Non-sensory experiences represent almost all context information in consciousness. They condition most aspects of conscious cognition including voluntary retrieval, perception, monitoring, problem solving, emotion, evaluation, meaning recognition. Many peculiar aspects of non-sensory qualia (e.g., they resist being 'grasped' by an act of attention) are explained as adaptations shaped by the cog...

Sensory experience in early life shapes the mammalian brain. An impairment in the activity-dependent refinement of functional connections within developing visual cortex was identified here in a mouse model. Gene-targeted disruption of one isoform of glutamic acid decarboxylase prevented the competitive loss of responsiveness to an eye briefly deprived of vision, without affecting cooperative m...

According to the abductivist reply to skepticism, the continuity, coherence and repeatable regularities found in our sensory experiences cry out for explanation. Abductivists claim the best explanation of these features of our experience is that they reflect objective regularities in the world. They maintain that the hypothesis that our sense experiences are caused by objects having roughly the...

I here present some doubts about whether Mandik's (2010) proposed intermediacy and recurrence constraints are necessary and sufficient for agentive experience. I also argue that in order to vindicate the conclusion that agentive experience is an exclusively perceptual phenomenon (Prinz, 2007), it is not enough to show that the predictions produced by forward models of planned motor actions are ...

The sensibilities and varieties of expression gathered under what John Law describes as resources of the baroque do not suggest a method but an orientation to thinking and research that departs from dominant modes of knowing in the social sciences and humanities. This includes concerns with excess, non-coherence, the senses, Otherness, affect, embodiment, movement, and heterogeneity as explored...

Selecting and adopting the appropriate assessment method for conducting subjective quality assessments is a challenging task. The method decides whether the assessment is successful in delivering the correct answers to previously set up hypotheses. Therefore, in this paper we provide recommendations on test methods used in the domain of Sensory Experience. The proposed test methods comprise sin...

The phenomenon of a phantom limb is a common experience after a limb has been amputated or its sensory roots have been destroyed. A complete break of the spinal cord also often leads to a phantom body below the level of the break. Furthermore, a phantom of the breast, the penis, or of other innervated body parts is reported after surgical removal of the structure. A substantial number of childr...

The mammalian neocortex is composed of a variety of cell types organized in a highly interconnected circuit. GABAergic neurons account for only about 20% of cortical neurons. However, they show widespread connectivity and a high degree of diversity in morphology, location, electrophysiological properties and gene expression. In addition, distinct populations of inhibitory neurons have different...

In the visual and somatosensory systems, maturation of neuronal circuits continues for days to weeks after sensory stimulation occurs. Deprivation of sensory input at various stages of development can induce physiological, and often structural, changes that modify the circuitry of these sensory systems. Recent studies also reveal a surprising degree of plasticity in the mature visual and somato...

Almost all living species regularly explore environments that they experience as pleasant, aversive, arousing or frightening. We postulate that such exploratory behavior and emotional experience both are regulated based on the interdependent perception of one's body and stimuli that collectively define a spatial context such as a cliff. Here we examined this by testing if the interaction of the...