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363 records returned

Can unconscious knowledge allow control in sequence learning?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This paper investigates the conscious status of both the knowledge that an item is legal (judgment knowledge) and the knowledge of why it is legal (structural knowledge) in sequence learning. We compared ability to control use of knowledge (Process Dissociation Procedure) with stated awareness of the knowledge (subjective measures) as measures of the conscious status of knowledge. Experiment 1 showed that when people could control use of judgment knowledge they were indeed conscious of having that knowledge according to their own statements. Yet Experiment 2 showed that people could exert such control over the use of j...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - November 10, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Fu Q, Dienes Z, Fu X Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Hypnosis and hemispheric asymmetry.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Participants of low and high hypnotic susceptibility were tested on a temporal order judgement task, both with and without hypnosis. Judgements were made of the order of presentation of light flashes appearing in first one hemi-field then the other. There were differences in the inter-stimulus intervals required accurately to report the order, depending upon which hemi-field led. This asymmetry was most marked in hypnotically susceptible participants and reversed when they were hypnotised. This implies not only that brain activity changes in hypnosis, but also that there is a difference in brain function between people...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - November 7, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Naish PL Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Time warp: Authorship shapes the perceived timing of actions and events.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
rsonal authorship for an event gives rise to intentional binding, a perceptual illusion in which one's action and inferred effect seem closer in time than they otherwise would (Haggard, Clark, & Kalogeras, 2002). Using a novel, naturalistic paradigm, we conducted two experiments to test this hypothesis and examine the relationship between binding and self-reported authorship. In both experiments, an important authorship indicator - consistency between one's action and a subsequent event - was manipulated, and its effects on binding and self-reported authorship were measured. Results showed that action-event consistency...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - November 5, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Authorship shapes the perceived timing of actions and events. Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Children's suggestion-induced omission errors are not caused by memory erasure.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
We explored whether children's suggestion-induced omission errors are caused by memory erasure. Seventy-five children were instructed to remove three pieces of clothing from a puppet. Next, they were confronted with evidence falsely suggesting that one of the items had not been removed. During two subsequent interviews separated by one week, children had to report which pieces of clothing they had removed. Children who during both interviews failed to report that they had removed the pertinent item (i.e., omission error; n=24) completed a choice reaction time task. In this task, they were presented with different cloth...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - October 31, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Otgaar H, Meijer EH, Giesbrecht T, Smeets T, Candel I, Merckelbach H Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Endogenous versus exogenous change: Change detection, self and agency.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The goal of this study is to characterize observers' abilities to discriminate between endogenous (i.e., self-produced) and exogenous changes. To do so, we developed a new experimental paradigm. On each trial, participants were shown a dot pattern on the screen. Next, the pattern disappeared and participants were to reproduce it. Changes were surreptuously introduced in the stimulus, either by presenting participants anew with the dot pattern they had themselves produced on the previous trial (endogenous change) or by presenting participants with a slightly different dot pattern (exogenous changes). We analyzed awarene...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - October 30, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Berberian B, Cleeremans A Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Evidence from the attentional blink for different sources of word repetition effects.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
T2 in an attentional blink paradigm served as a high- or low-frequency prime word for a subsequent repeated target. Consistent with research in visual word identification, only reported primes facilitated the identification of a target repeated approximately 8s after RSVP. Priming was greater for low- than high-frequency words. Analogous with masked priming, a blinked T2 facilitated report of a repeated target occurring 318ms after T2 in RSVP. The blinked repetition priming effect was additive with target frequency. These results indicate that: (1) the outcomes of processing prime words are a key factor in repetition p...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - October 23, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Howard S, Burt JS Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Turning the process-dissociation procedure inside-out: A new technique for understanding the relation between conscious and unconscious influences.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
While there is now general agreement that memory gives rise to both conscious and unconscious influences, there remains disagreement concerning the process architecture underlying these distinct influences. Do they arise from independent underlying systems (e.g., Jacoby, 1991) or from systems that are interactive (e.g., Joordens & Merikle, 1993)? In the current paper we present a novel "inside-out" technique that can be used with the process-dissociation paradigm to arrive at more concrete conclusions concerning this central question and demonstrate this technique via a meta-analysis of currently published findings...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - October 15, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Joordens S, Wilson DE, Spalek TM, Paré DE Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Unconscious strategies? Commentary on Risko and Stolz (2009): "The proportion valid effect in covert orienting: Strategic control or implicit learning?"Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
