Longer-term exposure vs training: Their effect on drivers' mental models of ADAS technology

Drivers often learn about the advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) on their vehicles over time and through trial and error. While this experience can aid drivers’ understanding about the systems, it may not necessarily lead to sufficient and accurate mental models, especially concerning less frequent “edge case” situations. This study recruited 39 new owners of vehicles equipped with ADAS technology to which the owners were naïve. The initial mental model of these owners was evaluated using a mental model assessment. To understand changes in mental models over time the assessment was repeated six times over the course of approximately 6 months. Weekly mileage, technology usage, and information regarding their exposure to edge case scenarios was also collected. At the end of the 6 months, participants completed a simulator drive using adaptive cruise control (ACC) that included several edge cases. Over the course of the first 6 months of vehicle ownership, drivers’ scores on the mental model assessment improved. These improvements were largely due to increased understanding of the technology’s limitations as opposed to improvements in knowledge about system function. With respect to driving performance in the simulator session, the mental model scores were not predictive of responses to the edge cases. However, a comparison of those mental model scores against weak and strong mental model benchmark scores gathered in a previous study revealed that mental models improve over 6 months (for some drivers), but not to the level of understanding of a group that received a short but extensive introduction to ACC. This suggests that there is room for improvement in how drivers gain understanding about driver support features and further underscores the need of training and education for proper use and interactions.     

Atypical central auditory speech-sound discrimination in children who stutter as indexed by the mismatch negativity

PurposeRecent theoretical conceptualizations suggest that disfluencies in stuttering may arise from several factors, one of them being atypical auditory processing. The main purpose of the present study was to investigate whether speech sound encoding and central auditory discrimination, are affected in children who stutter (CWS).MethodsParticipants were 10 CWS, and 12 typically developing children with fluent speech (TDC). Event-related potentials (ERPs) for syllables and syllable changes [consonant, vowel, vowel-duration, frequency (F0), and intensity changes], critical in speech perception and language development of CWS were compared to those of TDC.ResultsThere were no significant group differences in the amplitudes or latencies of the P1 or N2 responses elicited by the standard stimuli. However, the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) amplitude was significantly smaller in CWS than in TDC. For TDC all deviants of the linguistic multifeature paradigm elicited significant MMN amplitudes, comparable with the results found earlier with the same paradigm in 6-year-old children. In contrast, only the duration change elicited a significant MMN in CWS.ConclusionsThe results showed that central auditory speech-sound processing was typical at the level of sound encoding in CWS. In contrast, central speech-sound discrimination, as indexed by the MMN for multiple sound features (both phonetic and prosodic), was atypical in the group of CWS. Findings were linked to existing conceptualizations on stuttering etiology.Educational objectives: The reader will be able (a) to describe recent findings on central auditory speech-sound processing in individuals who stutter, (b) to describe the measurement of auditory reception and central auditory speech-sound discrimination, (c) to describe the findings of central auditory speech-sound discrimination, as indexed by the mismatch negativity (MMN), in children who stutter.     

First-person approaches in neuroscience of consciousness: Brain dynamics correlate with the intention to act

The belief in free will has been frequently challenged since Benjamin Libet published his famous experiment in 1983. Although Libet’s experiment is highly dependent upon subjective reports, no study has been conducted that focused on a first-person or introspective perspective of the task. We took a neurophenomenological approach in an N = 1 study providing reliable and valid measures of the first-person perspective in conjunction with brain dynamics. We found that a larger readiness potential (RP) is attributable to more frequent occurrences of self-initiated movements during negative deflections of the slow cortical potentials (SCP). These negative deflections occur in parallel with an inner impulse reported by an expert meditator which may in turn lead to a voluntary act. We demonstrate in this proof-of-principle approach that the first-person perspective obtained by an expert meditator in conjunction with neural signal analysis can contribute to our understanding of the neural underpinnings of voluntary acts.     

Movement,Stagnation, and Renewal of Movement in the Therapeutic Session

This article examines the term potential space in the therapeutic session and the pathological situations in which this space collapses. The article suggests that such failures occur in the weaving of transference and countertransference between patient and therapist. The potential to free and repair this space can be found in emotional thinking that occurs between the therapist and the patient. When the object-therapist can play or dream, the infant-patient can do so too. Thus, a new shared experience may be created in the therapeutic session and in the patient's mind. This article reviews the different types of collapse of the potential space, as suggested by Ogden, and offers a new additional type.     

