Please find the presentation titles and abstracts below.
Please note: While every effort will be made to adhere to this programme, the conference committee reserve the right to amend as necessary.
Friday 6th September
18:00-20:15:Early registration
20:00:Buffet dinner - available to those staying at Clifton Hill House/Rodney Hotel
 
Saturday 7th September
08:30-09:00:Conference Registration, tea & coffee
09:00-10:00:Keynote: Colwyn Trevarthen
10:00-10:30:Coffee
10:30-12:30:Papers: Joel Krueger; Alan McAuliffe; Ben Rumble; Nick Byrd
12:30-13:30:Lunch
13:30-15:00:Papers: Tony Cheng; Guy Saunders; Helen Graham, Sonia Pieczenko-Feldges & Nathan Michael
15:00-15:20:Tea
15:20-16:50:Papers: Elena Volkova; Stefan Schneider, Benjamin Angerer & Cornell Schreiber; Anna Ciaunica-Garrouty
16:50-17:00:Short break
17:00-18:00:Keynote: Elisabeth Schellekens
18:00-21:30:Wine Reception + Conference Dinner
 
Sunday 8th September
08:30-09:00:Conference Registration, tea & coffee
09:00-10:00:Keynote: Vasudevi Reddy
10:00-10:30:Coffee
10:30-12:00:Papers: Matthew Crippen; Cornell Schreiber, Benjamin Angerer & Stefan Schneider; Santiago Arango-Muñoz, Ana Lucía Fernádez-Cruz & Kristen Volz
12:00-14:00:Lunch
13:15-14:00:CEP AGM - All welcome
14:00-16:00:Papers: Tom Feldges; Joel Parthemore; Monia Brizzi & Simeon Nelson; Susan Stuart
16:00-16:30:Tea
16:30-17:30:Keynote: Eric Schwitzgebel
17:30:Closing remarks & thanks


Keynote speakers

Vasudevi Reddy (Portsmouth)

Response, engagement and mind

In this talk I'd like to tackle the the particular irresistibility of other minds. When dealing with the troubled question of knowing other minds, this quality is quite crucial. Many things call out a response from us - a punch approaching the nose, an ice cream on a hot day, a soft bed - but the quality of demand that we are faced with when dealing with minds is particularly, and probably somewhat peculiarly, irresistible. Felt responses to others are crucial for creating the engagements within which the awareness of other minds is both created and revealed.

To address the question of the origins of mind knowledge in infancy, I focus on infant responses to others' attentional and intentional actions. The earliest and most vivid engagements infants have with others' minds is when these are directed to the infant him/herself.The development of awareness of mind through the course of infancy, I argue, is one of contextual expansion rather than conceptual discovery. I use data from the first year of infancy to support this alternative theoretical argument.

Elisabeth Schellekens (Durham)

Explaining the Aesthetic: conceptual analysis or aesthetic psychology

Aesthetic experiences are unique mental states which can be studied from at least two different perspectives: philosophical and psychological. Generally speaking, recent research in psychology has focused on empirical investigations into the workings of the brain in aesthetic experience and the developmental and evolutionary trajectory of our aesthetic abilities. On the whole, philosophical examinations have targeted the concepts central to our aesthetic nomenclature and sought to analyse, clarify and improve our notions so as move forward toward more solid and sound working conceptions of art, taste, beauty and more.

In the last couple of decades, philosophers have become more and more aware of the many ways in which conceptual analysis can be enhanced by empirical data and socio-historical theory. But very few have addressed the question of how we should conceive of the relation between philosophical analysis and psychological results and the extent to which philosophers and psychologists do, or do not, operate with analogous understandings of the notions central to both forms of inquiry. In this paper I will outline some of the main areas of philosophical aesthetics which have benefited from psychology and sketch an explanation as to why just theses questions stand to reap greater benefits than others. I will also suggest one way in which the philosophical relation between philosophy and psychology can be cast and point to some of the limitations of empirical investigations in aesthetics.

Eric Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside)

Variability in Self-Described Emotional Phenomenology: Error or Real Individual Differences?

Self-reports of emotional phenomenology vary enormously between individuals. Some introspectors, such as James, report only the phenomenology of bodily arousal and activity, while others, such as Lambie and Marcel, report a wide variety of dimensions in emotional experience. People interviewed using Hurlburt’s Descriptive Experience Sampling vary enormously in the frequency with which they report emotional phenomenology or “feelings” and in what they say about the phenomenal character of those feelings. The question arises: To what extent does this variation in report reflect real differences in the frequency and character of people’s emotional phenomenology vs. to what extent does this variation reflect only differences in describing what is at root a similar range of experiences? We are not yet in a good position confidently to answer this question. If physiological differences correlate with differences in introspective report, that would provide some evidence favoring the individual differences hypothesis. On the other hand, the apparent difficulty and instability of reporting provide some evidence favoring a more skeptical attitude toward differences in reporting.

Colwyn Trevarthen (Edinburgh)

Neonatal Intelligence and Sensibility: Roots of Objective Knowledge, Articulate Representation of Shared Meanings, and Reflective Thought

The first intelligence of a child is motor intelligence, the natural wisdom of the human body seeking satisfaction in its vitality. Motor intelligence of a newborn infant exhibits coherent regulation of limbs and sense organs that project action into a body-related space and time of behaviour in highly expressive ‘musical’ forms. It can be both playful and sociable from the start, and is regulated by an inner vitality with its own rhythmic sense of present time, and of intended progress through narrative cycles of its energy in an imagined and remembered world of actions.

Evidence from neuroscience indicates that primate brains communicate intentions by a process of ‘mirroring’ that picks up directions and qualities of other individuals’ actions to use objects. It is proposed that the foundation of social intelligence is in imitation of ‘motor cognitions’ or ‘motor knowledge’ implicit in other’s actions. This theory runs counter to cognitive neuroscience explanations of how executive functions and propositional representations of thoughts and feelings in other minds is acquired by sensory information uptake and concept-building. But neither of these theories gives sufficient recognition to the innate foundations of aesthetic and moral feelings, which, with their subsequent sequencing as in ritual displays and music, give authenticity to acts of meaning, even the most practical and rational. The popular theory of empathic contagion is also unable to explain how cooperative impulses are guided by complementary emotions.

Movements of newborn infants are complex, coordinated and characteristically human in their adaptations for acquiring experience of the outside world, and especially for sympathetic engagement with the rhythmic expressions of motives and feelings of other persons who seek intimate communication. These subjective and intersubjective talents are prepared for in early development of the anatomy of a human body and brain, and are made evident by the sensitive actions and emotional expressions of the foetus. Knowledge of the spontaneous behaviours, narrative awareness and affective sensibilities of young infants, and of age-related developments before language, provides a basis for a richer natural science of cultural learning, social collaboration and mental health in human communities, and of language.

