Motor imagery in spinal cord injured people is modulated by somatotopic coding,perspective taking,and post‐lesional chronic pain

Motor imagery (MI) allows one to mentally represent an action without necessarily performing it. Importantly, however, MI is profoundly influenced by the ability to actually execute actions, as demonstrated by the impairment of this ability as a consequence of lesions in motor cortices, limb amputations, movement limiting chronic pain, and spinal cord injury. Understanding MI and its deficits in patients with motor limitations is fundamentally important as development of some brain–computer interfaces and daily life strategies for coping with motor disorders are based on this ability. We explored MI in a large sample of patients with spinal cord injury (SCI) using a comprehensive battery of questionnaires to assess the ability to imagine actions from a first‐person or a third‐person perspective and also imagine the proprioceptive components of actions. Moreover, we correlated MI skills with personality measures and clinical variables such as the level and completeness of the lesion and the presence of chronic pain. We found that the MI deficits (1) concerned the body parts affected by deafferentation and deefferentation, (2) were present in first‐ but not in third‐person perspectives, and (3) were more altered in the presence of chronic pain. MI is thus closely related to bodily perceptions and representations. Every attempt to devise tools and trainings aimed at improving autonomy needs to consider the cognitive changes due to the body–brain disconnection.     

A New “Essential Tension” for Rationality and Culture. What Happens if Politics Tries to Encounter Science Again

My intention is not to get into specific, detailed historical observation about the ways that led the term ‘democracy’ to take on its current meaning, in science as much as in politics, but rather to establish a comparison between the models that political science proposes and interprets as important for the existence of democracy and those that science illustrates as indicators of scientific knowledge constructed in a democratic form. The debate about the contemporary meaning of democracy has generated an extraordinary diversification of models of democracy: from technocratic conceptions of government to conceptions of social life that include widespread political participation. And it is exactly for this reason that the assumption of a specific point of view on the question we are dealing with inevitably brings with it the choice of a model suitable to describe democratic form as a form of politics without further explanation, that is, as a political system with which science measures itself as a cultural category. In this sense, we can consider the passage from the concept of democracy to that of politics and generally of science to be a peaceful one, since politics has been appointed with that set of behaviours and democratic practices (including science) that political culture demands for the social benefit. This demand can be met only on condition that structural obstacles are removed and new cultural and epistemological mediators are introduced.     

Influence of Stimulus Salience and Attentional Demands on Visual Search Patterns in Hemispatial Neglect

Seventy-five left and right brain-damaged patients, with or without hemispatial neglect, and 40 age-matched control subjects were tested on cancellation tasks with two different visual textures modeled after Julesz (1981). In one condition (“preattentive”), target elements segregated easily from background elements and were perceived effortlessly. In the other (“attentive”), target elements did not segregate easily and could be detected only after prolonged focal scrutiny. Both controls and patients were more accurate and faster on the preattentive than attentive texture. However, only neglect patients were disproportionately impaired on the attentive texture, thus suggesting that unilateral neglect is exacerbated by the low visual salience of the stimuli and a higher engagement of focal attention. Thus, a simple bedside test may help to tell apart the level of visual information processing maximally impaired in neglect patients.     

Attitude toward Christianity,sexual orientation,and parental religiosity in a sample of Italian adolescents

Literature suggests that several demographic variables are linked with religiosity in adolescence, such as gender, age and parental religiosity. The sample consisted of 910 young people (53% female) between 14 and 19 years of age, attending secular secondary schools in Rome, Italy. They self-identified as heterosexual adolescents (91.6%), and lesbian/gay (LG) adolescents (8.4%). High scores of positive attitudes toward God, Jesus, the Bible, prayer and church were associated with female gender, higher father’s religiosity, and higher mother’s religiosity, but not with age of the participants. As expected, heterosexual orientation was associated with a more positive attitude toward Christianity, controlling for sex, age, and parental religiosity.     

