Scheduling error Our officially scheduled final exam period is Saturday at 10:30 a.m. We put Monday at 7:30 a.m. on the syllabus. We still plan to hold the Monday session. But if you cannot make it on Monday morning and you want to give an extra- credit presentation, please let me know. We can have an additional session on Saturday.

Distinction from Thursday’s class Two general approaches to Iriki’s studies: 1. The self is wherever the subject represents it as being. 2. The self is what does the representing (if the representing is somewhere other than what is represented, the representation is inaccurate).

Consider two of your mental representations: one of a hill, the other of yourself. You can represent yourself as being on the hill, for example, by the co-activation of these two representations (properly bound), whether or not you are actually on the hill. So, the representing is happening in one place, what is represented is represented as happening somewhere else. Where is the self?

Applied to Cognition It’s one thing for you to represent an external thing as a literal part of your cognitive process. It’s another for this representation to be correct. It’s possible that cognition is only where the representing goes on, not at the place that is represented as having cognition occurring at it.

Assume for the sake of argument that your cognitive system is in the brain. There’s nothing to stop a cognitive system located there from forming a representation of itself as being somewhere else. Standing in a field, you can represent yourself as being on a mountain, thinking. Is your thinking taking place on the mountain?

Back to Iriki’s monkeys Possibility: All of the cognitive processing in Iriki’s monkeys occurs in the brain (the bimodal neurons in IPS are part of this process), whether the monkeys are retrieving food with their own hands or with a rake. The response patterns of the neurons in IPS in fact shows exactly where the relevant part of the cognitive process takes place.

Alternative View The movement of the monkey’s hand is part of the cognitive process to begin with. So, anything that plays the same role as the hand counts as part of the cognitive process. The response profiles of the bimodal neurons in IPS shows that the rake and the image of the hand etc., do play the same role.

Markman and Brendl: Background Pencil experiments (Strack, Martin, and Stepper, 1988:) Cartoons rated funnier when holding a pen in hand than when holding it with lips; even funnier if holding it with teeth. (But note that the effect goes away when it pertains specifically to “objective” funniness, as opposed to the subjective feeling of amusement.)

Chen and Bargh (1999): Push-Pull Two experiments: First is a “conscious” condition: Congruent: Push lever if word on screen is bad, pull if good. Incongruent: Push if good, pull if bad. Responses are significantly faster in the congruent condition.

Second experiment Uses immediate reaction; no instructions given regarding evaluation of words. Always push or always pull, as soon as stimulus is recognized. Congruent responses (e.g., pull subjects responding to good words) significantly faster than incongruent response (e.g., pull subjects responding to bad words)

Does it matter where one represents oneself as being? Simon effect: same-sided response to stimulus is facilitated (faster). But it’s faster even if response is made with opposite hand, so long as response button is on the same side as the stimulus. Suggests that there’s a distinction between a more abstract representation of the location of the self and something more like spatially guided brute reflex (or low-level space-based associations).

Markman and Brendl’s Design Subject’s name displayed in corridor. Instructions given only in relation to location of the name. Word far condition: word is on the far side of the name Instructions are either push lever if negative, pull if positive or vice versa. This is consistent with the arrangement in Chen and Bargh. The relation of the word to the self is the same as the word’s relation to the representation of the self.

Word near condition: the word is in the corridor between the viewer and the viewer’s name. (same variation in instructions) In this case, pushing the lever away from (where one represents) one’s actual body also pushes the lever toward where one represents (a representation of) one’s self. Supposed to distinguish the effect of actual location of the body from effect of representation of the self.

Results Significantly faster to move toward the name (whether or not that involved pulling toward oneself) in response to positive words. Significantly faster to move away from the name (whether or not that involved pushing away from oneself) in response to negative words.

Does this implicate the use of abstract representations in cognition? Only in some kinds of cognitive processes? How artificial or natural is the experimental design? Does it take extra (or an unusual kind of) effort to project oneself onto the screen via the use of a linguistic representation?