手近效应：研究内容、影响因素与神经机制

把手放在刺激旁边,会对知觉、记忆、语义和执行控制等认知加工产生影响,这类现象被称为手近效应。手近效应反映了身体与环境的互动对认知的塑造作用,为具身认知提供了新证据。本文从手近效应的内容,影响因素,及其认知、神经机制等方面对相关研究进行梳理。并从手近效应的神经机制,应用研究,以及动作意图和人际社会因素的调节作用等方面探讨当前手近效应还未解决的问题。     

小学生在交通情境中的视觉搜索：发展的观点

为探讨小学生在交通情境中的视觉搜索发展特点,研究以一、二、四和六年级小学生,以及成人为被试,采用“找不同”任务和过马路决策眼动任务进行实验。结果发现,一、二年级小学生“找不同”的效率低于成人;一年级小学生冒险及错失过马路比例均较高;小学生的眼跳特征与成人相似,但对兴趣区的关注低于成人;女生错失过马路比例高于男生,视觉搜索水平及搜索策略的性别差异不显著。研究表明,小学生的视觉搜索能力随年龄逐渐提高,但搜索的有效性低于成人,性别分化不明显。     

身体动作与语义加工:具身隐喻的视角

概念隐喻理论认为个体建立基于身体经验的具体概念和抽象概念之间的隐喻联结是人类特有的认知方式。不管是具体概念还是抽象概念,只要有具身隐喻联结的概念,其语义的理解便会受到具身启动效应的影响。大脑在加工动词或者含动词的句子时,不仅激活了语言中枢和运动皮层,且大脑随着个体是否执行与语义相应的动作、抽象概念的熟悉程度和其文本背景是否符合等因素而激活不同的神经回路。本文将对以上研究进行梳理与分析,旨在从具身隐喻的视角为身体动作影响语义加工的神经机制模型提供初步的思路。     

Attentional biases to threat in social anxiety disorder: time to focus our attention elsewhere?

Background: Cognitive models propose that attentional biases to threat contribute to the maintenance of social anxiety disorder (SAD). However, the specific characteristics of such biases are still object to debate.

Objectives: The current study aimed to disentangle effects of trait and state social anxiety on attention allocation towards social stimuli.

Methods: Participants with SAD (n?=?67) and healthy controls (n?=?62) completed three visual search tasks while their eye movements were recorded. Half of the participants in each group were randomly assigned to a state anxiety induction.

Results: Contrary to our predictions, neither trait nor state social anxiety was associated with a facilitated attention to or a delayed disengagement from threat. However, participants with SAD did show reduced fixation durations for threatening stimuli, indicating an avoidance of threat. Induction of state anxiety led to an increased distractibility by threat.

Conclusions: We suggest that attention allocation in SAD is characterized by an avoidant rather than a vigilant attentional bias. Accordingly, our results contradict previous results that associate SAD with facilitated attention to threat and existing approaches to modify attentional biases, that aim to decrease attention towards threatening stimuli.     

The relationship between visual search and categorization of own- and other-age faces

Young adult participants are faster to detect young adult faces in crowds of infant and child faces than vice versa. These findings have been interpreted as evidence for more efficient attentional capture by own-age than other-age faces, but could alternatively reflect faster rejection of other-age than own-age distractors, consistent with the previously reported other-age categorization advantage: faster categorization of other-age than own-age faces. Participants searched for own-age faces in other-age backgrounds or vice versa. Extending the finding to different other-age groups, young adult participants were faster to detect young adult faces in both early adolescent (Experiment 1) and older adult backgrounds (Experiment 2). To investigate whether the own-age detection advantage could be explained by faster categorization and rejection of other-age background faces, participants in experiments 3 and 4 also completed an age categorization task. Relatively faster categorization of other-age faces was related to relatively faster search through other-age backgrounds on target absent trials but not target present trials. These results confirm that other-age faces are more quickly categorized and searched through and that categorization and search processes are related; however, this correlational approach could not confirm or reject the contribution of background face processing to the own-age detection advantage.     

Examining the Spatiotemporal Disruption to Gaze When Using a Myoelectric Prosthetic Hand

The aim of this study was to provide a detailed account of the spatial and temporal disruptions to eye-hand coordination when using a prosthetic hand during a sequential fine motor skill. Twenty-one able-bodied participants performed 15 trials of the picking up coins task derived from the Southampton Hand Assessment Procedure with their anatomic hand and with a prosthesis simulator while wearing eye-tracking equipment. Gaze behavior results revealed that when using the prosthesis, performance detriments were accompanied by significantly greater hand-focused gaze and a significantly longer time to disengage gaze from manipulations to plan upcoming movements. The study findings highlight key metrics that distinguish disruptions to eye-hand coordination that may have implications for the training of prosthesis use.     

