Retrospective construction of the judgement of free choice

The problem of free will lies at the heart of modern scientific studies of consciousness. Some authors propose that actions are unconsciously initiated and awareness of intention is referred retrospectively to the action after it has been performed [e.g. Aarts, H., Custers, R., & Wegner, D. M. (2005). On the inference of personal authorship: Enhancing experienced agency by priming effect information. Consciousness & Cognition, 14, 439-458]. This contrasts with the common impression that our intentions cause those actions. By combining a stop signal paradigm and an intentional action paradigm we show that participants sometimes indicate to have intentionally initiated an action while reaction time data strongly suggest that they in fact failed to stop the action. In a second experiment we demonstrate that the number of trials in which participants misattributed their awareness of intention varied with the intentional involvement during action planning. Our data support the retrospective account of intentional action. Furthermore, we introduce an experimental approach that objectifies introspective judgments of awareness of intention.     

Intentionally remembering or forgetting own- and other-race faces: Evidence from directed forgetting

People are better at remembering faces of their own relative to another ethnic group. This so-called own-race bias (ORB) has been explained in terms of differential perceptual expertise for own- and other-race faces or, alternatively, as resulting from socio-cognitive factors. To test predictions derived from the latter account, we examined item-method directed forgetting (DF), a paradigm sensitive to an intentional modulation of memory, for faces belonging to different ethnic and social groups. In a series of five experiments, participants during learning received cues following each face to either remember or forget the item, but at test were required to recognize all items irrespective of instruction. In Experiments 1 and 5, Caucasian participants showed DF for own-race faces only while, in Experiment 2, East Asian participants with considerable expertise for Caucasian faces demonstrated DF for own- and other-race faces. Experiments 3 and 4 found clear DF for social in- and outgroup faces. These results suggest that a modulation of face memory by motivational processes is limited to faces with which we have acquired perceptual expertise. Thus, motivation alone is not sufficient to modulate memory for other-race faces and cannot fully explain the ORB.     

PHILOSOPHY AS A FEMINIST SPIRITUALITY AND CRITICAL PRACTICE FOR MARY ASTELL

The question of how gender might inflect and affect philosophy as a way of life has been somewhat neglected, as has the role of philosophical modes of living for historical female philosophers. This essay draws on Michel Foucault’s multifaceted, Hadot-inspired conception of philosophy to show how transformative philosophical practices of the self function as feminist praxis in the work of the early modern feminist philosopher Mary Astell. Philosophy in Astell’s texts, the essay argues, is a spiritual practice of the self that at the same time functions as a feminist critique both of sexist social structures and of the self that undertakes the practice. It facilitates women in achieving internal freedom. Finally, the essay discusses potential feminist concerns about Astell’s proposed philosophical way of living, before suggesting that it may have value for women today.     

Sinistrals’ upper hand: Evidence for handedness differences in the representation of body space

A difference in the perception of extrapersonal space has been shown to exist between dextrals and sinistrals. On the classical line bisection task, this difference is evident in a greater left bias for dextrals compared to sinistrals. Different modalities and regions of space can be affected. However, it has not yet been investigated whether a systematic bias also exists for the perception of personal or body space. We investigated this by using three tasks which assess different aspects of personal space in an implicit and explicit way. These tasks were performed by strongly right-handed (dextrals), strongly left-handed (sinistrals) and mixed-handed participants. First, a task of pointing to three areas of one’s own body without the use of visual information showed dextrals to have an asymmetric estimation of their body. In right hemispace, dextrals’ pointing was at a greater distance from the midsagittal plane compared to pointing in left hemispace. No such asymmetry was present for sinistrals, while mixed-handers’ performance was intermediate to that of strong right- and strong left-handers. Second, a task of recovering circular patches from their body surface whilst blindfolded also showed superior performance of sinistrals compared to dextrals. On these two tasks, there was also a moderate relationship between handedness scores and performance measures. Third, a computer-based task of adjusting scaled body-outline-halves showed no handedness differences. Overall, these findings suggest handedness differences in the implicit but not explicit representation of one’s own body space. Possible mechanisms underlying the handedness differences shown for the implicit tasks are a stronger lateralization or a greater activation imbalance for dextrals and/or greater access to right hemispheric functions, such as an “up-to-date body” representation, by sinistrals. In contrast, explicit measures of how body space is represented may not be affected due to their relying on a different processing pathway.     