Electrophysiological correlates of emotional crossmodal processing in binge drinking

Emotional crossmodal integration (i.e., multisensorial decoding of emotions) is a crucial process that ensures adaptive social behaviors and responses to the environment. Recent evidence suggests that in binge drinking—an excessive alcohol consumption pattern associated with psychological and cerebral deficits—crossmodal integration is preserved at the behavioral level. Although some studies have suggested brain modifications during affective processing in binge drinking, nothing is known about the cerebral correlates of crossmodal integration. In the current study, we asked 53 university students (17 binge drinkers, 17 moderate drinkers, 19 nondrinkers) to perform an emotional crossmodal task while their behavioral and neurophysiological responses were recorded. Participants had to identify happiness and anger in three conditions (unimodal, crossmodal congruent, crossmodal incongruent) and two modalities (face and/or voice). Binge drinkers did not significantly differ from moderate drinkers and nondrinkers at the behavioral level. However, widespread cerebral modifications were found at perceptual (N100) and mainly at decisional (P3b) stages in binge drinkers, indexed by slower brain processing and stronger activity. These cerebral modifications were mostly related to anger processing and crossmodal integration. This study highlights higher electrophysiological activity in the absence of behavioral deficits, which could index a potential compensation process in binge drinkers. In line with results found in severe alcohol-use disorders, these electrophysiological findings show modified anger processing, which might have a deleterious impact on social functioning. Moreover, this study suggests impaired crossmodal integration at early stages of alcohol-related disorders.     

Does a Judicial Warning Improve Defendant‐Culprit Matching?

During a trial, jurors may be asked to compare the defendant with video of the culprit. Yet matching unfamiliar people in this manner can be difficult and error‐prone. Judges may warn jurors about the dangers of identification from video images, but the effect of warnings is unknown. Here we report two studies that assessed the effect of warning instructions on defendant‐culprit matching. In Experiment 1, college students read either control, warning, or illustrated warning instructions before deciding if a defendant seen in one video matched the culprit in another video. Experiment 2 compared control and warning instructions in a sample of Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. Matching accuracy in both experiments was poor, and warnings did not consistently improve performance or make participants more cautious. These results do not support the supposition that warning instructions help jurors compare the defendant to images of the culprit.Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The egocentric bias: Seeing oneself as cause and target of others' behavior

The egocentric bias—the tendency to see oneself as both cause and target of another person's behavior—was examined in the context of a small group interaction. Pairs of subjects plus a confederate conducted a short discussion, their goal being to achieve consensus on a specific topic. The discussion was interrupted by the experimenter when the confederate summarized his/her opinion. It was found that subjects were more likely to see themselves as a cause as well as a target of the confederate's last statement compared to the way they were seen by other group members. Subjects were also more likely to exaggerate the amount of attention they received from the confederate. The overall egocentric bias scores were correlated with subjects' level of self-esteem. Cognitive and motivational processes that may account for this bias were discussed.     

Overshoot of curvature in visual apparent motion

If a curved line and a straight line are presented briefly, one above the other, in sequence to the eye, then, under appropriate conditions, visual apparent motion is obtained. Subjects report that the illusory figure moving and changing from the curved line to the straight line appears to overshoot the latter, gaining a small curvature in the opposite sense. Three experiments are described. In the first, the magnitude of this apparent curvature was quantified as a function of the delay between the onsets of the curved line and straight line (the stimulus onset asynchrony, SOA). It is shown that overshoot in curvature cannot be attributed to inappropriate patterns of eye fixations. In the second experiment, the stimulus configuration was modified to reveal the contribution to apparent curvature of classical curvature-contrast effects. Curvature overshoot due to apparent motion alone was thus estimated as a function of SOA. In the third experiment, an analogous position overshoot was measured for apparent motion elicited by two brief sequentially presented parallel line segments. It is argued that a combination of such position overshoots cannot explain curvature overshoot. Two schemes of a more general kind that might be used to interpret curvature overshoot are then outlined. One scheme is based on a neural-net model of apparent motion, and the other on a functional model of apparent motion that operates by laws analogous to those governing real physical motion.