Directly assessing the relationship between irrelevant speech and irrelevant tapping

The acoustic confusion effect is the finding that lists of to-be-remembered items that sound similar to one another are recalled worse than otherwise comparable lists of items that sound different. Previous work has shown that concurrent irrelevant speech and concurrent irrelevant tapping both reduce the size of this effect, suggesting similarities between the two manipulations. The authors assessed the relation between irrelevant speech and irrelevant tapping by correlating the disruption each causes to recall of similar- and dissimilar-sounding items. A significant correlation was obtained, indicating a relation between the two. The results indicate that researchers should be sensitive to changes in the magnitude of the effects rather than focusing exclusively on the presence or absence of particular effects. Implications for the 3 major explanations of the irrelevant speech effect are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved).     

Self-representation in mediated environments: the experience of emotions modulated by auditory-vibrotactile heartbeat.

In 1890, William James hypothesized that emotions are our perception of physiological changes. Many different theories of emotion have emerged since then, but it has been demonstrated that a specifically induced physiological state can influence an individual's emotional responses to stimuli. In the present study, auditory and/or vibrotactile heartbeat stimuli were presented to participants (N = 24), and the stimuli's effect on participants' physiological state and subsequent emotional attitude to affective pictures was measured. In particular, we aimed to investigate the effect of the perceived distance to stimuli on emotional experience. Distant versus close sound reproduction conditions (loudspeakers vs. headphones) were used to identify whether an "embodied" experience can occur in which participants would associate the external heartbeat sound with their own. Vibrotactile stimulation of an experimental chair and footrest was added to magnify the experience. Participants' peripheral heartbeat signals, self-reported valence (pleasantness) and arousal (activation) ratings for the pictures, and memory performance scores were collected. Heartbeat sounds significantly affected participants' heartbeat, the emotional judgments of pictures, and their recall. The effect of distance to stimuli was observed in the significant interaction between the spatial location of the heartbeat sound and the vibrotactile stimulation, which was mainly caused by the auditory-vibrotactile interaction in the loudspeakers condition. This interaction might suggest that vibrations transform the far sound condition (sound via loudspeakers) in a close-stimulation condition and support the hypothesis that close sounds are more affective than distant ones. These findings have implications for the design and evaluation of mediated environments.     

The On-Line Processing of Verb-Phrase Ellipsis in Aphasia

We investigate the on-line processing of verb-phrase ellipsis (VPE) constructions in two brain injured populations: Broca’s and Anomic aphasics. VPE constructions are built from two simple clauses; the first is the antecedent clause and the second is the ellipsis clause. The ellipsis clause is missing its verb and object (i.e., its verb phrase (VP)), which receives its reference from the fully specified VP in the antecedent clause. VPE constructions are unlike other sentence types that require displacement of an argument NP; these latter constructions (e.g., object-relatives, wh-questions) yield either on-time or delayed antecedent reactivation. Our results demonstrate that Anomics, like unimpaired individuals, evince reactivation of the direct object NP (within the VP) at the elided position. Broca’s patients, on the other hand, do not show reactivation of the antecedent. We consider several interpretations for our data, including explanations focusing on the larger ‘grain size’ of the reconstructed material in the ellipsis clause, the properties of the auxiliary that carries tense and agreement features, and the possibility that the cost-free syntactic copy procedure claimed to underlie VPE may be modulated by the functional deficit in Broca’s aphasia.     

Social Cognitive Determinants of Moderate and Vigorous Physical Activity in College Freshmen

This paper examined the relationship among social cognitive factors and physical activity in college freshmen. Students from a midwestern university ( N  = 69; 56.5% female) participated in this prospective study. Psychosocial data were collected at the beginning of a semester, and physical activity measurement by accelerometry was completed at semester's end. Multiple regression analyses indicated that self-efficacy and physical activity goals were significant predictors of vigorous activity ( r ² = .16). However, these constructs were not significant for moderate activity ( r ² = .16). Social cognitive constructs appear to be related to vigorous, but not moderate activity in college freshmen. Future studies should consider assessing social cognitive and physical activity variables at multiple time points across extended durations.     

Some Comments on the Reviews

We comment on the preceding reviews of our book “Memory Evolutive Systems”, discussing the improvements proposed by some of the reviewers and answering to critics of others, in particular on the use of category theory for modeling living systems.     

Perceiving subjectivity in bodily movement: The case of dancers

This paper is about one of the puzzles of bodily self-consciousness: can an experience be both and at the same time an experience of one′s physicality and of one′s subjectivity? We will answer this question positively by determining a form of experience where the body′s physicality is experienced in a non-reifying manner. We will consider a form of experience of oneself as bodily which is different from both “prenoetic embodiment” and “pre-reflective bodily consciousness” and rather corresponds to a form of reflective access to subjectivity at the bodily level. In particular, we argue that subjectivity is bodily expressed, thereby allowing the experience of the body′s subjectivity directly during perceptual experiences of the body. We use an interweaving of phenomenological explorations and ethnographical methods which allows validating this proposal by considering the experience of body experts (dancers).     

Agreeableness, empathy, and helping: a person x situation perspective

This research program explored links among prosocial motives, empathy, and helping behavior. Preliminary work found significant relations among components of self-reported empathy and personality (N = 223). In Study 1, the authors examined the generality of prosocial behavior across situations and group memberships of victims (N = 622). In Study 2, empathic focus and the victim's outgroup status were experimentally manipulated (N = 87). Study 3 (N = 245) replicated and extended Study 2 by collecting measures of prosocial emotions before helping. In Study 4 (N = 244), empathic focus and cost of helping as predictors of helping behavior were experimentally manipulated. Overall, prosocial motivation is linked to (a) Agreeableness as a dimension of personality, (b) proximal prosocial cognition and motives, and (c) helping behavior across a range of situations and victims. In persons low in prosocial motivation, when costs of helping are high, efforts to induce empathy situationally can undermine prosocial behavior.     

Second-Order Quantifier Elimination in Higher-Order Contexts with Applications to the Semantical Analysis of Conditionals

Second-order quantifier elimination in the context of classical logic emerged as a powerful technique in many applications, including the correspondence theory, relational databases, deductive and knowledge databases, knowledge representation, commonsense reasoning and approximate reasoning. In the current paper we first generalize the result of Nonnengart and Szałas [17] by allowing second-order variables to appear within higher-order contexts. Then we focus on a semantical analysis of conditionals, using the introduced technique and Gabbay’s semantics provided in [10] and substantially using a third-order accessibility relation. The analysis is done via finding correspondences between axioms involving conditionals and properties of the underlying third-order relation. Presented by Wojciech Buszkowski