BM0605: Joint WG Meeting & First Conference, Nov 20-21, Ghent (Belgium)— 1
Action BM0605:
Consciousness: A Transdisciplinary, Integrated Approach
First CONFERENCE,
Joint Working Groups Meeting
& 3rd Management Committee
November 20-21, 2008
Hotel Express Holiday Inn
Akkerhage 2, 9000 Gent, Belgium
WG1 : Fundamentals: T. Bayne & J.-M. Roy
Advancing our understanding of the concept of consciousness
WG2: Technologies: A.K. Engel & J.-D. Haynes
Advancing the technologies and data analysis used to assess brain function
WG3: Paradigms: R. Balas
Advancing the behavioural methods used to assess conscious states
WG4: Implications: S. Laureys & K.Vogeley
Assessing the ethical and societal implications of neuroscientific findings about consciousness
Local Organizer
Axel Cleeremans
Consciousness, Cognition & Computation Group
Université Libre de Bruxelles
50 avenue F.-D. Roosevelt CP 191, 1050 Bruxelles, Belgium
Tel. +32 2 6503296 - Fax. +32 2 6502209 -
First Scientific Session: Program Overview
THURSDAY 20 NOVEMBER 2008
09:30 – 18:00
08:30 – 9:00Welcome & registration
09:00 – 9:30 Introduction
Axel Cleeremans, chair
09:30 – 10:00Coffee break
10:00 – 12:30Independent Meetings of WG1-4
WG1 (Fundamentals)
WG2 (Technologies)
12:30 – 13:30Lunch & Poster session
13:30 – 16:00WG1 (Fundamentals, ctd’)
WG3 (Paradigms)
WG4 (Implications)
16:00 – 16:30Coffee break
16:30 – 18:303rd Management Committee Meeting
18:45Bus to Ghent Centre
19:00Evening guided visit of Ghent Centre
20:15Social Dinner
Second Scientific Session: Program Overview
FRIDAY 21 NOVEMBER 2008
09:30 – 17:00
09:00 Welcome
09:30 – 10:30First Keynote Lecture:
A neural stance on Consciousness
Victor Lamme,UvA, The Netherlands
10:30 – 11:00 Coffee break
11:00 – 11:30WG1 (Fundamentals) Plenary Presentation
Consciousness as environmental mediation
Adrian Cussins, NUC, Colombia
11:30 — 12:00 WG2 (Technologies) Plenary Presentation
Measuring Consciousness: From Behaviour to Neurodynamics
Anil Seth, Sussex, UK
12:30 — 13:00WG3 (Paradigms) Plenary Presentation
Various unconscious influences
Robert Balas, Poland
12:30 — 13:00WG4 (Implications) Plenary Presentation
Clinical and ethicals implications of disorders of consciousness
Steven Laureys, Belgium
13:00 – 14:30 Lunch & Poster Session
14:30 – 15:30Second Keynote Lecture:
Feelings of control: Conscious intention and sense of agency in human volition
Patrick Haggard, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, U.K.
15:30 – 16:00 Coffee break
16:00 – 17:00Joint discussion & conclusions
19:00Bus to city centre
19:30Dinner
First Scientific Session: Working Group Meetings
THURSDAY 20 NOVEMBER 2008
WG1: Fundamentals (J.-M. Roy & T. Bayne)
Acting Chairs: R. Chrisley & T. Froese
“Specifying the content of consciousness: Toward a scientific phenomenology”
As with any science, a science of consciousness requires an ability to specify its explananda (facts, events, etc. to be explained) and its explanantia (states, facts, events, properties, laws, etc.) that do the explaining. Conscious states (experiences) may be expected to play both of those roles. A science of consciousness, then, has a double need for a way to specify experiences, and to do so precisely, systematically, canonically and communicably. At least part of what is essential to most, if not all, experiences is their content — the way the experience presents the world as being. This group will discuss the fundamental issue of how the contents of consciousness are to be specified. How can images, virtual reality systems, new elicitation methods, art works, novel uses of language, technologies, et al, be used in a systematic way so as to enable a scientific study of consciousness?
