Psychology

Thomas Natsoulas

Professor Emeritus

Publications

The research interests of Dr. Natsoulas consist of theoretical and scholarly work on selected topics in the psychology of consciousness and perception. These topics include, among other things: (1) ordinary and technical concepts of consciousness; (2) the importance of being conscious; (3) the consciousness of people with complete forebrain commissurotomy; (4) Sigmund Freud's little-known conception of consciousness, and his perception-consciousness system of the psychical apparatus; (5) the ontology of subjectivity; (6) why things look to us as they do (i.e., Kurt Koffka's question); (7) William James's stream of consciousness and its central component "the self of all the other selves"; (8) the unique relation of special ownership in which we stand to our own mental-occurrence instances; (9) the visual perceptual "tunnel effect" (Michotte), as it relates to James J. Gibson's perception theory and to a special mode of functioning of the visual system that Dr. Natsoulas calls "reflective seeing," and Gibson called "viewing"; (10) theories of inner (second-order) consciousness, especially the popular appendage kind and the probably correct intrinsic (or self-intimational) kind; (11) the distinction between the object and the content of consciousness; (12) the distinction between the activity or process of visual perceiving and its component stream of visual perceptual experience; (13) the radical behaviorist (Skinnerian) conception of consciousness and feelings, including pain experience; (14) blindsight and consciousness; (15) tertiary consciousness, or the conscious (as opposed to the nonconscious) inner awareness that we have of parts of our mental life; (16) the presence of environmental objects to perceptual consciousness: ecological and phenomenological perspectives.