Relationships between implicit and explicit uncertainty monitoring and mindreading: Evidence from autism spectrum disorder.

We examined performance on implicit (non-verbal) and explicit (verbal) uncertainty-monitoring tasks among neurotypical participants and participants with autism, while also testing mindreading abilities in both groups. We found that: (i) performance of autistic participants was unimpaired on the implicit uncertainty-monitoring task, while being significantly impaired on the explicit task; (ii) performance on the explicit task was correlated with performance on mindreading tasks in both groups, whereas performance on the implicit uncertainty-monitoring task was not; and (iii) performance on implicit and explicit uncertainty-monitoring tasks was not correlated. The results support the view that (a) explicit uncertainty-monitoring draws on the same cognitive faculty as mindreading whereas (b) implicit uncertainty-monitoring only test first-order decision making. These findings support the theory that metacognition and mindreading are underpinned by the same meta-representational faculty/resources, and that the implicit uncertainty-monitoring tasks that are frequently used with non-human animals fail to demonstrate the presence of metacognitive abilities.

No doing without time.

Hoerl & McCormack claim that animals don't represent time. Because this makes a mystery of established findings in comparative psychology, there had better be some important payoff. The main one they mention is that it explains a clash of intuition about the reality of time's passage. But any theory that recognizes the representational requirements of agency can do likewise.

Comparative psychology without consciousness.

The goal of this paper is to establish the truth of the following conditional: if a global workspace theory of phenomenal consciousness is correct, and is fully reductive in nature, then we should stop asking questions about consciousness in nonhuman animals-not because those questions are too hard to answer, but because there are no substantive facts to discover. The argument in support of this conditional turns on the idea that while global broadcasting is all-or-nothing in the human mind, it is framed in terms that imply gradations across species. Yet our concept of phenomenal consciousness doesn't permit mental states to be to some degree conscious. Before getting to that argument, however, and in order to motivate the subsequent discussion, some of the virtues of global workspace theory are displayed.

Correction: Evidence-based scientific exercise guidelines for adults with spinal cord injury: an update and a new guideline.

Authors Victoria L. Goosey-Tolfrey and Karen M. Smith were listed under the incorrect affiliations at the time of publication.

Evidence-based scientific exercise guidelines for adults with spinal cord injury: an update and a new guideline.

OBJECTIVES: To describe the process and outcomes of using a new evidence base to develop scientific guidelines that specify the type and minimum dose of exercise necessary to improve fitness and cardiometabolic health in adults with spinal cord injury (SCI). SETTING: International. METHODS: Using Appraisal of Guidelines, Research and Evaluation (AGREE) II reporting criteria, steps included (a) determining the guidelines' scope; (b) conducting a systematic review of relevant literature; (c) holding three consensus panel meetings (European, Canadian and International) to formulate the guidelines; (d) obtaining stakeholder feedback; and (e) process evaluation by an AGREE II consultant. Stakeholders were actively involved in steps (c) and (d). RESULTS: For cardiorespiratory fitness and muscle strength benefits, adults with a SCI should engage in at least 20 min of moderate to vigorous intensity aerobic exercise 2 times per week AND 3 sets of strength exercises for each major functioning muscle group, at a moderate to vigorous intensity, 2 times per week (strong recommendation). For cardiometabolic health benefits, adults with a SCI are suggested to engage in at least 30 min of moderate to vigorous intensity aerobic exercise 3 times per week (conditional recommendation). CONCLUSIONS: Through a systematic, rigorous, and participatory process involving international scientists and stakeholders, a new exercise guideline was formulated for cardiometabolic health benefits. A previously published SCI guideline was endorsed for achieving fitness benefits. These guidelines represent an important step toward international harmonization of exercise guidelines for adults with SCI, and a foundation for developing exercise policies and programs for people with SCI around the world.

Episodic memory isn't essentially autonoetic.

I argue that the function attributed to episodic memory by Mahr & Csibra (M&C) - that is, grounding one's claims to epistemic authority over past events - fails to support the essentially autonoetic character of such memories. I suggest, in contrast, that episodic event memories are sometimes purely first order, sometimes autonoetic, depending on relevance in the context.

Consciousness operationalized, a debate realigned.

This paper revisits the debate about cognitive phenomenology. It elaborates, defends, and improves on our earlier proposal for resolving that debate, according to which the test for irreducible phenomenology is the presence of explanatory gaps. After showing how proposals like ours have been misunderstood or misused by others, we deploy our operationalization to argue that the correct way to align the debate over cognitive phenomenology is not between sensory and (alleged) cognitive phenomenology, but rather between non-conceptual and (alleged) conceptual or propositional phenomenology. In doing so we defend three varieties of non-sensory (amodal)1 non-conceptual phenomenology: valence, a sense of approximate number, and a sense of elapsed time.

Attitude-Scenario-Emotion (ASE) sentiments are superficial.

Gervais & Fessler's (G&F's) Attitude-Scenario-Emotion (ASE) model reduces sentiments to superficial patterns of emotional responding that emerge when an underlying evaluative attitude interacts with appraisals of a range of specific scenarios. Thus construed, sentiments are epiphenomenal. We argue that G&F would do better to identify each sentiment (love, say) with the attitude that underlies and explains the patterns of emotional responding (in the case of love, this might be the attitude of valuing the good of a specific other).

Evolution of working memory.

Working memory (WM) is fundamental to many aspects of human life, including learning, speech and text comprehension, prospection and future planning, and explicit "system 2" forms of reasoning, as well as overlapping heavily with fluid general intelligence. WM has been intensively studied for many decades, and there is a growing consensus about its nature, its components, and its signature limits. Remarkably, given its central importance in human life, there has been very little comparative investigation of WM abilities across species. Consequently, much remains unknown about the evolution of this important human capacity. Some questions can be tentatively answered from the existing comparative literature. Even studies that were not intended to do so can nonetheless shed light on the WM capacities of nonhuman animals. However, many questions remain.

