Countering illegibility: Religion,ethnicity and sexuality in public debates and lived experience in Belgium

In this article, I set out to explore various intersectional social constructions of ethnicity, religion and sexuality. First, I conduct an analysis of recent public controversies in Flanders (Belgium) about women’s and (homo)sexual equality as set against religious authorities and religious-ethnic minorities. It reveals how dominant understandings of ethnicity, sexuality and religion are constructed, reinforced and, if needed, defended. Second, I foreground a critical counter-voice negotiating these what I call ‘ethno-sexular’ boundary constructions. I analyse the lived experiences of Hajar, a volunteer of an antiracist LGBTQI organisation located in Brussels, and argue that because of a dominant ethno-sexular discourse, Hajar’s hybrid identifications and critical voice is made illegible in much of her social environment.     

Tuning down the hedonic brain: Cognitive load reduces neural responses to high-calorie food pictures in the nucleus accumbens

The present research examined whether cognitive load modulates the neural processing of appetitive, high-calorie food stimuli. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, participants quickly categorized high-calorie and low-calorie food pictures versus object pictures as edible or inedible while they concurrently performed a digit-span task that varied between low and high cognitive load (memorizing six digits vs. one digit). In line with predictions, the digit-span task engaged the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) when cognitive load was high compared to low. Moreover, exposure to high-calorie compared to low-calorie food pictures led to increased activation in the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), but only when cognitive load was low and not when it was high. In addition, connectivity analyses showed that load altered the functional coupling between NAcc and right DLPFC during presentation of the high-calorie versus low-calorie food pictures. Together, these findings indicate that loading the cognitive system moderates hedonic brain responses to high-calorie food pictures via interactions between NAcc and DLPFC. Our findings are consistent with the putative cognitive nature of food motivation. Implications for future research are discussed.     

Rapid recalibration to audiovisual asynchrony follows the physical—not the perceived—temporal order

In natural scenes, audiovisual events deriving from the same source are synchronized at their origin. However, from the perspective of the observer, there are likely to be significant multisensory delays due to physical and neural latencies. Fortunately, our brain appears to compensate for the resulting latency differences by rapidly adapting to asynchronous audiovisual events by shifting the point of subjective synchrony (PSS) in the direction of the leading modality of the most recent event. Here we examined whether it is the perceived modality order of this prior lag or its physical order that determines the direction of the subsequent rapid recalibration. On each experimental trial, a brief tone pip and flash were presented across a range of stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). The participants’ task alternated over trials: On adaptor trials, audition either led or lagged vision with fixed SOAs, and participants judged the order of the audiovisual event; on test trials, the SOA as well as the modality order varied randomly, and participants judged whether or not the event was synchronized. For test trials, we showed that the PSS shifted in the direction of the physical rather than the perceived (reported) modality order of the preceding adaptor trial. These results suggest that rapid temporal recalibration is determined by the physical timing of the preceding events, not by one’s prior perceptual decisions.     

Immediate and long-term priming effects are independent of prime awareness

Subliminal primes are assumed to produce weaker and short-lived effects on subsequent behavior compared to clearly visible primes. However, this difference in priming effect may be due to differences in signal strength, rather than level of awareness. In the present study we manipulated prime discriminability by using metacontrast masks and pseudomasks, while keeping the prime strength equal. This manipulation resulted in large differences in discriminability of the primes. However, both immediate response priming and long-term response priming (measured with conflict adaptation) was equal for the poorly discriminable and well discriminable primes, and equal for groups that differed markedly in terms of how well they could discriminate the primes. Our findings imply that discriminability of information is independent of both the immediate and long-term effects that information can have on behavior.     

Prime and probability: causal knowledge affects inferential and predictive effects on self-agency experiences

Experiences of having caused a certain outcome may arise from motor predictions based on action–outcome probabilities and causal inferences based on pre-activated outcome representations. However, when and how both indicators combine to affect such self-agency experiences is still unclear. Based on previous research on prediction and inference effects on self-agency, we propose that their (combined) contribution crucially depends on whether people have knowledge about the causal relation between actions and outcomes that is relevant to subsequent self-agency experiences. Therefore, we manipulated causal knowledge that was either relevant or irrelevant by varying the probability of co-occurrence (50% or 80%) of specific actions and outcomes. Afterwards, we measured self-agency experiences in an action–outcome task where outcomes were primed or not. Results showed that motor prediction only affected self-agency when relevant actions and outcomes were learned to be causally related. Interestingly, however, inference effects also occurred when no relevant causal knowledge was acquired.     

Contextual conditioning in rats as an animal model for generalized anxiety disorder

Animal models of psychiatric disorders are important translational tools for exploring new treatment options and gaining more insight into the disease. Thus far, there is no systematically validated animal model for generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), a severely impairing and difficult-to-treat disease. In this review, we propose contextual conditioning (CC) as an animal model for GAD. We argue that this model has sufficient face validity (there are several symptom similarities), predictive validity (it responds to clinically effective treatments), and construct validity (the underlying mechanisms are comparable). Although the refinement and validation of an animal model is a never-ending process, we want to give a concise overview of the currently available evidence. We suggest that the CC model might be a valuable preclinical tool to enhance the development of new treatment strategies and our understanding of GAD.     

The sound of enemies and friends in the neighborhood

Previous studies (e.g., Pecher, Zeelenberg, & Wagenmakers, 2005) found that semantic classification performance is better for target words with orthographic neighbors that are mostly from the same semantic class (e.g., living) compared to target words with orthographic neighbors that are mostly from the opposite semantic class (e.g., nonliving). In the present study we investigated the contribution of phonology to orthographic neighborhood effects by comparing effects of phonologically congruent orthographic neighbors (book-hook) to phonologically incongruent orthographic neighbors (sand-wand). The prior presentation of a semantically congruent word produced larger effects on subsequent animacy decisions when the previously presented word was a phonologically congruent neighbor than when it was a phonologically incongruent neighbor. In a second experiment, performance differences between target words with versus without semantically congruent orthographic neighbors were larger if the orthographic neighbors were also phonologically congruent. These results support models of visual word recognition that assume an important role for phonology in cascaded access to meaning.