Context, not conflict, drives cognitive control

Theories of cognitive control generally assume that perceived conflict acts as a signal to engage inhibitory mechanisms that suppress subsequent conflicting information. Crucially, an absence of conflict is not regarded as being a relevant signal for cognitive control. Using a cueing, a priming, and a Simon task, we provide evidence that conflict does not have this unique signal status: Encountering a conflict does not lead to behavioral adjustments on subsequent conflict trials, whereas encountering a nonconflict trial does lead to behavioral adjustments on subsequent nonconflict trials. We propose that this apparent role-reversal can be explained by a mechanism that responds to both the presence and the absence of conflict, down-regulating the visuomotor system following conflict, and up-regulating it following nonconflict.     

What is embodiment? A psychometric approach

What is it like to have a body? The present study takes a psychometric approach to this question. We collected structured introspective reports of the rubber hand illusion, to systematically investigate the structure of bodily self-consciousness. Participants observed a rubber hand that was stroked either synchronously or asynchronously with their own hand and then made proprioceptive judgments of the location of their own hand and used Likert scales to rate their agreement or disagreement with 27 statements relating to their subjective experience of the illusion. Principal components analysis of this data revealed four major components of the experience across conditions, which we interpret as: embodiment of rubber hand, loss of own hand, movement, and affect. In the asynchronous condition, an additional fifth component, deafference, was found. Secondary analysis of the embodiment of runner hand component revealed three subcomponents in both conditions: ownership, location, and agency. The ownership and location components were independent significant predictors of proprioceptive biases induced by the illusion. These results suggest that psychometric tools may provide a rich method for studying the structure of conscious experience, and point the way towards an empirically rigorous phenomenology.     

Norms on the gender perception of role nouns in Czech,English, French,German, Italian,Norwegian, and Slovak

We collected norms on the gender stereotypicality of an extensive list of role nouns in Czech, English, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, and Slovak, to be used as a basis for the selection of stimulus materials in future studies. We present a Web-based tool (available at https://www.unifr.ch/lcg/) that we developed to collect these norms and that we expect to be useful for other researchers, as well. In essence, we provide (a) gender stereotypicality norms across a number of languages and (b) a tool to facilitate cross-language as well as cross-cultural comparisons when researchers are interested in the investigation of the impact of stereotypicality on the processing of role nouns.     

Self awareness and the body image

What mental representations give us the sense of our body as a unique object in the world? We investigated this issue in the context of the rubber hand illusion (RHI), an illusion of body image in which a prosthetic hand brushed synchronously, but not asynchronously, with one’s own hand is perceived as actually being one’s hand. We conducted a large-scale study of the RHI, and used psychometric analysis to reveal the structure of the subjective experience of embodiment [Longo et al. (2008). What is embodiment? A psychometric approach. Cognition,107, 978-998]. Here, we use this dataset to investigate the relation between incorporation of a rubber hand into the body image and the perceived similarity between the participant’s hand and the rubber hand. Objective similarity (as measured by skin luminance, hand shape, and third-person similarity ratings) did not appear to influence participants’ experience of the RHI. Conversely, incorporation of the rubber hand into the body image did affect the similarity that participants perceived between their own hand and the rubber hand. Participants who had experienced the RHI perceived their hand and the rubber hand as significantly more similar than participants who had not experienced the illusion. That is, embodiment leads to perceived similarity, but perceived similarity does not lead to embodiment. Furthermore, similarity ratings following the illusion were selectively correlated with some components of embodiment, but not with others. These results suggest an important role of a mental body image in the perception of the relation between the self and others.     

Differential course of executive control changes during normal aging

Normal aging has been associated with executive control deficits, but it is as yet unclear whether different executive subprocesses are differentially affected during the course of aging. The present study aimed to investigate age effects on a range of executive control subcomponents. Four consecutive age groups (20-30 years, 31-45 years, 46-60 years, 61-75 years), matched on present state IQ and mood, were compared on tasks of strategic memory processing, verbal fluency, reasoning, inhibition, task management, and self-rating of executive abilities. Deficits concerning the suppression of habitual and experimentally induced prepotent response tendencies and the ability to efficiently divide attention were observed in subjects over 60 years of age compared to the younger groups, while memory, verbal fluency, and reasoning were largely unaffected. Results suggest a sharp decline of executive function after age 60 and a differential course of different executive subcomponents across aging, adding further support to a multi-dimensional model of executive function.     

The Rating of Sexist Humor Under Time Pressure as an Indicator of Spontaneous Sexist Attitudes

Spontaneous vs. more controlled indicators of sexist attitudes were assessed in a laboratory experiment with 131 male German undergraduates. Participants rated the funniness of sexist and nonsexist jokes either with or without time pressure, and completed self-report measures of sexism and related constructs. With time pressure, participants showed greater liking for sexist jokes than without. No such effect was found for nonsexist jokes. Both with and without time pressure, sexist joke ratings showed meaningful correlations with standard self-report measures, which attests to the joke measure’s high reliability and construct validity. Directions for future research are discussed.     

Events,Tropes, and Truthmaking

Nominalizations are expressions that are particularly challenging philosophically in that they help form singular terms that seem to refer to abstract or derived objects often considered controversial. The three standard views about the semantics of nominalizations are [1] that they map mere meanings onto objects, [2] that they refer to implicit arguments, and [3] that they introduce new objects, in virtue of their compositional semantics. In the second case, nominalizations do not add anything new but pick up objects that would be present anyway in the semantic structure of a corresponding sentence without a nominalization. In the first and third case, nominalizations in a sense ‘create’ new objects’, enriching the ontology on the basis of the meaning of expressions. I will argue that there is a fourth kind of nominalization which requires a quite different treatment. These are nominalizations that introduce ‘new’ objects, but only partially characterize them. Such nominalizations generally refer to events or tropes. I will explore an account according on which such nominalizations refer to truth makers.     

Masked prime stimuli can bias “free” choices between response alternatives

Stimuli presented below the threshold of awareness can systematically influence choice responses determined by the instructed stimulus-response (S-R) mapping (task set). In this study, we investigated whether such stimuli will also bias a free choice between two response alternatives under conditions in which this choice subjectively appears to be internally generated and free. Participants had to respond to targets preceded by masked arrow primes. Left-pointing and right-pointing arrow targets required left or right responses, whereas randomly interspersed “free-choice” targets indicated that the participants were free to choose either response. Although masked primes could not be consciously discriminated, they systematically affected not only performance to arrow targets, but also the free choice between response alternatives. This demonstrates that apparently “free” choices are not immune to nonconsciously triggered biases. However, in blocks in which no specific S-R mapping was imposed, masked primes did not affect free-choice performance, indicating that these effects are not automatic but are determined by currently active task sets.