Mature adults' attitudes to mental health service utilisation

This qualitative study examined mature adults' attitudes to mental health services, in order to improve service utilisation among members of this group. Twenty individual and 12 focus group interviews were conducted with 111 West Australians aged ≥40 years living in urban and regional areas. The findings indicate that mature individuals may be receptive to information that assists them in differentiating the symptoms of ageing and mental illness and empowers them to make appropriate help‐seeking decisions. Perceived stigma and an aversion to medication were identified as barriers preventing individuals from acknowledging and addressing mental illness. A model of mature adults' intentions to utilise mental health services is proposed.     

Unattended exposure to components of speech sounds yields same benefits as explicit auditory training

Learning a second language as an adult is particularly effortful when new phonetic representations must be formed. Therefore the processes that allow learning of speech sounds are of great theoretical and practical interest. Here we examined whether perception of single formant transitions, that is, sound components critical in speech perception, can be enhanced through an implicit task-irrelevant learning procedure that has been shown to produce visual perceptual learning. The single-formant sounds were paired at subthreshold levels with the attended targets in an auditory identification task. Results showed that task-irrelevant learning occurred for the unattended stimuli. Surprisingly, the magnitude of this learning effect was similar to that following explicit training on auditory formant transition detection using discriminable stimuli in an adaptive procedure, whereas explicit training on the subthreshold stimuli produced no learning. These results suggest that in adults learning of speech parts can occur at least partially through implicit mechanisms.     

Visual perception in fencing: Do the eye movements of fencers represent their information pickup?

The present study examined whether results of athletes' eye movements while they observe fencing attacks reflect their actual information pickup by comparing these results with others gained with temporal and spatial occlusion and cuing techniques. Fifteen top-ranking expert fencers, 15 advanced fencers, and 32 sport students predicted the target region of 405 fencing attacks on a computer monitor. Results of eye movement recordings showed a stronger foveal fixation on the opponent's trunk and weapon in the two fencer groups. Top-ranking expert fencers fixated particularly on the upper trunk. This matched their performance decrements in the spatial occlusion condition. However, when the upper trunk was occluded, participants also shifted eye movements to neighboring body regions. Adding cues to the video material had no positive effects on prediction performance. We conclude that gaze behavior does not necessarily represent information pickup, but that studies applying the spatial occlusion paradigm should also register eye movements to avoid underestimating the information contributed by occluded regions.     

The Influence of Ease of Retrieval on Judgment as a Function of Attention to Subjective Experience

The ease with which information comes to mind can impact judgment. We examine whether the influence of ease of retrieval is moderated by situational factors that call it to attention before judgment and by individual differences in experiential processing style, as measured by the rational experiential inventory scale (Pacini & Epstein, 1999). An ease of retrieval effect, indicated by less favorable evaluations of a proposal following the retrieval of many reasons advocating the proposal than following the retrieval of only a few, was found for high‐experiential style processors regardless of situational factors that made ease of retrieval salient. However, the effect was found among low‐experiential style processors only when ease of retrieval was explicitly called to their attention prior to judgment.     

Head-mounted displays for clinical virtual reality applications: pitfalls in understanding user behavior while using technology.

The use of virtual environments with head-mounted displays (HMDs) offers unique assets to the evaluation and therapy of clinical populations. However, research examining the effects of this technology on clinical populations is sparse. Understanding how wearers interact with the HMD is vital. Discomfort leads to altered use of the HMD that could confound performance measures; the very measures which might be used as tools for clinical decision making. The current study is a post-hoc analysis of the relationship between HMD use and HMD comfort. The analysis was conducted to examine contributing factors for a high incidence of simulator sickness observed in an HMD-based driving simulator. Pearson correlation analysis was used to evaluate objective and subjective measures of HMD performance and self-reported user comfort ratings. The results indicated weak correlations between these variables, indicating the complexity of quantifying user discomfort and HMD performance. Comparison of two case studies detailing user behavior in the virtual environment demonstrates that selected variables may not capture how individuals use the HMD. The validity and usefulness of the HMD-based virtual environments must be understood to fully reap the benefits of virtual reality (VR) in rehabilitation medicine.