Dynamic adjustments of cognitive control during economic decision making

Decision making in the Ultimatum game requires the resolution of conflicts between economic self-interest and fairness intuitions. Since cognitive control processes play an important role in conflict resolution, the present study examined how control processes that are triggered by conflicts between fairness and self-interest in unfair offers affect subsequent decisions in the Ultimatum game. Our results revealed that more unfair offers were accepted following previously unfair, compared to previously fair offers. Interestingly, the magnitude of this conflict adaptation effect correlated with the individual subjects' focus on economic self-interest. We concluded that conflicts between fairness and self-interest trigger cognitive control processes, which reinforce the focus on the current task goal.     

Moment-to-moment changes in feeling moved match changes in closeness,tears, goosebumps,and warmth: time series analyses

Feeling moved or touched can be accompanied by tears, goosebumps, and sensations of warmth in the centre of the chest. The experience has been described frequently, but psychological science knows little about it. We propose that labelling one’s feeling as being moved or touched is a component of a social-relational emotion that we term kama muta (its Sanskrit label). We hypothesise that it is caused by appraising an intensification of communal sharing relations. Here, we test this by investigating people’s moment-to-moment reports of feeling moved and touched while watching six short videos. We compare these to six other sets of participants’ moment-to-moment responses watching the same videos: respectively, judgements of closeness (indexing communal sharing), reports of weeping, goosebumps, warmth in the centre of the chest, happiness, and sadness. Our eighth time series is expert ratings of communal sharing. Time series analyses show strong and consistent cross-correlations of feeling moved and touched and closeness with each other and with each of the three physiological variables and expert-rated communal sharing – but distinctiveness from happiness and sadness. These results support our model.     

Temporal order judgements as a sensitive measure of the spatial bias in patients with visuospatial neglect

Visuospatial neglect is not a unitary phenomenon, but can be better considered a syndrome, consisting of a multitude of different spatial and non‐spatial components. In this study, we used a temporal order judgement (TOJ) test in a large sample of stroke patients (n = 73) to scrutinize the contribution of a spatial bias to the performance on shape cancellation and line bisection tests. In the TOJ test, patients were presented with two elements, one in each visual field, after which the one needed to indicate which of the two elements was presented earlier. For each visual field, the presentation of the stimuli was determined by a staircase procedure where the interval between the two stimuli was determined by the performance of the patient. Results indicated that the strength of the spatial bias was strongly correlated with an object cancellation test, but not with a line bisection test. We argue that these findings are explained by differences in the extent to which a spatial bias determines performance on both tasks: In contrast to shape cancellation tests, successful performance on line bisection tests depends primarily on an object‐based, allocentric representation of space, unrelated to any spatial bias in the detection of elements in the contralesional visual field.     

Action observation produces motor resonance in Parkinson's disease

Observation of movement activates the observer's own motor system, influencing the performance of actions and facilitating social interaction. This motor resonance is demonstrated behaviourally through visuomotor priming, whereby response latencies are influenced by the compatibility between an intended action and an observed (task‐irrelevant) action. The impact of movement disorders such as Parkinson's disease (PD) on motor resonance is unclear, as previous studies of visuomotor priming have not separated imitative compatibility (specific to human movement) from general stimulus‐response compatibility effects. We examined visuomotor priming in 23 participants with mild‐to‐moderate PD and 24 healthy older adults, using a task that pitted imitative compatibility against general stimulus‐response compatibility. Participants made a key press after observing a task‐irrelevant moving human finger or rectangle that was either compatible or incompatible with their response. Imitative compatibility effects, rather than general stimulus‐response compatibility effects, were found specifically for the human finger. Moreover, imitative compatibility effects did not differ between groups, indicating intact motor resonance in the PD group. These findings constitute the first unambiguous demonstration of imitative priming in both PD and healthy ageing, and have implications for therapeutic techniques to facilitate action, as well as the understanding of social cognition in PD.     

Salience from multiple feature contrast: Evidence from saccade trajectories

We used eye tracking to quantify the extent to which combinations of salient contrasts (orientation, luminance, and movement) influence a central salience map that guides eye movements. We found that luminance combined additively with orientation and movement, suggesting that the salience system processes luminance somewhat independently of the two other features. On the other hand, orientation and movement together influenced salience underadditively, suggesting that these two features are processed nonindependently. This pattern of results suggests that the visual system does not sum sources of salience linearly, but treats some sources of salience as redundant.

     

Measuring Processing Fluency: One versus Five Items

While there is an ample amount of consumer behavior research that recruits processing fluency as an explanatory construct, the question how to best measure the fluency experience has received little attention. Therefore, there is a lack of consistency in measuring the construct, particularly with regard to the use of single‐item versus multi‐item measures. The current research, thus, aims to investigate how processing fluency can be consistently measured across different experimental fluency manipulations and which type of measure has the highest validity. Based on classic scale development procedures, we propose a reliable and valid multi‐item measure and compare this measure against a single‐item measure in terms of predictive validity. We show that both measures mediate the effect of five established fluency manipulations and that the single‐item measure is sufficient. In addition to providing a measure for future research that can be adapted to different empirical settings, we provide empirical evidence on the replicability of fluency effects and on the theoretical conjecture that people have a uniform fluency experience across different manipulations of fluency.     

Gender Differences in Escapist Uses of Sexually Explicit Internet Material: Results from a German Probability Sample

The intensity of using sexually explicit internet material (SEIM) is contingent on users’ gender. However, gender differences in the motivations for watching SEIM have not yet been comprehensively explored. Drawing on a representative survey of German internet users, we therefore analyze how women and men use SEIM to satisfy escapist needs. Lower life satisfaction, the lack of a committed relationship, and feelings of loneliness contribute to predicting the frequency of using SEIM among men. Loneliness likewise fosters the consumption of SEIM among women, yet the effect is less pronounced. For female internet users, consumption of SEIM even increases in committed relationships and rather indicates a comparably high level of life satisfaction than dissatisfaction with life circumstances. Gender hence substantially moderates the connection between need structures and the consumption of SEIM.     

Emotional granularity and borderline personality disorder

This study examined the affective dysregulation component of borderline personality disorder (BPD) from an emotional granularity perspective, which refers to the specificity in which one represents emotions. Forty-six female participants meeting criteria for BPD and 51 female control participants without BPD and Axis I pathology completed tasks that assessed the degree to which participants incorporated information about valence (pleasant-unpleasant) and arousal (calm-activated) in their semantic/conceptual representations of emotions and in using labels to represent emotional reactions. As hypothesized, participants with BPD emphasized valence more and arousal less than control participants did when using emotion terms to label their emotional reactions. Implications and future research directions are discussed.     

Word category and verb--argument structure information in the dynamics of parsing

One of the core issues in psycholinguistic research concerns the relationship between word category information and verb-argument structure (e.g. transitivity) information of verbs in the process of sentence parsing. In two experiments (visual versus auditory presentation) using event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we addressed this question by presenting sentences in which the critical word simultaneously realized both a word category and a transitivity violation. ERPs for sentences with both types of violation clustered with the patterns for sentences with a word category violation only, but were different from the patterns elicited by argument structure violations in isolation, since only the latter elicited an N400 ERP component. The finding that an argument structure violation evoked an N400 only if the phrase structure of the respective sentence was correct suggests that a successful integration of the word category information of a verb functionally precedes the application of its argument structure information.