PMID: 19836973 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher] (Source: Consciousness and Cognition)
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - October 14, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Chica AB, Bartolomeo P Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Taking credit for success: The phenomenology of control in a goal-directed task.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
We studied how people determine when they are in control of objects. In a computer task, participants moved a virtual boat towards a goal using a joystick to investigate how subjective control is shaped by (1) correspondence between motor actions and the visual consequences of those actions, and (2) attainment of higher-level goals. In Experiment 1, random discrepancies from joystick input (noise) decreased judgments of control (JoCs), but discrepancies that brought the boat closer to the goal and increased success (the autopilot) increased JoCs. In Experiment 2, participants raced to the goal against a computer-contro...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - October 12, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Dewey JA, Seiffert AE, Carr TH Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Grape expectations: The role of cognitive influences in color-flavor interactions.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Color conveys critical information about the flavor of food and drink by providing clues as to edibility, flavor identity, and flavor intensity. Despite the fact that more than 100 published papers have investigated the influence of color on flavor perception in humans, surprisingly little research has considered how cognitive and contextual constraints may mediate color-flavor interactions. In this review, we argue that the discrepancies demonstrated in previously-published color-flavor studies may, at least in part, reflect differences in the sensory expectations that different people generate as a result of their pr...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - October 11, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Shankar MU, Levitan CA, Spence C Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Gambling on the unconscious: A comparison of wagering and confidence ratings as measures of awareness in an artificial grammar task.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
We explore three methods for measuring the conscious status of knowledge using the artificial grammar learning paradigm. We show wagering is no more sensitive to conscious knowledge than simple verbal confidence reports but is affected by risk aversion. When people wager rather than give verbal confidence they are less ready to indicate high confidence. We introduce a "no-loss gambling" method which is insensitive to risk aversion. We show that when people are just as ready to bet on a genuine random process as their own classification decisions, their classifications are still above baseline, indicating knowledge part...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - October 11, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Dienes Z, Seth A Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Masked response priming in expert typists.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In masked priming tasks responses are usually faster when prime and target require identical rather than different responses. Previous research has extensively manipulated the nature and number of response-affording stimuli. However, little is known about the constraints of masked priming regarding the nature and number of response alternatives. The present study explored the limits of masked priming in a six-choice reaction time task, where responses from different fingers of both hands were required. We studied participants that were either experts for the type of response (skilled typists) or novices. Masked primes ...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - October 8, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Heinemann A, Kiesel A, Pohl C, Kunde W Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

When one sees what the other hears: Crossmodal attentional modulation for gazed and non-gazed upon auditory targets.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Three experiments investigated the nature of visuo-auditory crossmodal cueing in a triadic setting: participants had to detect an auditory signal while observing another agent's head facing one of the two laterally positioned auditory sources. Experiment 1 showed that when the agent's eyes were open, sounds originating on the side of the agent's gaze were detected faster than sounds originating on the side of the agent's visible ear; when the agent's eyes were closed this pat-tern of responses was reversed. Two additional experiments showed that the results were sensitive to whether participants could infer a hearing f...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - October 8, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Nuku P, Bekkering H Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Phenomenal and access consciousness in olfaction.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Contemporary literature on consciousness, with some exceptions, rarely considers the olfactory system. In this article the characteristics of olfactory consciousness, viewed from the standpoint of the phenomenal (P)/access (A) distinction, are examined relative to the major senses. The review details several qualitative differences in both olfactory P consciousness (shifts in the felt location, universal synesthesia-like and affect-rich experiences, and misperceptions) and A consciousness (recovery from habituation, capacity for conscious processing, access to semantic and episodic memory, learning, attention, and in t...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - October 5, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Stevenson RJ Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Types of attention matter for awareness: A study with color afterimages.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
