Representing others' actions: the role of expertise in the aging mind

A large body of evidence suggests that action execution and action observation share a common representational domain. To date, little is known about age-related changes in these action representations that are assumed to support various abilities such as the prediction of observed actions. The purpose of the present study was to investigate (a) how age affects the ability to predict the time course of observed actions; and (b) whether and to what extent sensorimotor expertise attenuates age-related declines in prediction performance. In a first experiment, older adults predicted the time course of familiar everyday actions less precisely than younger adults. In a second experiment, younger and older figure skating experts as well as age-matched novices were asked to predict the time course of figure skating elements and simple movement exercises. Both young age and sensorimotor expertise had a positive influence on prediction performance of figure skating elements. The expertise-related benefit did not show a transfer to movement exercises. Together, the results suggest a specific decline of action representations in the aging mind. However, extensive sensorimotor experience seems to enable experts to represent actions from their domain of expertise more precisely even in older age.     

When two actions are easier than one: How inhibitory control demands affect response processing

Numerous studies showed that the simultaneous execution of multiple actions is associated with performance costs. Here, we demonstrate that when highly automatic responses are involved, performance in single-response conditions can actually be worse than in dual-response conditions. Participants responded to peripheral visual stimuli with an eye movement (saccade), a manual key press, or both. To manipulate saccade automaticity, a central fixation cross either remained present throughout the trial (overlap condition, lower automaticity) or disappeared 200 ms before visual target onset (gap condition, greater automaticity). Crucially, single-response conditions yielded more performance errors than dual-response conditions (i.e., dual-response benefit), especially in gap trials. This was due to difficulties associated with inhibiting saccades when only manual responses were required, suggesting that response inhibition (remaining fixated) can be even more resource-demanding than overt response execution (saccade to peripheral target).     

When mutations meet motivations: Attitude biases in counterfactual thought

The present research examines whether existing attitudes can spontaneously bias the content and direction of generated counterfactual thoughts, and whether these thoughts influence subsequent attitude-relevant judgments. Two experimental studies demonstrate that attitudes can bias the content of counterfactual thoughts, and that these biased thoughts in turn predict polarized attitudes. These effects were obtained regardless of whether explicit instructions for counterfactual generation were given. Furthermore, both studies demonstrate that these effects are mediated by judgments of future likelihood. Implications of these results for theories of counterfactual thinking and persuasion are discussed.     

When deception influences memory: the implication of theory of mind

When deceiving, one should remember to whom a falsified story was previously told; otherwise he or she may include inconsistencies, and the deception will probably be discovered. Bearing this in mind, we investigated the potential relationship between deception and the ability to remember to whom a piece of information was previously told (i.e., destination memory). Forty-one adults were given a destination memory task in which they had to decide to whom proverbs had previously been told. They were also given a questionnaire about deception (e.g., “I sometimes tell lies if I have to) and a cognitive theory of mind task in which they had to predict the behaviour of protagonists who hold a mistaken belief about the state of the world. Results showed a positive correlation between deception and destination memory (p <?.001), a relationship that was further mediated by cognitive theory of mind ability (p?<?.01). Deception requires monitoring and inferring what targets know, suspect, and believe. This monitoring ability (i.e., cognitive theory of mind) results in better processing of the target and consequently better destination memory. By showing the involvement of deception and theory of mind in destination memory, our findings emphasize the memory variations in social and interpersonal interactions.     

Error management theory: a new perspective on biases in cross-sex mind reading

A new theory of cognitive biases, called error management theory (EMT), proposes that psychological mechanisms are designed to be predictably biased when the costs of false-positive and false-negative errors were asymmetrical over evolutionary history. This theory explains known phenomena such as men's overperception of women's sexual intent, and it predicts new biases in social inference such as women's underestimation of men's commitment. In Study 1 (N = 217), the authors documented the commitment underperception effect predicted by EMT. In Study 2 (N = 289), the authors replicated the commitment bias and documented a condition in which men's sexual overperception bias is corrected. Discussion contrasts EMT with the heuristics and biases approach and suggests additional testable hypotheses based on EMT.     

When attention matters: The curious incident of the wandering mind

Attention plays an essential role in the construction of the mental models necessary to make sense of ongoing events. In this article, we consider the implications of temporary inattention during reading for the construction and updating of the situation model during text comprehension. We examined how self-reported mind wandering during reading relates to the online construction of the situation model of the narrative, which in this case involved the pseudonym used by a villain in a detective novella. In successful readers, mind wandering without awareness, referred to as zoning out, was less frequent when the text revealed a clue about the villain's identity. Additional analyses indicated that mind wandering interfered with the construction of the situation model independent of the participants' ability to retrieve factual information. The analysis of the temporal consequences of zoning out indicated that lapses had the greatest influence when they occurred early in the narrative. These results confirm the intuition that zoning out during reading is an indication that the construction of the situation model has gone awry, and underscore the fact that our ability to understand ongoing events depends on the ability to pay attention when it matters.     

