Observing repetitive finger movements modulates response times of auditorily cued finger movements

Our motor and perceptual representations of actions seem to be intimately linked and the human mirror neuron system (MNS) has been proposed as the mediator. In two experiments, we presented biological or non-biological movement stimuli that were either congruent or incongruent to a required response prompted by a tone. When the tone occurred with the onset of the last movement in a series, i.e., it was perceived during the movement presentation, congruent biological stimuli resulted in faster reaction times than congruent non-biological stimuli. The opposite was observed for incongruent stimuli. When the tone was presented after visual movement stimulation, however, no such interaction was present. This implies that biological movement stimuli only affect motor behaviour during visual processing but not thereafter. These data suggest that the MNS is an "online" system; longstanding repetitive visual stimulation (Experiment 1) has no benefit in comparison to only one or two repetitions (Experiment 2).     

儿童经验开放性:城乡差异及其与家庭、班级环境的关系

采用问卷法,以483名小学五、六年级儿童为被试,考察了经验开放性的城乡差异及其与家庭环境、班级环境的关系。结果发现:1)城市儿童经验开放性得分显著高于农村儿童。2)家庭(控制性维度除外)、班级环境与经验开放性存在有显著的相关关系。在控制了学校类型、年级和性别因素的影响后,班级环境、家庭社会经济地位、家庭环境的知识性、独立性对于经验开放性仍具有显著的预测作用。     

宗教体验的神经生理基础

宗教体验是人在宗教活动中的心态或体悟及伴随的情感体验,它是一个过程。其神经生理基础的研究表明,宗教体验过程中大脑的某些特定脑波或区域被激活。这些研究表明宗教体验与认知和情绪有关,在一定程度上与早期有关宗教体验实质的结论吻合,但这并不表明大脑中存在“上帝脑区”。该文简要介绍了宗教体验的概念、冥想以及基督教宗教体验神经生理基础的研究以及跨宗教传统的相关比较研究,并对该领域内的一些问题做出了说明     

材料呈现方式对不同音乐训练经验的汉语儿童英语言语记忆的影响

选取受过音乐训练和未受过音乐训练的汉语儿童为被试,在同一呈现速率条件下以歌曲、韵律和朗读三种方式呈现一段英文材料,从单词、句子和篇章三个层面探讨音乐训练经验和材料呈现方式对第二语言言语记忆的影响。结果发现：1）音乐组的记忆成绩高于非音乐组;2）相比于朗读材料,儿童对于歌曲和韵律材料的记忆效果更好;3）在单词和句子层面,音乐组和非音乐组的差异主要体现在歌曲材料上,而篇章层面没有类似发现。该结果表明音乐训练和材料呈现方式均能影响儿童的第二语言言语记忆,并且音乐训练效应对材料呈现方式表现出选择性     

The Fear of Death

Taking a somewhat indirect route that includes some autobiographical reflection, I address three questions. One is what it might mean to say, with Socrates, that philosophy is "studying for death". The second is why Christians should fear death at all, if the good of Heaven is really what they believe is beyond it. The third is the question what difference it makes to your philosophical view of death if you are a believer.     

The role of familiarity in dietary development

The rise in inadequate and unhealthily diets in children has led investigations to examine the development of food preferences. This review outlines the ways in which children choose between foods made available to them and the subsequent shaping of their own habitual diet. Children are liable to form preferences to certain hedonic foods, and to exhibit neophobic reactions to the unfamiliar. Unfamiliar foods can elicit anxiety and suspicion. Trust and liking of a once novel food can be gained through exposure, increasing familiarity towards that food. This review examines: visual familiarity (awareness of foods within their environment); taste familiarity (knowledge and experience of the taste of foods); contextual familiarity (knowledge of how foods should be presented); and categorical familiarity (which family foods belong to). The influence of familiarity is also explained with regards to both positive and negative associative learning. These associations are influenced by the specific presentation and the social environment of a novel food. The potential benefits of understanding the nature of children’s learning and preference development for the promotion of healthy nutrition to both parent and child are discussed.     

Perception with compensatory devices: from sensory substitution to sensorimotor extension

Sensory substitution devices provide through an unusual sensory modality (the substituting modality, e.g., audition) access to features of the world that are normally accessed through another sensory modality (the substituted modality, e.g., vision). In this article, we address the question of which sensory modality the acquired perception belongs to. We have recourse to the four traditional criteria that have been used to define sensory modalities: sensory organ, stimuli, properties, and qualitative experience ( Grice, 1962 ), to which we have added the criteria of behavioral equivalence ( Morgan, 1977 ), dedication ( Keeley, 2002 ), and sensorimotor equivalence ( O'Regan & Noë, 2001 ). We discuss which of them are fulfilled by perception through sensory substitution devices and whether this favors the view that perception belongs to the substituting or to the substituted modality. Though the application of a number of criteria might be taken to point to the conclusion that perception with a sensory substitution device belongs to the substituted modality, we argue that the evidence leads to an alternative view on sensory substitution. According to this view, the experience after sensory substitution is a transformation, extension, or augmentation of our perceptual capacities, rather than being something equivalent or reducible to an already existing sensory modality. We develop this view by comparing sensory substitution devices to other "mind-enhancing tools" such as pen and paper, sketchpads, or calculators. An analysis of sensory substitution in terms of mind-enhancing tools unveils it as a thoroughly transforming perceptual experience and as giving rise to a novel form of perceptual interaction with the environment.     

Perspectives on multisensory experience and cognitive development in infants with cochlear implants

Infants learn about their environment through sensory exploration, acquiring knowledge that is important for cognitive development. However, little is known about the sensory exploration of infants with profound hearing loss before or after they receive cochlear implants. This paper reviews aspects of sensory perception and cognitive development in hearing infants, discusses the implications of delayed access to auditory information for multisensory perception and cognitive development in infants who use cochlear implants, and suggests several new directions for research addressing multisensory exploration and cognitive development in infants with cochlear implants.     

Feelings of control: Contingency determines experience of action

The experience of causation is a pervasive product of the human mind. Moreover, the experience of causing an event alters subjective time: actions are perceived as temporally shifted towards their effects [Haggard, P., Clark, S., & Kalogeras, J. (2002). Voluntary action and conscious awareness. Nature Neuroscience, 5(4), 382-385]. This temporal shift depends partly on advance prediction of the effects of action, and partly on inferential “postdictive” explanations of sensory effects of action. We investigated whether a single factor of statistical contingency could explain both these aspects of causal experience. We studied the time at which people perceived a simple manual action to occur, when statistical contingency indicated a causal relation between action and effect, and when no such relation was indicated. Both predictive and inferential “postdictive” shifts in the time of action depended on strong contingency between action and effect. The experience of agency involves a process of causal learning based on statistical contingency.     

Perceptual interactions in a minimalist virtual environment

How in real-life or through the use of technical devices can we recognize the presence of other persons and under what conditions can we differentiate them from objects? In order to approach this question, in the study reported here we explored the most basic conditions necessary for participants to recognize the presence of another person during a perceptual interaction. We created a mini-network of two minimalist devices and investigated whether participants were able to differentiate the perception of another person from the perception of a fixed and a mobile object even when the pattern of sensory stimulation was reduced to a bare minimum. We show that participants can recognize when the all-or-none tactile stimulation they experienced was attributable to an encounter with the other participant's avatar or the mobile object rather than with a fixed object. Participants were also able to establish different strategies in order to favor the situations of mutual perception. Thus, in the minimalist conditions of our experiment, the perception of another intentional subject was not based purely on any particular shape or objective trajectories of displacement; it was also based on properties that are intrinsic to the joint perceptual activity itself.