Visual tracking and entrainment to an environmental rhythm

This study investigated the role that visual tracking plays in coupling rhythmic limb movements to an environmental rhythm. Two experiments were conducted in which participants swung a hand-held pendulum while tracking an oscillating stimulus or while keeping their eyes fixed on a stationary location directly above an oscillating stimulus. It was expected that the participants' rhythmic movements would become entrained to the oscillating stimulus in both conditions but that visual tracking would strengthen this entrainment. Experiment 1 investigated the role of visual tracking in establishing unintentional entrainment. Experiment 2 investigated the role of visual tracking in intentional entrainment. As predicted, participants exhibited greater unintentional coordination and more stable intentional coordination when they tracked the stimulus. These findings highlight the importance of understanding the role of eye movements in environmental coordination.     

Toward a psychophysics of agency: detecting gain and loss of control over auditory action effects

Theories of agency--the feeling of being in control of one's actions and their effects--emphasize either perceptual or cognitive aspects. This study addresses both aspects simultaneously in a finger-tapping paradigm. The tasks required participants to detect when synchronization of their taps with computer-controlled tones changed to self-controlled production of tones, or the reverse. For comparison, the tone sequences recorded in these active tapping conditions were also presented in passive listening conditions, in which participants had to detect the transition from computer to human control, or vice versa. Signal detection theory was applied to separate sensitivity from bias. Sensorimotor cues to agency were found to increase sensitivity in the active conditions compared with the passive conditions, which provided only perceptual cues. Analysis of bias revealed a tendency to attribute action effects to self-control. Thus, judgments of agency rely on veridical sensorimotor cues but can also be subject to cognitive bias.     

Anxiety and body satisfaction before and six months after mastectomy and breast reconstruction surgery

As breast reconstruction is an important adjunct after mastectomy to regain physical integrity and also to improve affect, the present aim was to evaluate patients' subjective perceptions of body image during the whole breast reconstruction period and to assess the importance of their psychological reaction in terms of negative affectivity. Participants were 62 women, 43 women (M age = 46.4, SD = 9.8) who had had mastectomies and 19 healthy women (M age = 39.9, SD = 13.99). Patients were admitted for surgery at the Hospital S. Orsola in Bologna. Healthy subjects were relatives of the women and students, all with no history of breast pathology. The Body Satisfaction Scale and the State Anxiety Inventory-Y were administered to the two groups before, post, and 6 mo. after surgery. Analysis of scores indicated that during the period of the study, the women with mastectomies reported higher anxiety and also greater dissatisfaction with their body image than the healthy group, even when the breast had been reconstructed. This unexpected finding suggests patients' unrealistic expectations of the breast reconstruction and the surgical outcome.     

The experience of male spouses in the context of breast cancer: a systematic review of the literature

The purpose of this systematic review is to look into how the experience of husbands of women treated for breast cancer is approached in the literature. Between July and August 2015, the databases of PubMed, SciELO and BIREME were searched for papers published in the period January 2005–July 2015; a final sample of 23 papers was defined. The studies listed several negative and positive aspects of the experience, such as financial difficulties, psychological distress, lack of coping skills among family members, social recognition of the role of caregiver, acquisition of new responsibilities and the maturing of family members.     

Conventions and Moral Norms: The Legacy of Lewis

David Lewis’ Convention has been a major source of inspiration for philosophers and social scientists alike for the analysis of norms. In this essay, I demonstrate its usefulness for the analysis of some moral norms. At the same time, conventionalism with regards to moral norms has attracted sustained criticism. I discuss three major strands of criticism and propose how these can be met. First, I discuss the criticism that Lewis conventions analyze norms in situations with no conflict of interest, whereas most, if not all, moral norms deal with situations with conflicting interests. This criticism can be answered by showing that conventions can emerge in those contexts as well. Secondly, I discuss the objection that this type of conventionalism, inspired by Lewis, presents moral norms as fundamentally contingent, whereas most, if not all, moral norms are not. However, such critics fail to appreciate that conventions are not radically contingent. Moreover, if one distinguishes the question as to why an individual should comply with a norm from the question whether the norm in question itself can be justified, a core element of the complaint of contingency disappears. The third objection to conventionalism concerns the way in which conventionalists justify norms. I argue that reflection upon the way in which according to Lewis norms are justified reveals a fundamental tension in his theory. Possible solutions to this tension all have in common that the complaint of contingency returns in some form. Therefore, this third complaint cannot be avoided altogether.     

Cheating the Lie Detector: Faking in the Autobiographical Implicit Association Test

ABSTRACT— The autobiographical Implicit Association Test (aIAT) was recently introduced in this journal as a new and promising lie-detection tool. The initial report found 91% accuracy in determining which of two autobiographical events was true. It was suggested that the aIAT, unlike other lie-detection tests, is resistant to faking. We investigated whether participants can strategically alter their performance on the aIAT. Experiment 1 showed that participants guilty of a mock theft were able to obtain an innocent test outcome. Two additional experiments showed that guilty participants can fake the aIAT without prior experience with the aIAT and when a response deadline is imposed. The aIAT is subject to the same shortcomings as other lie-detection tests.     

Short-term and long-term memory deficit following intracarotid Amytal injection: Further support for the memory consolidation hypothesis

To test the three main hypotheses of the human amnesic syndrome (encoding, consolidation, retrieval), we designed an original protocol for memory assessment under Amytal that included, in addition to a retrograde memory measure, both short-term and long-term anterograde memory measures. Twenty epileptic patients with SEEG-confirmed unilateral temporal lobe foci were given right and left injections on successive days. Only the long-term memory measure for material presented under Amytal was significantly related to the presence of a temporal contralateral epileptogenic focus, even if it was assessed when the hemisphere had completely recovered from the effect of Amytal. Short-term memory deficits were observed equally often after injections ipsilateral and contralateral to the epileptogenic focus, and no retrograde amnesia was observed. These results are consistent with the consolidation hypothesis.     

How to Revise a Total Preorder

Most approaches to iterated belief revision are accompanied by some motivation for the use of the proposed revision operator (or family of operators), and typically encode enough information in the epistemic state of an agent for uniquely determining one-step revision. But in those approaches describing a family of operators there is usually little indication of how to proceed uniquely after the first revision step. In this paper we contribute towards addressing that deficiency by providing a formal framework which goes beyond the first revision step in two ways. First, the framework is obtained by enriching the epistemic state of an agent starting from the following intuitive idea: we associate to each world x two abstract objects x ⁺ and x ⁻, and we assume that, in addition to preferences over the set of worlds, we are given preferences over this set of objects as well. The latter can be considered as meta-information encoded in the epistemic state which enables us to go beyond the first revision step of the revision operator being applied, and to obtain a unique set of preferences over worlds. We then extend this framework to consider, not only the revision of preferences over worlds, but also the revision of this extended structure itself. We look at some desirable properties for revising the structure and prove the consistency of these properties by giving a concrete operator satisfying all of them. Perhaps more importantly, we show that this framework has strong connections with two other types of constructions in related areas. Firstly, it can be seen as a special case of preference aggregation which opens up the possibility of extending the framework presented here into a full-fledged framework for preference aggregation and social choice theory. Secondly, it is related to existing work on the use of interval orderings in a number of different contexts.