Talks

Santiago Arango-Muñoz (Bochum), Ana Lucía Fernández-Cruz (McGill) & Kristen Volz (Tübingen)

The Feeling of Error

When solving math problems such as multiplication or division, people sometimes get the feeling that their calculations have gone wrong and, therefore, they should not endorse the output of their mental calculation. This feeling appears as a spontaneous phenomenal experience that comes to mind pointing to the fact that the calculation might be mistaken, and motivates the subject to revise what has been done. This phenomenon does not restrain to the classroom; it generalizes to all contexts where people carry out mental actions such as making mental rotations when calculating their way from one point to another by using a map, deciding between two possible actions, reasoning about the probability of an event, or just mentally calculating how much money they spent in the last week. In situations like these, people may experience a “feeling of error” (henceforth FOE) that prevents them from erroneous mental actions and decisions. The subjective experience that something went wrong might arise during or right after the calculation/mental action, and is fundamental for further corrections and improvement in calculating and reasoning.

This feeling, however, has been little studied by psychologists. To amend this lack, we have designed an experiment to test subjects’ awareness of their errors and the accuracy of such awareness. We used the “number bisection task” (NBT) to evoke and test this feeling by asking participants if they felt they had committed an error after solving the bisection task. In the NBT, the subject has to estimate whether the number in the middle is the arithmetic mean of the two other numbers (e.g., 2 4 8) by a Yes/No answer. Subjects were instructed to press the Yes/ No buttons as fast as possible (in less than 2s) and then report whether they have a feeling of error as fast as possible (in less than 2s) using again the Yes/No buttons. Each bisection problem was presented only once during the experiment, and no feedback about the correction of their answers was given to the subjects. The fast timing manipulation was done to prevent the subjects recalculating the problems and thus to ensure that the FOE reports were based on sheer feelings and not analytical thought. In this way, we elicited metacognitive feelings and could compare actual errors in the NBT with participants’ error awareness provided by the FOE reports. Interestingly, our results about FOE error reports were strongly correlated with actual arithmetic errors; in other words, subjects reported having a FOE mainly when they had actually committed an error. Additionally, the experimenters tested subjects’ confidence in their answers when they did not report a FOE. Surprisingly, in these cases subjects reported less confidence for wrong answers than for right ones, suggesting that in cases where subjects did not have a conscious feeling they still had an implicit awareness of their errors.

This result provides support to the increasing literature on metacognitive feelings and their essential role in the mind. These feelings play an essential role in the production and explanation of mental actions (such as remembering, mentally calculating, and reasoning) by monitoring mental processes.

Monia Brizzi (London Natural Health Centre) & Simeon Nelson (Hertfordshire)

Beyond Words: Imagination, Tacit Knowing and the Art of Subjectification

‘Consciousness seems to obscure the actions it perceives, and only when they occur without it are they purer, more effective, more vital’ (Buber’s translation of Plotinus, in Farber 1976: 5)

Lived experience has both natural-scientific and human-scientific aspects. It also has aspects which precede and substantiate but entirely escape the certainty and certain-uncertainty of both types of science because despite being directly felt in a bodily and affective manner they are invisible, intangible, relational, unintentional, prereflective and nonverbal. These uncertainly-uncertain aspects constitute an imaginative border matrix that generates both the body and consciousness but is particularly hard to access because in grounding, materialising and mediating them its liminal qualities inhere everywhere and are not gathered in a simple location. Being a middle or third dimension diffused in-between matter and mind implies that they can’t feasibly be fully given in or boiled down to either hard (the physicalist organism) or soft (the psyche) poles alone for, as their middle, they exceed and withdraw the actualities of mere presence separate from potentiality. The ambiguity of these ubiquitous experiential structures of the threshold defy scientific representation and the sedimentations of ordinary perception but can be rescued through the sensorial imaginary of tacit knowledge where the tensions in the structure of intelligibility are preserved. Imagination is the body of subjectification, its creativity and art.

The ‘actual cannot be reduced to mere matter of fact in divorce from the potential’ (Whitehead, 1929: 227) and the liminal territories prior to substance/process and subject/object consciousness splits are reflectively vague and conceptually indeterminate despite being really primal and factically felt, i.e., primordially sculpting and being sculpted in our ongoing experience of being: ‘transcendence does not consist of objectification but objectification presupposes transcendence’ (Heidegger in May 1983: 149). We simply don’t have the words to capture the form of their elusive yet concrete materiality in a certain and fully-formed way, we don’t have names to name the unnameable. They are the heart of subjectification’s matter, a fact yet not matter of fact. The simultaneously concrete and ineffable, actual and potential, unified and contrasted, constant and transitory reality of the whole cannot be entirely present at hand and spatialised, it is not given in representation but is able to overflow and stand revealed in expression only insofar as this ‘is essentially open onto a totality that is itself open’ (Deleuze, 1966: 105).

Throughout time human beings have sought a structure to tap into and communicate the more foundational and embodied qualities of being but in this quest have confused things even more. With a misplaced emphasis on logos and language they have constructed lofty and barely decipherable intellectual highways that can all too often only be understood by a specific niche of experts, like for example in the specialist jargon in science, philosophy and psychotherapy. By responding to ‘the need to bring to language modes of being that ordinary vision obscures or even represses’ (Ricoeur, 1976: 60), imagination is much more than mere luxury, embellishment, frivolity, distraction or even escapism from more serious concerns. Its art grants the disclosure of commonly hidden aspects of embodied experience and enables us to feel and make sense of their tensions in an immediate and personally engaged way through the sensuous experience of being bodily, emotionally and spiritually affected and called into activity, into question and into perceptivity by the pathic qualities of the world. Art’s veritas aesthetica directly illuminate the tensions inherent in the structure of intelligibility, letting them tacitly speak to bodily perception. For the unspoken imaginary of affective undergoing sustains and informs the retroactive verbalisations of consciousness and gnostic knowing, it is their humus but remains unexhausted by them.

Nick Byrd (Colorado)

How Do Selfish Goals Improve The Belief-Desire-Intention Model?

Huang and Bargh propose the existence of consciously inaccessible, autonomous, selfish, mental representations of end-states. They call these mental entities “goals.” These goals are supposed to make sense of a wide range of behaviors including, but not limited to inconsistent behavior, adaptive behavior, self-destructive behavior, and automatic behavior. The existence of such goals is part of Bargh and colleagues’ budding theory known as Selfish Goal Theory (SGT). I want to propose that Bargh and colleagues’ most valuable contribution is not their proposal of selfish goals, but their attempt to include consciously inaccessible, autonomous, and selfish mental entities in a theory of behavior and judgment. In what follows, I will show how it is the inclusion of these kinds of mental entities—which need not be goals—that allow for an explanation of otherwise puzzling behavior.

