A new look at sensory attenuation. Action-effect anticipation affects sensitivity, not response bias

The systematic association of an action that a person performs with its sensory effects is thought to attenuate that person's perception of the effect of the action. However, whether learned sensorimotor contingencies truly affect perception, rather than just inducing a response bias, has yet to be determined. The experiment presented in this article comprised two parts: an action-effect association phase and a test phase, during which the actions' perceptual effects were tested. During the association phase, specific actions (left-key and right-key presses) were associated with specific visual effects (tilted Gabor patches). In the test phase, participants' left-key presses and right-key presses triggered the onset of a low-contrast tilted Gabor patch in 50% of trials (no stimulus was presented on the remaining 50% of trials). Participants were required to report the presence or absence of this tilted Gabor patch. Our results showed that participants' sensitivity (d') to the Gabor patches was reduced by 10% when the patches were triggered by the action they had previously been associated with. This finding indicates that a person's action does not induce a response bias (c), but changes the perception (d') of the learned action effect.     

Supporting IAAOC Members: Potential Localized Services

The International Association of Addictions and Offender Counselors (IAAOC) is challenged to support its members beyond the national level. The long‐standing model of state chapters fulfilling members' needs has been unsuccessful. An updated model for service delivery is suggested to assist IAAOC members.     

Minimizing motor mimicry by myself: Self-focus enhances online action-control mechanisms during motor contagion

Ideomotor theory of human action control proposes that activation of a motor representation can occur either through internally-intended or externally-perceived actions. Critically, sometimes these alternatives of eliciting a motor response may be conflicting, for example, when intending one action and perceiving another, necessitating the recruitment of enhanced action-control to avoid motor mimicry. Based on previous neuroimaging evidence, suggesting that reduced mimicry is associated with self-related processing, we aimed to experimentally enhance these action-control mechanisms during motor contagion by inducing self-focus. In two within-subjects experiments, participants had to enforce their action intention against an external motor contagion tendency under heightened and normal self-focus. During high self-focus participants showed reduced motor mimicry, induced either by mirror self-observation or self-referential judgments. This indicates that a self-focus provoking situation can enhance online action-control mechanisms, needed to resist unintentional motor contagion tendencies and thereby enables a modulation of automatic mirroring responses.     

Levinas in Japan: the ethics of alterity and the philosophy of no-self

Does the Buddhist doctrine of no-self imply, simply put, no-other? Does this doctrine necessarily come into conflict with an ethics premised on the alterity of the other? This article explores these questions by situating Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics in the context of contemporary Japanese philosophy. The work of twentieth-century Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō provides a starting point from which to consider the ethics of the self-other relation in light of the Buddhist notion of emptiness. The philosophy of thirteenth-century Zen Master Dōgen casts doubt on Watsuji’s commitment to reciprocal self-other relationality, showing that the idea of self-emptiness disrupts any conventional understanding of reciprocity and promotes instead other-oriented compassion. Despite interesting similarities between the ethics of alterity and Buddhist compassion, a Buddhist-influenced understanding of alterity differs from Levinas on important points, by making possible the claim that all others—human, animal, plant, and mineral—are ethical others.     

Planning not to do something: Does intending not to do something activate associated sensory consequences?

The present fMRI study investigated the central assumptions of ideomotor theory that actions become associated with their sensory consequences. Furthermore, we tested whether sensory effects can also become associated with the voluntary omission of an action. In a training phase, participants had to decide between executing an action and not executing it. Both decisions were followed by a specific effect tone. In the test phase, the participants had to carry out actions without hearing the effect tone. They either had to decide whether to execute an action or not or were instructed to execute an action or not. Our results reveal an increased activity in the auditory cortex elicited by responses that formerly elicited a tone—namely, self-chosen actions and self-chosen nonactions. Moreover, we found binding effects for stimulus-cued actions, but not for stimulus-cued nonactions. These findings support ideomotor theory by showing that a link exists between actions and their effects. Furthermore, our data demonstrate on a neural level that effect tones can become associated with intentionally not acting, therewith supporting the idea of a binding between the voluntary omission of an action and its effects in the environment.     

Web usability evaluation with screen reader users: implementation of the partial concurrent thinking aloud technique

A verbal protocol technique, adopted for a web usability evaluation, requires that the users are able to perform a double task: surfing and talking. Nevertheless, when blind users surf by using a screen reader and talk about the way they interact with the computer, the evaluation is influenced by a structural interference: users are forced to think aloud and listen to the screen reader at the same time. The aim of this study is to build up a verbal protocol technique for samples of visual impaired users in order to overcome the limits of concurrent and retrospective protocols. The technique we improved, called partial concurrent thinking aloud (PCTA), integrates a modified set of concurrent verbalization and retrospective analysis. One group of 6 blind users and another group of 6 sighted users evaluated the usability of a website using PCTA. By estimating the number of necessary users by the means of an asymptotic test, it was found out that the two groups had an equivalent ability of identifying usability problems, both over 80%. The result suggests that PCTA, while respecting the properties of classic verbal protocols, also allows to overcome the structural interference and the limits of concurrent and retrospective protocols when used with screen reader users. In this way, PCTA reduces the efficiency difference of usability evaluation between blind and sighted users.     

The Femme Fatale Effect: Attractiveness is a Liability for Businesswomen’s Perceived Truthfulness,Trust, and Deservingness of Termination

Sex Roles - In what we label the “femme fatale” effect, we proposed and found support for the notion that attractive businesswomen are judged as being less truthful than less attractive...