Disgust as embodied loss aversion

A quickly expanding literature has examined the link between physical disgust and morality. This article critically integrates the existing evidence and draws the following conclusions: First, there is considerable evidence that experimentally induced disgust and cleanliness influence moral judgment, but moderating variables and attributional processes need to be considered. Second, moral considerations have substantial effects on behavioural concomitants of disgust, such as facial expressions, economic games and food consumption. Third, while disgust involves a conservation concern, it can manifest itself in both liberal and conservative political attitudes. Overall, disgust can be considered to form part of a behavioural loss aversion system aimed at protecting valuable resources, including the integrity of one’s body. Recommendations are offered to investigate the role of disgust more rigorously in order to fully capture its role in moral life.     

The spacing effect in older and younger adults: does context matter?

Age-related memory change has been a topic of much investigation in recent years, including spacing benefits and reliance on contextual cues. We manipulated the spacing schedule and the context of learning and observed the effects on long-term recall ability in healthy older and younger adults. After learning Swahili–English word pairs, half practiced immediately (massed) and half practiced 24 h later (spaced) either in the same room or a different room (context) from the initial session. A final recall test 10 days after the practice session occurred in the same room as the first session. Participants in the spaced condition remembered more than those in the massed condition 10 days later. Younger adults remembered more word pairs than older adult participants. Context change eliminated the spacing benefit for both age groups.     

Global/local processing of hierarchical visual stimuli in a conflict–choice task by capuchin monkeys (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Sapajus</Emphasis> spp.)

In the last two decades, comparative research has addressed the issue of how the global and local levels of structure of visual stimuli are processed by different species, using Navon-type hierarchical figures, i.e. smaller local elements that form larger global configurations. Determining whether or not the variety of procedures adopted to test different species with hierarchical figures are equivalent is of crucial importance to ensure comparability of results. Among non-human species, global/local processing has been extensively studied in tufted capuchin monkeys using matching-to-sample tasks with hierarchical patterns. Local dominance has emerged consistently in these New World primates. In the present study, we assessed capuchins’ processing of hierarchical stimuli with a method frequently adopted in studies of global/local processing in non-primate species: the conflict–choice task. Different from the matching-to-sample procedure, this task involved processing local and global information retained in long-term memory. Capuchins were trained to discriminate between consistent hierarchical stimuli (similar global and local shape) and then tested with inconsistent hierarchical stimuli (different global and local shapes). We found that capuchins preferred the hierarchical stimuli featuring the correct local elements rather than those with the correct global configuration. This finding confirms that capuchins’ local dominance, typically observed using matching-to-sample procedures, is also expressed as a local preference in the conflict–choice task. Our study adds to the growing body of comparative studies on visual grouping functions by demonstrating that the methods most frequently used in the literature on global/local processing produce analogous results irrespective of extent of the involvement of memory processes.     

Early markers of lexical stress in visual word recognition

The goal of the present study was to investigate the time-course of suprasegmental information in visual word recognition. To this aim we measured event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during a simple lexical decision task in Italian. Two factors were manipulated: Stress dominance (the most frequent stress type) and stress neighborhood consistency (the proportion and number of existent words sharing orthographic ending and stress pattern). Participants were presented with target words either bearing dominant (on the penultimate syllable; 'graNIta,' 'seNIle,' slush, senile) or non-dominant stress (on the antepenultimate syllable; 'MISsile,' 'BIbita,' missile, drink), and either having a consistent (graNIta, MISsile) or an inconsistent stress neighborhood (seNIle, BIbita). Our results showed in the initial stages of processing an effect that we interpreted as an early orthographic marker of stress neighborhood in interaction with dominance. Later, from 250 ms after target onset, a marker of the lexical stress difference also emerged. The role of stress assignment in word recognition is discussed.     

Attention to configural information in change detection for faces

In recent research the change-detection paradigm has been used along with cueing manipulations to show that more attention is allocated to the upper than lower facial region, and that this attentional allocation is disrupted by inversion. We report two experiments the object of which was to investigate how the type of information changed might be a factor in these findings by explicitly comparing the role of attention in detecting change to information thought to be 'special' to faces (second-order relations) with information that is more useful for basic-level object discrimination (first-order relations). Results suggest that attention is automatically directed to second-order relations in upright faces, but not first-order relations, and that this pattern of attentional allocation is similar across features.     

On agency and body-ownership: phenomenological and neurocognitive reflections

The recent distinction between sense of agency and sense of body-ownership has attracted considerable empirical and theoretical interest. The respective contributions of central motor signals and peripheral afferent signals to these two varieties of body experience remain unknown. In the present review, we consider the methodological problems encountered in the empirical study of agency and body-ownership, and we then present a series of experiments that study the interplay between motor and sensory information. In particular, we focus on how multisensory signals interact with body representations to generate the sense of body-ownership, and how the sense of agency modulates the sense of body-ownership. Finally, we consider the respective roles of efferent and afferent signals for the experience of one's own body and actions, in relation to self-recognition and the recognition of other people's actions. We suggest that the coherent experience of the body depends on the integration of efferent information with afferent information in action contexts. Overall, whereas afferent signals provide the distinctive content of one's own body experience, efferent signals seem to structure the experience of one's own body in an integrative and coherent way.