The studies evaluated in the following papers are pointing toward a paradigm shift in what neuroscientists, physicists, and the philosophers of mind must consider in future theories of consciousness: The predictive anticipatory effects [found in a 2012 study] constitute a fourth category in addition to three broad categories of anticipatory effects that have already been established in psychophysiology and neuroscience. The first category includes physiological anticipation of intentional motor activity, e.g., physiological anticipation of a willed movement begins at least 500 ms before the conscious report of the intention to move (Libet et al., 1983; Haggard and Eimer, 1999; Soon et al., 2008). The explanation for these effects is that human conscious experience is preceded by subconscious initiation of that experience (Libet et al., 1983). The second category consists of experiments for which the EEG signals during the pre-stimulus period from trials on which stimuli will later be detected differ significantly from the pre-stimulus signals from trials on which stimuli will later be undetected. The general explanation for these effects is that specific phases and/or amplitudes of neural oscillatory firing (Ergenoglu et al., 2004; Mathewson et al., 2009; Panzeri et al., 2010) facilitate detection (or non-detection) of an upcoming stimulus. Recently, a third category of anticipatory effect, dubbed “preplay,” was discovered when the pre-maze activity of mouse hippocampal neurons was shown to mimic the activity recorded during and after being in the maze, even in mice for whom a maze was novel (Dragoi and Tonegawa, 2011). The authors also found that the firing patterns typically recorded in one maze are predictably different from those recorded in another maze. They offer the explanation that preplay patterns may reflect a sort of recycling phenomenon in which the hippocampus uses generalizable firing pattern templates from its recent history to code for an animal’s current spatial exploration experience. For all three categories of anticipatory effects described above, the usual cause-preceding-effect assumption is sufficient to construct reasonable explanations for the observed phenomena. The seemingly anomalous anticipatory effects investigated in this meta-analysis could have some influence on the each of these three types of phenomena, but these unexplained anticipatory effects are not necessary to explain these three types of established anticipatory effects. Conversely, the three types of established predictive effects cannot explain the unexplained anticipatory activity examined [in the 2012 study]. Thus we suggest that unexplained predictive anticipatory effects belong in a category independent from, but potentially overlapping with, the three other categories of anticipatory effects already described. journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00390/full
Posted on: Sat, 27 Sep 2014 05:30:39 +0000
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