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Mechanisms underlying visual imagery, the ability to create vivid mental representations of a scene in the absence of sensory input, remain to be fully understood. Some previous studies have proposed that visual imagery might be related to visual short-term memory (STM), with a common mechanism involving retention of visual information over short periods of time. Other observations have shown a strong relationship between visual imagery and functional activity in the hippocampus and primary visual cortex, both regions also associated with visual STM. Here we examined the relationship of visual imagery to STM and hippocampal and primary visual cortex volumes, first in a large sample of healthy people across a large age range (N=229 behavioural data; N=56 MRI data in older participants) and then in patients with Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease (N=19 in each group compared to 19 age-matched healthy controls). We used a variant of the “What was where?” visual object-location binding task to assess the quality of remembered information over short delays. In healthy people, no evidence of a relationship between the vividness of visual imagery and any visual STM performance parameter was found. However, there was a significant positive correlation between visual imagery and the volumes of the hippocampus and primary visual cortex. Although visual STM performance was significantly impaired in patients with Alzheimer’s disease, their vividness of visual imagery scores were comparable to those of age-matched elderly controls and patients with Parkinson’s disease. Despite hippocampal volumes also being reduced in Alzheimer’s patients, there appeared to be no impact on their self-reported visual imagery. In conclusion, visual imagery was not significantly related to visual STM performance, either in healthy controls or Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease but it was related to hippocampal and visual cortex volume in healthy people.

Summary Brain circuits are thought to form a “cognitive map” to process and store statistical relationships in the environment. A cognitive map is commonly defined as a mental representation that describes environmental states (i.e., variables or events) and the relationship between these states. This process is commonly conceptualized as a prospective process, as it is based on the relationships between states in chronological order (e.g., does reward follow a given state?). In this perspective, we expand this concept on the basis of recent findings to postulate that in addition to a prospective map, the brain forms and uses a retrospective cognitive map (e.g., does a given state precede reward?). In doing so, we demonstrate that many neural signals and behaviors (e.g., habits) that seem inflexible and non-cognitive can result from retrospective cognitive maps. Together, we present a significant conceptual reframing of the neurobiological study of associative learning, memory, and decision making.

This study employed electrophysiological measures to investigate the processes of expectancy fulfillment and semantic integration during the processing of binding and compound nouns in Chinese. Sequential expectancy and cloze probability between the two constituents of a two-character noun were manipulated in two experiments, resulting in four types of target characters (i.e., the final characters of two-character nouns): (i) high-cloze, binding character (HB); (ii) high-cloze, compound character (HC); (iii) low-cloze, binding character (LB); (iv) low-cloze, compound character (LC). Participants were asked to judge as quickly and accurately as possible whether the two characters, presented sequentially, formed a real word. The two experiments varied in stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the initial and the target characters: 1000 ms and 300 ms. ERPs acquired at the target characters revealed a significant semantic integration effect in both experiments whereby low-cloze target characters elicited more negative-going activities than high-cloze target characters (L > H) with both long and short SOAs. Importantly, there was a graded N400 effect (LC = LB > HC > HB) at the central region: a clearly visible positive deflection for HB relative to HC in synchrony with an equivalence in negativity for LB and LC. This graded pattern was observed with an SOA of 1000 ms but not 300 ms. These results are discussed in terms of the possible coexistence of an expectancy fulfillment mechanism indexed by the P300 that monitors incoming information for realization of expectancies based on stored mental representations and a semantic integration mechanism indexed by the N400 that incorporates incoming information into the preceding context based on semantic-pragmatic knowledge. Manifestation of this coexistence appears sensitive to SOA-modulated attention orientation.

Supplying training to drivers that teaches them about automated driving and requests to intervene may help them to build and maintain a mental representation of how automation works and thereby improve takeover performance. We aimed to investigate the effect of different types of training programmes about the functioning of automated driving on drivers’ takeover performance during real driving. Fifty-two participants were split into three groups for training sessions: paper (short notice), video (3-minute tutorial) and practice (short drive). After the training, participants experienced automated driving and both urgent and non-urgent requests to intervene in a Wizard-of-Oz vehicle on public roads. Participants’ takeover time, visual behaviour, mental workload, and flow levels during the requests to intervene were assessed. Our results indicated that in urgent circumstances, participants’ takeover response times were faster in the practice training condition compared to the other training conditions. Nevertheless, the practice training session did not present any other positive effect on drivers’ visual behaviour. This could indicate that prior training, particularly when reinforcing drivers' motor skills, improved their takeover response time at the latest motor stages rather than in the early sensory states. In addition, the analysis of in-vehicle videos revealed that participants’ attention was captured in the first place by the in-vehicle human-machine interface during the urgent request to intervene. This highlights the importance for designers to display information on the HMI in an appropriate way to optimise drivers’ situation awareness in critical situations.

