Visual Attention in Crisis - Volume 48

An argument for replacing Chomsky’s set-theoretic Merge view of syntax with a theory of syntax based on mereological objects.Mereology is the study of part

The MIT Consciousness Club, led by professors Matthias Michel and Earl Miller, explores how neurological activity gives rise to human experience.

AbstractMany empirical studies have found a curvilinear (inverted-U) relationship between knowledge and curiosity, such that curiosity is induced when stimuli are neither unknown nor too familiar. While various theoretical accounts have been proposed to explain this phenomenon, no clear link between them have been delineated. In this Perspective, we review seven psychological accounts of the inverted-U relationship between knowledge and curiosity (“the U”) and provide a coherent framework integrating them. According to this framework, the U emerges as a consequence of the imperative to pursue learning progress and thus maximize knowledge. We show that some theories of curiosity address this issue by explicitly stipulating knowledge maximization as the computational objective, and learning-progress maximization as an optimal means of achieving it (i.e., normative theories). Other theories focus on psychological mechanisms or factors that drive curiosity (i.e., process theories). We propose that these process-theoretic mechanisms could also work in a manner that maximizes learning by signaling situations in which some relevant prior knowledge exists, but is incomplete. The implications of this framework for future theoretical work on curiosity and its connections to related phenomena are discussed.

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I argue that there is currently no alternative to functionalism. Functionalism explains the differences between types of mental states. No biological theory does. Functionalist theories account for th...

AbstractBoth human children and animals seek information following a violation-of-expectation event, but little research suggests the latter do so for the sake of it. In this preregistered experiment, we compared epistemic curiosity—the pursuit of information for its own sake—in kea parrots (Nestor notabilis) and three-year-old human children (Homo sapiens) following a violation-of-expectation event. Subjects were trained to push a tool into an apparatus that produced a reward before the apparatus was surreptitiously made non-functional in following trials. In both functional and non-functional trials, after solving the task, subjects were rewarded and allowed to explore the apparatus for thirty seconds with the opportunity to peek into the side of the apparatus. We found that relatively more kea peeked than children, but the children and not the kea were significantly more likely to peek in the non-functional versus functional trials, particularly when the researcher was absent. While both species showed markers of curiosity in the experiment, we found expectancy-violation-induced epistemic curiosity only in the children and not the kea in this context.