The Functional Role of Cognitive Frameworks on Visuomotor Adaptation Performance

The authors investigated the effects of cognitive representations of movement directions on sensorimotor adaptation performance. Adaptation performance was measured via a pointing experiment in which participants were provided with visual feedback that was distorted along the midsagittal plane (i.e., left-right reversal). Performance was analyzed relative to participants’ individual adaptation gains and 3 groups were subsequently defined (i.e., skilled, average, and poor adapters). The group separation was kept for the Cognitive Measurement of Represented Directions, which was used to analyze participants’ cognitive representation of movement directions. The results showed that skilled adapters, in contrast to poor adapters, possess a global representation of movement directions aligned to the cardinal axes. The cognitive representation structure hence supports the sensorimotor adaptation performance.     

Event-based prospective memory in depression: The impact of cue focality

This study is the first to compare event-based prospective memory performance in individuals with depression and healthy controls. The degree to which self-initiated processing is required to perform the prospective memory task was varied. Twenty-eight individuals with depression and 32 healthy controls worked on a computerised prospective memory task. Prospective cues were either presented focally or non-focally to the ongoing activity. Collapsing data across both conditions, controls outperformed individuals with depression in the prospective memory task. Overall, participants showed a poorer prospective memory performance in the non-focal condition that required self-initiated processing to a higher degree than the focal condition. Importantly, as revealed by a group by task condition interaction, groups did not differ in the focal condition, whereas, controls outperformed individuals with depression in the non-focal condition. The results are in line with the multiprocess framework of event-based prospective remembering and the cognitive-initiative account of depression-related cognitive deficits.     

Importance effects on performance in event‐based prospective memory tasks

In the present study we manipulated the importance of performing two event‐based prospective memory tasks. In Experiment 1, the event‐based task was assumed to rely on relatively automatic processes, whereas in Experiment 2 the event‐based task was assumed to rely on a more demanding monitoring process. In contrast to the first experiment, the second experiment showed that importance had a positive effect on prospective memory performance. In addition, the occurrence of an importance effect on prospective memory performance seemed to be mainly due to the features of the prospective memory task itself, and not to the characteristics of the ongoing tasks that only influenced the size of the importance effect. The results suggest that importance instructions may improve prospective memory if the prospective task requires the strategic allocation of attentional monitoring resources.     

Fish and microchips: on fish pain and multiple realization

Philosophical Studies - Opponents to consciousness in fish argue that fish do not feel pain because they do not have a neocortex, which is a necessary condition for feeling pain. A common...