To demonstrate this, I will show how the belief-desire-intention (BDI) model can be radically improved by admitting that beliefs, desires, and intentions can be like Huang and Bargh’s goals—that is, they can be consciously inaccessible, autonomous, and selfish. Indeed, if we admit this, we will find that BDI can explain the same behaviors and judgments that SGT explains—and more importantly, the proposed version of BDI can predict the same principles of behavior and judgment that SGT predicts. After showing how the improved BDI model can do the same work that SGT does, I will make a strong claim: the proposed version of BDI might be able to do without Huang and Bargh’s goals altogether. I will also present a soft claim: even if we accept Huang and Bargh’s selfish goals into our ontology of mental states, we cannot dispense of beliefs, desires, and intentions altogether. The common claim between the strong and weak claim is that SGT will not suffice without being supplemented by some form of BDI.

Tony Cheng (UCL)

Consciousness, Attention, and Visual Indexes

Consciousness and attention are two difficult topics in the study of mind; the various relations between them are even more daunting. In recent years, Ned Block (1995, 2007, 2011, etc.) has been pushing the view that the content of consciousness is, in general, richer than what attention captures at any given time. This view – OVERFLOW for short – is controversial and has important implications for both philosophical and empirical issues. Proponents of this rich consciousness view include John Searle (1992) and Susanna Siegel and Nico Sillins (forthcoming); opponents include Daniel Dennett (1991, 2012), Jesse Prinz (2007), Paul Coates (2009), and many others. The present paper develops a version of the rich view and discusses relevant ramifications. Section 1 offers some preliminaries and terminological clarifications. For example, the meanings of attention are extremely difficult to pin down. Here we compare Block’s preferred notion ‘access’ with Jesse Prinz’s alternative ‘accessibility.’ Along the way notions such as ‘access consciousness’ will be explained as well. Section 2 introduces the latest version of Block’s view based on the famous Sperling paradigm. This updated version is the finest one (e.g., with more layers of visual memories) and therefore deserves most discussions. The bottom line of his view is that fragile visual short-term memory is conscious, and since it can last as long as several seconds, its capacity is much larger than the capacity of working memory and attention. Section 3 explains why parts of Block’s view are implausible (i.e., the thesis that before the cue participants have specific phenomenology for almost every item on the screen), and then elaborates a weaker version of OVERFLOW, which has it that before the cue participants enjoy a generic phenomenology with some parts more specific than others. What’s more, the phenomenology overall is richer than what attention actually captures at a given time. This is equally supported by Block’s favorite argument that subjective reports can be interpreted as saying that participants read off their answers from visual memories, and at the same time sits better with what we know about visual awareness, i.e., outside of attention the specificity of awareness drops down dramatically. Section 4 discusses further issues. First, I discuss Ian Phillips's postdiction interpretation (2011) and James Stazicker’s indeterminacy interpretation (2011) of Sperling-style experiments and argue that they are actually compatible with OVERFLOW as I elaborated. Secondly, I reply to a potential objection from Block that my view cannot accommodate a series of experiments conducted by Victor Lamme’s lab (e.g., 2003), i.e., the experiments of change detections. The main thrust is to show that the Lamme experiments differ from the Sperling paradigm in some crucial aspects so that the analogy does not hold. Last, I connect the present discussion to another important literature – the multiple-object-tracking initiated by Zenon Pylyshyn and Brian Scholl. The general moral is that varieties of attention and visual indexes can explain different levels of visual experiences. The paper ends with several caveats concerning the way we should elaborate the picture of levels of seeing. The reason to connect the two literatures is that both in psychology and in philosophy there is a gap between the attention literature and the visual index literature. Specialisation is a reasonable strategy nowadays, but these two groups of phenomena are so closely related that at some point they need to be considered in a more unified way.

Anna Ciaunica-Garrouty (EMC, Lyon)

Is the Social Brain an Intersubjective System?

There is controversy over the basis for young children’s experience of themselves and other people as separate yet related individuals, each with a mental perspective on the world – and over the nature of corresponding deficits in autism. It has become fashionable to think of limitations in psychological perspective-taking among autistic children (AC hereafter) as signs of lacks in their “theory of mind” (ToM) abilities (Baron-Cohen et al 1985; Leslie 1994), i.e. a “Mindblindness” deficit in having metarepresentational mental states. Typically, the litmus false-belief test (Wimmer & Perner 1983) uses elicited-response task in which children answer a direct question about an agent’s false belief. However, recent studies using spontaneous-response tasks which include violation-of-expectation looking paradigm (VOE)¹ strongly suggest that this ability could be present much earlier in typically developing children (Onishi & Baillargeon 2005) while it is missing in AC (Senju et al. 2010). Here I defend the idea that AC might suffer from a specific “relational self impairment” (RSI) which causes ToM deficits. In other words, the intersubjective relatedness of the self is foundational for and not merely subsidiary to the development of representational skills.

This paper is structured as follows: in section 1 I discuss the use of the term “metarepresentations” in ToM paradigm and argue in line with Scott (2001) that a confusion has been made between “dual representations” and “metarepresentations”. Then I will interpret recent findings of Onishi & Baillargeon (2005) and Senju et al (2010) as corroborating the idea that ToM fails to encapsulate the relational aspects of the self. Part 2 builds upon the premise that “one cannot be a self on one’s own” (de Haan 2010) and argues that the “minimal self” is primarily a “relational self”, i.e. constitutively dependent upon “participatory sense-making” interactions (de Jaegher & Di Paolo 2007).

Then I review behavioral and neural evidence supporting the RSI hypothesis. Indeed, fMRI evidence is accumulating that infants’ brain organization in typically developing children may well adapted to be an “intersubjective system” (Aitken & Trevarthen 1997, Tzourio-Mazoyer et al. 2002). Furthermore, developmental studies seem to suggest that higher level cognitive processes are strongly affected by the history of social interactions (Jaffe et al. 2001, Hobson 2002, Trevarthen 2005). Finally, this paper supports the conclusion that what is missing among AC highlights what is present among children without autism, namely forms of emotional engagement through which a child is moved in psychological attitudes by the bodily expressed attitudes of someone else (Hobson 2012).

¹ VOE task tests whether children look longer when agents act in a manner that is inconsistent with their false beliefs.

