Seeing the body distorts tactile size perception

Vision of the body modulates somatosensation, even when entirely non-informative about stimulation. For example, seeing the body increases tactile spatial acuity, but reduces acute pain. While previous results demonstrate that vision of the body modulates somatosensory sensitivity, it is unknown whether vision also affects metric properties of touch, and if so how. This study investigated how non-informative vision of the body modulates tactile size perception. We used the mirror box illusion to induce the illusion that participants were directly seeing their stimulated left hand, though they actually saw their reflected right hand. We manipulated whether participants: (a) had the illusion of directly seeing their stimulated left hand, (b) had the illusion of seeing a non-body object at the same location, or (c) looked directly at their non-stimulated right-hand. Participants made verbal estimates of the perceived distance between two tactile stimuli presented simultaneously to the dorsum of the left hand, either 20, 30, or 40 mm apart. Vision of the body significantly reduced the perceived size of touch, compared to vision of the object or of the contralateral hand. In contrast, no apparent changes of perceived hand size were found. These results show that seeing the body distorts tactile size perception.     

Reconsidering Advertising Literacy as a Defense Against Advertising Effects

It is widely assumed that advertising literacy makes children less susceptible to advertising effects. However, empirical research does not provide convincing evidence for this view. In this article, we explain why advertising literacy as it is currently defined (i.e., conceptual knowledge of advertising) is not effective in reducing children's advertising susceptibility. Specifically, based on recent insights on children's advertising processing, we argue that due to the affect-based nature of contemporary advertising, children primarily process advertising under conditions of low elaboration and, consequently, are unlikely to use their advertising knowledge as a critical defense. Moreover, literature on cognitive development suggests that children's ability to use advertising knowledge as a defense will be further limited by their immature executive functioning and emotion regulation abilities. Therefore, we argue that the current conceptualization of advertising literacy needs to be extended with two dimensions: advertising literacy performance, which takes into account the actual use of conceptual advertising knowledge, and attitudinal advertising literacy, which includes low-effort, attitudinal mechanisms that can function as a defense under conditions of low elaboration. We conclude our article with specific directions for future research and implications for the ongoing societal and political debate about children and advertising.     

Role of the hippocampus and orbitofrontal cortex during the disambiguation of social cues in working memory

Human social interactions are complex behaviors requiring the concerted effort of multiple neural systems to track and monitor the individuals around us. Cognitively, adjusting our behavior on the basis of changing social cues such as facial expressions relies on working memory and the ability to disambiguate, or separate, the representations of overlapping stimuli resulting from viewing the same individual with different facial expressions. We conducted an fMRI experiment examining the brain regions contributing to the encoding, maintenance, and retrieval of overlapping identity information during working memory using a delayed match-to-sample task. In the overlapping condition, two faces from the same individual with different facial expressions were presented at sample. In the nonoverlapping condition, the two sample faces were from two different individuals with different expressions. fMRI activity was assessed by contrasting the overlapping and nonoverlapping conditions at sample, delay, and test. The lateral orbitofrontal cortex showed increased fMRI signal in the overlapping condition in all three phases of the delayed match-to-sample task and increased functional connectivity with the hippocampus when encoding overlapping stimuli. The hippocampus showed increased fMRI signal at test. These data suggest that lateral orbitofrontal cortex helps encode and maintain representations of overlapping stimuli in working memory, whereas the orbitofrontal cortex and hippocampus contribute to the successful retrieval of overlapping stimuli. We suggest that the lateral orbitofrontal cortex and hippocampus play a role in encoding, maintaining, and retrieving social cues, especially when multiple interactions with an individual need to be disambiguated in a rapidly changing social context in order to make appropriate social responses.     

Semantic diversity: A measure of semantic ambiguity based on variability in the contextual usage of words

Semantic ambiguity is typically measured by summing the number of senses or dictionary definitions that a word has. Such measures are somewhat subjective and may not adequately capture the full extent of variation in word meaning, particularly for polysemous words that can be used in many different ways, with subtle shifts in meaning. Here, we describe an alternative, computationally derived measure of ambiguity based on the proposal that the meanings of words vary continuously as a function of their contexts. On this view, words that appear in a wide range of contexts on diverse topics are more variable in meaning than those that appear in a restricted set of similar contexts. To quantify this variation, we performed latent semantic analysis on a large text corpus to estimate the semantic similarities of different linguistic contexts. From these estimates, we calculated the degree to which the different contexts associated with a given word vary in their meanings. We term this quantity a word’s semantic diversity (SemD). We suggest that this approach provides an objective way of quantifying the subtle, context-dependent variations in word meaning that are often present in language. We demonstrate that SemD is correlated with other measures of ambiguity and contextual variability, as well as with frequency and imageability. We also show that SemD is a strong predictor of performance in semantic judgments in healthy individuals and in patients with semantic deficits, accounting for unique variance beyond that of other predictors. SemD values for over 30,000 English words are provided as supplementary materials.     

Moral Clarity in Narratives Elicits Greater Cooperation than Moral Ambiguity

In disciplines such as moral psychology and media theory, investigations of moral clarity versus ambiguity in narratives are increasingly important. Untested mechanisms have been proposed for how moral clarity and ambiguity might affect audiences. Based on literature regarding joint action and coordinated experiences, we reason that morally clear narratives elicit coordinated responses across audience members, which should increase within-group cooperation. By contrast, we reason that morally ambiguous narratives elicit divergent, uncoordinated responses across audience members, and this experience decreases cooperation. We conducted three independent studies (one using short text narratives, one using feature-length films, and one using morally and emotionally neutral stimuli). Results indicate that moral clarity is indeed associated with subsequently higher levels of group cooperation than moral ambiguity, and the effect cannot be attributed to changes in affect or moral priming.     

Can Giving Clients a Choice in Food Selection Help to Meet Their Nutritional Needs?: Investigating a Novel Food Bank Approach for Asylum Seekers

The aim of this research was to investigate whether a foodbank working directly with people seeking asylum and incorporating client choice, located in Melbourne Australia, can meet the nutritional requirements of asylum seekers. A structured process of direct observation was used to document each item selected from the foodbank in a single basket. The food baskets of 116 asylum seekers, all over the age of 18, who were wholly reliant on the foodbank were analysed for nutritional content. Analysis revealed that an average basket was deficient in almost all micronutrients including vitamins A, C, D and E, folate, calcium and zinc. Baskets were found to have higher than recommended levels of sodium and fat. Despite the foodbank allowing clients to individually select the food they wish to consume, the food baskets remained nutritionally inadequate. This may be due the structure of the foodbank, the nature of relying on community donations of food and complexities surrounding healthy food choice among asylum seekers. Providing choice around food acquisition is one way to promote dignity in the refugee determination process; however, this may not be the best way to provide a nutritionally adequate diet. In addition to donor guidelines that highlight the need for nutritionally and culturally appropriate foods, further supplementary nutritional education may be required to encourage healthy food choices where they exist.