题目：Is consciousness a blessing or a curse? （意识:是恩典还是诅咒？）

主讲人: 林志成博士（美国明尼苏达大学博士、华盛顿大学博士后）

时间：6月12日（周四）下午3:30-5:30

地点： 学院214会议室

内容简介:

Why do we have consciousness? What is it for? Understanding the function of consciousness is one of most fundamental and difficult problem in science. In this talk, I will focus on consciousness in the visual domain, things that we see and become conscious of. My approach is to contrast visual processes that do not require awareness with those that do. The first part of the talk will address a basic measurement question—what is the proper way of measuring awareness in the first place?—in the context of a new phenomenon called priming of awareness. The second part of the talk will provide evidence showing that integrating information from two different objects (e.g., whether two shapes are the same or different) can occurs without awareness, but binding of shape and color within an object—such as recognizing an object as a red apple or a green pear, but not the reverse—requires conscious awareness. This latter finding points to feature binding as a unique function endowed by conscious awareness—consciousness as a blessing. The final part of the talk will show that robust attentional orienting and alerting can be evoked by invisible, but not visible, cues; in other words, visual attention can be better captured when we are not aware of its source—consciousness as a curse. Consciousness therefore can be both a blessing and a curse in visual processing.

主讲人简介：

林志成博士，2007年本科毕业于北京大学心理系，2012年于美国明尼苏达大学心理系获得博士学位，导师为何生教授。目前在美国华盛顿大学从事博士后工作。林志成博士的工作主要集中在视觉、注意和意识等研究领域。至今已在Journal of experimental psychology: Human Perception and Performance, Cognition, Psychological Science, Journal of vision, Biological Psychology等国际著名学术杂志发表论文十余篇，并在Cortex, Behavioral and Brain Sciences以及Journal of neuroscience杂志发表三篇评论文章。林志成博士于2008年获得美国心理学会早期研究者奖，于2013年获得明尼苏达大学最佳论文奖，于2014年获得意识科学研究学会威廉詹姆斯奖。