10:00 — 10:30Specifying the content of consciousness: Toward a scientific phenomenology
R. Chrisley
Centre for Research in Cognitive Science (COGS), Dep. of Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. Tel: +44 (0) 1273 678581 or +44 (0) 1273 678195, Fax: +44 (0) 1273 877873, E-mail:
10:30 — 11:30Title TBA
A. Cussins
Dep. de Filosofia, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia. Tel: +57 (1) 316 5000 Ext. 16872, E-mail:
11:30 — 12:00Pain and content
E. Myin
Dept. Wijsbegeerte, Universiteit Antwerpen, Antwerpen, Belgium. Tel: +32 (0) 32204337, Fax: +32 (0) 32204420, E-mail:
12:00 — 12:30Images are not words, and there is a Cartesian theater
M. Stamenov
Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgary,
12:30 —13:30Lunch & Poster Session
13:30 — 14:30Title TBA
B. Smith
School of Philosophy, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK. Tel: +44 (0) 20 7631 6383, Fax: +44 (0) 20 7631 6564, E-mail:
14:30 — 15:00Discussion
15:00 —15:30The enactive torch: A technological bridge between eidetic and empirical psychology
T. Froese
Centre for Research in Cognitive Science (COGS), Dep. of Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. Tel: +44 (0) 1273 872948, Fax: +44 (0) 1273 877873, E-mail:
15:30 —16:00Consciousness, Imagery and Music
W. Duch
Department of Informatics, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland. Tel: +48 56 622 1543, Fax: +48 56 622 1543, E-mail:
First Scientific Session: Working Group Meetings
THURSDAY 20 NOVEMBER 2008
WG2: Technologies (A.K. Engel & J.-D. Haynes)
Acting Chair: A.K. Engel
“Dynamics of Consciousness”
The group will discuss how the spatiotemporal dynamics of neural populations and, specifically, large-scale interactions among brain areas are modified during changes of states or contents of consciousness. The discussion will also address the methodologies needed to uncover the dynamics of networks involved in the generation of conscious states, using noninvasive methods in humans and multisite recordings in non-human primates.
10:00 — 10:25Local gamma dynamics and visual awareness
C. Tallon-Baudry
CNRS LENA UPR640, 47 Bd de l'Hopital, 75651 Paris cedex 13, FRANCE, tel +33 142 161163, fax: +33 145 862537, email:
10:25 — 10:50The gamma-band on BrainTV
J.-P. Lachaux
INSERM U821, Brain Dynamics and Cognition, 69675 Bron Cedex, FRANCE, tel: +33 4 7213 8913, fax : +33 4 7213 8901, email:
10:50 — 11:15The estimation of cortical activity and connectivity from high resolution EEG recordings
F. Babiloni
Dept. Physiology and Pharmacology, Univ. "Sapienza" Rome, Italy, tel: +393287697914, fax: +390651501467, email:
11:15 — 11:40To do or not to do: The functional neuroanatomy of intending to do something or not
M. Brass
Dept. of Experimental Psychology. Ghent University, Henri Dunantlaan 2, 9000 Gent, BELGIUM, tel: +32 92646401, fax: +32 92646496, email:
11:40 — 12:05Cortical neurodynamics estimation: MEG simulation and empirical studies
S. Supek
Dept. of Physics, Faculty of Science, Bijenicka cesta 32, 10 000 Zagreb,
CROATIA, tel: +385 1 4605569, fax: +385 1 4680336, email:
12:05 — 12:30(Un)consciousness through coherence
A.K. Engel
Dept. of Neurophysiology and Pathophysiology, University Medical Center Hamburg- Eppendorf, Martinistr. 52, 20246 Hamburg, GERMANY, tel: +49 40 42803 6170, fax: +49 40 42803 7752, email:
First Scientific Session: Working Group Meetings
THURSDAY 20 NOVEMBER 2008
WG3: Paradigms (R. Balas)
“Various manifestations of unconscious influences”
This group will discuss various influences of unconsciously processed information on explicit judgments. With special focus on methods used to assess awareness the topics covered will include implicit learning, evaluative condtioning, priming as well as neural bases of consciousness.
