Intentional control based on familiarity in artificial grammar learning

It is commonly held that implicit learning is based largely on familiarity. It is also commonly held that familiarity is not affected by intentions. It follows that people should not be able to use familiarity to distinguish strings from two different implicitly learned grammars. In two experiments, subjects were trained on two grammars and then asked to endorse strings from only one of the grammars. Subjects also rated how familiar each string felt and reported whether or not they used familiarity to make their grammaticality judgment. We found subjects could endorse the strings of just one grammar and ignore the strings from the other. Importantly, when subjects said they were using familiarity, the rated familiarity for test strings consistent with their chosen grammar was greater than that for strings from the other grammar. Familiarity, subjectively defined, is sensitive to intentions and can play a key role in strategic control.     

Self-esteem regulation after success and failure to attain unconsciously activated goals

People are motivated to establish and maintain a positive self-image. When people fail to attain their goals self-esteem is threatened, and this elicits the motivation to protect or repair self-esteem. We investigated whether success and failure to attain goals affects self-esteem if these goals were unconsciously activated. In three experiments, we tested and confirmed the hypothesis that self-esteem is indeed affected by success and failure to attain unconsciously activated goals. In two additional experiments, we demonstrated that people were motivated to protect or restore self-esteem after failure to attain an unconsciously activated achievement goal.     

Fluctuations in state implicit self-esteem in response to daily negative events

A repeated assessment study examined changes in state implicit self-esteem after negative events. Multilevel analyses revealed that trait explicit self-esteem and self-concept clarity moderated the within-person association between daily negative events and state implicit self-esteem. People with low trait explicit self-esteem or low self-concept clarity experienced decreases in state implicit self-esteem when they experienced negative life events. In contrast, for people with high trait explicit self-esteem or high self-concept clarity, state implicit self-esteem remained stable after negative events. In addition, changes in state implicit self-esteem remained significant after controlling for state explicit self-esteem and daily negative affect. This study is the first to study changes in implicit self-esteem in the context of daily life events.     

Attentional modulation of masked repetition and categorical priming in young and older adults

Three experiments examined the effects of temporal attention and aging on masked repetition and categorical priming for numbers and words. Participants' temporal attention was manipulated by varying the stimulus onset asynchrony (i.e., constant or variable SOA). In Experiment 1, participants performed a parity judgment task and a lexical decision task in which categorical priming and repetition priming were, respectively, tested. Experiment 2 used a semantic categorization task testing categorical priming. In Experiment 3, repetition and categorical priming were tested in the same semantic categorization task with the same stimuli. The results of the three experiments showed that masked repetition priming is insensitive to manipulations of temporal attention whereas categorical priming is. Furthermore, no differences were found between young and older adults in repetition priming effects, again contrasting with the categorical priming results for which older adults were more sensitive to attentional manipulations than young adults.     

简论里贝特的意识理论

里贝特是人类意识和自由意志的实验研究领域的一个卓越的、先驱性的神经科学家。里贝特的意识研究工作涉及如下四个方面：（1）关于意识研究的认识论原则;（2）对意识现象本性的界定;（3）意识机制的时控理论;（4）对自由意志的阐释和有意识的心智场理论。里贝特的意识研究独树一帜,其时控理论具有坚实可信的实验证据,它从时间维度揭示了有意识的主观体验以及无意识的心智功能与神经活动之间的时间机制。     

Unconscious choice: the dissociation of creative animus among writers and psychotherapists

The paper argues that writers and psychotherapists are drawn to their work through the desire to remedy an unconscious sense of lack brought about by early relational trauma. Often, because of its origins in psychic pain, the connection between these individuals' beginnings and their profession remains largely dissociated. The theme is developed with reference to the idea of the wounded healer taken up by Jung. It is proposed that the original wound is also the crack that lets the light in: a dissociated tough spirit that can be channelled into discriminating countertransference and strong writing. This paper is implicitly arguing against an objective or neutral analytic stance, and for the therapeutic and creative value of acquaintance with negative affect.     

