A new look at sensory attenuation. Action-effect anticipation affects sensitivity, not response bias

The systematic association of an action that a person performs with its sensory effects is thought to attenuate that person's perception of the effect of the action. However, whether learned sensorimotor contingencies truly affect perception, rather than just inducing a response bias, has yet to be determined. The experiment presented in this article comprised two parts: an action-effect association phase and a test phase, during which the actions' perceptual effects were tested. During the association phase, specific actions (left-key and right-key presses) were associated with specific visual effects (tilted Gabor patches). In the test phase, participants' left-key presses and right-key presses triggered the onset of a low-contrast tilted Gabor patch in 50% of trials (no stimulus was presented on the remaining 50% of trials). Participants were required to report the presence or absence of this tilted Gabor patch. Our results showed that participants' sensitivity (d') to the Gabor patches was reduced by 10% when the patches were triggered by the action they had previously been associated with. This finding indicates that a person's action does not induce a response bias (c), but changes the perception (d') of the learned action effect.     

Krankheitsbelastung bei chronisch entzündlichen Darmerkrankungen

Background

Psychosocial distress is considerable in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The aim of this study was to assess the association of illness perceptions with disease-specific distress in patients with IBD in the context of various medical and psychological parameters.

Method

A total of 62 patients suffering from IBD were examined for illness perceptions using the illness perception questionnaire revised (IPQ-R), medical parameters and affective parameters using the hospital anxiety and depression scale (HADS) in a cross-sectional study. Associations with disease-specific distress were assessed.

Results

In multiple regression analyses illness perceptions and also physical well-being were identified as significant predictors of disease-specific distress and showed significant effects on the explanation for the amount of variance (R²=0.70).

Conclusion

Even in the context of various medical and psychological parameters illness perceptions showed significant associations with disease-specific distress in patients with IBD.     

Minimizing motor mimicry by myself: Self-focus enhances online action-control mechanisms during motor contagion

Ideomotor theory of human action control proposes that activation of a motor representation can occur either through internally-intended or externally-perceived actions. Critically, sometimes these alternatives of eliciting a motor response may be conflicting, for example, when intending one action and perceiving another, necessitating the recruitment of enhanced action-control to avoid motor mimicry. Based on previous neuroimaging evidence, suggesting that reduced mimicry is associated with self-related processing, we aimed to experimentally enhance these action-control mechanisms during motor contagion by inducing self-focus. In two within-subjects experiments, participants had to enforce their action intention against an external motor contagion tendency under heightened and normal self-focus. During high self-focus participants showed reduced motor mimicry, induced either by mirror self-observation or self-referential judgments. This indicates that a self-focus provoking situation can enhance online action-control mechanisms, needed to resist unintentional motor contagion tendencies and thereby enables a modulation of automatic mirroring responses.     

The surface structure and the deep structure of sequential control: What can we learn from task span switch costs?

A large component of response time switch costs in the cued task-switching paradigm is linked to cue changes without task changes, suggesting costs might reflect passive priming rather than endogenous control. In contrast, the task span procedure requires subjects to guide task selection via sequences of memorized task cues and therefore may be better suited to reflect endogenous switch processes (Logan, 2004). The present experiments combined the task span procedure with a 2:1 mapping between cues and tasks, allowing separation of cue-switch costs from true task-switch costs. Replicating findings with the cued task-switching paradigm, results showed both substantial cue-switch costs and actual task-switch costs (Experiments 1 and 2) as well as sensitivity of cue-switch costs, but not of task-switch costs, to opportunity for preparation (Experiment 2). Apparently, simple action plans use “surface level” phonological or articulatory codes that contain no task information. These results suggest that the distinction between cue-related and task-related processes is critical no matter whether tasks are cued exogenously or endogenously.     