13:30 — 13:55TMS in disorders of consciousness
N. Lapitskaya
Coma Science Group, Cyclotron Research Centre/University of Liège, Belgium and Hammel Neurorehabilitation and Research Centre/University of Aarhus, Denmark, Allée du 6 août n° 8, Sart Tilman B30, 4000 Liège, Belgium, tel.: +32 4 366 23 16 or 36 87 or 85 55, email:
13:55 — 14:20The discrepancy between audiovisual temporal order and simultaneity judgements. A research proposal
M. Binder
Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University, al. Mickiewicza 3, 31-130, Krakow, Poland, tel:+48 12663 24 59, fax: +48 12663 24 60, email;
14:20 — 14:45How to know the content of non-reportable consciousness
V. Lamme
Cognitive Neuroscience Group, University of Amsterdam, Room A626 Dept. of Psychology, Roeterstraat 15, 1018 WB Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Tel: +31 20 5256675, fax: +31 20 6391656, email:
14:45 — 15:10Intuition: How unconscious roots bear conscious fruits
S. Topolinsky
Department of Psychology II, University Wuerzburg, Roentgenring 10, 97070 Wuerzburg, Germany, tel:+49 (0) 931 312285, fax: +49 (0) 931 312812, email:
15:10 — 15:35The feeling of warmth scale, post-decision wagering and confidence ratings as a measure of knowledge access inartificial grammar learning task
M. Wierzchon
Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University, al. Mickiewicza 3, 31-130, Krakow, Poland, tel: 48 692 438 841, fax: 48 12 623 76 99, email:
15:35 — 16:00Conflict adaptation effects in implicit sequence learning L. Jiménez
Department of Psychology, University Santiago de Compostela, Campus Sur, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, tel.: +34 981 56 3100 Ext 13914 , fax.: +34 981 528072, email:
First Scientific Session: Working Group Meetings
THURSDAY 20 NOVEMBER 2008
WG4: Implications (S. Laureys & K. Vogeley)
“Clinical, societal and ethical implications of disturbed consciousness”
The study of consciousness raises substantial clinical, societal, and ethical implications. We here focus on the study of altered states of consciousness, to consciousness in pathological cases (such as vegetative state), to the design of new ways to study resting state activity, and to a consideration of the ethical and societal implications of the findings. Consciousness research is especially interesting with respect to so-called altered states of consciousness, which provide another important window to the contents of subjectively experienced conscious states. These comprise disturbances of the level of consciousness (e.g.sleep, anesthesia, vegetative state, coma) or of the content of consciousness (e.g. hallucinatory or illusory experiences).
13:30 — 13:55Imaging the Brain at rest
S. Rombouts
Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Postzone CS-2, P.O. Box 9600, 2300 RC Leiden, The Netherlands. tel: +31 71 5264404, fax: +32 71 5248256, email:
13:55 — 14:20A Perturb-and-Measure Approach to study Consciousness
M. Massimini
Universita degli Studi di Milano, Milano, Italy. email:
14:20 — 14:45Clinical and ethical challenges for brain-computer interfaces A. Kübler
Department of Psychology I, University of Würzburg, Marcusstrasse 9-11, 97070 Würzburg, Germany. tel: +49 931 31 2836, fax: +49 931 31 2831, email: .
14:45 — 15:10Clinical and ethical challenges for artificial manipulation of of consciousness: Deep Brain Stimulation
D. De Ridder
Faculteit Geneeskunde, Vg. Neurowetenschappen, Universiteit Antwerpen, Universiteitsplein 1, 2610 Antwerpen, België. tel: +32 3 821 45 40, email:
15:10 — 15:35Social Cognition and the default mode of the brain
K. Vogeley
Klinikum der Universität zu Köln, Kerpener Str. 62, 50924 Köln, Germany, tel: +49 221 478 87155, fax: +49 221 478 3738, email:
15:35 — 16:00How conscious is the resting state?
M. Boly
Coma Science Group, Cyclotron Research Centre, University of Liège, Sart-Tilman-B30, 4000 Liège, Belgium, tel: +32 4 366 23 16, fax: +32 4 366 29 46, email:
Poster Presentations
THURSDAY 20 NOVEMBER 2008 —12:30-13:30
FRIDAY 21 NOVEMBER 2008 — 13:00-14:30
WG1 (Fundamentals)
- No posters presented in this WG -
WG2 (Technologies)
P2-1Occipital gamma power and visual masking
Talis Bachmann
University of Tartu, Tallinn, ESTONIA
P2-2Functional connectivity in the resting state default network reflects the level of consciousness in brain-injured patients: an fMRI study in brain death, comatose, vegetative, minimally conscious and locked-in states
M. Boly1,2, A. Vanhaudenhuyse1, L. Tshibanda3, M-A. Bruno1, P. Boveroux1,4, Q. Noirhomme1, C. Schnakers1, A. Demertzi1, D. Ledoux1,4, B. Lambermont5, G. Moonen2, R-F. Dondelinger3, C. Phillips1, P. Maquet1,2, S. Laureys1,2
1Cyclotron Research Center,2Neurology Department, 3Radiology Department, 4Anesthesiology Department, 5Internal Medicine Department, University of Liège, BELGIUM
P2-3The study of attention in adults using event related EEG components