Matthew Crippen (American University in Cairo)

Perception of Emotional Expression and Some Lessons It Teaches

In their 2012 article, “Holistic person processing: Faces with bodies tell the whole story,” Hillel Aviezer and colleagues noted that researchers investigating facial expressions have mostly considered “the face and the body as discrete perceptual units, focusing on the processing of each source in isolation” (p. 20). They further reported that their experiments “show that faces and bodies are processed as a single unit” (p. 20), so that body language can have a striking effect on how we perceive facial expressions. However, while adding much to the understanding of emotional expression, this is not the whole story, for as filmmakers have long recognized and the occasional psychologist observed, the contexts in which we encounter bodies and faces also bears on the appearance of emotional expression.

Integrating examples from filmmaking, results from experimental psychology and phenomenological and pragmatic accounts of emotion and perception, I examine instances in which situations shape how we perceive emotional expression. I begin with illustrations of the “Kuleshov effect”—a cinematic phenomenon wherein audiences perceive different emotions on performers’ faces when identical shots of them are contextualized in different situations. I next consider insights that Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s 1947 “Film and the New Psychology” drew from this phenomenon. Here I focus on how the Kuleshov effect reinforces two positions advanced in phenomenological and pragmatic literature: first, that we are ill-equipped to register isolated objects or events; and, second, that reducing emotions to purely internal, subjective happenings reduces them to almost nothing. Then, consolidating lessons from cinema and the aforementioned literature, along with more recent psychological and philosophical research, I develop a position hinted at by John Dewey nearly a century ago, and loosely echoed by more recent thinkers such as Herman Schmitz and Gernot Böhme, namely, that worldly situations, in a manner of speaking, have objective emotional qualities.

The notion that worlds, as opposed to isolated faces, can be primary determinants of emotional expression suggests a rethinking of the view, which has received increasing support since the 1960s, that basic emotions such as fear, anger, disgust and happiness have fairly specific, universal and involuntary corresponding facial expressions. It further suggests rethinking the thesis, popularized by Paul Ekman, that basic facial expressions cannot be easily faked, so that, for instance, security personnel can learn to detect non-genuine expressions. It is not so much the thesis itself that is problematic, however, but that professional and especially popular media promulgate it in ways that lead us to neglect frequent cases in which faces do not as much express as reflect emotional qualities of situations. Indeed, an interesting subset of cases exists in which emotions are reflected on the faces of performers literally wearing masks. Extending phenomenological and pragmatic theories that hold that the manner in which we register elements within a field is determined by our perception of the whole, and relating these ideas to 20th century physics and the position that properties are effects of interrelationships, I argue that emotional expressions that appear as a consequence of people’s placement within situations need not be illusions. On the contrary, a speculative case can be made that they have the same ontological status as colour and other qualities of objects perceived in the world.

Tom Feldges (Hull)

Husserl's epoché & schizophrenia

Francisco Varela (1996) proposed to utilise aspects of Husserlian phenomenology, especially the epoché as an initial reductive method to forward and substantiate scientific research regarding consciousness. Phenomenology as a philosophical approach to consciousness had always attracted criticism and scepticism. In this respect doubt may be warranted as to whether phenomenological methods could ever support scientific investigations, and if so – under what sort of conditions. One commonly repeated criticism against the use of phenomenological methods to forward empirical research is the argument that it is impossible to subjectively undergo experiences, while attending to them at the same time. Especially this objection, as – for example – formulated by Searle forms the focal point of this paper.

Searle (1992:97) claims that “Any introspection I have of my own conscious state is itself that conscious state” and this is sometimes formulated in a more metaphorical way by stating that one can not stand on the balcony overlooking the street while being in the street at the same time. Such a position seems to imply a hermeneutical a priori impossibility to gain direct subjective access to one's own subjective states. In this paper I will show a) that the aim of phenomenological-informed research is different to mere introspection and b) that a strong claim for an a priori impossibility cannot be upheld.

Husserl (Hua, III) proposed the epoché as a means to break free with what he called the “natural attitude”, which he understood to be an interrelated web of sense-providing references used in everyday life. To gain certainty about the phenomena as they appear, one had to break through this veil of the natural attitude via the epoché in order to reach the object of an intersubjectively shared life-world (Hua VI). This reveals the objects, brought to consciousness as they really are, without any underlying social or scientific presumptions. In a further step, Husserl’s investigative gaze is now no longer focused upon the current perception only, but re-directed towards the internal structures of actual or emerging intentional acts as they are about to bring the phenomena of the shared life-world to consciousness in relation to the one – indexed – object of the initial epoché (Hua VI). Husserl is thus not concentrating on the content, but on the structures whereby conscious thoughts in relation to objects gain their meaning or reference.

Searle’s claim however was an undifferentiated a priori impossibility of direct access to one’s own subjective states, thus seemingly capturing content as well as enabling structures.

In a recent article Fuchs (2012) utilises an established differentiation between a basic, pre-reflective and embodied self as opposed to a reflective or personal self. Fuchs, concentrating on the first concept divides this basic self further into a) a primarily embodied self, b) an ecological self and c) a social self. By running the first concept’s three sub-divisions against a phenomenological understanding of schizophrenia, Fuchs is able to provide an explanatory account that allows him to conceptualise schizophrenia as a disruption of the self. This then may lead to a loss of the self, a disintegration of mental processes and sense-making relations together with a dissociation and alienation of one’s act of perceiving from the intentional content of this very act. Such a – pathological case – leaves the afflicted self as a spectator of its own seeing.

In this respect it appears as if Searle’s claim has to take a major blow, as obviously his a priori claim regarding the access-problem cannot be maintained while at least one specific sort of cases – albeit pathological ones – provide evidence to the contrary. Thus the question regarding the aspired decomposition of perceptive acts via a reductive method to gain information about sense-making structures is no longer one regarding the sheer possibility of such a redirection of focus, but one regarding the actual chances to achieve this without the need to suffer from an underlying psychopathology.

Helen Graham, Sonia Pieczenko-Feldges & Nathan Michael (Grimsby)

Creativity and consciousness

This presentation aims to give a brief overview of a currently on-going research project regarding a possible connection between Thalbourne and Maltby’s (2008) concept of transliminality on one side and creativity on the other. Despite the fact that the project is currently still ongoing, the first results will be available during the summer. However, in relation to further stages of this project, the researchers would welcome the chance to exchange ideas about the research and the concepts of creativity and consciousness.

