Howard Bowman is to give a Philosophy Research Seminar, titled ‘Fragile Memories for Fleeting Percepts’ on Wednesday 8 February 2023 at 15:00 in ELT2.
You can also join via Zoom:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81732767975?pwd=VEVPSWgwQmlhM1lsNUozWVlPQmQwZz09
Meeting ID: 817 3276 7975
Passcode: 053806
Abstract: The Simultaneous Type/ Serial Token (STST) model of temporal attention and working memory (Bowman & Wyble, 2007) was published over 15 years ago as a theory of the attentional blink and associated phenomena. In the intervening period, the scope of the theory has grown, becoming a theory of the episodic nature of attention and perception. Recently, we have also been considering the implications of the STST model for theories of conscious perception. If one interprets the neural network model that implements the STST theory literally, it makes two particular predictions for conscious experience: 1) that we can pre-consciously search our sensory environments for salient stimuli (type-information); and 2) that we cannot pre-consciously search our sensory environment on the basis of episodic information (token-information). The latter of these fits well with theories of conscious perception based upon event individuation (Kanwisher, 2001).
Using rapid serial visual presentation, I will report a series of EEG (Bowman et al, 2014) and behavioural (Aviles et al, 2020; Bowman & Avilés, 2022) experiments that provide evidence in support of these two predictions. These experiments focus on the fragility, even absence, of memory for fleetingly presented stimuli. We argue that these findings provide support for a theory we call the tokenised percept hypothesis.
Bio: Howard Bowman is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in Psychology at the University of Birmingham and Professor of Cognition & Logic in Computing at the University of Kent. He is also Honorary Professor of Imaging Neuroscience at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, University College London. For the first half of his career, he worked in theoretical computer science; specific contributions were on decision procedures for temporal logics and process calculi in concurrency theory. More recently, he has worked in cognitive and clinical neuroscience, with particular focus on theories of temporal attention (e.g. the Simultaneous Type/ Serial Token model), the role of oscillations in episodic memory formation (e.g. the Synch/deSynch model) and predicting stroke patient’s recovery trajectories. He also has interests in methods development for neuroimaging, e.g. problems of small samples, and over-fitting of hyper-parameters in machine learning. Finally, he is inventor of the Fringe-P3 method, which he has proposed as a countermeasures-resistant concealed knowledge test. He is also a founding member of GSEJ.