Browsing by Author "Thompson, Evan"

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    Clarifying the self: Response to Northoff
    (2011) Christoff, Katalina; Cosmelli Sánchez, Diego José; Legrand, Dorothée; Thompson, Evan
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    Mountains and valleys: Binocular rivalry and the flow of experience
    (ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE, 2007) Cosmelli, Diego; Thompson, Evan
    Binocular rivalry provides a useful situation for studying the relation between the temporal flow of conscious experience and the temporal dynamics of neural activity. After proposing a phenomenological framework for understanding temporal aspects of consciousness, we review experimental research on multistable perception and binocular rivalry, singling out various methodological, theoretical, and empirical aspects of this research relevant to studying the flow of experience. We then review an experimental study from our group explicitly concerned with relating the temporal dynamics of rivalrous experience to the temporal dynamics of cortical activity. Drawing attention to the importance of dealing with ongoing activity and its inherent changing nature at both phenomenological and neurodynamical levels, we argue that the notions of recurrence and variability are pertinent to understanding rivalry in particular and the flow of experience in general. (c) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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    Specifying the self for cognitive neuroscience
    (2011) Christoff, Kalina; Cosmelli, Diego; Legrand, Dorothée; Thompson, Evan
    Cognitive neuroscience investigations of self-experience have mainly focused on the mental attribution of features to the self (self-related processing). In this paper, we highlight another fundamental, yet neglected, aspect of self-experience, that of being an agent. We propose that this aspect of self-experience depends on self-specifying processes, ones that implicitly specify the self by implementing a functional self/non-self distinction in perception, action, cognition and emotion. We describe two paradigmatic cases - sensorimotor integration and homeostatic regulation - and use the principles from these cases to show how cognitive control, including emotion regulation, is also self-specifying. We argue that externally directed, attention-demanding tasks, rather than suppressing self-experience, give rise to the self-experience of being a cognitive-affective agent. We conclude with directions for experimental work based on our framework.