It has been argued that attention and awareness might oppose each other given that attending to an adapting stimulus weakens its afterimage. We argue instead that the type of attention guided by spatial extent and perceptual levels is critical and might result in differences in awareness using afterimages. Participants performed a central task with small, large, local, or global letters and a blue square as an adapting stimulus in three experiments and indicated the onset and offset of the afterimage. We found that increases in the spatial spread of attention resulted in the decrease of afterimage duration. In terms of...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - October 4, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Baijal S, Srinivasan N Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Testing the repression hypothesis: Effects of emotional valence on memory suppression in the think - No think task.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
It has been proposed that performance in the think - no think (TNT) task represents a laboratory analogue of the voluntary form of memory repression. The central prediction of this repression hypothesis is that performance in the TNT task will be influenced by emotional characteristics of the material to be remembered. This prediction was tested in two experiments by asking participants to learn paired associates in which the first item was either emotionally positive (e.g. joy) or emotionally negative (e.g. hatred). The second word was always emotionally neutral (e.g. socks). Consistent with the repression hypothesis,...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - October 2, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Lambert AJ, Good KS, Kirk IJ Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Context-specific prime-congruency effects: On the role of conscious stimulus representations for cognitive control.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Recent research suggests that processing of irrelevant information can be modulated in a rapid online fashion by contextual information in the task environment depending on the usefulness of that information in different contexts. Congruency effects evoked by irrelevant stimulus attributes are smaller in contexts with high proportions of incongruent trials and larger in contexts with high proportions of congruent trials (e.g., Corballis & Gratton, 2003; Lehle & Hübner, 2008). The present study investigates these context-adaptation effects in a masked-priming paradigm. Context-specific adaptation effects tr...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - September 28, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Heinemann A, Kunde W, Kiesel A Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Hypnotic induction decreases anterior default mode activity.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The 'default mode' network refers to cortical areas that are active in the absence of goal-directed activity. In previous studies, decreased activity in the 'default mode' has always been associated with increased activation in task-relevant areas. We show that the induction of hypnosis can reduce anterior default mode activity during rest without increasing activity in other cortical regions. We assessed brain activation patterns of high and low suggestible people while resting in the fMRI scanner and while engaged in visual tasks, in and out of hypnosis. High suggestible participants in hypnosis showed decreased brai...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - September 23, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: McGeown WJ, Mazzoni G, Venneri A, Kirsch I Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

How chromatic phenomenality largely overflow its cognitive accessibility.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
It has been suggested (Block, 2007) that the core neural bases for visual phenomenal consciousness and for access consciousness are located in anatomically separate regions. If this is correct, and if, as Block suggests, the core neural substrate of visual phenomenality is located early in the visual cortex where detailed chromatic information is available, then it would be reasonable to infer that our intuitions of chromatically rich visual phenomenality are plausible. It is furthermore suggested that during perception cognitive access to this chromatic cornucopia is mediated through mereologically superordinate (MS) ...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - September 22, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Beeckmans J Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Intracranial EEG power spectra and phase synchrony during consciousness and unconsciousness.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Power density spectra and phase synchrony measurements were taken from intracranial electrode grids implanted in epileptic subjects. Comparisons were made between data from the waking state and from the period of unconsciousness immediately following a generalised tonic-clonic seizure. Power spectra in the waking state resembled coloured noise. Power spectra in the unconscious state resembled coloured noise from 1 to about 5Hz, but at higher frequencies changed in two out of three subjects to resemble white noise. This boosted unconscious gamma power to a higher level than conscious gamma power. For both gamma and beta...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - September 20, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Pockett S, Holmes MD Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

'Faultless' ignorance: Strengths and limitations of epistemic definitions of confabulation.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
There is no satisfactory account for the general phenomenon of confabulation, for the following reasons: (1) confabulation occurs in a number of pathological and non-pathological conditions; (2) impairments giving rise to confabulation are likely to have different neural bases; and (3) there is no unique theory explaining the aetiology of confabulations. An epistemic approach to defining confabulation could solve all of these issues, by focusing on the surface features of the phenomenon. However, existing epistemic accounts are unable to offer sufficient conditions for confabulation and tend to emphasise only its epist...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - September 18, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Bortolotti L, Cox RE Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Seeking patterns in dream content: A systematic approach to word searches.