Journal of Consciousness Studies
Volume 10, No. 9-10, Sept-Oct 2003

Special Double Issue:

Trusting the Subject? Part 1

The Use of Introspective Evidence in Cognitive Science

Anthony Jack and Andreas Roepstorff (eds.)

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ABSTRACTS

Bernard J. Baars

How Brain Reveals Mind: Neural Studies Support the Fundamental Role of Conscious Experience

Abstract: In the last decade, careful studies of the living brain have opened the way for human consciousness to return to the heights it held before the behavioristic coup of 1913. This is illustrated by seven cases: (1) the discovery of widespread brain activation during conscious perception; (2) high levels of regional brain metabolism in the resting state of consciousness, dropping drastically in unconscious states; (3) the brain correlates of inner speech; (4) visual imagery; (5) fringe consciousness; (6) executive functions of the self; and (7) volition. Other papers in this issue expand on many of these points. (Roepstorff; Leopold & Logothetis; Bærentsen; Haggard; Hohwy & Frith).

In the past, evidence based on subjective reports was often neglected (e.g., Ericsson, this issue). It is still true that brain evidence has greater credibility than subjective reports, no matter how reliable. What is new is increasing convergence between subjective experiences and brain observations. For that reason it is no longer rare to see the word ‘consciousness’ and ‘subjectivity’ in major science journals. No one so far has discovered a gulf dividing mind and brain. On the contrary, the new evidence supports the central role of consciousness as it was regarded over more than two millenia of written thought.
In a sense this was predictable. Nature is full of unexpected convergences — between fruit fly genes and the human body, between the arc of a tennis ball and the orbit of Mars, and between consciousness and the brain. These convergences show once again the remarkable unity of the observable universe.

Correspondence: B.J. Baars, 3616 Chestnut St. Apt. 3, Lafayette, CA 94549, USA.
Bernard Baars is an Affiliated Research Fellow at The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego. Email: baars@nsi.edu

Richard E. Cytowic

The Clinician’s Paradox: Believing Those You Must Not Trust

Abstract: Clinicians have a convention whereby symptoms are subjective statements ‘as told by’ patients, whereas signs are outwardly observable facts. Yet both first-person reports and third-person observations are theory laden and can bias conclusions. Two aspects of the oft-mentioned unreliability of reports are the subject’s interpretation of them and the experimenter’s assumptions when translating introspective reports into scientifically useful characterizations. Meticulous training of introspectors can address their mischief, whereas investigators can become more attentive to their own theory-laden biases. In the case of hallucinations, for example, ignoring some customary third-person constructs and focusing on the visual experience itself has led to fresh explanations of visual symptoms based on cortical physiology rather than conceptual categories. Constructs that historically have ignored the subject’s state of mind are also problematic; an example is the so-called resting state during metabolic brain imaging, long believed to reflect a blank mental slate.
Introspective reports, not accepted literally but properly interpreted and revised by investigators as necessary, are legitimate sources of data.

Correspondence: Richard E. Cytowic MD, 4720 Blagden Terrace NW, Washington DC 20011-3720, USA. Email: Richard@Cytowic.net

Daniel C. Dennett

Who’s On First? Heterophenomenology Explained

There is a pattern of miscommunication bedeviling the people working on consciousness that is reminiscent of the classic Abbott and Costello ‘Who’s on First?’ routine. With the best of intentions, people are talking past each other, seeing major disagreements when there are only terminological or tactical preferences — or even just matters of emphasis — that divide the sides. Since some substantive differences also lurk in this confusion, it is well worth trying to sort out. Much of the problem seems to have been caused by some misdirection in my apologia for heterophenomenology (Dennett, 1982; 1991), advertised as an explicitly third-person approach to human consciousness, so I will try to make amends by first removing those misleading signposts and sending us back to the real issues.

Correspondence: D.C. Dennett, Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University, Medford, MA 02155-5555, USA. Email: daniel.dennett@tufts.edu

K. Anders Ericsson

Valid and Non-Reactive Verbalization of Thoughts During Performance of Tasks

Towards a Solution to the Central Problems of Introspection as a Source of Scientific Data

Abstract: Recent proposals for a return to introspective methods make it necessary to review the central problems that led psychologists to abandon those methods as sources of scientific data in the early twentieth century. These problems and other related challenges to verbal reports collected during the cognitive revolution during the 1960s and 1970s were discussed in Ericsson and Simon’s (1980; 1993) proposal for a theoretically motivated procedure to elicit valid and non- reactive concurrent verbalization of thoughts while subjects were performing tasks. The same proposal explains why other verbal reports, such as introspections, detailed descriptions or explanations, require additional cognitive activity that often leads to reactivity and invalid reports. Finally, a new proposal is sketched for how the generation of introspective reports might be incorporated within a framework for non-reactive and valid verbalization of thoughts.