This study examines the acoustic outputs in boundary coarticulation and attempts to explain the native and nonnative production differences in relation to speech planning. English consonant clusters across words produced by English (L1) and Mandarin (L2) speakers are analyzed. This study focuses on two segmental features (place of articulation and voicing) and computes three acoustic-based measurements (internal release, closure durations and closure shortening). The results find a lesser coarticulation degree in L2 production, and differing acoustic deviations varying with speakers’ proficiency level. The results also suggest that cross-word planning involving place of articulation is robust in both L1 and L2 production, while cross-word voicing encoding is not available in L2 speech. The asymmetry in L2 encoding is compatible with a competitive gestural selection analysis, and the implications of L1 production have been interpreted as in favor of a richer mental representation and finer-level execution than the syllable-sized programming. The preliminary results support the core assumption that L1 and L2 coarticulation differences arise from phonological and phonetic encoding. This study adds cross-linguistic output-based evidence on speech planning and encourages speech models to further specify the very late stage of phonetic encoding.

The ability to manually dock a spacecraft to a space station can be crucial for astronauts during space missions. The computer-based self-learning program 6df is an abstract docking simulation for acquisition and maintenance of the underlying skill to control six degrees of freedom. One of the difficulties of this complex task is to construct a mental representation of the own position and orientation in space, based only on two-dimensional information. To facilitate this and possibly further improve the learning process, a new three-dimensional (3D) stereoscopic presentation of the program is tested. This study investigates whether there is faster learning progress with 3D presentation compared to standard 2D presentation. 24 participants of the Artificial Gravity Bed Rest Study with ESA (AGBRESA) participated in the 6df docking experiment. Each of them completed 20 training sessions which lasted approximately 45 min and were conducted twice a week. The learning program is self-sufficient and adapts itself to individual learning speed. Half of the participants were presented with an UNITY-based stereoscopic visualization of docking, whereas the other half used the standard 2D version of the learning program 6df. Learning progress was measured as the number of tasks needed to reach a target task. Results overall indicate a slightly faster learning progress when using 3D technology, but no long-term performance advantages. The small benefit might not justify the usage of costlier and operationally limiting 3D systems.

The scope of human learning and development poses a radical challenge for cognitive science. We propose that developmental theories can address this challenge by adopting perspectives from computer science. Many of our best models treat learning as analogous to computer programming because symbolic programs provide the most compelling account of sophisticated mental representations. We specifically propose that children's learning is analogous to a particular style of programming called hacking, making code better along many dimensions through an open-ended set of goals and activities. By contrast to existing theories, which depend primarily on local search and simple metrics, this view highlights the many features of good mental representations and the multiple complementary processes children use to create them.

Epistemic curiosity is an intrinsic drive to obtain non-instrumental information. It is presumed to be adaptively useful for building mental representations where there is an exploration bonus for learning. Formally, epistemic curiosity is most commonly modelled by calculating the entropy associated with information. Human curiosity across life stages exhibits a predictable Goldilocks pattern, where maximum entropy attracts attention and arousal, thus ‘piquing’ curiosity. This and close variants of the curiosity ‘formula’ have been used to generate more efficient algorithms, clickbait headlines, and maximum-suspense thrillers. Human fMRI studies have shown activity associated with curiosity and ‘fulfillment’ of curiosity (e.g. learning answers), typically in basal ganglia reward areas. Understanding this near-universal human drive is important for education and many other domains.

In this research, the authors examine the effect of underdog versus top dog brand positioning on different stages of WOM generation, from mental representation (i.e., WOM intention) to action implementation (i.e., WOM behavior) and the underlying mechanism. Across five experiments, the authors find that an underdog (versus top dog) positioning leads to higher WOM intention, whereas its effect on actual WOM behavior demonstrates a reverse pattern. Additionally, the results show that consumer self-concepts (i.e., idealistic self vs. pragmatic self) mediate the relationship between brand positioning and WOM (i.e., intention vs. behavior). Moreover, the authors find that the consumer lay theory of achievement moderates the effect of brand positioning on WOM behavior, in that consumers who hold an incremental (vs. entity) theory are more likely to generate WOM for a brand with an underdog (vs. top dog) positioning. These findings provide contributions to WOM and branding literatures and offer important implications to managers.

Contains fulltext : 219603.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) Speakers and listeners usually interact in larger discourses than single words or even single sentences. The goal of the present study was to identify the neural bases reflecting how the mental representation of the situation denoted in a multi-sentence discourse (situation model) is constructed and shared between speakers and listeners. An fMRI study using a variant of the ambiguous text paradigm was designed. Speakers (n=15) produced ambiguous texts in the scanner and listeners (n=27) subsequently listened to these texts in different states of ambiguity: preceded by a highly informative, intermediately informative or no title at all. Conventional BOLD activation analyses in listeners, as well as inter-subject correlation analyses between the speakers' and the listeners' hemodynamic time courses were performed. Critically, only the processing of disambiguated, coherent discourse with an intelligible situation model representation involved (shared) activation in bilateral lateral parietal and medial prefrontal regions. This shared spatiotemporal pattern of brain activation between the speaker and the listener suggests that the process of memory retrieval in medial prefrontal regions and the binding of retrieved information in the lateral parietal cortex constitutes a core mechanism underlying the communication of complex conceptual representations. 16 p.