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This paper systematizes the word search potential of DreamBank.net (Domhoff & Schneider, 2008a, 2008b) by formulating and testing a set of word strings that can be used as default analytic categories in future investigations. The word strings are applied to the 981 dream reports of college students gathered by Hall and Van de Castle (1966) and the 136 dream reports of an 80-year old male gathered by Bulkeley (2008a). The results show a basic compatibility with the frequencies identified by Hall and Van de Castle's labor-intensive method of content analysis employing teams of human coders. These findings support the...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - September 8, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Bulkeley K Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Feedback suppression in anesthesia. Is it reversible?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Information processing that subserves conscious cognitive functions is thought to involve recurrent signaling through feedforward and feedback loops among hierarchically arranged functional regions of the cerebral cortex. In the current issue of Consciousness and Cognition, Lee et al. report that loss of consciousness, as produced by a bolus injection of the general anesthetic propofol to human volunteers, was accompanied by a decrease in wide-band EEG feedback connectivity from frontal cortex to parietal cortex, confirming a prediction from previous experimental studies. Interestingly, frontoparietal feedback connecti...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - September 6, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Hudetz AG Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Brain preparation before a voluntary action: Evidence against unconscious movement initiation.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Benjamin Libet has argued that electrophysiological signs of cortical movement preparation are present before people report having made a conscious decision to move, and that these signs constitute evidence that voluntary movements are initiated unconsciously. This controversial conclusion depends critically on the assumption that the electrophysiological signs recorded by Libet, Gleason, Wright, and Pearl (1983) are associated only with preparation for movement. We tested that assumption by comparing the electrophysiological signs before a decision to move with signs present before a decision not to move. There was no...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - September 4, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Trevena J, Miller J Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Development of autonoetic autobiographical memory in school-age children: Genuine age effect or development of basic cognitive abilities?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study investigated the mechanisms behind episodic autobiographical memory (EAM) development in school-age children. Thirty children (6-11years) performed a novel EAM test. We computed one index of episodicity via autonoetic consciousness and two indices of retrieval spontaneity (overall and EAM-specific) for a recent period (previous school year) and a more remote one (preschool years). Executive functions, and episodic and personal semantic memory were assessed. Results showed that recent autobiographical memories (AMs) were mainly episodic, unlike remote ones. An age-related increase in the indices of episodicity an...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - September 2, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Picard L, Reffuveille I, Eustache F, Piolino P Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Very brief exposure: The effects of unreportable stimuli on fearful behavior.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
A series of experiments tested the hypothesis that very brief exposure to feared stimuli can have positive effects on avoidance of the corresponding feared object. Participants identified themselves as fearful of spiders through a widely used questionnaire. A preliminary experiment showed that they were unable to identify the stimuli used in the main experiments. Experiment 2 (N=65) compared the effects of exposure to masked feared stimuli at short and long stimulus onset asynchronies (SOA). Participants were individually administered one of three continuous series of backwards masked or non-masked stimuli: unreportabl...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - September 1, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Siegel P, Weinberger J Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

The flow of anoetic to noetic and autonoetic consciousness: A vision of unknowing (anoetic) and knowing (noetic) consciousness in the remembrance of things past and imagined futures.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In recent years there has been an expansion of scientific work on consciousness. However, there is an increasing necessity to integrate evolutionary and interdisciplinary perspectives and to bring affective feelings more centrally into the overall discussion. Pursuant especially to the theorizing of Endel Tulving (1985, 2004, 2005), Panksepp (1998a, 2003, 2005) and Vandekerckhove (2009) we will look at the phenomena starting with primary-process consciousness, namely the rudimentary state of autonomic awareness or unknowing (anoetic) consciousness, with a fundamental form of first-person 'self-experience' which relies ...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - August 24, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Vandekerckhove M, Panksepp J Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Hypnotic suggestibility, cognitive inhibition, and dissociation.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
We examined two potential correlates of hypnotic suggestibility: dissociation and cognitive inhibition. Dissociation is the foundation of two of the major theories of hypnosis and other theories commonly postulate that hypnotic responding is a result of attentional abilities (including inhibition). Participants were administered the Waterloo-Stanford Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility, Form C. Under the guise of an unrelated study, 180 of these participants also completed: a version of the Dissociative Experiences Scale that is normally distributed in non-clinical populations; a latent inhibition task, a spatial negati...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - August 23, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Dienes Z, Brown E, Hutton S, Kirsch I, Mazzoni G, Wright DB Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Implicit knowledge and motor skill: What people who know how to catch don't know.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