Correspondence: K. Anders Ericsson, Department of Psychology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida 32306-1270, USA. Email: ericsson@darwin.psy.fsu.edu

Shaun Gallagher

Phenomenology and Experimental Design

Toward a Phenomenologically Enlightened Experimental Science

Abstract: I review three answers to the question: How can phenomenology contribute to the experimental cognitive neurosciences? The first approach, neurophenomenology, employs phenomenological method and training, and uses first-person reports not just as more data for analysis, but to generate descriptive categories that are intersubjectively and scientifically validated, and are then used to interpret results that correlate with objective measurements of behaviour and brain activity. A second approach, indirect phenomenology, is shown to be problematic in a number of ways. Indirect phenomenology is generally put to work after the experiment, in critical or creative interpretations of the scientific evidence. Ultimately, however, proposals for the indirect use of phenomenology lead back to methodological questions about the direct use of phenomenology in experimental design. The third approach, ‘front-loaded’ phenomenology, suggests that the results of phenomenological investigations can be used in the design of empirical ones. Concepts or clarifications that have been worked out phenomenologically may operate as a partial framework for experimentation.

Correspondence: Shaun Gallagher, Department of Philosophy, Colbourn Hall 411, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL 32816-1352, USA. Email: gallaghr@mail.ucf.edu

Patrick Haggard and Helen Johnson

Experiences of Voluntary Action

Abstract: Psychologists have traditionally approached phenomenology by describing perceptual states, typically in the context of vision. The control of actions has often been described as ‘automatic’, and therefore lacking any specific phenomenology worth studying. This article will begin by reviewing some historical attempts to investigate the phenomenology of action. This review leads to the conclusion that, while movement of the body itself need not produce a vivid conscious experience, the neural process of voluntary action as a whole has distinctive phenomenological consequences.
The remainder of the article tries to characterise this phenomenology. First, the planning of actions is often conscious, and can produce a characteristic executive mode of awareness. Second, our awareness of action often arises from the process of matching what we intended to do with what actually happened. Failures of this matching process lead to particularly vivid conscious experience, which we call ‘error awareness’. These features of action phenomenology can be directly related to established models of motor control. This allows an important connection between phenomenology and neuroscience of action. Third, whereas perceptual phenomenology is normally seen as caused or driven by the sensory stimulus, a much more fluid model is required for phenomenology of action. Several experimental results suggest that phenomenology of action is partly a post hoc reconstruction, while others suggest that our awareness of action represents an integration of several processes at multiple levels of motor processing. Fourth, and finally, studies of the phenomenology of action, unlike those of perception, show a strong linkage between primary awareness and secondary awareness or self-consciousness: awareness of action is specifically and inextricably awareness of my action. We argue that the concepts of agency and of proprioaction (my control over my own body) are fundamental to this linkage. For these reasons, action represents a much more promising field than perception for attacking the problematic question of the relation between primary and secondary consciousness. Some promising directions for future research are indicated.

Correspondence:
Patrick Haggard and Helen Johnson, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, 17 Queen Square, London. WC1N 3AR. Email: patrick@psychol.ucl.ac.uk

David A. Leopold, Alexander Maier and Nikos K. Logothetis

Measuring Subjective Visual Perception in the Nonhuman Primate

Abstract: Understanding how activity in the brain leads to a subjective percept is of great interest to philosophers and neuroscientists alike. In the last years, neurophysiological experiments have approached this problem directly by measuring neural signals in animals as they experience well-defined visual percepts. Stimuli in these studies are often inherently ambiguous, and thus rely upon the subjective report, generally from trained monkeys, to provide a measure of perception. By correlating activity levels in the brain to this report, one can speculate on the role of individual neurons and groups of neurons in the formation and maintenance of a particular percept. However, in order to draw valid conclusions from such experiments, it is critical that the responses accurately and reliably reflect what is perceived. For this reason, a number of behavioural paradigms have been developed to control and evaluate the truthfulness of responses from behaving animals. Here we describe several approaches to optimizing the reliability of a monkey’s perceptual report, and argue that their combination provides an invaluable approach in the study of subjective visual perception.

Correspondence: D.A. Leopold, Max Planck Institut für biologische Kybernetik, Spemannstrasse 38, 72076 Tübingen, Germany. Email: david.leopold@tuebingen.mpg.de

Antoine Lutz and Evan Thompson

Neurophenomenology

Integrating Subjective Experience and Brain Dynamics in the Neuroscience of Consciousness

Abstract: The paper presents a research programme for the neuroscience of consciousness called ‘neurophenomenology’ (Varela 1996) and illustrates it with a recent pilot study (Lutz et al., 2002). At a theoretical level, neurophenomenology pursues an embodied and large-scale dynamical approach to the neurophysiology of consciousness (Varela 1995; Thompson and Varela 2001; Varela and Thompson 2003). At a methodological level, the neurophenomenological strategy is to make rigorous and extensive use of first-person data about subjective experience as a heuristic to describe and quantify the large-scale neurodynamics of consciousness (Lutz 2002). The paper focuses on neurophenomenology in relation to three challenging methodological issues about incorporating first-person data into cognitive neuroscience: (i) first-person reports can be biased or inaccurate; (ii) the process of generating first-person reports about an experience can modify that experience; and (iii) there is an ‘explanatory gap’ in our understanding of how to relate first-person, phenomenological data to third-person, biobehavioural data.