Silvana Markovska-Simoska1, Nadja Meier2
1Bioinformatics Unit, ICEIM-Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts, MACEDONIA; 2Brain and Trauma Foundation Grison Switzerland, University of Berne, SWITZERLAND
P2-4Searching for behavioral signs of consciousness: a study on blinking to visual threat
A. Vanhaudenhuyse 1, J. Giacino 2, C. Schnakers 1, K. Kalmar 2, C. Smart 2, M-A Bruno 1, O. Gosseries 1, G. Moonen1, S. Laureys 1
1Cyclotron Research Centre & Neurology Dept, University of Liège, BELGIUM; 2JFK Johnson Rehabilitation Institute, New Jersey, USA
WG3 (Paradigms)
P3-1 The cerebellar electrocortical activity in wakefulness
J. Podgorac, Lj. Martac, G. Grbic, M. Culic, G. Kekovic, S. Sekulic*
Institute for Biological Research “Sinisa Stankovic”, University of Belgrade, Belgrade, *Medical Faculty, University of Novi Sad, Novi Sad, Serbia
P3-2 Unconscious rule application
Filip Van Opstal, Wim Gevers, Magda Osman, Tom Verguts, ULB, Belgium
P3-3 Contingent negative variation – an electrophysiological parameter of learning in subjects with high anxiety
Sanja Mancevska, Liljana Bozinovska, Adrijan Bozinovski1, Department of Physiology, Medical Faculty, University "Ss.Cyril and Methodius", Skopje,
1 American College, Skopje
P3-4 What the recovery of structure-from-motion can tell about the adaptive brain: cue combination and sensory conflict
Nadeja Bocheva, Institute of Neurobiology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria
WG4 (Implications)
P4-1Dissociating Neural Correlates of Detection and Evaluation of Social Gaze.
A. Georgescua, B. Kuzmanovica, , S. Eickhoffb,c, N. J. Shahb,d, G. Bentee, G. R. Finkb,d,f, K.Vogeleya,d
aDepartment of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Hospital Cologne
bInstitute of Neurosciences and Biophysics — Medicine (INB3), Research Center Juelich
cDepartment of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Hospital Aachen
dBrain Imaging Center West, Research Center Juelich
eDepartment of Psychology, University of Cologne
fDepartment of Neurology, University Hospital Cologne
P4-2Vegetative and the minimally conscious state: Ethical considerations
Athena Demertzi,Cyclotron Research Centre, University of Liège, Belgium
Abstracts
Keynote Lectures
K1
A neural stance on Consciousness
V.A.F. Lamme
Cognitive Neuroscience Group, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Behavior is considered the gold standard of consciousness: when someone says he is conscious, he is, and when he says not, he isn?t. However, this makes it impossible to find the neural mechanism of conscious experience per se. We will always conflate consciousness with cognition. Therefore, arguments from neuroscience should be allowed to shape a definition of consciousness, together with, yet in some cases overruling behavioral evidence. I will show how such a neuro-behavioral definition of consciousness makes it possible to dissociate consciousness from cognition, explains the key features of conscious experience, and opens up a path towards solving the hard problem.
K2
Feelings of control: Conscious intention and sense of agency in human volition
Patrick Haggard
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, U.K.
The capacity for voluntary action is seen as essential to human nature. Yet neuroscience and behaviourist psychology have traditionally dismissed the topic as unscientific, perhaps because the mechanisms that cause actions are unclear. New research has identified networks of brain areas, including the preSMA, the anterior prefrontal cortex and the parietal cortex, that underlie voluntary action. These areas generate information for forthcoming actions, and also cause the distinctive conscious experience of intending and controlling one's own actions. Volition consists of a series of decisions regarding whether to act, what action to perform and when to perform it. Neuroscientific accounts of voluntary action may inform debates about the nature of individual responsibility.
WG1 (Fundamentals)
ORAL PRESENTATIONS
T1-1
Specifying the content of consciousness: Toward a scientific phenomenology
Ron Chrisley
Centre for Research in Cognitive Science (COGS), Dep. of Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. Tel: +44 (0) 1273 678581 or +44 (0) 1273 678195, Fax: +44 (0) 1273 877873, E-mail:
The central themes of the workshop are introduced. After motivating the requirement, in a science of consciousness, for a means of specifying the content of particular experiences, standard ways of doing so, and their limitations, are examined. In particular, the inability for conceptual, linguistic specifications, such as "that"-clauses, to capture the non-conceptual content of experience are reviewed. Alternative means of specifying the content of experience are considered and evaluated with respect to several criteria, including precision, communicability, objectivity, and projectability.