People are unable to report how they decide whether to move backwards or forwards to catch a ball. When asked to imagine how their angle of elevation of gaze would change when they caught a ball, most people are unable to describe what happens although their interception strategy is based on controlling changes in this angle. Just after catching a ball, many people are unable to recognise a description of how their angle of gaze changed during the catch. Some people confidently choose incorrect descriptions that would guarantee failure of interception demonstrating unconscious knowledge co-existing with systematically ...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - August 21, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Reed N, McLeod P, Dienes Z Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Base rate effects on the IAT.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
We investigated the influence of stimulus base rates on the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Using an East/West-German attitude-IAT, we demonstrated that both overall response speed and differential response speed underlying IAT effects depend on the relative frequencies of the stimulus categories. First, when those stimuli that are more common in reality also occurred more frequently in the stimulus list, response speed generally increased. Second, IAT effects increased when congruent blocks profited from the compatibility of frequency-based response biases (i.e., frequent target stimuli and frequent valence stimuli m...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - August 20, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Bluemke M, Fiedler K Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Long-lasting effects of subliminal affective priming from facial expressions.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Unconscious processing of stimuli with emotional content can bias affective judgments. Is this subliminal affective priming merely a transient phenomenon manifested in fleeting perceptual changes, or are long-lasting effects also induced? To address this question, we investigated memory for surprise faces 24h after they had been shown with 30-ms fearful, happy, or neutral faces. Surprise faces subliminally primed by happy faces were initially rated as more positive, and were later remembered better, than those primed by fearful or neutral faces. Participants likely to have processed primes supraliminally did not respon...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - August 17, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Sweeny TD, Grabowecky M, Suzuki S, Paller KA Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

I can see it both ways: First- and third-person visual perspectives at retrieval.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The number of studies examining visual perspective during retrieval has recently grown. However, the way in which perspective has been conceptualized differs across studies. Some studies have suggested perspective is experienced as either a first-person or a third-person perspective, whereas others have suggested both perspectives can be experienced during a single retrieval attempt. This aspect of perspective was examined across three studies, which used different measurement techniques commonly used in studies of perspective. Results suggest that individuals can experience more than one perspective when recalling eve...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - August 16, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Rice HJ, Rubin DC Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Me or not me - An optimal integration of agency cues?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Recent work has demonstrated that the sense of agency is not only determined by efference-copy-based internal predictions and internal comparator mechanisms, but by a large variety of different internal and external cues. The study by Moore and colleagues [Moore, J. W., Wegner, D. M., & Haggard, P. (2009). Modulating the sense of agency with external cues. Conscious and Cognition] aimed to provide further evidence for this view by demonstrating that external agency cues might outweigh or even substitute efferent signals to install a basic registration of self-agency. Although the study contains some critical points...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - August 12, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Synofzik M, Vosgerau G, Lindner A Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Anosognosia in Alzheimer's disease - The petrified self.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This paper reviews the literature concerning the neural correlates of the self, the relationship between self and memory and the profile of memory impairments in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and explores the relationship between the preservation of the self and anosognosia in this condition. It concludes that a potential explanation for anosognosia in AD is a lack of updating of personal information due to the memory impairments characteristic of this disease. We put forward the hypothesis that anosognosia is due in part to the "petrified self." PMID: 19683461 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher] (Source: Consciousness and Cognition)
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - August 12, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Mograbi DC, Brown RG, Morris RG Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Attention control and susceptibility to hypnosis.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The present work aimed at assessing whether the interference exerted by task-irrelevant spatial information is comparable in high- and low-susceptible individuals and whether it may be eliminated by means of a specific posthypnotic suggestion. To this purpose high- and low-susceptible participants were tested using a Simon-like interference task after the administration of a suggestion aimed at preventing the processing of the irrelevant spatial information conveyed by the stimuli. The suggestion could be administered either in the absence or following a standard hypnotic induction. We showed that, outside from the hyp...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - July 30, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Iani C, Ricci F, Baroni G, Rubichi S Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Lost in the move? Secondary task performance impairs tactile change detection on the body.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Change blindness, the surprising inability of people to detect significant changes between consecutively-presented visual displays, has recently been shown to affect tactile perception as well. Visual change blindness has been observed during saccades and eye blinks, conditions under which people's awareness of visual information is temporarily suppressed. In the present study, we demonstrate change blindness for suprathreshold tactile stimuli resulting from the execution of a secondary task requiring bodily movement. In Experiment 1, the ability of participants to detect changes between two sequentially-presented vibr...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - July 29, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Gallace A, Zeeden S, Röder B, Spence C Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

