Higher-order Theories of Consciousness: An Adversarial Collaboration
Project Description
This is a multi-site international adversarial collaboration funded by the Templeton World Charities Foundation through their Accelerating Research on Consciousness initiative. The overarching goal of the project is to arbitrate between four higher order theories: Higher-Order State Space model (HOSS; Fleming, 2020), Perceptual Reality Monitoring theory (PRM; Lau, 2019), Higher-Order Representation of a Representation (HOROR; Brown, 2015), and Self-Organising Meta-Representational theory (SOMA; Cleeremans, 2011; Cleeremans et al., 2020). The disagreement within Higher Order Theories of consciousness (HOTs) varies along two axes. One axis examines to what degree higher-order representations are rich or sparse. A second (related) axis of disagreement is on whether higher-order representations can “misrepresent” their first-order targets, and in what way. The two axes of disagreement will be tested in distinct experiments with a number of convergent methodologies. HOTs hypotheses cross-cut a number of different theories, with different theorists placing greater or lesser weight on the two axes. We seek to devise experiments that can identify whether the data are more consistent with one or other pole of these two axes.
In particular, this project involves experiments designed to provide a critical test of 1) whether perceptual/imagery vividness is coded in a rich or sparse manner, and 2) whether the nature of perceptual experience (“seeing” vs. “imagining”) relies on a dedicated higher-order reality monitoring signal (PRM), or whether inference on reality depends on thresholding a unidimensional code for phenomenal magnitude (HOSS).
Overall project personnel:
- Lead PIs: Stephen Fleming and Axel Cleeremans
- Project PIs: Jorge Morales, Megan Peters, Nadine Dijkstra, Rachel Denison, Zoltan Dienes, Guy Cheron
- Scientific steering committee: Hakwan Lau, Richard Brown, Stephen Fleming, Axel Cleeremans, Elisabeth Pacherie
- External advisory board: David Rosenthal, Matthias Michel, Joseph LeDoux, Lucie Charles
Postdoctoral Research Associate Recruitment
The Subjectivity Lab, directed by Jorge Morales, and located in the Department of Psychology at Northeastern University is seeking to recruit a Postdoctoral Research Associate to work on-site in Boston, Massachusetts. This research position is for research on a neuroimaging (fMRI), psychophysics, modeling, and machine learning project to arbitrate among competing higher order theories of consciousness. The focus of the project is on disentangling the neural substrates of vision and mental imagery and their respective support for conscious experiences.
Application
For official consideration, please submit your CV and some other required information to the Northeastern Job Portal.
Also, please feel free to get in touch with Jorge!