The concept of transliminality was developed by Thalbourne and Maltby (2008). The concept tries to account for a certain fluidity of consciousness, a consciousness with fuzzy boundaries, defined as a ‘hypersensitivity to psychological material originating in (a) the unconscious, and/or (b) the external environment’ (p1617). The concept of transliminality has been used to explain phenomena which resist being put into “normal” categories. In this respect the concept of transliminality has found application to account for anomalous psychological phenomena (para-psychological) as well as for certain pathological deviations in order to provide a construct whereby these “strange” phenomena could find explanation by a crossing of phenomena across the hypothesized fuzzy boundaries. According to Crawley, French and Yesson (2002) transliminality is associated with sensitivity to visual stimuli, so higher levels of transliminality are associated with higher levels of sensitivity to visual stimulation.

Rugg (1963) used the term ‘transliminal’ to describe a borderline state of mind conducive to creative consciousness. There are many definitions of creativity as both a process and a personality variable. However, creativity is commonly defined as a process whereby a novel product emerges, something that is original and also valuable or adaptive (e.g., Boden, 1996).

The research hypothesis is that there will be a significant positive correlation between measures of transliminality and measures of creativity.

In an experimental setting the creativity of the participants (n=20+) will be assessed by their performance in a spontaneous free association measure regarding the possible use of a common object as used by Hudson (1966). The individual levels of proneness to transliminal border-crossing will be assessed using specifically designed computer-software, exposing the participants to blurred images which gain clarity during sequential exposure. The number of increasingly less blurred images presented before participants reach a decision about the images content will provide a measure of transliminality.

A correlation of the two sets of data should reveal the sought after relationship between transliminality and creativity and therefore provide a better understanding of the underlying processes of creativity.

Joel Krueger (Exeter)

Emotions, Music and the Hypothesis of Extended Cognition

The hypothesis of extended (HEC) cognition is the view that some forms of cognition are partially composed of structures and processes beyond the individual. Some cognitive processes thus extend into the surrounding environment. Might emotions be likewise extended? Despite intense interest in HEC within recent years, the hypothesis of extended emotions (HEE) has not received similar attention. In this talk, I defend HEE. I argue that there are cases where some emotions can plausibly be said to extend. I support HEE by appealing specifically to emotions that arise from engaging with music. I argue that, in certain cases—beginning in infancy and continuing into adulthood—musical structures profoundly enhance various cognitive processes that give rise to emotional experience and thus ought to be thought of as part of our extended (emotional) mind.

I begin by distinguishing two ways of potentially parsing HEE: the hypothesis of bodily extended emotions (HEBE), and the hypothesis of environmentally extended emotions (HEEE). I briefly canvass empirical evidence that appears to support both. I then argue that, while both HEBE and HEEE are empirically plausible, only HEEE is an instance of genuinely extended cognition. Therefore, if the case for HEE is to be made, it is, I suggest, by defending HEEE.

Next, I support HEEE by appealing to different streams of music cognition research. I argue that, just as technologies like notebooks, computers, and compasses can serve as cognition-extending “tools for thinking”, music can, analogously, function as a “tool for feeling”: an external structure that enables the listener to cultivate and refine certain emotional experiences they wouldn’t otherwise have. Specifically, it does so by enhancing the functional complexity of various motor, attentional, and regulative capacities responsible for generating and sustaining emotional experience.

Movement has always been associated with music listening: from simply tapping one’s fingers to participating in an elaborate dance or ritual. Moreover, one of the main reasons people in all cultures listen to music is to regulate emotion. But a number of recent studies suggest that these two aspects of music perception are interrelated. For example, multiple studies have found that listening to music—even “passively” or inattentively—evokes spontaneous motor responses at various levels (neural, behavioral-expressive, etc.) (Chan et al 2013; Lundqvist et al 2009). We hear movement within the dynamics of music and respond with movement of our own (Molnar-Szakacs and Overy 2006). These motor responses, such as facial expressions or postural adjustments, subsequently generate associated affects (Laird 2007: Niedenthal 2007). The physiological changes associated with auditory-motor integration in music listening can in this way, I suggest, provide afferent feedback enhancing and/or transforming our affective state. In other words, listener and music together form a dynamically coupled system in which the listener uses musical features to regulate and transform their attention and emotion. I discuss evidence indicating that using music as an external tool for feeling appears to be something we do from birth (Malloch and Trevarthen 2009). For example, preterm infants respond selectively to certain kinds of consonant music and, via entrainment to musical structure, exhibit heightened endogenous control and emotion regulation within musical contexts (Standley 2001).

In sum, I defend the hypothesis of extended emotions. I argue that music can serve as a tool for feeling that enhances the functional complexity of various motor, attentional, and regulative capacities responsible for emotional experience. As a consequence, music can open up certain types of emotional experiences that wouldn’t otherwise be available and thus, at least in some contexts, ought to be thought of as part of our emotionally extended mind. I conclude the talk by briefly indicating how this way of thinking about music and the emotionally extended mind might help us understand the developmental roots of social cognition.

Alan McAuliffe (Limerick)

Meaning and qualia: Context and stimuli in decision making tasks

Traditional information processing approaches to understanding perception and response to the environment take an analytic perspective to understanding the relationship between a person and the world. The important characteristics of stimuli in cognitive psychology tasks tend to relate to perceptual or structural aspects of those stimuli (their contrast, order or presentation, duration of presentation and so on). These different aspects of stimuli are typically examined in isolation and our understanding of the multi-faceted nature situations is built up in some kind of additive sense from various findings. Such standard experiments provide us with precision and reliability in measurements that are important in the development of a clear and adequate science.

However, a long but generally disparate tradition of research within cognitive psychology shows that the *meaning* of the stimulus may also have significant implications for how a person reacts to or uses those stimuli. The classic example is the content effects associated with the Wason selection task (Wason, 1966). It is generally believed that performance in the task changes when the stimuli content is varied, which has been used to argue that human cognitive architecture contains domain-specific inference systems (Fiddick, Cosmides & Tooby, 2000).

Recently developing perspectives within Psychology, such as the "enactive" approach (Varela et al; Di Paolo et al) argue that we need to replace our existing analytic modes of research with models that also afford more synthetic thinking, without sacrificing the rigour and discipline of proper scientific practice. An enactive approach sees not just the individual aspects of a stimulus or situation as important, but the overall meaning of the stimulus or task as playing a significant role in how we construct our thinking and acting at given time.

At present, however, while the enactive approach has grown considerably within the theoretical literature and within the areas of artificial life and other certain areas of robotics, it has yet to make a big impact within the domain of human behavioural research.

The present research is part of a project to explore the possibility of adapting existing research methods for a more enactive agenda. Building on the plentiful but disparate literature on content effects we examined the potential impact of meaning on an executive control task - the classic go-no-go task.