Memories of mother,complementarity and shame: predicting response to subliminal stimulation with "Mommy and I are one"

A poorly understood finding with potentially wide-ranging implications is that subliminal stimulation with "Mommy and I are one" affects behavior. In this study (n= 62), "Mommy and I are one" lowered implicit mood (p= 0.0015) in comparison with a neutral stimulus ("People are walking"). The effect was most pronounced in shame-prone participants with less positive memories of their mother, and low self-mother complementarity (interaction p= 0.0044). Effects of a potentially shame-inducing stimulus ("I am completely isolated") were not significant (ps > 0.11). The results concerning less positive memories of mother replicate previous findings. We suggest that activation of unconscious associative networks explains the data. Though more research is needed, the cognitive content of these networks may involve representations of self-with-mother; for some, the affective content could involve shame.     

A presentation of Attentional Semantics

The paper presents the two main assumptions of Attentional Semantics—(A) and (B), and its main aim (C). (A) Conscious experience is determined by attention: there cannot be consciousness without attention. Consciousness is explained as the product of attentional activity. Attentional activity can be performed thanks to a special kind of energy: nervous energy. This energy is supplied by the organ of attention. When we perform attentional activity, we use our nervous energy. This activity directly affects the organ of attention, causing a variation in the state of the nervous energy. This variation constitutes the phenomenal aspect of consciousness. (B) Words are tools to pilot attention. The meanings of words isolate, de-contextualize, “freeze” and classify in an articulated system the ever-changing and multiform stream of our conscious experiences. Each meaning is composed of the sequence of invariable elements that, independently of any individual occurrence of a given conscious experience, are responsible for the production of any instance of that conscious experience. The elements composing the meanings of words are attentional operations: each word conveys the condensed instructions on the attentional operations one has to perform if one wants to consciously experience what is expressed through and by it. (C) Attentional Semantics aims at finding the attentional instruction conveyed by the meanings of words. To achieve this goal, it tries: (1) to identify the sequence of the elementary conscious experiences that invariably accompany, and are prompted by, the use of the word being analyzed; (2) to describe these conscious experiences in terms of the attentional operations that are responsible for their production; and (3) to identify the unconscious and non-conscious operations that, directly or indirectly, serve either as the support that makes it possible for the attentional operations to take place, be completed, and occur in a certain way, or as the necessary complement that makes it possible to execute and implement the activities determined and triggered by the conscious experiences. The origins of Attentional Semantics are also presented, and the methodological problems researchers encounter when analyzing meanings in attentional terms are discussed. Finally, a brief comparison with the other kinds of semantics is made.     

Unconscious semantic priming extends to novel unseen stimuli

Many subliminal priming experiments are thought to demonstrate unconscious access to semantics. However, most of them can be reinterpreted in a non-semantic framework that supposes only that subjects learn to map non-semantic visual features of the subliminal stimuli onto motor responses. In order to clarify this issue, we engaged subjects in a number comparison task in which the target number was preceded by another invisible masked number. We show that unconscious semantic priming occurs even for prime stimuli that are never presented as target stimuli, and for which no stimulus–response learning could conceivably occur. We also report analyses of the impact of the numerical relation between prime and target, and of the impact of learning on priming, all of which confirm that unconscious utilization of semantic information is indeed possible.     

Verbal social primes alter motor contagion during action observation

We investigated whether prosocial and nonsocial word primes prior to action observation modify subsequent initiation and execution of the observer's own reach-to-grasp actions. Participants observed a model performing exaggeratedly curved (vertical deviation) or natural straight reaches to a vertical dowel and always performed a straight reach to a dowel themselves. Observing curved movements slowed initiation times and increased the vertical deviation of the participants’ movements. Observing curved movements enhanced vertical deviation only in the prosocial word primes condition. We suggest that social context priming can modulate initiation of movement as well as the extent of motor contagion (in this case, the extent of vertical deviation) between model and observer.