The self and dreams during a period of transition.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The content of dreams and changes to the self were investigated in students moving to University. In study 1, 20 participants completed dream diaries and memory tasks before and after they had left home and moved to university, and generated self images, "I am..." statements (e.g. I am an undergraduate), reflective of their current self. Changes in "I ams" were observed, indicating a newly-formed 'university' self. These self, images and related autobiographical knowledge were found to be incorporated into recent dreams but not into dreams from other periods. Study 2 replicated these findings in a different sample (N=5...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - July 26, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Horton CL, Moulin CJ, Conway MA Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Time-space synaesthesia - A cognitive advantage?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Is synaesthesia cognitively useful? Individuals with time-space synaesthesia experience time units (such as months of the year) as idiosyncratic spatial forms, and report that these forms aid them in mentally organising their time. In the present study, we hypothesised that time-space synaesthesia would facilitate performance on a time-related cognitive task. Synaesthetes were not specifically recruited for participation; instead, likelihood of time-space synaesthesia was assessed on a continuous scale based on participants' responses during a semi-structured interview. Participants performed a month-manipulation task,...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - July 22, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Mann H, Korzenko J, Carriere JS, Dixon MJ Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Does the intention to communicate affect action kinematics?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of communicative intention on action. In Experiment 1 participants were requested to reach towards an object, grasp it, and either simply lift it (individual condition) or lift it with the intent to communicate a meaning to a partner (communicative condition). Movement kinematics were recorded using a three-dimensional motion analysis system. The results indicate that kinematics was sensitive to communicative intention. Although the to-be-grasped object remained the same, movements performed for the 'communicative' condition were characterized by a kinematic p...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - July 22, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Sartori L, Becchio C, Bara BG, Castiello U Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

In what sense 'familiar'? Examining experiential differences within pathologies of facial recognition.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Explanations of Capgras delusion and prosopagnosia typically incorporate a dual-route approach to facial recognition in which a deficit in overt or covert processing in one condition is mirror-reversed in the other. Despite this double dissociation, experiences of either patient-group are often reported in the same way - as lacking a sense of familiarity toward familiar faces. In this paper, deficits in the facial processing of these patients are compared to other facial recognition pathologies, and their experiential characteristics mapped onto the dual-route model in order to provide a less ambiguous link between fac...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - July 20, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Young G Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Beyond perception: Testing for implicit conceptual traces in high-load tasks.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The present commentary addresses the main results obtained in the Butler and Klein [Butler, B. C., & Klein, R. (2009). Inattentional blindness for ignored words: Comparison of explicit and implicit memory tasks. Consciousness and Cognition, doi:10.1016/j.concog.2009.02.009.] study and discusses them in relation to the Perceptual Load Theory of Lavie [Lavie, N. (1995). Perceptual load as a necessary condition for selective attention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 21, 451-68.]. The authors claim that the use of implicit indexes of conceptual distractor processing in high-load s...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - July 19, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Ruz M, Fuentes LJ Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Impaired self-reflection in psychiatric disorders among adults: A proposal for the existence of a network of semi independent functions.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Self-reflection plays a key role in healthy human adaptation. Self-reflection might involve different capacities which may be impaired to different degrees relatively independently of one another. Variation in abilities for different forms of self-reflection are commonly seen as key aspects of many adult mental disorders. Yet little has been written about whether there are different kinds of deficits in self-reflection found in mental illness, how those deficits should be distinguished from one another and how to characterize the extent to which they are interrelated. We review clinical and experimental literature and ...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - July 14, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Dimaggio G, Vanheule S, Lysaker PH, Carcione A, Nicolò G Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Conscious thought and the sustained attention to response task.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