The Go No go task is a fast paced decision task with ‘Go’ and ‘No go’ stimuli. Changing the stimuli presented to participants impacted reaction times and accuracy across three versions of the identical task. We utilised one ‘meaningful’ condition and two abstract conditions using three distinct stimuli sets: red and green traffic lights; numbers 6 and 9 with controlled spatial alignments; and a blue/yellow coloured circle task. We explored the meaningfulness of the stimuli accessible to participants and concluded that the meaningfulness of the stimuli affected performance with faster reaction times and greater errors seen in the seemingly meaningful, traffic light version of the task. This raised questions of how the participant may be experiencing the cognitive task. It seems that the stimuli in this condition prompted more rapid responses, which also increased error rates.

The implications of these findings will be discussed with a view to evaluating the practical and theoretical challenges in the development of an enactive approach to human experience and behaviour.

Joel Parthemore (Lund)

Drawing the Link Between Concepts and Consciousness

Concepts relate to consciousness through the medium of experience. For the conceptually reflective agent, concepts simply are part of experience: whenever we look for them, they are there. Experience gives rise to concepts even as concepts structure the very experience that gives rise to them. Given their integral role in experience, it might seem that a theory of concepts – that is, a theory about the properties and applications of structured thought -- is a necessary part of any adequate theory of consciousness. It is therefore perhaps surprising that relatively little attention has been paid in consciousness studies to theories of concepts, and which of them might be of most explanatory benefit: I have in mind e.g. Jerry Fodor’s informational atomism, Jesse Prinz’s proxytypes theory, and Peter Gärdenfors’ conceptual spaces theory. At the same time, theories of concepts have paid little attention to concepts’ relation to consciousness, other than to claim, as Fodor seems to do, that concepts are necessarily introspectible; or allow, as Prinz implies and Gärdenfors makes clear, that some concepts may not be introspectible at all – either in practice or, sometimes, even in principle. Among the unanswered questions is: what is the relation between one’s various concepts of self (e.g., as a biological organism, as an intentional cognitive entity, as an identifying label) and one’s other concepts, and what this relationship – which is to say, the distinctive role of the various “self” concepts – have to say about consciousness? This paper makes a first attempt to address the lack of discussion to date.

Concepts – like consciousness – by their nature resist direct empirical investigation. At the same time, an accumulation of indirect, “circumstantial” evidence can weigh for or against one or another theory. Some theories of concepts are more amenable to empirical investigation than others: e.g. informational atomism seems almost designed to be beyond possibility of empirical testing. By contrast, conceptual spaces theory, like the prototype theories it is based on, has undergone a fair amount of such investigation. Meanwhile, my own unified conceptual space theory (UCST), which is derived from it, attempts to push it in a more algorithmically amenable and, therefore, hopefully more empirically testable direction.

I describe experiments I have designed with psychologist Daniel Barratt to test UCST empirically, at the same time investigating people’s capacity to introspect their own concepts through a mind-mapping program based directly on UCST. The experiments aim to provide a set of quantitative (e.g., time to completion of task) and qualitative measures (e.g., pre- and posttesting questionnaires) benchmarking the application against traditional mind-mapping software and pen-and-paper; a psychologically valid measure of belief consistency, determined by how frequently and in what ways users revise their mind maps over the course of the test session; and, most critically, a list of errors/omissions in both the program and underlying theory, as revealed by what subjects ought to be able to do, and cannot, as well as ways in which their actions prove under-constrained. More generally, subjects’ ease or lack thereof in using the application and the degree of introduction they require to the application (minimal, on par with current mindmapping software, or advanced) can be expected to shed light on the relationship between the theory of concepts embodied by the application and the nature of their underlying thought processes. The results may be hoped to reveal something about the nature of introspection itself: like experience, a key component of our (self-)consciousness.

Ben Rumble (NHS Sussex)

Multiplicity, Emotion and Cognitive Therapy: A Possible Role for Deleuze

The paper comments on a potentially fruitful relationship between multi-level cognitive accounts of emotion and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Multi level theories, such as Teasdale and Barnard’s Interactive Cognitive Subsystems model, contribute two key points to cognitive accounts of emotion. 1) A distinction is made between ‘propositional’ and ‘implicational’ meaning. Propositional meaning concerns verbal statements about self and world, readily available to conscious reflection. Implicational meaning concerns an implicit, felt sense of self, summarised by global beliefs (‘failure’, ‘danger’). Emotional cognition is implicational in nature. 2) The concept of multiplicity plays a productive role in generating emotional beliefs. Emotions happen when multiple components (somatic, verbal, sensory etc.) interact to produce an intensive globalising sense of self. The paper explores the relevance of Deleuze’s philosophy to multi level accounts of emotion by considering the following:

- Extending the idea that emotions concern global beliefs (‘failure’), emotional beliefs are ‘pre-individual’ in nature: ‘Failure’ is not an attribute someone has but a process someone undergoes (i.e. failing).
- Extending the idea of emotion as a cognitive filter, an emotional belief is a ‘capacity to affect and be affected’. Once activated, an emotional belief selects the ‘distinctive points’ which characterise an emotional domain (Failing = sleeping, withdrawing, ruminating).
- As a process, an emotional belief is primarily a ‘verb’, an ‘event’. The beliefs felt sense is therefore an agitated sense of direction (‘it’s all going wrong’). The distinctive points of a belief are effectively intensive trajectories which move through a particular emotional domain.
- Extending the relationship between emotional beliefs and space, an emotional belief is effectively embedded within a multiplex environment, a multiplicity. Multiplicity for Deleuze is not an abstract informational space but the continuous relationship between the diverse elements which compose ‘a life’. An emotional belief happens when different elements vary and reciprocally differentiate each other to generate the distinctive tendencies which characterise the belief (Failing = slowing down ↔ isolating more ↔ sleeping more ↔ eating less etc).
- The potential for connection intrinsic to Deleuze’s notion of multiplicity introduces a ‘virtual’ dimension into emotion, which might inform treatment. An emotional belief is both ‘distinct’ (i.e. ‘(I know) I’m failing’) and ‘obscure’ (i.e. failing consists of multiple interactions or little perceptions still to be explored). The ‘metastable’ nature of multiplicity means ‘we don’t yet know’ where an emotional belief might lead. The beliefs which compose a life therefore consist of manifold opportunities for variation which might modulate distress (sleeping less ↔ ?).

