Are better eye movements an advantage in ball games? A study of prosaccadic and antisaccadic eye movements

The aim of this study was to compare prosaccadic and antisaccadic eye movements of experts in ball sports and controls. In the prosaccadic and antisaccadic task, subjects made saccades respectively towards and away from a suddenly appearing stimulus. By means of infrared-oculography, we compared horizontal eye movements of experts (n=18) and controls (n=20). Experts had shorter overall saccadic latencies, but significantly shorter latencies occurred only on the antisaccade task, not on the prosaccade task. Our findings seem to support the concept that prosaccades and antisaccades have different underlying mechanisms and that expertise in ball games mainly improves antisaccadic performance in terms of latency and variability.     

Duration estimation and the phonological loop: Articulatory suppression and irrelevant sounds

Clock-based theories of time estimation propose that clock pulses are accumulated in working memory. Although these theories do not constrain the form of the memory trace, evidence reported in the literature suggests that active manipulation of a verbal trace may be involved. Four experiments are reported in which participants reproduced or verbally estimated short durations (up to a few seconds) either in a single-task condition or in a condition with a phonological load. Experiments 1, 2 and 4 showed that both interval reproduction and verbal estimation were impaired under concurrent articulatory suppression in comparison to a timing only control condition. Neither irrelevant speech (Experiments 1-3) nor irrelevant tones and music (Experiment 3) impaired timing performance. These findings are taken to show that time estimation is mediated by phonological working memory and the involvement of an active articulatory rehearsal process.     

Artificial consciousness, artificial emotions, and autonomous robots

Nowadays for robots, the notion of behavior is reduced to a simple factual concept at the level of the movements. On another hand, consciousness is a very cultural concept, founding the main property of human beings, according to themselves. We propose to develop a computable transposition of the consciousness concepts into artificial brains, able to express emotions and consciousness facts. The production of such artificial brains allows the intentional and really adaptive behavior for the autonomous robots. Such a system managing the robot’s behavior will be made of two parts: the first one computes and generates, in a constructivist manner, a representation for the robot moving in its environment, and using symbols and concepts. The other part achieves the representation of the previous one using morphologies in a dynamic geometrical way. The robot’s body will be seen for itself as the morphologic apprehension of its material substrata. The model goes strictly by the notion of massive multi-agent’s organizations with a morphologic control.     

Openness to experience and boundaries in the mind: relationships with cultural and economic conservative beliefs

The present research investigates whether Openness to Experience and Boundaries in the mind are related to conservatism. In the first study, significant relationships between several scales of the Boundaries in the mind questionnaire and indicators of conservative beliefs were obtained in an adult sample (N=78) as well as in a sample of political party activists (N=44). In the second study, these negative relationships between conservatism and thin boundaries were replicated in an adult sample (N=225). Moreover, two dimensions representing Boundaries in the mind were identified, one positively related to Openness to Experience and negatively to conservatism and the second showing high positive correlations with Neuroticism. The exceptionally strong correlations between conservatism and the Boundaries in the mind facet scales Opinions about organizations, Opinions about beauty, truth, Edges, lines, clothing and Opinions about peoples, nations, groups are discussed, as well as the weak relationships between economic conservatism and Openness to Experience.     

A neurocognitive and socioecological model of self-awareness

In the past, researchers have focused mainly on the effects and consequences of self-awareness; however, they have neglected a more basic issue pertaining to the specific mechanisms that initiate and sustain self-perception. The author presents a model of self-awareness that proposes the existence of 3 sources of self-information. First, the social milieu includes early face-to-face interactions, self-relevant feedback, a social comparison mechanism that leads to perspective taking, and audiences. Second, contacts with objects and structures in the physical environment foster self-world differentiation in infants; this environment also contains self-focusing and reflecting stimuli, such as mirrors and video cameras. Third, the self can develop bodily awareness through proprioception and can reflect on itself using imagery and inner speech. Furthermore, self-awareness is mainly mediated by the prefrontal lobes. The author establishes various links among these different neurological, social, ecological, and cognitive elements of the model.     