Child As Metaphor: Colonialism,Psy-Governance,and Epistemicide

This paper mobilizes transdisciplinary inquiry to explore and deconstruct the often-used comparison of racialized/colonized people, intellectually disabled people and mad people as being like children. To be childlike is a metaphor that is used to denigrate, to classify as irrational and incompetent, to dismiss as not being knowledge holders, to justify governance and action on others’ behalf, to deem as being animistic, as undeveloped, underdeveloped or wrongly developed, and, hence, to subjugate. We explore the political work done by the metaphorical appeal to childhood, and particularly the centrality of the metaphor of childhood to legitimizing colonialism and white supremacy. The article attends to the ways in which this metaphor contributes to the shaping of the material and discursive realities of racialized and colonized others, as well as those who have been psychiatrized and deemed “intellectually disabled”. Further, we explore specific metaphors of child-colony, and child-mad-“crip”. We then detail the developmental logic underlying the historical and continued use of the metaphorics of childhood, and explore how this makes possible an infantilization of colonized peoples and the global South more widely. The material and discursive impact of this metaphor on children’s lives, and particularly children who are racialized, colonized, and/or deemed mad or “crip”, is then considered. We argue that complex adult-child relations, sane-mad relations and Western-majority world relations within global psychiatry, are situated firmly within pejorative notions of what it means to be childlike, and reproduce multi-systemic forms of oppression that, ostensibly in their “best interests”, govern children and all those deemed childlike.     

Image memorability across longer time intervals

You may find some images easier to remember than others. Recent studies of visual memory have found remarkable levels of consistency for this inter-item variability across observers, suggesting that memorability can be considered an intrinsic image property. The current study replicated and extended previous results, while adopting a more traditional visual long-term memory task with retention intervals of 20 min, one day, and one week, as opposed to the previously used repeat-detection task, which typically relied on short retention intervals (5 min). Our memorability rank scores show levels of consistency across observers in line with those reported in previous research. They correlate strongly with previous quantifications and appear stable over time. Furthermore, we show that the way consistency of memorability scores increases with the number of responses per image follows the Spearman–Brown formula. Interestingly, our results also seem to show an increase in consistency with an increase in retention interval. Supported by simulated data, this effect is attributed to a decrease of extraneous influences on recognition over time. Finally, we also provide evidence for a log-linear, rather than linear, decline of the raw memorability scores over time, with more memorable images declining less strongly.     

Higher visuo-Attentional Demands of Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) Lead to A Lower Precision in Pointing Movements

Multiple object tracking (MOT) requires visually attending to dynamically moving targets and distractors. This cognitive ability is based on perceptual-attentional processes that are also involved in goal-directed movements. This study aimed to test the hypothesis that MOT affects the motor performance of aiming movements. Therefore, the participants performed pointing movements using their fingers or a computer mouse that controlled the movements of a cursor directed at the targets in the MOT task. The precision of the pointing movements was measured, and it was predicted that a higher number of targets and distractors in the MOT task would result in a lower pointing precision. The results confirmed this hypothesis, indicating that MOT might influence the performance of motor actions. The potential factors underlying this influence are discussed.     

WHY I AM AN ACCOMMODATIONIST AND PROUD OF IT

There is a strong need of a reasoned defense of what was known as the “independence” position of the science–religion relationship but that more recently has been denigrated as the “accommodationist” position, namely that while there are parts of religion—fundamentalist Christianity in particular—that clash with modern science, the essential parts of religion (Christianity) do not and could not clash with science. A case for this position is made on the grounds of the essentially metaphorical nature of science. Modern science functions because of its root metaphor of the machine: the world is seen in mechanical terms. As Thomas Kuhn insisted, metaphors function in part by ruling some questions outside their domain. In the case of modern science, four questions go unasked and hence unanswered: Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the foundation of morality? What is mind and its relationship to matter? What is the meaning of it all? You can remain a nonreligious skeptic on these questions, but it is open for the Christian to offer his or her answers, so long as they are not scientific answers. Here then is a way that science and religion can coexist.