You are not what you feel you are

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences -     

Seeing what you hear: Visual feedback improves pitch recognition

The present study examined the effect of visual feedback on the ability to recognise and consolidate pitch information. We trained two groups of nonmusicians to play a piano piece by ear, having one group receiving uninterrupted audiovisual feedback, while allowing the other only to hear, but not see their hand on the keyboard. Results indicate that subjects for whom visual information was deprived showed significantly poorer ability to recognise pitches from the musical piece they had learned. These results are interesting since pitch recognition ability would not intuitively seem to rely on visual feedback. In addition, we show that subjects with previous experience in computer touch-typing made fewer errors during training when trained with no visual feedback, but did not show improved pitch recognition ability posttraining. Our results demonstrate how sensory redundancy increases robustness of learning, and further encourage the use of audiovisual training procedures for facilitating the learning of new skills.     

I feel you feel what I feel: Perceived perspective‐taking promotes victims' conciliatory attitudes because of inferred emotions in the offender

In the context of bullying in a nursing workplace, we test the argument that an offender's perspective‐taking promotes victim conciliation, mediated by perceived perspective‐taking, that is, the extent to which the victim perceives the offender as taking their perspective. Perceived perspective‐taking facilitates the attribution of moral emotions (remorse, etc.) to the offender, thereby promoting conciliatory victim responses. However, perceived perspective‐taking would be qualified by the extent to which the severity of consequences expressed in the offender's perspective‐taking matches or surpasses the severity for the victim. In Studies 1 and 2 (Ns = 141 and 122, respectively), victims indicated greater trust and/or forgiveness when the offender had taken the victim's perspective. This was sequentially mediated by perceived perspective‐taking and victim's inference that the offender had felt moral emotions. As predicted, in Study 2 (but not Study 1), severity of consequences qualified victims' perceived perspective‐taking. Study 3 (N = 138) examined three potential mechanisms for the moderation by severity. Victims attributed greater perspective‐taking to the offender when the consequences were less severe than voiced by the offender, suggesting victims' appreciation of the offender's generous appraisal. Attributions of perspective‐taking and of moral emotions to the offender may play an important role in reconciliation processes. Key outcome: To the extent that victims perceive the offender as taking their perspective (perceived perspective‐taking), they infer that the offender feels more moral emotions, prompting victims to be more conciliatory. Perceived perspective‐taking benefits from the offender over‐stating the consequences to the victim.     

Seeing what is not seen

This paper connects ideas from twentieth century Gestalt psychology, experiments in vision science, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception. I propose that when we engage in simple sensorimotor tasks whose successful completion is open, our behavior may be motivated by practical perceptual awareness alone, responding to invariant features of the perceptual field that are invisible to other forms of perceptual awareness. On this view, we see more than we think we see, as evidenced by our skillful bodily behavior.     

Seeing yourself helps you see others

It has been proposed that self-face representations are involved in interpreting facial emotions of others. We experimentally primed participants' self-face representations. In Study 1, we assessed eye tracking patterns and performance on a facial emotion discrimination task, and in Study 2, we assessed emotion ratings between self and nonself groups. Results show that experimental priming of self-face representations increases visual exploration of faces, facilitates the speed of facial expression processing, and increases the emotional distance between expressions. These findings suggest that the ability to interpret facial expressions of others is intimately associated with the representations we have of our own faces.     

How you lie affects what you remember

We investigated how telling different types of lies may impact memory. Participants studied pictures of objects, and later lied and told the truth about these and new objects once or multiple times by describing them or by denying they had seen them. Forty-eight hours later, participants were tested on their source memory. Results revealed that participants had good memory for having falsely described a never-seen object, but relatively poor memory for having falsely denied seeing a studied object. These results suggest that telling certain types of lies may make a person more likely to forget having lied. In addition, repeated truthful denials of having seen a picture paradoxically increased false memories for having seen it. Thus, telling the truth does not always prevent the possibility of memory distortion.     

Getting what you want

Philosophical Studies - It is commonly accepted that if an agent wants p, then she has a desire that is satisfied in exactly the worlds where p is true. Call this the ‘Satisfaction-is-Truth...     

Psychological distance and emotional experience: what you see is what you get

Recent research suggests that perceiving negative emotion-eliciting scenes approaching intensifies the associated felt emotion, while perceiving emotion-eliciting scenes receding weakens the associated felt emotion (Muhlberger, Neumann, Wieser, & Pauli, 2008). In the present studies, we sought to extend these findings by examining the effects of imagining rather than perceiving such changes to negative emotion-eliciting scenes. Across three studies, we found that negative scenes generally elicited less negative responses and lower levels of arousal when imagined moving away from participants and shrinking, and more negative responses and higher levels of arousal when imagined moving toward participants and growing, as compared to the responses elicited by negative scenes when imagined unchanged. Patterns in responses to neutral scenes undergoing the same imagined transformations were similar on ratings of emotional arousal, but differed on valence-generally eliciting greater positivity when imagined moving toward participants and growing, and less positivity when imagined moving away from participants and shrinking. Moreover, for these effects to emerge, participants reported it necessary to explicitly imagine scenes moving closer or farther. These findings have implications for emotion regulation, and suggest that imagined spatial distance plays a role in mental representations of emotionally salient events.     