Psycholinguistic norms for action photographs in French and their relationships with spoken and written latencies

A set of 142 photographs of actions (taken from Fiez & Tranel, 1997) was standardized in French on name agreement, image agreement, conceptual familiarity, visual complexity, imageability, age of acquisition, and duration of the depicted actions. Objective word frequency measures were provided for the infinitive modal forms of the verbs and for the cumulative frequency of the verbal forms associated with the photographs. Statistics on the variables collected for action items were provided and compared with the statistics on the same variables collected for object items. The relationships between these variables were analyzed, and certain comparisons between the current database and other similar published databases of pictures of actions are reported. Spoken and written naming latencies were also collected for the photographs of actions, and multiple regression analyses revealed that name agreement, image agreement, and age of acquisition are the major determinants of action naming speed. Finally, certain analyses were performed to compare object and action naming times. The norms and the spoken and written naming latencies corresponding to the pictures are available on the Internet (http://www.psy.univ-bpclermont.fr/~pbonin/pbonin-eng.html) and should be of great use to researchers interested in the processing of actions.     

Controlled and automatic uses of memory in depressed patients: effect of retention interval lengths

The present study examines controlled and automatic uses of memory in clinically depressed patients by applying the Process Dissociation Procedure developed by Jacoby (1991) to a stem completion memory task with short and long retention intervals. The results show that the contribution of controlled processes is lower in depressed patients than in controls, especially for the longest retention interval, whereas the contribution of automatic processes is equivalent in both groups and unaffected by the length of the retention interval. These findings are discussed in a cognitive control framework.     

Performing the vertical jump: movement adaptations for submaximal jumping

The purpose of this study was to gain insight into the kinematics and kinetics of the vertical jump when jumping for different heights and to investigate movement effectiveness as a criterion for movement control in submaximal jumping. In order to jump high a countermovement is used and large body segments are rotated, both of which consume energy which is not directly used to gain extra jump height. It was hypothesized that the energy used to reach a specified jump height is minimized by limiting the non-effective energy consumed. Standing vertical jumps attempting 100%, 75%, 50%, and 25% of maximal height were performed by a group of 10 subjects. Force and motion data were recorded simultaneously during each performance. We found that jump height increased due to increasing vertical velocity at take off. This was primarily related to an increase in countermovement amplitude. As such, flexion amplitude of the hip joint increased with jump height whereas the ankle and knee joint flexion did not. These findings revealed that for submaximal jumping a consistent strategy was used of maximizing the contribution of distal joints and minimizing the contribution of proximal joints. Taking into account the high inertia of proximal segments, the potential energy deficit due to countermovement prior to joint extension, the advantageous horizontal orientation of the foot segment during stance and the tendon lengths in distal muscles, it was concluded that movement effectiveness is a likely candidate for the driving criterion of this strategy.     

Contextual and serial discriminations: a new learning paradigm to assess simultaneously the effects of acute stress on retrieval of flexible or stable information in mice

The present study was aimed at simultaneously determining on the same subject, the effects of stress on retrieval of flexible (contextual or temporal) or stable (spatial) information. Three behavioral paradigms carried out in a four-hole board were designed as follows: (1) Simple Discrimination (SD), in which mice learned a single discrimination; (2) Contextual and Serial Discriminations (CSD), in which mice learned two successive discriminations on two different internal contexts; (3) Spatial Serial Discriminations (SSD), in which mice learned two successive discriminations on an identical internal context. The stressor (three inescapable electric footshocks) was delivered 5 min before retention, occurring 5 min or 24 h after acquisition. Results showed that this stressor increased plasmatic corticosterone levels and fear reactivity in an elevated-plus-maze, as compared with nonstressed mice. The stressor reversed the normal pattern of retrieval observed in nonstressed controls in the CSD task, this effect being context dependent, as it was not observed in the SSD task. Overall, our study shows that stress affected the retrieval of flexible and old information, but spared the retrieval of stable or recent ones. Therefore, these behavioral paradigms allow us to study simultaneously, on the same animal, the effects of stress on distinct forms of memory retrieval.