Correspondence: Antoine Lutz, W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior, Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1500 Highland Avenue, Madison, WI 53703-2280, USA. Email: alutz@wisc.edu

Evan Thompson, Department of Philosophy, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, Canada. Email: evant@yorku.ca

Anthony J. Marcel

Introspective Report: Trust, Self-Knowledge and Science

Abstract: This paper addresses whether we have transparent accurate access to our own conscious experience. It first sketches the origin and social history of this issue in the seventeenth century, when the trust one can have in self- knowledge was disputed in the religious, social and scientific domains. It then reviews evidence (a) that our conscious experience is disunified in several ways and has two levels, can be opaque to us, and contains much that is non-explicit; and (b) that attending to one’s experience not only affects and changes it, but may also bring about specific content and phenomenal experience. Quite apart from (mis)trusting other people’s introspective reports, we cannot trust ourselves even in knowing our own consciousness. Finally, several ways of coping with the problems produced by these characteristics are suggested.

Correspondence: A.J. Marcel, Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, 15 Chaucer Road, Cambridge CB2 2EF, UK.. Email: tony.marcel@mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk

Gualtiero Piccinini

Data from Introspective Reports

Upgrading from Common Sense to Science

Abstract: Introspective reports are used as sources of information about other minds, in both everyday life and science. Many scientists and philosophers consider this practice unjustified, while others have made the untestable assumption that introspection is a truthful method of private observation. I argue that neither scepticism nor faith concerning introspective reports are warranted. As an alternative, I consider our everyday, commonsensical reliance on each other’s introspective reports. When we hear people talk about their minds, we neither refuse to learn from nor blindly accept what they say. Sometimes we accept what we are told, other times we reject it, and still other times we take the report, revise it in light of what we believe, then accept the modified version. Whatever we do, we have (implicit) reasons for it. In developing a sound methodology for the scientific use of introspective reports, we can take our commonsense treatment of introspective reports and make it more explicit and rigorous. We can discover what to infer from introspective reports in a way similar to how we do it every day, but with extra knowledge, methodological care and precision. Sorting out the use of introspective reports as sources of data is going to be a painstaking, piecemeal task, but it promises to enhance our science of the mind and brain.

Correspondence: Gualtiero Piccinini, Dept of Philosophy, Washington University, Campus Box 1073, One Brookings Dr., St. Louis, MO 63130-4899, USA. Email: gpiccini@artsci.wustl.edu

Timothy D. Wilson

Knowing When To Ask

Introspection and the Adaptive Unconscious

Abstract: The introspective method has come under attack throughout the history of psychology, yet it is widely used today in virtually all areas of the field, often to good effect. At the same time indirect methods that do not rely on introspection are widely used, also to good effect. This conundrum is best understood in terms of models of nonconscious processing and the role of consciousness. People have access to many of their feelings and emotions, and develop rich narratives about themselves and their social worlds. These conscious states, accessible to introspective reports, are often good predictors of people’s behaviour. There is also a pervasive adaptive unconscious that is inaccessible via introspection. When using introspective reports researchers should be clear about which kinds of mental states they are trying to measure.

Correspondence: Dr. Timothy D. Wilson, Dept. of Psychology, 102 Gilmer Hall, PO Box 400400, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4400, USA. Email: twilson@virginia.edu

Dan Zahavi and Josef Parnas

Conceptual Problems in Infantile Autism Research

Why Cognitive Science Needs Phenomenology

Abstract: Until recently, cognitive research in infantile autism primarily focussed on the ability of autistic subjects to understand and predict the actions of others. Currently, researchers are also considering the capacity of autists to understand their own minds. In this article we discuss selected recent contributions to the theory of mind debate and the study of infantile autism, and provide an analysis of intersubjectivity and self-awareness that is informed both by empirical research and by work in the phenomenological tradition. This analysis uncovers certain problems in the theory-theory account of autism, and at the same time illustrates the potential value of phenomenology for cognitive science.

Correspondence: Dan Zahavi (zahavi@cfs.ku.dk) and Josef Parnas (jpa@cfs.ku.dk)
The Danish National Research Foundation: Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen, Købmagergade 46, DK-1150 Copenhagen N, Denmark.

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