Entropy considerations are used to determine the types of subtle interactions (SI), or psi phenomena, that are consistent with the second law of thermodynamics. The analysis is preceded by a short tutorial on entropy and the second law of thermodynamics. For a coherent advanced (retrocausation) signal to exist, it would conflict with the second law in forward time because it would require a red...

Interference effects from semantically similar items are well-known in studies of single word production, where the presence of semantically similar distractor words slows picture naming. This article examines the consequences of this interference in sentence production and tests the hypothesis that in situations of high similarity-based interference, producers are more likely to omit one of th...

We designed an fMRI experiment comparing perception of human faces and robotic faces producing emotional expressions. The purpose of our experiment was to investigate engagement of different parts of the social brain by viewing these animate and inanimate agents. Both human and robotic face expressions evoked activity in face-responsive regions in the fusiform gyrus and STS and in the putative ...

We looked at how far students aged 10–17 years differentiate between the force and energy concepts for animates and inanimates. Within a structured interview format, participants described situations in which inanimate objects and animate agents interacted. Results showed that the younger students made no distinction between the two concepts for the inanimate objects. They regarded force and en...

A central feature of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is an impairment in 'social attention'--the prioritized processing of socially relevant information, e.g. the eyes and face. Socially relevant stimuli are also preferentially attended in a broader categorical sense, however: observers orient preferentially to people and animals (compared to inanimate objects) in complex natural scenes. To meas...

Communication in general requires a process for (a) producing an optimal form given a certain meaning, and recovering that meaning given the optimal form, and (b) arriving at an optimal interpretation given a certain form, and reproducing that form given the optimal interpretation (Blutner et al. 2006). Hence, optimal communication involves more than the sum of two unidirectional processes of o...

Communication in general requires a process for (a) producing an optimal form given a certain meaning, and recovering that meaning given the optimal form, and (b) arriving at an optimal interpretation given a certain form, and reproducing that form given the optimal interpretation (Blutner et al. 2006). Hence, optimal communication involves more than the sum of two unidirectional processes of o...

Our mental representation of object categories is hierarchically organized, and our rapid and seemingly effortless categorization ability is crucial for our daily behavior. Here, we examine responses of a large number (>600) of neurons in monkey inferior temporal (IT) cortex with a large number (>1,000) of natural and artificial object images. During the recordings, the monkeys performed a pass...