First-person dimensions of mental agency in visual counting of moving objects

Abstract

Counting objects, especially moving ones, is an important capacity that has been intensively explored in experimental psychology and related disciplines. The common approach is to trace the three counting principles (estimating, subitizing, serial counting) back to functional constructs like the Approximate Number System and the Object Tracking System. While usually attempts are made to explain these competing models by computational processes at the neural level, their first-person dimensions have been hardly investigated so far. However, explanatory gaps in both psychological and philosophical terms may suggest a methodologically complementary approach that systematically incorporates introspective data. For example, the mental-action debate raises the question of whether mental activity plays only a marginal role in otherwise automatic cognitive processes or if it can be developed in such a way that it can count as genuine mental action. To address this question not only theoretically, we conducted an exploratory study with a moving-dots task and analyze the self-report data qualitatively and quantitatively on different levels. Building on this, a multi-layered, consciousness-immanent model of counting is presented, which integrates the various counting principles and concretizes mental agency as developing from pre-reflective to increasingly conscious mental activity.

Voluntary auditory change: First-person access to agentive aspects of attention regulation

“…Instead, we endorse McAdams' phenomenal conclusion that "we actively strive to make sense out of the everchanging array of sounds, putting together parts that belong together and separating out conflicting information" (McAdams, 2002, p. 439). Regarding such elementary activities as "separating out" and "putting together", we suggest executive intentions as a more process-related and phenomenally conscious level the explanatory power of which we already showcased in previous work (Wagemann & Raggatz, 2021). So, one aim of the present study is to find out whether such a set of conscious perceptual intentions can be concretized in terms of attention regulation by involving first-person observation.…”

“…As reported in the data analysis section, 6 out of 7 double-coded segments were confirmed by coders, and now we can add that all these double-encodings consisted of consecutive categories: While combinations Turning Away/Producing and Turning Toward/Perceiving occurred one time each, Producing/Turning Toward occurred four times. As argued in our earlier study (Wagemann & Raggatz, 2021), we consider this a possible indication that the nominal categories could be interpreted as successive phases of a mental process structure. This is further substantiated by the logical independency of the categories as well as their logical relations.…”

“…The third level is about different aspects of intention related to the activities of the second level (Table 3). Also, this analytic level can be traced to previous work (Wagemann & Raggatz, 2021), as explained above, and thus can be seen to be driven by prior theory building, too.…”

“…Second, from a quantitative perspective, we found that this structure adapts to audition and vision based on characteristic frequency patterns of the two stimulus-distanced activity forms (Producing, Turning Toward) which, moreover, suggests a differentiation of Posner and Petersen's model of attentional shift regarding the middle phase of reorienting. While with view on our previous studies the external validity of this mental activity structure is initially strengthened (Wagemann et al, 2018;Wagemann, 2020Wagemann, , 2021Wagemann & Raggatz, 2021;Wagemann & Weger, 2021), it will have to be further tested in experimental work. To this end, we pinpoint two exemplary aspects to be taken up in further research: On the one hand, the limitations of the current sample in terms of gender, age, and educational background, for example, must be overcome.…”

“…Introspection, if deployed in such a systematic and rigorous way, is not too far from meditation which recently turned out to provide promising cues for an understanding of mental action beyond content dependency (Upton & Brent, 2018). Aggregating the two stimulus-oriented (TT, PE) and the two stimulus-averted (TA, PR) activities, respectively, we obtain what in meditation research is known as focused attention and open monitoring (see, e.g., Lutz et al, 2008) and which can also serve as an access route to agentive aspects of cognitive and perceptual problem-solving (Wagemann & Raggatz, 2021). Apart from content-dependent attentional processing, a meditation-based approach to mental action and agentive awareness can already be found in Steiner's 1918 edition of the Philosophy of freedom in which he grants mental activity the option of self-perception: "On the one hand, intuitively experienced thinking is an active process taking place in the human spirit, on the other hand it is also a spiritual percept grasped without a physical sense organ.…”