We examined whether SART performance shows characteristics of speed-accuracy tradeoffs and in addition, we examined whether SART performance is influenced by prior exposure to emotional picture stimuli. Thirty-six participants in this study performed SARTs after being exposed to neutral and negative picture stimuli. Performance in the SART changed rapidly over time and there was a high correlation between participants errors of commission rate and their reaction time to the neutral targets (r=-.61). Regardless of exposure self-reported thoughts significantly correlated with both errors of commission and reaction times. Ove...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - July 6, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Helton WS, Kern RP, Walker DR Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Modulation of long-term memory by arousal in alexithymia: The role of interpretation.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Moderate physiological or emotional arousal induced after learning modulates memory consolidation, helping to distinguish important memories from trivial ones. Yet, the contribution of subjective awareness or interpretation of arousal to this effect is uncertain. Alexithymia, which is an inability to describe or identify one's emotional and arousal states even though physiological responses to arousal are intact, provides a tool to evaluate the role of arousal interpretation. Participants scoring high and low on alexithymia (N=30 each) learned a list of 30 words, followed by immediate recall. Participants then saw eith...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - June 30, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Nielson KA, Meltzer MA Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

The biology of visual perspective and depression: A reply to Sutin.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
A recent meta-analysis by Munafò, Durrant, Lewis, and Flint (2009) [Munafò, M. R., Durrant, C., Lewis, G., & Flint, J. (2009). Genexenvironment interactions at the serotonin transporter locus. Biological Psychiatry, 65, 211-219] questioned the meaning of studies searching for endophenotypes associated with the serotonin-transporter-linked promoter region (5-HTTLPR) polymorphism, including our study on visual perspective during autobiographical memory retrieval. However, the association of 3rd person perspective with vulnerability for depression does not rely only on genetics. External consistency is provi...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - June 25, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Lemogne C, Bergouignan L, Fossati P Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

The mental time line: An analogue of the mental number line in the mapping of life events.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
A crucial aspect of the human mind is the ability to project the self along the time line to past and future. It has been argued that such self-projection is essential to re-experience past experiences and predict future events. In-depth analysis of a novel paradigm investigating mental time shows that the speed of this "self-projection" in time depends logarithmically on the temporal-distance between an imagined "location" on the time line that participants were asked to imagine and the location of another imagined event from the time line. This logarithmic pattern suggests that events in human cognition are spatially...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - June 21, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Arzy S, Adi-Japha E, Blanke O Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Visual perspective and genetics: A commentary on Lemogne and colleagues.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Lemogne and colleagues offer an interesting extension to their previous work on visual perspective and depression: Individuals at-risk for depression (defined as higher scores on Harm Avoidance), without a history of mood disorders, report retrieval of positive memories from the 3rd person perspective. Their findings suggest that the retrieval of positive experiences from the 3rd person perspective may be a risk-factor for depression, not just a lingering consequence of it. Their study, however, also reports a genetic association in a severely underpowered sample. Rather than focusing on gene x environment interactions...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - June 19, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Sutin AR Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Modulating the sense of agency with external cues.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
We investigate the processes underlying the feeling of control over one's actions ("sense of agency"). Sense of agency may depend on internal motoric signals, and general inferences about external events. We used priming to modulate the sense of agency for voluntary and involuntary movements, by modifying the content of conscious thought prior to moving. Trials began with the presentation of one of two supraliminal primes, which corresponded to the effect of a voluntary action participants subsequently made. The perceived interval between movement and effect was used as an implicit measure of sense of agency. Primes mo...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - June 7, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Moore JW, Wegner DM, Haggard P Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Age effects on attentional blink performance in meditation.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Here we explore whether mental training in the form of meditation can help to overcome age-related attentional decline. We compared performance on the attentional blink task between three populations: A group of long-term meditation practitioners within an older population, a control group of age-matched participants and a control group of young participants. Members of both control groups had never practiced meditation. Our results show that long-term meditation practice leads to a reduction of the attentional blink. Meditation practitioners taken from an older population showed a reduction in blink as compared to a c...
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - June 7, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: van Leeuwen S, Müller NG, Melloni L Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals

Reply to Bachmann on ERP correlates of visual awareness.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
PMID: 19515579 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher] (Source: Consciousness and Cognition)
Source: Consciousness and Cognition - June 7, 2009 Category: Neurology Authors: Railo H, Koivisto M Tags: Conscious Cogn Source Type: journals