A Psychophysical Approach to Test: “The Bignetti Model”.
“The Bignetti Model” (TBM) is a comprehensive approach that considers cognition as a pure
neurobiological process (see Appendix). In TBM, Self and Free Will (FW) are self-feeding
illusions of the mind with a functional role in cognition.
According to both TBM features and hints from psychophysical bibliography, a “press/no-press” visual test was set up. If preliminary results reveal the presence of an experience dependent learning process, compatible with TBM, this makes reasonable to address a bottom-up investigation to neural correlates. It is a matter of fact that the neuronal correlates of the
learning curve remain undefined so further investigations with electrophysiology or imaging techniques.
B&W drawings with neat contours and few or no shading can facilitate immediate recognition, by means of a mental process named “continuity”. Time needed to identify each stimulus on the computer screen, has been estimated to be less than 40 msec by means of control experiments carried out with different subjects. These equations have been derived to deterministically predict probabilistic enzyme reactions, so that the metaphoric analogy with TBM in which action-decision mechanism is based on a probabilistic-deterministic model, is striking.
The term Saliency means a key attentional mechanism facilitating discrimination of various items and learning. Saliency might play a primary role in the first mental process of the participant
engaged in DTs, i.e. the attentional selection and categorization of the stimulus as soon as it appears.
In conclusion, the main concern of this work is to validate the theory of TBM by experimental means. The results of press/no-press DTs are compatible either with TBM or with the
current literature’s observations.
Psychol Cogn Sci Open J. 2017; 3(1): 24-35. doi: 10.17140/PCSOJ-3-121
