Cognitive science
May 1, 2024
Dylan Ludwig, Muhammad Ali Khalidi
8 citations
ASMR, a sensory-emotional experience first named in online forums, shows mounting psychological and neural evidence of a consistent set of triggers, experiential properties, and downstream effects. Psychological instruments now measure it. Despite its nonscientific origins, ASMR is a good candidate for being a real kind in cognitive sciences due to a robust causal profile and possible adaptive evolutionary history. Understanding its distinctive phenomenal experience can illuminate the functions of consciousness and challenge certain cognitive theories. ASMR warrants more extensive scientific investigation, including potential therapeutic applications.
Consciousness and cognition
January 1, 2025
Dylan Ludwig
2 citations
A novel working hypothesis proposes that conscious experiences enable a variety of functional capacities that differ across psychological tasks, individuals, and species—a view called functional pluralism. Examining emotional processing, the paper consolidates evidence from vision science experiments (masking and suppression of emotional stimuli) and clinical research on Generalized Anxiety Disorder to compare unconscious and conscious emotional processes. Conscious experiences are argued to facilitate emotion-specific functions, including enhanced representation of fine-grained evaluative information, inhibition, and flexible responses, contrary to leading theories of consciousness that assume a single function.
Neuroscience of Consciousness
January 1, 2023
Dylan Ludwig
Consciousness contributes a cluster of functions to visual processing, including increased capacities for semantically processing complex visual stimuli, increased spatiotemporal precision, and increased capacities for representational integration over large spatiotemporal intervals. This position, called functional pluralism, argues that consciousness occupies a variety of different functional roles across different task domains, individuals, and species. The analysis consolidates research from across the cognitive sciences to compare visual system capabilities with and without conscious awareness, yielding functional markers that may guide future research in philosophy and science of consciousness, some of which are not captured by global workspace theory or information integration theory.
Consciousness and Cognition
August 10, 2022
Dylan Ludwig
Consciousness likely serves multiple distinct functions rather than a single capacity, as leading theories assume. Conscious processes are a heterogeneous class supported by various neurobiological mechanisms, suggesting different functional contributions across psychological domains. This paper develops a methodological framework for isolating functions associated with conscious experience and argues that Global Workspace Theories, Higher Order Thought Theory, and Information Integration Theory all fail to acknowledge this functional pluralism, limiting their applicability as theories of consciousness.