"That's not a real body": identifying stimulus qualities that modulate synaesthetic experiences of touch

Mirror-touch synaesthesia is a condition where observing touch to another’s body induces a subjective tactile sensation on the synaesthetes body. The present study explores which characteristics of the inducing stimulus modulate the synaesthetic touch experience. Fourteen mirror-touch synaesthetes watched videos depicting a touch event while indicating (i) whether the video induced a tactile sensation, (ii) on which side of their body they felt this sensation and (iii) the intensity of the experienced sensation. Results indicate that the synaesthetes experience stronger tactile sensations when observing touch to real bodies, whereas observing touch to dummy bodies, pictures of bodies and disconnected dummy body parts elicited weaker sensations. These results suggest that mirror-touch synaesthesia is not entirely bottom-up driven, but top-down information, such as knowledge about real and dummy body parts, also modulate the intensity of the experience.     

Eye Movements Reveal the Dynamic Simulation of Speed in Language

This study investigates how speed of motion is processed in language. In three eye‐tracking experiments, participants were presented with visual scenes and spoken sentences describing fast or slow events (e.g., The lion ambled/dashed to the balloon). Results showed that looking time to relevant objects in the visual scene was affected by the speed of verb of the sentence, speaking rate, and configuration of a supporting visual scene. The results provide novel evidence for the mental simulation of speed in language and show that internal dynamic simulations can be played out via eye movements toward a static visual scene.     

Implication and reasoning in mental state attribution: Comments on Jane Heal's theory of co-cognition

Simulation theory explains third-person mental state attribution in terms of an attributor's ability to imaginatively mimic other people's mental processes. Jane Heal's version of simulation theory, which she calls a theory of “co-cognition,” maintains that one can know and can predict others’ beliefs primarily by thinking about what their antecedent beliefs imply. I argue that Heal's account of belief attribution elides crucial differences between reasoning and merely discovering relations among propositions.     

An electromyographic investigation of the impact of task relevance on facial mimicry

When viewing a face expressing emotion, the viewer's face mimics the same emotion. It is unknown whether such facial mimicry takes place when the viewed emotion is a task irrelevant property of the face. The present experiment addressed this question by asking participants to judge either the emotional expression or the colour of a series of happy and angry faces that were either blue or yellow. Electromyographical recordings showed that when emotion was ignored, there was a tendency for facial muscle activity to be suppressed. Nonetheless, participants’ facial expressions mimicked target expressions, with the zygomaticus cheek muscle being more active when viewing a smiling face and the corrugator brow muscle more active when viewing an angry face. These data support the automatic encoding of irrelevant emotional information, as well as suppression of emotional information by selective attention.     

Purchasing decisions,partial knowledge,and economic search experimental and simulation evidence

Several experimental studies have discovered high-performing heuristic strategies in the search for the most economic price of a good in situations where a searcher has both full prior knowledge and no prior knowledge of the underlying price distribution. This paper describes a new experiment set in a more realistic ‘partial-knowledge’ framework. Several new search heuristics are suggested which match well with observed behaviour, and which, over a large number of simulated trials, perform well in comparison with the optimal model and better than previously reported ‘no-knowledge’ rules.     

La construction de compétences d’étudiants en soins infirmiers lors d’un apprentissage par simulation : étude au cours d’un exercice de prise en charge d’un arrêt cardiorespiratoire

Our study focuses on the professionalization process in nursing students. More specifically, it aims to understand how each step of simulation in nursing education contributes to skills development in nursing students. In total, forty-seven students participated in this study. All the learners were first year students and answered anonymously, at the four stages of the research process, to a questionnaire consisting of six questions to measure their opinion on the acquisition of skills during a learning session based on simulation. Each question was built on one of the six forms of knowledge defined by Le Boterf, 1997, Le Boterf, 2007, Le Boterf, 2011 in his theoretical model of competence. The results show that each stage of the simulation training significantly modifies the students’ opinion on the different forms of knowledge they have acquired. Moreover, the debriefing, that is an essential part of simulation learning, proves to be the most complex stage given the multiple psycho-cognitive and emotional processes involved.     

否定情绪词的具身动态模拟过程

实验1和实验2分别以“（不）+积极/消极情绪词”和“（不）+愤怒/悲伤情绪词”形式的情绪词语或否定短语作为实验材料,分别采取词-图匹配范式和趋近-回避范式,以否定加工的早期（250ms）和中后期（1000ms）两种探测时间,探讨否定对情绪词效价与动机维度加工是否符合否定的两步模拟假设。结果发现,否定情绪效价部分符合否定的两步模拟假设,早期以被否定的情绪状态模拟为主,即不高兴会首先激活高兴;中后期,否定消极词和积极词都被理解为积极;否定情绪动机维度并不符合否定的两步模拟假设,否定对愤怒与悲伤的趋近－回避的影响出现在否定加工中后期,否定改变愤怒的动机方向,由趋近变为回避,却没有改变悲伤的动机方向,悲伤仍表现为回避。本研究证明否定对情绪词的效价和动机维度部分符合两步模拟假设,否定情绪词有其特定的加工过程,各维度加工有所不同。     

Driving performance while using a mobile phone: A simulation study of Greek professional drivers

PurposeThe current study aims to assess the driving performance of professional drivers while using a mobile phone.Material and methodsA sample of 50 male professional drivers participated in the study. The sample was drawn conveniently from the professional drivers’ registries and the main taxi ranks. The inclusion criteria were: (a) age above 18 years, (b) possession of a driving license, (c) sufficient reading, writing, and communicating skills, (d) informed consent prior to participation. Laboratory tests were conducted using the VS500M driving simulator manufactured by Virage Simulation Inc. The intervention involved different tasks/assignments: (a) driving without using a mobile phone (Control time), (b) driving while having a conversation on the mobile phone, (Task_1), (c) driving while reading out loud text messages (Task_2) and, (d) driving while texting (Task_3). Differences in the driving performance between the control time and the time with assignments, were examined. The participants were evaluated on the followings outcome measures: (a) variation of the steering position per second, (b) following distance per second, (c) variation of the lateral lane position per second, and (d) sum of squared acceleration per second.ResultsThe analysis indicated that “variation of the steering position per second” was significantly affected by “text-message reading” [t(50) = −5.443; p < 0.0001] and “texting” [t(50) = −5.442; p < 0.0001]. A significant main effect was observed in terms of the “following distance per second” and the “variation of the lateral lane position per second” for all the three mobile phone assignments. Lastly, the “sum of squared acceleration per second” was significantly decreased during conversation on the phone [t(50) = 2.713; p = 0.009] as well as during texting [t(50) = 3.428; p = 0.001] as compared with the control time.ConclusionsThe study is among the few existing experimental studies in a country with one of the highest road fatalities in Europe but with limited evidence on road traffic behaviour. This study could guide the design of large-scale simulation studies aiming to explore the impact of mobile phone on driving behaviour.     

The degree of disparateness of event details modulates future simulation construction,plausibility, and recall

Several episodic simulation studies have suggested that the plausibility of future events may be influenced by the disparateness of the details comprising the event. However, no study had directly investigated this idea. In the current study, we designed a novel episodic combination paradigm that varied the disparateness of details through a social sphere manipulation. Participants recalled memory details from three different social spheres. Details were recombined either within spheres or across spheres to create detail sets for which participants imagined future events in a second session. Across-sphere events were rated as significantly less plausible than within-sphere events and were remembered less often. The presented paradigm, which increases control over the disparateness of details in future event simulations, may be useful for future studies concerned with the similarity of the simulations to previous events and its plausibility.