The imagination: Cognitive, pre-cognitive, and meta-cognitive aspects

Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science

“…The underlying idea is that we do not just 'see' what there is but that we also import or project certain elements into perception. However, paying special attention to the differenceswithin perception -between those elements that can be explained with reference to present stimuli and those that cannot surely amounts to important research into the nature of perception and does not require representationalism (O'Connor and Aardema 2005;Lohmar 2008;Lennon 2009 forthcoming). Recent research on 'change blindness' (the failure to perceive even great changes in a perceived scene), 'inattentional blindness' (the failure to perceive events outside one's attentional focus), and 'filling-in' or 'perceptual completion' (the seeing of a figure as complete although parts of it are outside the visual field) has stirred a debate on the so-called 'grand illusion' of perception (Noë 2002a).…”

Between emotion, imagination and cognition: Play as a hybrid neuro-evolutionary concept in bridging Saussure, Hegel and Alexander von Humboldt

“…Th e mirror system may help facilitate our foreseeing of possibilities or potential developments before we decide to take action. At the starting point of observing any kind of situation (either in art or in nature), patterns of our neural circuits of perceiving and imagining are not very diff erent, rather, they are almost blended -they collaborate to create perspectives for further applications (O'Connor, Aardema 2005;Gallagher 2006;Kaag 2009). Aft er taking action to explore a situation (including watching, assimilating, discovering and interpreting sensory forms), we become more or less removed from the way we were in the fi rst place.…”

An Ontology for Comparative Cognition: A Functional Approach

“…A third level of such processing, metacognitive processing, is described in humans as thinking about thinking (Hacker & Bol, 2004;O'Connor & Aardema, 2005). Sloman (1999) refers to this term as meta-management or reflexive.…”

“…In a deliberative process, options may be constructed and evaluated, and plans created. This process can be thought of as using imagination, an internal simulation of interaction with the environment (O'Connor &Aardema, 2005;Shanahan, 2005), in the service of decision making, problem solving or planning. Once again, there is a large psychological literature devoted to this topic under various names (Busemeyer, Medin, & Hastie, 1995;Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky, 1982).…”