T1-2
Title TBA
A. Cussins
Dep. de Filosofia, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia. Tel: +57 (1) 316 5000 Ext. 16872, E-mail:
-abstract forthcoming –
T1-3
Pain and content
Erik Myin
Dept. Wijsbegeerte, Universiteit Antwerpen, Antwerpen, Belgium. Tel: +32 (0) 32204337, Fax: +32 (0) 32204420, E-mail:
Can the conscious experience of pain be understood by a specification of its alleged content? According philosophers who subscribe to intentionalism, it can. These philosophers think the qualititative feel of pain is identical to what is represented by states of pain. Two recent intentionalist proposals for the specification of the content of pain exist: one according to which pain is mainly about the registration of internal damage, another according to which the content of pain is imperative rather than descriptive. Relying both on data and theory in current pain research and on philosophical argument, it will be shown that neither intentionalist option works. Both intensionalist approaches fail to do proper justice to the fact that pain has an anticipatory function: it often functions to avoid initial damage, rather than that it has a purely registrational or restorative function. Another major stumbling block is that the affective-motivational aspect of pain, acknowledged in most current pain theories as an essential factor besides a sensory-discriminative aspect, resists any analysis in terms of content, be it registrational or imperative. From this case study of intentionalism and pain, the conclusion will be drawn that explanatory role of the notion of content in any theory of experience will be much more limited than theorists of intentionalist stripe have hoped for. This should be not seen as problematic, however, because, so it will be argued, the case of pain indicates that a theory of conscious experience should be descriptive rather explanatory.
T1-4
Images are not words and there is a Cartesian theatre
Max Stamenov
Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Bulgary,
The most popular folk model of the way we ‘have’ mental contents is along the lines of a Cartesian theatre. Philosophers of mind have presented barrages of arguments against it, esp. after the appearance of Dennett (1991). These arguments are based on a certain set of (mis)conceptions what this model is supposed to represent and in what way(s). The first problem with the Cartesian theatre is that it represents on a par with each other (in a single image) both the subject and object of consciousness. The second problem with it is that it implies that the object of consciousness (the explicit mental content) has structure symmetric to that of a sentence describing it. The third problem is related to the way of mapping of the structure of consciousness to that of a sentence with embedded (via recursion) that-sentence in a report about it, etc. If the Cartesian theatre has many flaws, why is it proposed here as a model of consciousness with potential heuristic value? The point of this paper is that the structure of consciousness, the structure of the explicit mental content and the structure of language must not and do not coincide. The best way to show and appreciate the similarities and differences between them is a model along the lines of a Cartesian theatre.
T1-5
Title TBA
Barry Smith
School of Philosophy, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK. Tel: +44 (0) 20 7631 6383, Fax: +44 (0) 20 7631 6564, E-mail:
-abstract forthcoming –
T1-6
The Enactive Torch: A technological bridge between eidetic and empirical psychology
T. Froese
Centre for Research in Cognitive Science (COGS), Dep. of Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. Tel: +44 (0) 1273 872948, Fax: +44 (0) 1273 877873, E-mail:
The method of eidetic intuition (Wesenschau) was an important aspect of the early phenomenology of Husserl. However, the essences which are intuited in this manner, namely by a kind of imaginative ‘free variation’, are not only difficult to obtain in practice, but also necessarily limited by our imagination in principle. Moreover, such ideal essences have little implication for developing our understanding of the circumstances related to our factual existence in the world. Thus, as the phenomenological tradition developed further, especially in terms of recognizing the importance of embodiment and situatedness, it became crucial to develop a methodology that was more adequate to the concreteness of actual existence.
One popular approach, pioneered by Merleau-Ponty and continued by others today, is to turn to empirical psychology in order to analyze case studies of pathological conditions. These represent a kind of ‘factual variation’ of human existence which can help us to determine essential aspects of consciousness that would be difficult (if not impossible) to simply intuit imaginatively. However, this methodology also poses significant difficulties to the phenomenological tradition, especially in terms of its inherent lack of researchers’ first-person access to the phenomena in question, and thus the impossibility of proper intersubjective verification.
Here we propose that certain technological interfaces, such as the Enactive Torch (Froese & Spiers 2007), can provide a way forward by enabling a systematic variation of (perceptual) lived experience that can potentially be available on a first-person basis for all interested researchers. Moreover, it points to a way of capturing experience by means of a practice based in sharing technology rather than linguistic specification.
Froese, T. & Spiers, A. (2007), “Toward a Phenomenological Pragmatics of Enactive Perception”, Proc. of the 4th Int. Conf. on Enactive Interfaces, Grenoble, France: Association ACROE, pp. 105-108
T1-7