Emotions in action through the looking glass1

Abstract: The paper aims at highlighting how our primary understanding of others’ actions is rooted in the mirror mechanism. To this end, the anatomical architecture of the mirror neuron system for action will be outlined as well as its role in grasping goals and intentions in others’ motor behaviour. One further step through the looking glass of social cognition will be referring to the ubiquitous emotional colouring of actions and considering its links with the motor domain. This will allow a clearer perspective on the mechanism underlying our abilities for emotional understanding and on cases in which these abilities are amiss, as in autistic spectrum disorders.     

Enantiomorphy through the looking glass: literacy effects on mirror-image discrimination

To examine whether enantiomorphy (i.e., the ability to discriminate lateral mirror images) is influenced by the acquisition of a written system that incorporates mirrored letters (e.g., b and d), unschooled illiterate adults were compared with people reading the Latin alphabet, namely, both schooled literate adults and unschooled adults alphabetized in adulthood. In various sorting and same-different comparison tasks with nonlinguistic materials, illiterate participants displayed some sensitivity to enantiomorphic contrasts but performed far worse than all the other participant groups when the task required paying attention to such contrasts. The difficulties of illiterate participants were more severe with enantiomorphs than with rotations in the plane or shape contrasts. Learning a written system that incorporates enantiomorphic letters thus pushes the beginning reader to break the mirror invariance characteristic of the visual system, and this process generalizes beyond the realm of symbolic characters.     

Learning by looking: Infants' social looking behavior across the transition from crawling to walking

This study investigated how infants gather information about their environment through looking and how that changes with increases in motor skills. In Experiment 1, 9.5- and 14-month-olds participated in a 10-min free play session with both a stranger and ambiguous toys present. There was a significant developmental progression from passive to active social engagement, as evidenced by younger infants watching others communicate more and older infants making more bids for social interaction. Experiment 2 examined longitudinally the impact of age and walking onset on this progression. The transition to independent walking marked significant changes in how often infants watched others communicate and made active bids for social interaction. Results suggest that infants transition from passive observers as crawlers to active participants in their social environment with the onset of walking.     

Recollection and familiarity through the looking glass: when old does not mirror new

The authors use the qualitative differences logic to demonstrate that 2 separate memory influences underlie performance in recognition memory tasks, familiarity and recollection. The experiments focus on the mirror effect, the finding that more memorable stimulus classes produce higher hit rates but lower false-alarm rates than less memorable stimulus classes. The authors demonstrate across a number of experiments that manipulations assumed to decrease recollection eliminate or even reverse the hit-rate portion of the mirror effect while leaving the false-alarm portion intact. This occurs whether the critical distinction between conditions is created during the test phase or manipulated during the study phase. Thus, when recollection is present, it dominates familiarity so that the hit-rate portion of the mirror effect primarily reflects recollection; when recollection is largely absent, the opposite pattern associated with the familiarity process emerges.     

Action induction through action observation

Ideomotor movements may arise in individuals while they watch goal-directed actions or events. In a previous study we developed a paradigm for investigating ideomotor movements induced through watching the outcome of one's own action. In the present study we extended the paradigm to investigate both movements induced through watching the outcome of one's own as well as somebody else's action (player mode and observer mode respectively). We report three experiments, each with differing conditions for the player mode, but identical conditions for the observer mode. Results indicate that in both modes ideomotor movements are governed by two basic principles: Perceptual induction and intentional induction. In the player mode we replicated and extended previous findings, indicating dissociation between hand and head movements. In the observer mode no such dissociation was obtained. Our findings suggest that people perform, in their own actions, what they see being performed in other people's actions. Induction of action through observation can pertain to both the action's physical surface and underlying intentions. Furthermore, our results suggest that perceptual induction is ubiquitous but may be locally suspended for intentional action control. We discuss our results in the framework of theories invoking a strong overlap between representational structures for action perception and action planning.     

Malice through the looking glass: Reflections and refractions of envy,greed & jealousy

A great deal of time, effort and money is involved in the training of counsellors; hence it is most important that the selection process discriminates between those candidates who are likely to achieve the standard required at the end of the training and those who are not. This paper discusses some of the issues pertinent to the selection of candidates for training as counsellors. It considers the question of whether counsellors are born or made, in other words whether anyone can be a good counsellor given the right training or whether they have to be suitable before they start. The paper uses Kohutian concepts to address issues of narcissism, as well as considering equal opportunities and personal development.     

Response selection during a joint action task

It has been suggested that a shared task representation is used to predict a coactors' needs and that these predictions influence each coactor's response selection in a joint action task. The authors tested this idea using a joint action task in which participants passed a jug to a confederate under different conditions. They hypothesized that if participants predicted the needs of their coactor and planned their movement according to these predictions, the jug would be passed with the handle available to the confederate. Consistent with this hypothesis, the jug was passed with the handle available on 86% of the trials. This strategy may be adopted to improve the efficiency of the whole task as opposed to each individual's portion of the task.     

Looking forward to looking backward: the misprediction of regret

Decisions are powerfully affected by anticipated regret, and people anticipate feeling more regret when they lose by a narrow margin than when they lose by a wide margin. But research suggests that people are remarkably good at avoiding self-blame, and hence they may be better at avoiding regret than they realize. Four studies measured people's anticipations and experiences of regret and self-blame. In Study 1, students overestimated how much more regret they would feel when they "nearly won" than when they "clearly lost" a contest. In Studies 2, 3a, and 3b, subway riders overestimated how much more regret and self-blame they would feel if they "nearly caught" their trains than if they "clearly missed" their trains. These results suggest that people are less susceptible to regret than they imagine, and that decision makers who pay to avoid future regrets may be buying emotional insurance that they do not actually need.     

On Enigmas and Oracles: looking back to the future

The Turing Day was held at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland, on 28 June 2002.     

Enhancing implicit change detection through action

Implicit change detection demonstrates how the visual system can benefit from stored information that is not immediately available to conscious awareness. We investigated the role of motor action in this context. In the first two experiments, using a one-shot implicit change-detection paradigm, participants responded to unperceived changes either with an action (jabbing the screen at the guessed location of a change) or with words (verbal report), and sat either 60 cm or 300 cm (with a laser pointer) away from the display. Our observers guessed the locations of changes at a reachable distance better with an action than with a verbal judgment. At 300 cm, beyond reach, the motor advantage disappeared. In experiment 3, this advantage was also unavailable when participants sat at a reachable distance but responded with hand-held laser pointers near their bodies. We conclude that a motor system specialized for real-time visually guided behavior has access to additional visual information. Importantly, this system is not activated by merely executing an action (experiment 2) or presenting stimuli in one's near space (experiment 3). It is activated only when both conditions are fulfilled, which implies that it is the actual contact that matters to the visual system.     

When looking back to nothing goes back to nothing

Previous research showed that the eyes revisit the location in which the stimulus has been encoded when visual or verbal information is retrieved from memory. A recent study showed that this behavior still occurs 1 week after encoding, suggesting that visual, spatial and linguistic information is tightly associated with the oculomotor trace and stored as an integrated memory representation. However, it is yet unclear whether looking behavior simply remains stable between encoding and recall or whether it changes over time in a more fine-tuned manner. Here, we investigate the time course of looking behavior during recall in multiple sessions across 1 week. Participants encoded visual objects presented in one of the four locations on the computer screen. In five sessions during the week after encoding, they performed on a visual memory recall task. During retrieval, participants looked back to the encoding location, but only in the recall sessions within 1 day of encoding. We discuss different explanations for the temporal dynamics of looking behavior during recall, searching for the role of eye movements in memory.