Know yourself and you shall know the other... to a certain extent: multiple paths of influence of self-reflection on mindreading

Social and neurocognitive research suggests that thinking about one's own thinking and thinking about the thinking of others-termed 'mindreading', 'metacognition', 'social cognition' or 'mentalizing' are not identical activities. The ability though to think about thinking in the first person is nevertheless related to the ability to think about other's thoughts in the third person. Unclear is how these phenomena influence one another. In this review, we explore how self-reflection and autobiographical memory influence the capacity to think about the thoughts and emotions of others. We review studies suggesting that the more individuals are able to reflect on and retrieve episodes from their life narratives, the more they are likely to grasp others' thoughts and emotions. We discuss evidence supporting this possibility including studies of the neurocognitive bases of empathy and self-awareness and how different aspects of self-reflection may impact on mindreading. We also draw from clinical reports how improved self-reflection may result in a more nuanced mindreading, namely persons suffering from schizophrenia and narcissistic personality disorder. We finally discuss the implications for research and practice and consider whether there are conditions in which the reverse is true, where self-reflection might impair mindreading or in which mindreading may facilitate self-reflection.     

Scaffolding the design of accessible eLearning content: a user-centered approach and cognitive perspective

There exist various guidelines for facilitating the design, preparation, and deployment of accessible eLearning applications and contents. However, such guidelines prevalently address accessibility in a rather technical sense, without giving sufficient consideration to the cognitive aspects and issues related to the use of eLearning materials by learners with disabilities. In this paper we describe how a user-centered design process was applied to develop a method and set of guidelines for didactical experts to scaffold their creation of accessible eLearning content, based on a more sound approach to accessibility. The paper also discusses possible design solutions for tools supporting eLearning content authors in the adoption and application of the proposed approach.     

The layers of presence: a bio-cultural approach to understanding presence in natural and mediated environments.

This paper proposes a bio-cultural theory of presence based on four different positions related to the role and structure of presence, as follows. First, presence is a defining feature of self and it is related to the evolution of a key feature of any central nervous system: the embedding of sensory-referred properties into an internal functional space. Without the emergence of the sense of presence it is impossible for the nervous system to experience distal attribution: the referencing of our perception to an external space beyond the limits of the sensory organs themselves. Second, even if the experience of the sense of presence is a unitary feeling, conceptually it can be divided in three different layers, phylogenetically different and strictly related to the three levels of self identified by Damasio. In particular we can make conceptual distinctions between proto presence (self vs. non self), core presence (self vs. present external world), and extended presence (self relative to present external world). Third, given that each layer of presence solves a particular facet of the internal/external world separation, it is characterized by specific properties. Finally, in humans the sense of presence is a direct function of these three layers: the more they are integrated, the more we are present. In the experience of optimal presence, biologically and culturally determined cognitive processes are working in harmony--to focus all levels of the self on a significant situation in the external world, whether this is real or virtual.     

Short-term forgetting and the articulatory loop

Two experiments explored the role of subvocal articulatory rehearsal in the Peterson short-term forgetting task. In the first of these, subjects recalled consonant trigrams after an interval of 0, 5 or 15 s during which they either counted backwards in threes, suppressed articulation by continuously uttering the word “the”, or in a third control condition continuously tapped on the table. While counting backwards caused the usual dramatic forgetting, tapping caused no forgetting, and articulatory suppression only minimal forgetting at the longest delay. A second study used the same procedure but included only two conditions, articulatory suppression during the retention interval and articulatory suppression during both input and retention. Neither showed evidence of forgetting over the 15 s delay. These results suggest that covert speech is not necessary for rehearsal in short-term verbal memory. As such they call for a re-evaluation of the nature and function of rehearsal.