Phantom arcs: now you see them..

A new visual illusion is reported and illustrated. The illusion, dubbed 'phantom arcs', survives manipulations of contrast, scale, and hue. The arcs can be seen in printed versions as well as in images displayed on CRT or LCD monitors. Data collected in an undergraduate perception class reveal that the illusion can be seen by untrained observers.     

溶栓后PCI,从不行到可行

再灌注治疗STEMI的方法有直接PCI和溶栓。我国各地医疗条件差别较大,只有12%的STEMI患者能够及时接受直接PCI,超过半数的患者仍行溶栓治疗,故溶栓在我国再灌注策略中占有重要地位。虽然溶栓后即刻PCI即易化PCI被证实不如直接PCI,但溶栓并非STEMI治疗的终点。目前国外循证证据显示溶栓后早期转运PCI优于溶栓失败后再转运行补救PCI,值得我国借鉴学习。     

Impaired emotion recognition in music in Parkinson’s disease

Music has the potential to evoke strong emotions and plays a significant role in the lives of many people. Music might therefore be an ideal medium to assess emotion recognition. We investigated emotion recognition in music in 20 patients with idiopathic Parkinson’s disease (PD) and 20 matched healthy volunteers. The role of cognitive dysfunction and other disease characteristics in emotion recognition was also evaluated.     

Violence et qualité de vie : étude de l’effet du genre dans un contexte tunisien

This study aims at a better understanding of concrete violence phenomena and their implication, particularly in matters of men's and women's health and quality of life. Our study was carried out in Tunisia with a sample population of 720 male and female adults from different age groups and various socio-economic contexts. Diverse forms of violence (physical, psychological, and sexual) undergone during different phases of life (childhood, adolescence, and adulthood) were measured in a bid to investigate their linkage with the quality of the population's personal life. The results tend to corroborate that the violence one undergoes at a specific moment in one's life affects the quality of one's personal life. It is more particularly women who are the ones most affected and the quality of their personal lives is of a poor quality in comparison with men's.     

Visual prominence and representationalism

A common objection to representationalism is that a representationalist view of phenomenal character cannot accommodate the effects that shifts in covert attention have on visual phenomenology: covert attention can make items more visually prominent than they would otherwise be without altering the content of visual experience. Recent empirical work on attention casts doubt on previous attempts to advance this type of objection to representationalism and it also points the way to an alternative development of the objection.     

Perceptions and attitudes to sexual harassment: an examination of sex differences and the sex composition of the harasser–target dyad

This study examines the role of sex in determining attitudes toward sexual harassment (SH) and perceptions of SH, and studies the extent to which attitudes toward SH predict perceptions of SH by sex. All informants (146 men and 160 women) completed three questionnaires: personal information; perceptions of SH, including cases with variations on the perpetrators and victims' sex; and attitudes toward SH, with a male, female, or unspecified victim. The findings point to significant sex differences in the perception of behaviors as SH. Women were less tolerant of SH regardless of the victim's sex. In all cases, less tolerant attitudes toward SH predicted a stronger perception of behaviors as manifesting SH. In addition, women tended to perceive male harasser/male target behaviors as SH more than men.     

An anxiety-induced bias in the perception of a bistable point-light walker

Human sensitivity for social cues is exquisite, as illustrated by the ease with which simplified point-light movements invoke social and emotional responses. Compared to faces, these biological motion stimuli only recently started to be used to explore questions regarding social cognition and anxiety. We presented human point-light walkers that could be perceived as facing towards or facing away from the observer, and tested whether participants with high social anxiety would perceive these bistable stimuli differently, because this type of stimuli has particular relevance for them. The results showed that observers with high social anxiety tended to see walkers as facing away more frequently than those with low social anxiety. This may mean that high socially anxious observers are biased towards the more positive perceptual alternative because they are motivated to protect themselves against threatening social experiences, but we also explore alternative explanations. The findings are in line with the evidence for a positivity bias in perception, also called wishful seeing, but in contrast with the attentional negativity bias often found in social anxiety. We discuss reasons for this divergence and possible limitations of the current study.     

Memories defining the self in Alzheimer’s disease

ABSTRACT

There is a debate over the extent to which personal identity or the self is preserved in patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Autobiographical memory deficits at early stages of AD could contribute to altering patients’ self. However, the nature of the relationship between autobiographical memory deficits and the self in AD has not been much investigated experimentally. In the present study, we aimed to investigate the integrative meaning of self-defining memories (SDMs) in early stages of AD and to analyse its relationship with the self-concept. The results showed that, when compared to the control group, AD patients less frequently extracted meaning from their SDMs and the meaning was less frequently tied to the self. Patients exhibited some altered aspects of the self-concept (i.e., complexity and strength), though some other components still persisted (i.e., valence and certainty). Correlation analyses showed that the impaired integrative meaning in the AD group was correlated with some changes in self-concept. We suggest that integrative meaning may act as a bridge between autobiographical memories and the self-concept, with reduced integration abilities appearing as a potential mechanism for the deterioration of the self-concept in AD.     

Observed Variability and Values Matter: Toward a Better Understanding of Information Search and Decisions from Experience

The search for different options before making a consequential choice is a central aspect of many important decisions, such as mate selection or purchasing a house. Despite its importance, surprisingly little is known about how search and choice are affected by the observed and objective properties of the decision problem. Here, we analyze the effects of two key properties in a binary choice task: the options' observed and objective values, and the variability of payoffs. First, in a large public data set of a binary choice task, we investigate how the observed value and variability relate to decision‐makers' efforts and preferences during search. Furthermore, we test how these properties influence the chance of correctly identifying the objectively maximizing option, and how they affect choice. Second, we designed a novel experiment to systematically analyze the role of the objective difference between the options. We find that a larger objective difference between options increases the chance for correctly identifying the maximizing option, but it does not affect behavior during search and choice. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Predictable Mispredictions in the Context of Physical Activity and Sport: A Review

Theoretical models and research that aim to identify antecedents of participation in physical activities or sport can measure antecedents of physical activity behaviour through instruments that involve subjective predictions. In this article, we argue that such instruments may not reflect physical activity experiences or behaviour accurately because people are not very good predictors of future states. Additionally, we propose that mispredictions may be predictable because they are “caused” by tendencies to neglect processes related to hedonic adaptation and competing alternatives. We also suggest that it may be possible to improve measurement of antecedents through methods that focus respondents' attention on factors that cause mispredictions or through experiential sampling methods.