The effect of a cross-trial shift of auditory warning signals on the sequential foreperiod effect

When a warning signal (WS) precedes an imperative signal (IS) by a certain amount of time (the foreperiod, FP), responses are speeded. Moreover, this effect is modulated by the FP length in the previous trial. This sequential FP effect has lately been attributed to a trace-conditioning mechanism according to which individuals learn (and re-learn) temporal relationships between the WS and the IS. Recent evidence suggests that sensory WS attributes are critical to trigger time-related response activation. Specifically, when WS modality is shifted in subsequent trials (e.g., from auditory to visual modality), the sequential FP effect becomes attenuated. This study examined whether the sequential FP effect is reduced only by between-modality shifts or whether this attenuation generalizes to cross-trial shifts of WS attributes within modalities. We compared dimensional (low vs. high tone frequency) and qualitative shifts (pure tone vs. noise) of equal-intense auditory WS events. The results of four experiments revealed that shifts of tone frequency did not, whereas shifts of qualitative tone characteristics did attenuate the sequential FP effect. These results support the view that the WS acts as a trigger cue that unintentionally activates responses at previously reinforced critical moments.     

Testing the theory of embodied cognition with subliminal words

In the current study, we tested the embodied cognition theory (ECT). The ECT postulates mandatory sensorimotor processing of words when accessing their meaning. We test that prediction by investigating whether invisible (i.e., subliminal) spatial words activate responses based on their long-term and short-term meaning. Masking of the words is used to prevent word visibility and intentional elaboration of the words’ semantic content. In this way, masking specifically isolates mandatory sensorimotor processing of words as predicted by the ECT. Do spatial subliminal words activate responses nonetheless? In Experiment 1, we demonstrate a spatial congruence effect of the invisible words if they precede visible target words. In Experiment 2, we show that masked words activate responses based on their long-term meaning. In Experiment 3, we demonstrate that masked words are also processed according to their short-term response meaning. We conclude that the ECT is supported by our findings and discuss implications of our results for embodied theories of semantic word processing and masked priming experiments.     

Left–right coding of past and future in language: The mental timeline during sentence processing

The metaphoric mapping theory suggests that abstract concepts, like time, are represented in terms of concrete dimensions such as space. This theory receives support from several lines of research ranging from psychophysics to linguistics and cultural studies; especially strong support comes from recent response time studies. These studies have reported congruency effects between the dimensions of time and space indicating that time evokes spatial representations that may facilitate or impede responses to words with a temporal connotation. The present paper reports the results of three linguistic experiments that examined this congruency effect when participants processed past- and future-related sentences. Response time was shorter when past-related sentences required a left-hand response and future-related sentences a right-hand response than when this mapping of time onto response hand was reversed (Experiment 1). This result suggests that participants can form time–space associations during the processing of sentences and thus this result is consistent with the view that time is mentally represented from left to right. The activation of these time–space associations, however, appears to be non-automatic as shown by the results of Experiments 2 and 3 when participants were asked to perform a non-temporal meaning discrimination task.     

Contemporaneous Statistics for Estimation in Stochastic Actor-Oriented Co-evolution Models

Psychometrika - Stochastic actor-oriented models (SAOMs) can be used to analyse dynamic network data, collected by observing a network and a behaviour in a panel design. The parameters of SAOMs are...     

Lucky joint action

In this paper, I argue that joint action permits a certain degree of luck. The cases I have in mind exhibit the following structure: each participant believes that the intended ends of each robustly support the joint action. This belief turns out to be false. Due to lucky circumstances, the discordance in intention never becomes common knowledge. However, common knowledge of the relevant intentions would have undermined the joint action altogether. The analysis of such cases shows the extent to which common knowledge of the participants’ intentions can be harmful to joint action. This extends a recent line of research that has questioned the necessity of common knowledge in joint action.     

How to study the ‘quality of psychoanalytic treatments’ and their long‐term effects on patients' well‐being: A representative,multi‐perspective follow‐up study3

How can we study the ‘quality of psychoanalytic treatments’? The authors attempt to answer this question by discussing a naturalistic, multi‐perspective and representative follow‐up study of psychoanalyses and long‐term psychoanalytic psychotherapies. We studied a representative sample (n = 401) of all the patients who had terminated their psychoanalytic treatments with members of the German Psychoanalytical Association (DPV) between 1990 and 1993. Between 70 and 80 per cent of the patients achieved (average 6.5 years after the end of treatment) good and stable psychic changes according to the evaluations of the patients themselves, their analysts, independent psychoanalytic and non‐psychoanalytic experts, and questionnaires commonly applied in psychotherapy research. The evaluation of mental health costs showed a cost reduction through fewer days of sick leave during the seven years following the end of long‐term psychoanalytic treatments. The results achieved using non‐psychoanalytical instruments are complemented by the richness of the idiosyncratic findings, gained by the psychoanalytic research instruments.