control group, but showed no increase in within-search errors. The right TL group showed a similar pattern of impairment, but the left TL group showed no impairment. This finding implicates the right hippocampal formation in spatial memory functioning in a scenario in which the visual environment was controlled so as to eliminate extraneous visual cues.

Allocentric spatial memory activation of the hippocampal formation measured with fMRI.

Hippocampal activation was investigated, comparing allocentric and egocentric spatial memory. Healthy participants were immersed in a virtual reality circular arena, with pattern-rendered walls. In a viewpoint-independent task, they moved toward a pole, which was then removed. They were relocated to another position and had to move to the prior location of the pole. For viewpoint-dependent memory, the participants were not moved to a new starting point, but the patterns were rotated to prevent them from indicating the final position. Hippocampal and parahippocampal activation were found in the viewpoint-independent memory encoding phase. Viewpoint-dependent memory did not result in such activation. These results suggest differential activation of the hippocampal formation during allocentric encoding, in partial support of the spatial mapping hypothesis as applied to humans.