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Do people have dispositions towards visual or verbal thinking styles, i.e., a tendency towards one default representational modality versus the other? The problem in trying to answer this question is that visual/verbal thinking styles are challenging to measure. Subjective, introspective measures are the most common but often show poor reliability and validity; neuroimaging studies can provide objective evidence but are intrusive and resource-intensive. In previous work, we observed that in order for a purely behavioral testing method to be able to objectively evaluate a person’s visual/verbal thinking style, 1) the task must be solvable equally well using either visual or verbal mental representations, and 2) it must offer a secondary behavioral marker, in addition to primary performance measures, that indicates which modality is being used. We collected four such tasks from the psychology literature and conducted a small pilot study with adult participants to see the extent to which visual/verbal thinking styles can be differentiated using an individual’s results on these tasks.
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A potential mechanism for Gibsonian resonance: behavioral entrainment emerges from local homeostasis in an unsupervised reservoir network
While the cognitivist school of thought holds that the mind is analogous to a computer, performing logical operations over internal representations, the tradition of ecological psychology contends that organisms can directly ‘‘resonate’’ to information for action and perception without the need for a representational intermediary. The concept of resonance has played an important role in ecological psychology, but it remains a metaphor. Supplying a mechanistic account of resonance requires a non-representational account of central nervous system (CNS) dynamics. Towards this, we present a series of simple models in which a reservoir network with homeostatic nodes is used to control a simple agent embedded in an environment. This network spontaneously produces behaviors that are adaptive in each context, including (1) visually tracking a moving object, (2) substantially above-chance performance in the arcade game Pong, (2) and avoiding walls while controlling a mobile agent. Upon analyzing the dynamics of the networks, we find that behavioral stability can be maintained without the formation of stable or recurring patterns of network activity that could be identified as neural representations. These results may represent a useful step towards a mechanistic grounding of resonance and a view of the CNS that is compatible with ecological psychology.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1849446
- PAR ID:
- 10514653
- Publisher / Repository:
- Springer Nature
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Cognitive Neurodynamics
- ISSN:
- 1871-4080
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1007/s11571-023-09988-2
