Mimicry for money: Behavioral consequences of imitation

Two experiments investigated the idea that mimicry leads to pro-social behavior. It was hypothesized that mimicking the verbal behavior of customers would increase the size of tips. In Experiment 1, a waitress either mimicked half her customers by literally repeating their order or did not mimic her customers. It was found that she received significantly larger tips when she mimicked her customers than when she did not. In Experiment 2, in addition to a mimicry- and non-mimicry condition, a baseline condition was included in which the average tip was assessed prior to the experiment. The results indicated that, compared to the baseline, mimicry leads to larger tips. These results demonstrate that mimicry can be advantageous for the imitator because it can make people more generous.     

Grasp preparation improves change detection for congruent objects

A series of experiments provided converging support for the hypothesis that action preparation biases selective attention to action-congruent object features. When visual transients are masked in so-called change-blindness scenes, viewers are blind to substantial changes between 2 otherwise identical pictures that flick back and forth. The authors report data in which participants planned a grasp prior to the onset of a change-blindness scene in which 1 of 12 objects changed identity. Change blindness was substantially reduced for grasp-congruent objects (e.g., planning a whole-hand grasp reduced change blindness to a changing apple). A series of follow-up experiments ruled out an alternative explanation that this reduction had resulted from a labeling or strategizing of responses and provided converging support that the effect genuinely arose from grasp planning.     

Asymmetrical learning between a tactile and visual serial RT task

According to many researchers, implicit learning in the serial reaction-time task is predominantly motor based and therefore should be independent of stimulus modality. Previous research on the task, however, has focused almost completely on the visual domain. Here we investigated sequence learning when the imperative stimuli were presented tactilely to the fingers. Learning in this task was compared to sequence learning in a typical visual task, using very similar experimental conditions. The results indicate that sequential learning occurs in the tactile task, though to a lesser degree than in its visual counterpart. Furthermore, there was similar cross-modal transfer in both directions, meaning that transfer from the visual to the tactile task was partial. It is proposed that sequence learning involves a stimulus-specific component in the visual but not in the tactile task.     

The Medical Humanities Today: Humane Health Care or Tool of Governance?

The medical humanities have been presented as a panacea for medical reductionism; a means for 'humanizing' medicine. However, there is a lack of consensus about the appropriate contributing disciplines and how curricula should be taught and assessed. This special issue critically examines the role of the medical humanities in medical education and their potential to serve, inadvertently or otherwise, as a tool of governance. The contributors, who include medical educators and medical practitioners, employ a range of perspectives for analysing the pertinent issues.     

What Should A “Gibsonian Neuroscience” Look Like? Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract

Ecological psychology has been criticized for ignoring the brain in its theory formation. In recent years, however, a number of researchers have started asking ecologically-inspired questions about the ways in which not only the embodied activity of the organism in its environment, but also the particulars of the organism's nervous system matter. This work has typically appeared in neuroscience journals, thereby potentially escaping the attention of ecological psychologists. The current article introduces a Special Issue of Ecological Psychology that aims to correct this problem. This issue brings together one empirical and six theoretical articles that develop ideas about the contributions of the nervous system to perception-action. We briefly review each of the articles, identify common themes, and point out the surprising variety in theoretical positions. It is hoped that this Special Issue will help guide discussions amongst ecological psychologists and (ecological) neuroscientists as they confront the question “What should a ‘Gibsonian neuroscience’ look like?”     

Mindful social inferences: Decentering decreases hostile attributions

While research indicates that mindfulness can benefit individual well-being, less is known about its potential impact in the interpersonal domain. In the current research, we examined whether a central element of mindfulness—decentering—decreases hostile attributions in ambiguous social situations. We hypothesized that decentering from experiences—observing and considering them as mental events that arise and disappear—hampers the development of hostile attributions. A series of three laboratory studies, two of which were high-powered and pre-registered, demonstrated that decentering decreases hostile attribution in response to ambiguous social scenarios as compared to immersion instructions, and as compared to baseline. Additionally, the results suggest that decentering may be particularly beneficial in reducing hostile attribution bias among participants high in trait rumination. The current findings provide initial insights into the effect of decentering on the development of hostile attribution bias, and the association between mindfulness and interpersonal responses more generally.     

Tool-use and the left hemisphere: What is lost in ideomotor apraxia?

Impaired tool related action in ideomotor apraxia is normally ascribed to loss of sensorimotor memories for habitual actions (engrams), but this account has not been tested against a hypothesis of a general deficit in representation of hand-object spatial relationships. Rapid reaching for familiar tools was compared with reaching for abstract objects in apraxic patients (N = 9) and in a control group with right hemisphere posterior stroke. The apraxic patients alone showed an impairment in rotating the wrist to correctly grasp an inverted tool but not when inverting the hand to avoid a barrier and grasp an abstract object, and the severity of the impairment in tool reaching correlated with pantomime of tool-use. A second experiment with two apraxic patients tested whether barrier avoidance was simply less spatially demanding than reaching for a tool. However, the patient with damage limited to the inferior parietal lobe still showed a selective problem for tools. These results demonstrate that some apraxic patients are selectively impaired in their interaction with familiar tools, and this cannot be explained by the demands of the task on postural or spatial representation. However, traditional engram theory cannot account for associated problems with imitation of novel actions nor the absence of any correlated deficit in recognition of the methods of grasp of common tools. A revised theory is presented which follows the dorsal and ventral streams model ( Milner & Goodale, 2008) and proposes preservation of motor control by the dorsal stream but impaired modulating input to it from the conceptual systems of the left temporal lobe.     

The illness perception questionnaire: A new method for assessing the cognitive representation of illness

Abstract

The Illness Perception Questionnaire (IPQ) is a new method for assessing cognitive representations of illness. The IPQ is a theoretically derived measure comprising five scales that provides information about the five components that have been found to underlie the cognitive representation of illness. The five scales assess identity - the symptoms the patient associates with the illness, cause - personal ideas about aetiology, time-line - the perceived duration of the illness, consequences - expected effects and outcome and cure control - how one controls or recovers from the illness. The IPQ has a specific number of core items but allows the user to add items for particular patient groups or health threats. Data is presented supporting the reliability and validity of the IPQ scales in different chronic illness populations.     

Cultural and learning differences in the Judd illusion

In the present study, we examined whether individual differences in the perception of illusory Judd drawings point to variability in the pickup of informational variables. Two sources for these individual differences were addressed: culture and learning. East Asian (n = 24) and Western (n = 24) participants made perceptual judgments of the midpoint of the shaft of various Judd figures in a pretest–practice–posttest design. During practice, half of the participants received feedback about the actual midpoint after each trial, while the other half did not receive feedback. The results showed differences among perceivers of different cultures in judging the midpoints of the shafts of Judd figures, particularly with respect to their propensity to improve perceptual accuracy after repeated practice and feedback. For most participants, changes in illusory bias as a consequence of learning were shown to reflect either a change in what informational variable they exploited or a rescaling or calibration of the perception to the informational variable. However, the individual differences in illusory bias related to culture could not be unequivocally attributed to either of these perceptual-learning processes.