%0 Journal Article
%T Postdiction: its implications on visual awareness, hindsight, and sense of agency
%A Shinsuke Shimojo
%J Frontiers in Psychology
%D 2014
%I Frontiers Media
%R 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00196
%X There are a few postdictive perceptual phenomena known, in which a stimulus presented later seems causally to affect the percept of another stimulus presented earlier. While backward masking provides a classical example, the flash lag effect stimulates theorists with a variety of intriguing findings. The TMS-triggered scotoma together with ˇ°backward filling-inˇ± of it offer a unique neuroscientific case. Findings suggest that various visual attributes are reorganized in a postdictive fashion to be consistent with each other, or to be consistent in a causality framework. In terms of the underlying mechanisms, four prototypical models have been considered: the ˇ°catch up,ˇ± the ˇ°reentry,ˇ± the ˇ°different pathwayˇ± and the ˇ°memory revisionˇ± models. By extending the list of postdictive phenomena to memory, sensory-motor and higher-level cognition, one may note that such a postdictive reconstruction may be a general principle of neural computation, ranging from milliseconds to months in a time scale, from local neuronal interactions to long-range connectivity, in the complex brain. The operational definition of the ˇ°postdictive phenomenonˇ± can be applicable to such a wide range of sensory/cognitive effects across a wide range of time scale, even though the underlying neural mechanisms may vary across them. This has significant implications in interpreting ˇ°free willˇ± and ˇ°sense of agencyˇ± in functional, psychophysical and neuroscientific terms.
%K postdiction
%K flash lag
%K TMS
%K causality perception
%K hindsight
%K free will
%K sense of agency
%U http://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00196/abstract