The role of transmission biases in the cultural diffusion of irrelevant actions

This study used a diffusion chain paradigm to explore the cultural transmission of causally irrelevant tool actions in chains of adult participants. Each chain witnessed an "expert" adult retrieve a reward from inside a puzzle box using a combination of causally relevant actions and causally irrelevant actions. Which of the actions were causally relevant was evident in two of the chains where a transparent box was used. In the other two chains, the causal effectiveness of the tool was hidden inside an opaque version of the box. Results indicated that fewer of the irrelevant actions performed by the expert model were reproduced in the transparent box chains, than the opaque box chains. However, irrelevant actions, although not in their original form, were evident within each chain suggesting that causally irrelevant tool actions can survive within groups of adults. The current article places these results, alongside those from earlier overimitation studies, within a framework of cultural evolution. The proposal here is that the social learning of irrelevant actions is heavily influenced by the interaction between various transmission biases, including frequency-based biases, model-based biases, and content-based biases. It is further proposed that the transmission bias witnessed may differ according to the interplay between characteristics of the model, characteristics of the observer, and the contents of the task.     

Body and mind: two sides of one coin

ABSTRACT

Psychosomatics is concerned with mentalization and the mind’s impact on the body’s functions. Choosing the reverse approach, how the body steers the mind, the author elaborates on a monistic mind-body-theory, suggesting that all physiological processes down to the cellular level have a psychological concomitant. Body and mind are the two sides of one coin, distinguished though by different representational organizations. This perspective is pertinent to Freud’s 1915 definition of the drive as the body’s demand on the mind. It also opens interesting perspectives for the elaboration of a preservative drive and its specific ideation in mental life. Comparing the dynamics between the sexual and the preservative drives with the workings of the autonomous nervous system reveals some specific traits of the preservative drives, as they are considered characteristic for psychosomatic patients. As a case in point, the author looks into the French conception of the drives and the theoretical framework of the Paris School of Psychosomatics, to which her conception would add an important dimension, theoretically, clinically, and technically.     

They should have known: Hindsight and outcome biases in child abduction cases

Two cognitive biases might partially account for public support of the ineffective AMBER Alert system. Hindsight bias is a cognitive error in which people with outcome knowledge overestimate the likelihood that this particular outcome would occur; outcome bias is an error made in evaluating the quality of a decision once the outcome is known. Two experiments assessed whether hindsight and outcome bias occur in child abduction scenarios. Study 1 was a pre/posttest experiment that examined whether hindsight bias occurs in situations in which the identity of the abductor (stranger or parent) is manipulated between groups, and all participants are told the child was killed. Study 2, a between-subjects experiment, examined whether hindsight and outcome biases occur in situations in which no AMBER Alert was issued (because the situation did not meet the legal requirements to issue an Alert), and manipulated the identity of the abductor and the outcome (child safely returned, killed, or not outcome provided). Hindsight and outcome biases occurred in both studies, given the correct set of circumstances. Abductor identity also impacted outcome estimates. Results from the two studies indicate that hindsight and outcome bias occur, but this is dependent on the outcome (child killed, child returned safely, no outcome provided) and the identity of the abductor (stranger, dangerous parent, non-dangerous parent). Limitations and future directions are discussed.     

When the mind is otherwise engaged: resource depletion and social stereotyping

This study investigated the effects of resource depletion on stereotyping. Participants were instructed to form an impression of a target, and whilst performing this task, they overheard a tape-recorded conversation. The conversation was manipulated so that it was more or less relevant to the participants. Results in general supported the prediction that when participants eavesdrop on a relevant conversation, attentional capacity will be diminished, and target evaluations will be stereotypic in implication. Findings are discussed in terms of contemporary treatments of stereotyping. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

When the mind wanders: Age-related differences between young and older adults

Interest in mind wandering (MW) has grown in recent years, but few studies have assessed this phenomenon in older adults. The aim of this study was to assess age-related differences between young, young–old and old–old adults in MW using two versions of the sustained attention to response task (SART), one perceptual and one semantic. Different indicators were examined (i.e., reported MW episodes and behavioral indices of MW such as response time latency and variability, incorrect response and omission errors). The relationship between MW, certain basic mechanisms of cognition (working memory, inhibition and processing speed), cognitive failures and intrusive thoughts in everyday life was also explored. Findings in both versions of the SART indicated that older adults reported a lower frequency of MW episodes than young adults, but some of the behavioral indices of MW (response time variability, incorrect response and omission errors) were higher in old–old adults. This seems to suggest that MW becomes less frequent with aging, but more pervasive and detrimental to performance. Our results also indicated that the role of age and cognitive mechanisms in explaining MW depends on the demands of the SART task considered.     