Guy Saunders (UWE)

Landscape Imagined: How subjectivities are brought about

This presentation examines subjectivities and imagining through the theoretical issue of landscape. From the ‘cubist psychology’ standpoint, landscape is a set of imagined subjectivities (Saunders, forthcoming). In the doctoral research I carried out in the 1990s, I started with the view that a captive’s use of imagination could be figured out from the background of captivity. It wasn’t long before I began to foreground ‘captivity’ and the way that captives were, in a sense, landscaped by their confinement. And from this I concluded that we were all like this and that confinement simply served to amplify the human condition. In everyday life and living I concluded that we tended to play down the importance of the way that the world about us has brought us into being. I believe that we need to re-think landscape in a way that is in keeping with how the verb ‘to landscape’ was first used. I will draw on the history of, for example, the landscape garden movement and what came to be called ‘the picturesque’. I think the seemingly paradoxical story of gardens can help explicate how the way we landscape (verb) has shaped the way we see landscape (noun). When it comes to subjectivity, I think that the way we imagine the world about us to be has shaped the way we see subjectivity. I believe that the world about us is brought about by what I have come to call ‘acts of consciousness’ (Saunders, forthcoming).

Subjectivities can be seen as an interior landscape; but one that is built from, and implicated in, the world about us. I’m arguing that subjectivity, objectivity, inter-subjectivity, any standpoint, is brought about by how we see things. The words ‘see’ or ‘seeing’ are often used figuratively to convey the idea of ‘knowing’. A point of view is a standpoint that we take to see with. And we always do this. John Berger said in his book Ways of Seeing:

The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. ... The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe.

We do not see a landscape, we see with a landscaped view.

What is remarkable is the fact of viewpoint and what this amounts to. In social psychological literature, many people talk about ‘standpoints’. And this is, in part, to get away from the use of visual metaphors that a phrase such as ‘point of view’ perpetuates. Point of view may distance us as if we were not part of what it was that engaged us. We are in the landscape. We are of the landscape. Our standing means we stand somewhere. We are part of the landscape with which we view the world. We’re in the picture. We are our standing in the world and we need a standpoint for that.

A standpoint is brought about by being physically located and by being set socially.

I will argue that, where subjectivities are concerned, we are both the location – the bodily basis for viewing anything, and also the landscaped mind that has the view. We do not see the landscape, we see with a landscaped view or view: it is this – or these – that constitute the imagined, the landscape or the world about us. To view a landscape at all requires that we bring a landscaped mind to a viewpoint and engage with what we see. If we express our notice of a change of aspect, we express something of both the new way of seeing and the old unchanged way of seeing at the same time ; hence subjectivities in the plural form. We have to have the physical capability to see the world, but we need to have the social capability to view the world with. It is just this social capability – brought about through the social experience we have through other people – that constitutes our subjectivities.

Stefan Schneider (Osnabrück), Benjamin Angerer (Vienna) & Cornell Schreiber (Vienna)

Creative Imagery? A Joint Product of Intended Construction and Intuition

Imagery is widely considered to be involved in and even essential to creative processes. But what is creative about imagery? Folk psychology attributes the apparent absurdity of dreams and daydreams to some sort of subconscious, uncontrolled ingenuity. Anecdotal accounts of sudden insights being accompanied by symbolistic images (e.g. Kekulé’s benzene ring and Watson & Crick's DNA double helix) testify of that. It seems to be a well-established cliché that creative 'products' of the mind emerge as unexpected subjective experiences, rather than from a controlled, step-by-step construal of a subject matter. Creativity is thereby fully attributed to the faculty of intuition.

Another connotation of creativity is that of 'creator' and of the act of bringing something into being. Very prominent is Poincaré's account of mathematical creation, where he argues that a solution to a problem appears to him as a sudden intuition, but only after a long period of intensive work on the problem. Nowadays, the pivotal role of imagery in structuring and guiding problem solving is being acknowledged. However, crafting something often results in constructing only variations of something already known. For example, when subjects are asked to create an unknown, alien life form, they come up with very familiar creatures, including a body, limbs, sensory, and digestive organs. Creativity, as the function of propelling new ideas, thus also requires to restructure these on all levels of detail. Truly creative ideas probably arise when one reconsiders what one expects to be a solution to a problem in the first place. For example, an alien life form such as the all-affecting ocean in Stanisław Lem's novel "Solaris" differs largely from life forms as we know them.

In two qualitative studies which focused on subjectively reportable aspects of thought, we investigated creative construction processes and their relation to emerging image metaphors. In the first study, subjects were interviewed (following a protocol of the explicitation interview technique) in the course of problem solving imagery tasks. In the second study, we analyzed verbal reports, notes, depictions, and gestures of subjects during the inductive learning of an algorithmic concept. We found that in both cases, construction processes are deeply entangled with the emergence of intuitions. Intuitive ideas, often in the form of images, arose as the result of constructing and restructuring of a problem context. Once found, a figurative metaphor functions as a clue according to which a whole issue – be it of visuospatial or of procedural nature – could be unfolded. Accordingly, a problem context was never present in any situation in full flesh, but had to be dynamically maintained and frequently reconstructed. As a result, subjects were able to unfold and invent new detail, as well as generate new abstractions thereof.

Thus, we conclude that an emerging image is not inherently creative or new; quite simple and well-known figures often take the role of comprehensive metaphors for complex concepts. A creative invention lies in such a construction, in the unfolding and restructuring of a problem context, for which an image metaphor provides a possibly new and fruitful comprehensive perspective.

Cornell Schreiber (Vienna), Benjamin Angerer (Vienna) & Stefan Schneider (Osnabrück)

An Experimental Paradigm for the Introspection of Mental Imagery in Problem Solving

Problem solving is a complex cognitive process usually seen as the hallmark of “higher cognition”, making use of the various faculties of our cognitive architecture. Research on expertise in problem solving has shown that experts in their domain—as opposed to novices who have to employ “weak methods” like generate & test, means-end analysis or other generic search strategies—efficiently solve problems by employing a deeply integrated framework of domain-specific procedural and declarative knowledge (“strong methods”). When concerned with problems in their own domain, this allows experts to rapidly recognise task-relevant information, to readily apply adequate and automatised sub-procedures and to easier encode and retrieve intermediate stages of the process (cf. Nokes et al. 2010). Due to their automatised and more adequate procedures experts have more working memory capacity at hand, enabling them to explore problems that require a deeper understanding of the domain principles (cf. Feldon 2010).

