Research
My (Kathleen Akins) central iinterest in philosophy is the nature of mind and how we can explain it in naturalistic/scientific terms. For the most part, the questions that interest me are very old and traditional philosophical problems—the nature of intentionality (how we come to have thoughts that are about the world and ourselves), perception, the emotions, consciousness, persons and personal identity.
What unifies all of these investigations is a neuro-philosophical approach. I begin any project with the problem as traditionally conceived by philosophy; then I look at what recent neuroscience has unearthed on the topic. The task is then to use the empirical literature to re-conceive of the traditional philosophical problem while at the same time using the philosophical insights to drive forward the experiments in neuroscience. I regard my work as essentially interdisciplinary (although in practice I tend to spend more time reading neuroscience simply because of the sheer volume and complexity of the recent scientific literature).
Current Research Projects
Spectral Vision, a monograph co-authored with Martin Hahn and Lyle Crawford.
For the most part, we think of the human colour system as just one part of human vision, i.e. that part that is responsible for our seeing the world “in colour” as opposed to in shades of grey. This monograph starts by presenting a view called Spectral Theory, the view that human vision uses both luminance and wavelength information for a multitude of visual tasks, just one of which is seeing the surfaces of objects as having categorical colours (e.g. red, green, blue). This way of framing “colour vision” opens up some new ways of thinking about the evolution of human trichromatic colour vision (i.e. as constrained by a multitude of processes in human vision), of understanding our conscious perception of a coloured world (i.e. as a complex phenomenology produced by spectral processing, not unlike the phenomenology of luminance vision), and of thinking about the ontology of colour properties (here, a realist conception despite all appearances!).
The Czech/English Synaesthesia Project with Marcus Watson,, Lyle Crawford and Nazim Keven (SFU) and Jan Chromy (Charles University Prague).
Synaesthesia is an unusual condition in which people make unsual associations between the senses. For example, a colour-grapheme synaesthete sees/thinks of letters (written in black typeface) as having particular colours—e.g. “A” is fire engine red. Although it is now widely agreed that synaesthesia is a genuinely perceptual phenomenon, it is still not clear how or why certain people become synaesthetes. In our research, we testing the hypothesis that synaesthesia is an ability learned in childhood after the acquisition of colour naming, a skill learned in response to particularly difficult new cognitive/perceptual tasks (letter recognition and fluent reading). If this is correct, then one would expect to see a greater percentage of colour-grapheme synaesthetes in populations in which learning to recognize letters is particularly difficult. This is where the Czech language comes in. Unlike in English, every letter (grapheme) in Czech is associated with exactly one sound/phoneme, an example of what is called an orthographically transparent language. Depending upon dialect, English may have upwards of eight different phonemes associated with a single letter (think of saying “but”, “rude” and “upon”). This means that as a children, Czech speakers can learn to recognize letters by associating each letter with a known sound. English children will not have this “hook” when they learn to recognize letters. In this project, we are surveying large numbers of native Czech and English speakers to compare the incidence of colour-grapheme synaesthetes in the two different language populations with the incidence of other kinds of synaesthesia.
Neonate Imitation with Lyle Crawford and Nazim Kevin. One of the landmark findings in human neonate (newborn) research was Andrew Meltzoff’s surprising discovery that newborns can imitate the facial expressions of nearby adults. In his early results, Meltzoff recorded videos of infants, some only minutes after birth, making tongue “protrusions” and “O” shaped lips in imitation of the experimenter’s facial expressions. Prior to these experiments, human facial imitation was thought to begin around the age of two years old given the complexity of these actions. Genuine imitation of facial expression requires that the infant recognize the adult’s face as a face, but it also requires that the infant conceive of his or her own face as relevantly like the adult face perceived—and as capable of making a similar expression. All of this, one would have thought, requires rather a lot of sophisticated “wiring” in both the visual and motor areas. This is why Meltzoff’s findings were so very surprising. In this paper, we review the evidence for neonate imitation, show it to be inconclusive, and put forward an alternative hypothesis in terms of motor control and motor learning.