Electrophysiological correlates of face distortion after-effects

When observers are exposed to a distorted face the perceived configuration of a subsequently presented face is altered, a phenomenon called face distortion after-effect (FDAE). We compared the face-related components of the event-related potential (ERP) after adaptation to noise images—veridical and distorted faces. We found large bilateral adaptation effects on the P100 and N170 components that are related to face detection. Moreover, we found smaller adaptation effects on the N170, recorded over the right hemisphere, which can be related to the behavioural distortion after-effect and to face configurations. Our results suggest that the observed ERP adaptation effects are general for various steps of face processing and that the FDAEs similarly to gender after-effects are related to the early face-specific ERP components.     

Mug handle affordance and automatic response inhibition: Behavioural and electrophysiological evidence

Behavioural evidence has shown that the perception of an object's handle automatically activates the corresponding action representation. The activation appears to be inhibited if the object is a task-irrelevant prime mug that is presented very briefly prior to responding to the target arrow. The present study uses an electrophysiological indicator of automatic response priming, the lateralized readiness potential (LRP), to investigate the mechanisms of this inhibition effect. We presumed that this effect would reflect motor self-inhibition processes. The self-inhibition explanation of the effect would assume that the effect reflects activation-followed-by-inhibition observed rapidly after the offset of the prime at the primary motor cortex. However, the results showed that the effect is not associated with modulation of the early LRP deflections. In contrast, the inhibition manifested itself in the later LRP deflections that we assume to be linked to interference in the processing of response-related aspects of the target. We propose that the LRP pattern is similar to what would be predicted from the negative priming explanation of the effect. The study sheds light on understanding inhibition mechanisms associated with automatically activated affordance representations.     

Locating Potential Leverage Points In A Systems Thinking Causal Loop Diagram Toward Policy Intervention

Outcomes depending on various interacting and adaptive parts and actors in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world are challenging to analyze using traditional thinking. Hence, Systems Thinking (ST) can be applied as a tool to aid policy makers in designing interventions that anticipates various ways in which a system might react to policy changes through the practice of integrating multiple perspectives into a causal loop diagram (CLD). We formalize criteria for identifying potential leverage points (PLP) in a CLD. Identifying PLPs enable policy makers to apply ST tools to devise strategies that are capable of addressing VUCA problems.     

Syntactic priming in Chinese sentence comprehension: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials

Using the event-related potential (ERP) technique, this study examined the nature of syntactic priming effects in Chinese. Participants were required to read prime-target sentence pairs each embedding an ambiguous relative clause (RC) containing either the same verb or a synonymous verb. In Chinese, the word de serves as a relative clause marker. During reading a potential Chinese RC structure (either the prime or the target sentence), Chinese readers initially expect to read an Subject–Verb–Object (SVO) structure but the encounter of a relative clause marker de would make readers abandon the initial strategy and reanalyze the structure as a relative clause. A reduced P600 effect was elicited by the critical word de in the target sentence containing the same initial verb as in the prime sentence. No significant reduction of the P600 was observed in the target sentences in the synonymous condition. The results demonstrated that verb repetition but not similarity in meaning produced a syntactic priming effect in Chinese. The constraint-based lexicalist hypothesis and the argument structure theory were adopted to explain the syntactic priming effect obtained in the current study.     

Contemplating spiritual experience: Winnicott's potential space,Tibetan bardo,and liminality

Abstract

In this paper, ways of contemplating and accommodating the unfamiliar, especially the “other” of spiritual experience, are considered. Some concepts from psychoanalysis, such as Winnicott's “potential space” and his notion of “holding,” are helpful in comprehending spiritual experiences that can easily be misunderstood, or “flattened out” to use Bion's phrase. Interesting and rather remarkable confluences in these concepts from psychoanalysis and from Tibetan Buddhism (bardo) and cultural anthropology (liminality) are considered in their functions of both enabling and comprehending these extraordinary and often life-enhancing experiences.     

Neuronal correlates of decisions to speak and act: Spontaneous emergence and dynamic topographies in a computational model of frontal and temporal areas

The neural mechanisms underlying the spontaneous, stimulus-independent emergence of intentions and decisions to act are poorly understood. Using a neurobiologically realistic model of frontal and temporal areas of the brain, we simulated the learning of perception–action circuits for speech and hand-related actions and subsequently observed their spontaneous behaviour. Noise-driven accumulation of reverberant activity in these circuits leads to their spontaneous ignition and partial-to-full activation, which we interpret, respectively, as model correlates of action intention emergence and action decision-and-execution. Importantly, activity emerged first in higher-association prefrontal and temporal cortices, subsequently spreading to secondary and finally primary sensorimotor model-areas, hence reproducing the dynamics of cortical correlates of voluntary action revealed by readiness-potential and verb-generation experiments. This model for the first time explains the cortical origins and topography of endogenous action decisions, and the natural emergence of functional specialisation in the cortex, as mechanistic consequences of neurobiological principles, anatomical structure and sensorimotor experience.