Time warp: Authorship shapes the perceived timing of actions and events

It has been proposed that inferring personal authorship for an event gives rise to intentional binding, a perceptual illusion in which one’s action and inferred effect seem closer in time than they otherwise would (Haggard, Clark, & Kalogeras, 2002). Using a novel, naturalistic paradigm, we conducted two experiments to test this hypothesis and examine the relationship between binding and self-reported authorship. In both experiments, an important authorship indicator – consistency between one’s action and a subsequent event – was manipulated, and its effects on binding and self-reported authorship were measured. Results showed that action-event consistency enhanced both binding and self-reported authorship, supporting the hypothesis that binding arises from an inference of authorship. At the same time, evidence for a dissociation emerged, with consistency having a more robust effect on self-reports than on binding. Taken together, these results suggest that binding and self-reports reveal different aspects of the sense of authorship.     

Two models,one mind: Integrating the biological and psychological

The investigation of psychopathology and the development of personality have traditionally been carried out by two different methods. Psychoanalytic theory has largely relied on the hermeneutic approach, that is the explication of meanings. This has yielded rich and clinically relevant insights into individual functioning, but has the danger of conflating meaning with causes. The empirical approach, the dominant method of science, has in recent years begun to establish aetiological factors for mental ill-health. In the clinical situation, these findings have to be applied with caution as one can only rarely determine with a particular individual how important they are. At the same time, these findings establish important parameters in understanding and treating patients. This paper argues that, for the effective practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, the therapist should both be conversant with these two models and be able to integrate them.     

When knowing can replace seeing in audiovisual integration of actions

The ability to predict the effects of actions is necessary to behave properly in our physical and social world. Here, we describe how the ability to predict the consequence of complex gestures can change the way we integrate sight and sound when relevant visual information is missing. Six drummers and six novices were asked to judge audiovisual synchrony for drumming point-light displays where the visual information was manipulated to eliminate or include the drumstick–drumhead impact point. In the condition with only the arm information novices were unable to detect asynchrony whereas drummers were able to. Additionally, in the conditions that included the impact point drummers perceived the best alignment when the sight preceded the sound, while in the arm only condition they perceived the best alignment when the sound occurred together with or preceded the sight, as it would be expected if they were predicting the beat occurrence. Taken together these findings suggest that humans can acquire, through practice, internal models of action which can be used to replace missing information when integrating multisensory signals from the environment.     

When standards are wide of the mark: nonselective superiority and inferiority biases in comparative judgments of objects and concepts

People are frequently required to judge how particular group members measure up against others in their group. According to the local-comparisons-general-standards (LOGE) approach, in these member-to-group comparisons, people fail to use the normatively appropriate local (group) standard and are infelicitously affected by a more general standard (involving instances from outside the judged group). Within positive groups, target group members are judged superior to the other members of the group, and within negative groups, inferior. To date, these nonselective superiority and inferiority biases have been demonstrated solely in judgments about human beings. In 6 experiments, nonselective biases were found in perceptual, affective, and cognitive judgments of nonhuman targets, objects, and concepts, thus supporting a cognitive rather than a social account.     

When two become one: Temporally dynamic integration of the face and voice

In everyday interactions with others, people have to deal with the sight of a face and sound of a voice at the same time. How the perceptual system brings this information together over hundreds of milliseconds to perceive others remains unclear. In 2 studies, we investigated how facial and vocal cues are integrated during real-time social categorization by recording participants' hand movements (via the streaming x, y coordinates of the computer mouse) en route to “male” and “female” responses on the screen. Participants were presented with male and female faces that were accompanied by a same-sex voice morphed to be either sex-typical (e.g., masculinized male voice) or sex-atypical (i.e., feminized male voice). Before settling into ultimate sex categorizations of the face, the simultaneous processing of a sex-atypical voice led the hand to be continuously attracted to the opposite sex-category response across construal. This is evidence that ongoing results from voice perception continuously influence face perception across processing. Thus, social categorization involves dynamic updates of gradual integration of the face and voice.