Events

Epistemically transformative experiences are experiences that bring about epistemic transformation. One cannot know, or run a mental simulation of, what it would be like to have those experiences before undergoing them. Existing discussions of transformative experiences mostly centre on acquiring new identities (e.g., becoming a parent) or new sensory capacities (e.g., seeing colours). By contrast, the standard view holds that memory cannot bring about epistemically transformative experiences: the remembered past experience e itself is (no longer) epistemically transformative for you, nor is the experience of remembering e. This view is supported by several seemingly plausible reasons: first, when undergoing an experience e that is later remembered, one already knows what e is like; second, an alleged function of episodic memory is to store what-it-is-like knowledge of past experiences; third, episodic memory of e is itself regarded as a form of mental simulation of e. This paper challenges the standard view. I illustrate that (1) the process of remembering itself are sometimes epistemically transformative, and (2) some remembered experiences are epistemically transformative. The upshot is that we should reexamine our understanding of epistemic transformation, as well as the function, the phenomenology, and the epistemic generativity of episodic memory.

Are there emotional episodes that lack phenomenal consciousness? I first provide an overview of some seemingly compelling pieces of evidence in favor of Unconscious Emotion, explaining their key limitations. Then, I analyze a study by Winkielman et al. (2005b) that shows behavior indicative of an emotional change while subjects’ reports do not indicate such a change. While I take this to be the best putative evidence for unconscious emotion, I argue that an explanation of subjects’ behavior in terms of unconscious emotion is not superior to an explanation that posits that subjects’ emotional experience changed but subjects fail to notice or verbalize this change. From this, I conclude that we should either be agnostic about the existence of unconscious emotional episodes or form our view based on independent background commitments regarding the methodology or nature of consciousness or emotion. To facilitate the latter strategy, I survey the resulting theoretical landscape, exploring the main theoretical options with respect to mutual inconsistencies, relations of evidential support, and noteworthy implications.

What is perception? The most intuitive and influential answer to this question has long been the one given by David Marr: To see the world is “to know what is where by looking” — to transform light into representations of objects and their features, located somewhere in space. But is this all that perception delivers? Consider the figure to the right; certainly you see some colored shapes, as well as where they are located. Yet, beyond this, you may also see how they relate to one another: The green piece can fit into the others, and even create a new object with a shape of its own.
In this talk, I present evidence that perception extracts relations between objects in much the same way as it processes the objects themselves, and that these relations are abstract, structured, and surprisingly sophisticated. We’ll explore (and experience) the perception of several sophisticated relations between objects, including combining, supporting, containing, covering, and fastening — as well as relational “illusions” in which objects appear to interact with mysteriously invisible entities. Together, this work suggests that we see not only “what” and “where”, but also “how”.

Abstract: Trust is one of the most popular concepts in Human–Robot Interaction (HRI)—but also one of the most misunderstood. In this talk, we argue that HRI research has oversimplified trust by treating perceived trustworthiness as a stand-in for trust itself, often ignoring the risk and vulnerability that make trust meaningful in the first place. By revisiting trust theory, measurements, and common research
paradigms, we uncover key “trust issues” in HRI and propose ways to build more rigorous and insightful future research on trust in HRI.

Predictive Brain Talk Series 2026 (Hybrid) in person: MB7/159 Zoom: https://ruhr-uni-bochum.zoom-x.de/j/68193768258?pwd=PIr8naXEpVt1aXGLUY9g0MSFpjPyg2.1 Meeting ID: 681 9376 8258.     Passwort: 534201

E. B. Holt’s dissertation, The Motor Element in Vision, earned him the PhD in 1901 for empirical
research he conducted at Harvard’s psychology laboratory under Hugo Münsterberg. Later
published in polished form as “Eye-Movement and Central Anaesthesia” (Langfeld 1946), the
work seeks to explain why visual awareness is suppressed during voluntary eye movement (more
precisely, during what today would be called voluntary saccades; Holt 1903). A pointed
illustration of this phenomenon had already been documented in the psychological literature by
the late 19th century: it is difficult, under normal conditions, to see your own eyeball move in a
mirror. Holt’s dissertation project is to experimentally isolate this phenomenon and then explain
why it occurs.

In this talk, I shall examine Holt’s experimental work, which is interesting for several reasons.
Holt is a founding member of the New Realists, and an important influence (along with James)
on Russell’s neutral monism. Although philosophers often think of New Realism and Russellian
monism as quite conceptual, we will find that these movements have at least one important root
in experimental psychology. In particular, I will show that Holt’s philosophical thinking about
the relationship between consciousness and the body (as exemplified in later works like Holt
1912, 1914) took early shape in the context of his experimental work. Second, Holt’s
interpretation of his own experiments explicitly appealed to Münsterberg’s “action theory” of
consciousness, which is a step more radical than James’s better-known work. In James’s catch-
phrase, “consciousness is motor,” the “is” is the is of predication, not identity (Klein 2025); but
Münsterberg argued that contents become conscious in virtue of stimuli getting connected in the
right way with motor discharge. Hence Holt’s experimental work can be understood as an
important step in the radicalization of philosophical and psychological views associated with
James’s early work on mind, moving such functionalist thinking down the path towards
behaviorism.