While a lot of progress has been made in the last decades (e.g. Rittle-Johnson et al. 2001), we still do not know precisely which processes mediate the qualitative change from novice to expert, that is how this ‘deeply integrated framework’ the expert possesses, is constructed and how this is strategically put to use in problem solving. Considering the development of expertise, there is ample evidence that especially in intermediate periods of understanding domain principles, reflection and self-explanation (‘metacognition’) are playing a particularly important role. For instance, subjects instructed to explain their reasoning performed significantly better in transfer tasks than subjects instructed to explain on the level of the problem and subjects who thought-aloud (e.g. Berardi-Coletta et al. 1995). Thus, if we want to get protocol data about how problem solving strategies are constructed and integrated with the existing knowledge framework, it seems sensible to acquire process-level data about these learning periods. Promising steps in this direction have already been taken in the fields of developmental and educational psychology, e.g. microgenetic analysis (cf. Siegler 2006) and cognitive microanalysis (e.g. Clement 2008).

We present an experimental paradigm that is designed to allow for the collection of comprehensive process-level data from introspection about the development of expert-like problem solving skills. This paradigmatic setup adheres to the properties of a microgenetic study (cf. Siegler 2006) in that (a) observations span the period of rapidly changing competence, (b) within this period, the density of observations is high, relative to the rate of change and (c) observations are analysed intensively, with the goal of inferring the representations and processes that gave rise to them. The main properties of the paradigm are aimed at facilitating deep-level learning in order to allow small scale studies of “expertise in the making”. They are 1) the use of multi-stage tasks of increasing difficulty, 2) instructing subjects to solve tasks in mental imagery and 3) the instruction to introspect. It is hypothesised that, by imagining, subjects are impelled to process the relevant information in working memory. This way subjects obtain feedback concerning aspects of the information that they do not yet know, permitting a more thorough rehearsal and thereby assisting in the construction and automation of domain-relevant procedures and concepts in long-term memory. Furthermore, as a side effect of the instruction to imagine, we expect an increased amount of reportable cognitive activity through introspection.

We will also present preliminary results from an exploratory case study of cube dissection tasks, serving as a proof-of-concept by providing high-fidelity descriptions of problem solving processes that go beyond the boundaries of the above mentioned paradigms.

Susan Stuart (Glasgow)

Enkinaesthetic polyphony as the underpinning for first-order languaging

We contest the bias that continues to treat language, understood as the processing of abstract symbolic forms, as an instrument of cognition and rational thought. We offer an enkinaesthetic theory describing the reciprocal affective neuro-muscular dynamical flows and tensions that are felt and enfolded between co-participating agents in dialogical sense-making relations. We refer to this reciprocal felt-enfolding as an "enkinaesthetic dialogue" and argue that it is characterised by a preconceptual experientially-recursive temporal dynamics, without which the semiotic explosion, in which the child develops the ability to understand pictures, models, and other representational artifacts, could not occur.

The following ideas are central to this work: (i) that the plenisentient feeling body, in ongoing affective dialogue (locally and non-locally) with other feeling bodies, plays an integral role in full-bodied sense-making relations; and (ii) that notions of turn-taking, exchange structure, and move analysis, as in discourse- and conversation-analytical approaches to dialogue, are externally imposed and derived from rule-bound or code-like mechanisms and are, therefore, unsatisfactory as the basis for theorizing communication between living, feeling, moving agents.

Elena Volkova (Russian Academy of Sciences)

Nonverbal Image as Expression of Consciousness

This paper is devoted to the study of nonverbal images in the structure of consciousness. The data are presented of qualitative comparative analysis of pictures in Torrance’s figural creativity test depending on gender and academic achievement in chemistry. Participants were Russians, 374 second-year students (19-years-old, 60% female) of the Chemistry Department (Ural State University), 100 third-year-students of Psychology Department (female, 20-21-years-old), 200 preschoolers (5-6-years-old, 50% girls) and 6 experts in chemistry (men, aged 40-47-years-old). In addition to Torrance’s figural creativity tests, verbal creativity Torrance’s tests, the WISC test, the GreatChemist test and academic achievement scores were used.

It was found that the occurrence of images when performing Torrance’s figural creativity test was of regular nature. The number and quality of these images were associated with gender, culture and professional abilities. We observed both similar images to the same stimulus and specific ones for gender, culture or professional activity.

Boys and girls differently perceived experimental stimuli, which testifies to the different perception of the surrounding world. The images, which were typical for one gender group, were not typical for the other one, and required a creative force according to Torrance.

We made up the lists of typical images, which were characteristic of age, gender, professional status and education background.

The verification of the validity of the list of images was carried out only for students-chemists on the basis of mathematical-statistical analysis of contingency tables of nominal scale variables (Chi-square). It was established that most of the images in Torrance’s figural test were significantly associated with gender.

Comparison of indicators of intelligence and creativity did not reveal significant differences between groups with more successful and less successful students in chemistry, except for the fact that gifted chemists drew “chemical” images significantly more frequently (Т=3.253**) (test tubes, flasks, funnels, measuring cylinders, chemical formulas, charts and signs of chemical processes).

The findings of the present research show that the occurrence of “chemical” drawings in Torrance’s test can be accounted for by a higher degree of differentiation-integration of the conceptual structures of chemistry as a science discipline. We assert that these conceptual structures underlie chemists’ special abilities, which are measured by the GreatChemist test. The significant relationships were found (One-Way ANOVA) between the number of “chemical” images and the reaction time of the most complex chemical differentiations (F = 2.315*), the time of distinction of oxidation-reduction processes (F = 3.398**), the time of distinction of the spatial structures (F = 2.479**), the time of distinction of the reversible-irreversible chemical processes (F = 2.927**) and the time of differentiation of the acidity of solutions (F = 2.603**), and etc.

The results of testing of highly-professional chemists, who are “born to be chemists”, according to the experts, showed a great number of “chemical” images in Torrance’s test and high level of differentiation-integration of the concept "substance”. It should be noted that the students who drew formulas of organic compounds later chose the Department of organic chemistry. The students who drew diagrams of chemical processes chose the Department of physical chemistry. Subsequently, all these students successfully realized their potentials in professional activities.

Thus, the "chemical" images in Torrance’s figural creativity test can serve as a reliable criterion for identifying gifted chemists.

Through comparing the lists of typical responses between Russians (students-chemists) and Americans (literature data) in Torrance’s figural creativity test, we can describe the differences in "mentality" of American and Russian students.

For American students, abstraction, numbers, letters, face and body figures were observed more frequently.

Nature, animals, flowers, insects, trees, clouds and terrain were more significant for Russian students. The latter paid less attention in their drawings to the face as a whole, but more to the expressive details of the face – eyes and smile that point to their spiritual world.

The findings of our research open up new perspectives in interpretation of Torrance’s figural creativity test. Qualitative comparative analysis of the pictures in Torrance’s figural creativity test can be used as a projective technique that permits us to understand the content and structure of consciousness under controlled conditions.

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