The rubber hand illusion depends on a congruent mapping between real and artificial fingers

The rubber hand illusion (RHI), in which a visible artificial hand is touched (or moves) synchronously with the participant's unseen own hand, indicates that body representations can undergo rapid changes. While several constraints for this illusion have been described, some reports highlight a remarkable flexibility of body representations, even contradicting a priori assumptions regarding body appearance and anatomy (e.g., the subjective embodiment of a third arm).     

Deriving auditory features from triadic comparisons

A feature-based representation of auditory stimuli is proposed and tested experimentally. Within a measurement-theoretical framework, it is possible to decide whether a representation of subjective judgments with a set of auditory features is possible and how unique such a representation is. Furthermore, the method avoids confounding listeners' perceptual and verbal abilities, in that it strictly separates the process of identifying auditory features from labeling them. The approach was applied to simple synthetic sounds with well-defined physical properties (narrow-band noises and complex tones). For each stimulus triad, listeners had to judge whether the first two sounds displayed a common feature that was not shared by the third, by responding with a simple "yes" or "no." Because of the high degree of consistency in the responses, feature structures could be obtained for most of the subjects. In summary, the proposed procedure constitutes a supplement to the arsenal of psychometric methods with the main focus of identifying the type of sensation itself, rather than of measuring its threshold or magnitude.     

Optimizing Exposure Therapy for Pathological Health Anxiety: Considerations From the Inhibitory Learning Approach

Exposure therapy has demonstrated its efficacy in the treatment of pathological health anxiety—however, psychotherapy research reveals that many patients do not show a clinically significant change. Therefore, improvements are necessary to optimize psychotherapy for pathological health anxiety. Most treatment rationales refer to habituation during exposure as the central mechanism of change. However, there is evidence that extinction learning is mediated by inhibitory learning processes. Targeting these processes may help to improve treatment outcomes in pathological health anxiety. The aim of this review was to adapt, from the inhibitory learning approach and empirical findings, the most promising strategies for the exposure-based treatment of pathological health anxiety. The exposure-optimizing strategies adapted are expectancy violation, combination, variability in contexts and stimuli, affect labeling, and removal of safety signals. A case example illustrates how to implement these methods for patients with pathological health anxiety.     

Virtual/real transfer of spatial knowledge: benefit from visual fidelity provided in a virtual environment and impact of active navigation

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect the visual fidelity of a virtual environment (VE) (undetailed vs. detailed) has on the transfer of spatial knowledge based on the navigation mode (passive vs. active) for three different spatial recall tasks (wayfinding, sketch mapping, and picture sorting). Sixty-four subjects (32 men and 32 women) participated in the experiment. Spatial learning was evaluated by these three tasks in the context of the Bordeaux district. In the wayfinding task, the results indicated that the detailed VE helped subjects to transfer their spatial knowledge from the VE to the real world, irrespective of the navigation mode. In the sketch-mapping task, the detailed VE increased performances compared to the undetailed VE condition, and allowed subjects to benefit from the active navigation. In the sorting task, performances were better in the detailed VE; however, in the undetailed version of the VE, active learning either did not help the subjects or it even deteriorated their performances. These results are discussed in terms of appropriate perceptive-motor and/or spatial representations for each spatial recall task.     

Object-based attentional selection can modulate the Stroop effect

The Stroop (1935) effect is the inability to ignore a color word when the task is to report the ink color of that word (i.e., to say "green" to the word RED in green ink). The present study investigated whether object-based processing contributes to the Stroop effect. According to this view, observers are unable to ignore irrelevant features of an attended object (Kahneman & Henik, 1981). In three experiments, participants had to name the color of one of two superimposed rectangles and to ignore words that appeared in the relevant object, in the irrelevant object, or in the background. The words were congruent, neutral, or incongruent with respect to the correct color response. Words in the irrelevant object and in the background produced significant Stroop effects, consistent with earlier findings. Importantly, however, words in the relevant object produced larger Stroop effects than did the other conditions, suggesting amplified processing of all the features of an attended object. Thus, object-based processing can modulate the Stroop effect.     

On the influence of causal beliefs on the feeling of agency

The sense of agency is the experience of being the origin of a sensory consequence. This study investigates whether contextual beliefs modulate low-level sensorimotor processes which contribute to the emergence of the sense of agency. We looked at the influence of causal beliefs on ‘intentional binding’, a phenomenon which accompanies self-agency. Participants judged the onset-time of either an action or a sound which followed the action. They were induced to believe that the tone was either triggered by themselves or by somebody else, although, in reality, the sound was always triggered by the participants. We found that intentional binding was stronger when participants believed that they triggered the tone, compared to when they believed that another person triggered the tone. These results suggest that high-level contextual information influences sensorimotor processes responsible for generating intentional binding.