Seeing what you ought to see: The role of contextual factors in the social perception of achievement emotions

To assess the impact of context information on emotion perception, participants saw a picture of a male or female person with either a neutral, happy or sad facial expression and received information about the context in which the picture was taken. Their task was to rate the emotion actually expressed in the photo (i.e., focal emotions) as well as emotions not actually expressed (i.e., non-focal emotions) and inferences extracted from them. We predicted and found that context information affected both the perception of emotions and the inferences that the observers drew from them. Perceivers used context information in order to make sense of what was perceived to the extent that in the case of neutral expressions and for non-focal emotions, they “see” things that do not actually exist.     

Nonconscious goals can shape what people want to feel

Goals can determine what people want to feel (e.g., Tamir et al., 2008), but can they do so even when they are primed outside of conscious awareness? In two studies, participants wanted to feel significantly less angry after they were implicitly primed with a collaboration goal, compared to a neutral prime. These effects were found with different implicit priming manipulations, direct and indirect measures of emotional preferences, and when controlling for concurrent emotional experiences. The effects were obtained in social contexts in which the potential for collaboration was relatively higher (Study 1) and lower (Study 2). Also, similar effects were found when collaboration was activated nonconsciously (Studies 1–2) and consciously (Study 2). By showing that nonconscious goals can shape emotional preferences, we demonstrate that what people want to feel can be determined by factors they are unaware of.     

Saying what you mean, meaning what you say: language, interaction and interpretation

As analysts, we strive to say what we mean, which involves understanding the other person's communication, finding the appropriate form of words to articulate what we have understood, and expressing them in the tone of voice which can be heard. Meaning what we say refers to the authenticity of our response, that what we say is sincere. My theme touches on different ways of saying what we mean and how this can affect the meaning of what we say. Some of the issues are aesthetic, some grammatical. How some sentence structures lead to closing off communication while others open it.     

How thinking about what could have been affects how we feel about what was

Episodic counterfactual thoughts (CFT) and autobiographical memories (AM) involve the reactivation and recombination of episodic memory components into mental simulations. Upon reactivation, memories become labile and prone to modification. Thus, reactivating AM in the context of mentally generating CFT may provide an opportunity for editing processes to modify the content of the original memory. To examine this idea, this paper reports the results of two studies that investigated the effect of reactivating negative and positive AM in the context of either imagining a better (i.e. upward CFT) or a worse (i.e. downward CFT) alternative to an experienced event, as opposed to attentively retrieving the memory without mental modification (i.e. remembering) or no reactivation. Our results suggest that attentive remembering was the best strategy to both reduce the negative affect associated with negative AM, and to prevent the decay of positive affect associated with positive AM. In addition, reactivating positive, but not negative, AM with or without CFT modification reduces the perceived arousal of the original memory over time. Finally, reactivating negative AM in a downward CFT or an attentive remembering condition increases the perceived detail of the original memory over time.     

Spatial reasoning with external visualizations: what matters is what you see, not whether you interact

Three experiments examined the effects of interactive visualizations and spatial abilities on a task requiring participants to infer and draw cross sections of a three-dimensional (3D) object. The experiments manipulated whether participants could interactively control a virtual 3D visualization of the object while performing the task, and compared participants who were allowed interactive control of the visualization to those who were not allowed control. In Experiment 1, interactivity produced better performance than passive viewing, but the advantage of interactivity disappeared in Experiment 2 when visual input for the two conditions in a yoked design was equalized. In Experiments 2 and 3, differences in how interactive participants manipulated the visualization were large and related to performance. In Experiment 3, non-interactive participants who watched optimal movements of the display performed as well as interactive participants who manipulated the visualization effectively and better than interactive participants who manipulated the visualization ineffectively. Spatial ability made an independent contribution to performance on the spatial reasoning task, but did not predict patterns of interactive behavior. These experiments indicate that providing participants with active control of a computer visualization does not necessarily enhance task performance, whereas seeing the most task-relevant information does, and this is true regardless of whether the task-relevant information is obtained actively or passively.     

On not having what you are given

The statement, that these or those philosophers do not accept the distinction between what is, and what is not, ‘given’ in perception, has very little content; and should receive only a corresponding degree of emphasis.