Firestone & Scholl conflate two distinct issues.

Firestone & Scholl (F&S) seem to believe that the viability of a distinction between perception and cognition depends on perception being encapsulated from top-down information. We criticize this assumption and argue that top-down effects can leave the distinction between perception and cognition fully intact. Individuating the visual system is one thing; the question of encapsulation is quite another.

Perceiving mental states.

This paper argues that our awareness of the mental states of other agents is often perceptual in character. It draws partly on recent experimental findings concerning perception of animacy and intentionality. But it also emphasizes the unencapsulated nature of perception generally, and argues that concepts (including mental-state concepts) can be bound into the contents of conscious perception. One of the main arguments used in support of this conclusion draws on recent work concerning the nature and contents of working memory.

Unconsciously competing goals can collaborate or compromise as well as win or lose.

This commentary offers a friendly extension of Huang & Bargh's (H&B's) account. Not only do active goals sometimes operate unconsciously to dominate or preempt others, but simultaneously active goals can also collaborate or compromise in shaping behavior. Because neither goal wins complete control of behavior, the result may be that each is only partly satisfied.

Better tests of consciousness are needed, but skepticism about unconscious processes is unwarranted.

What people report is, at times, the best evidence we have for what they experience. Newell & Shanks (N&S) do a service for debates regarding the role of unconscious influences on decision making by offering some sound methodological recommendations. We doubt, however, that those recommendations go far enough. For even if people have knowledge of the factors that influence their decisions, it does not follow that such knowledge is conscious, and plays a causal role, at the time the decision is made. Moreover, N&S fail to demonstrate that unconscious thought plays no role at all in decision making. Indeed, such a claim is quite implausible. In making these points we comment on their discussion of the literature on expertise acquisition and the Iowa Gambling Task.

Model-free metacognition.

Extensive work has been done on the metacognitive capacities of humans, as well as to investigate metacognitive processes in nonhuman animals. What we propose here, however, is that there are two very different forms that metacognition can take: either model-based (implicating at least a simplified model of the thinker's own mind), or model-free (representing some mental state or process in oneself in the absence of any such model). The focus of all work on human metacognitive judgments has been on the model-based variety, as have been most attempts to discover metacognition in animals. We first review recent studies suggesting that there are no resources shared between human metacognitive judgments and the sorts of behavioral tests employed with animals, implying that the latter fail to provide evidence of even simplified forms of model-based metacognition. Thereafter the question of model-free metacognition in animals is pursued. Negative verdicts are rendered on a pair of possible claims of this sort. But two positive answers are defended. One is that epistemic emotions like curiosity and interest, as well as the signals involved in failed memory searches, implicate representations whose content is, unknown. The other is that decisions to deploy attentional / mental effort (which many animals besides humans can do) depend on appraisals of an analog-magnitude signal representing the extent to which executive resources are engaged.

Linking metacognition and mindreading: Evidence from autism and dual-task investigations.

Questions of how we know our own and other minds, and whether metacognition and mindreading rely on the same processes, are longstanding in psychology and philosophy. In Experiment 1, children/adolescents with autism (who tend to show attenuated mindreading) showed significantly lower accuracy on an explicit metacognition task than neurotypical children/adolescents, but not on an allegedly metacognitive implicit one. In Experiment 2, neurotypical adults completed these tasks in a single-task condition or a dual-task condition that required concurrent completion of a secondary task that tapped mindreading. Metacognitive accuracy was significantly diminished by the dual-mindreading-task on the explicit task but not the implicit task. In Experiment 3, we included additional dual-tasks to rule out the possibility that any secondary task (regardless of whether it required mindreading) would diminish metacognitive accuracy. Finally, in both Experiments 1 and 2, metacognitive accuracy on the explicit task, but not the implicit task, was associated significantly with performance on a measure of mindreading ability. These results suggest that explicit metacognitive tasks (used frequently to measure metacognition in humans) share metarepresentational processing resources with mindreading, whereas implicit tasks (which are claimed by some comparative psychologists to measure metacognition in nonhuman animals) do not. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The self-reference effect on memory is not diminished in autism: Three studies of incidental and explicit self-referential recognition memory in autistic and neurotypical adults and adolescents.

Three experiments investigated the extent to which (a) individuals with autism show a self-reference effect (i.e., better memory for self-relevant information), and (b) the size of the self-reference effect is associated with autism traits. Participants studied trait adjectives in relation to their own name (self-referent) or a celebrity's name (other-referent) under explicit and incidental/implicit encoding conditions. Explicit encoding involved judging whether the adjectives applied to self or other (denoted by proper names). Implicit encoding involved judging whether the adjectives were presented to the right or left of one's own or a celebrity's name. Recognition memory for the adjectives was tested using a yes/no procedure. Experiment 1 (individual differences; N = 257 neurotypical adults) employed the Autism-spectrum Quotient as a measure of autistic traits. Experiments 2 (n = 60) and 3 (n = 52) involved case-control designs with closely matched groups of autistic and neurotypical adults and children/adolescents, respectively. Autistic traits were measured using the Autism-spectrum Quotient and Social Responsiveness Scale, respectively. In all experiments, a significant self-reference effect was observed in both explicit and implicit encoding conditions. Most importantly, however, there was (a) no significant relation between size of the self-reference effect and number of autistic traits (Experiments 1, 2, and 3), and (b) no significant difference in the size of the self-reference effect between autistic and neurotypical participants (Experiments 2 and 3). In these respects, Bayesian analyses consistently suggested that the data supported the null hypothesis. These results challenge the notion that subjective or objective self-awareness are impaired in autism. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).