We examined direct and indirect associations among preschool-age children’s attachment-related mental representations of mothers and peer relationships with their early school adjustment. One hundred and eighteen preschoolers attending Head Start programs were administered a story stem completion task to measure prosocial and antisocial themes in their attachment representations. Approximately two months later, teachers reported on children’s physical and relational peer victimization and prosocial attention from peers. Another three months later, trained observers rated preschoolers’ school adjustment. Children’s prosocial themes in their attachment-related mental representations were negatively related to reported experiences of physical and relational peer victimization. Physical peer victimization was associated with poorer school adjustment and prosocial attention from peers was associated with better school adjustment. Children’s prosocial themes in their attachment-related mental representations were indirectly associated with better school adjustment via lower physical peer victimization. We discuss the implications of these findings for future research and intervention on peer victimization in early childhood.

Color constancy is a prime example of a perceptual constancy, giving stability to mental representations of objects in an unstable world. Yet color constancy is highly variable, depending on the illumination, the object and its context, and the viewer. Color constancy is particularly challenged by artificial lights that differ from the natural illuminations under which human vision evolved. The rapid developments in solid-state lighting technologies revive the need to scrutinise the limits of color constancy, to understand whether and how it is optimised for natural illuminations, and, in turn, to optimise novel lighting technologies for human color perception. For these goals, a deeper collaboration between the disciplines of human vision science and color science is needed.

The design of Sensory Substitution Devices (SSDs) often relies on the belief that the information supplied by the devices should allow the construction of spatial mental representations on the basis of which routes are planned. This study, in contrast, illustrates that navigation using an SSD can be conceived as an on-line, dynamic process, without the need for establishing a predefined plan or model of the task prior to its execution. We analyzed route selection performed with a vibrotactile SSD that could detect environmental surfaces only within a short spatial range, limiting the availability of information about remote parts of the environment to be navigated. Sixty sighted participants performed a navigation task that involved the goal of reaching a target destination while avoiding five obstacles (placed in randomly predetermined configurations). Three groups of participants differed in the sensory modality used (restricted visual, acoustic + vibrotactile, and restricted visual + vibrotactile). While participants in the visual condition had fewer obstacle collisions and reached the target location sooner, the groups coincided to a large extent in terms of the routes that they followed. Furthermore, the routes selected by participants in all groups conformed well to routes predicted by a dynamic model of visually-guided locomotion (Fajen and Warren, 2003). These findings show that local, limited information about environmental layout can support route selection equivalent to that seen when information about the full environmental layout is available.

An episodic memory is considered to be mentally encoded or constructed information instead of a copy of the past events. However, the mechanism that constructs episodic memory has not been systematically formulated in previous studies on cognitive architecture and system. In this study, the term “story” is used, rather than episodic memory, to refer to a mental representation of temporally and linguistically organized events and entities. The main difference between a story and an episodic memory is that a story involves a form of mental representation, while the definition of an episodic memory is generally based on the function or content (i.e., it enables the recollection of past events). A story is considered as a uniform mental representation involving episodic memory, current situation, prospective memory, planned or imagined future, and fiction. To ensure systematic formulation of the story-form memory construction, this study introduces Genette’s narrative discourse theory, which is a representative work in narratology. Genette provided a systematic classification of terms used to describe a narrative structure, with particular focus on how a narrative is structured on a text instead of what is told. In this study, Genette’s narratological terms are analogically translated to methods of story-form memory construction in a cognitive system. Furthermore, the narratological methods are rearranged using cognitive terms including temporal segmentation of the world, generalization of stories, theory of mind, metacognition, self-formation, memory organization, and sociocultural aspect of cognition. Thus, a story is characterized as integrative, multifaceted, and multifunctional information in the mind.

Mental representations of hazard recognition are crucial to inspection strategies in construction safety management. However, few studies have investigated scan patterns as the means of mental representation of hazard recognition in the construction industry. This paper aims to explore visual searching strategies through eye-tracking scan patterns for construction safety inspection. An experimental study with 47 participants was designed to identify hazards in a pseudo construction site, and the scanning data were collected with a portable eye-tracking device. Artificial intelligence was then used to quantitatively define areas of interest based on the extracted fixation data of all participants. For two specific hazards, 23 and 29 scanpaths were generated and presented in the form of fixation sequences. Finally, the searching strategies of the participants who successfully recognized hazards were compared to the strategies of those who failed, and their scan patterns were summarized with eyePatterns®. The results show that the successful participants follow similar hazard searching patterns, concentrating on specific hazardous areas rather than unimportant distractors, following a logical and serial search pattern. They tend to observe one sub-area fully before a systematic shift to another one. This paper reports on a conceptual study of hazard searching patterns based on visual scanpaths, contributing to research of the searching strategies of mental representations for hazard recognition as well as providing useful practical implications for hazard inspection strategies in construction projects.

Previous research has demonstrated that social stereotypes associated with women's gender can preclude them from leadership positions. It remains unclear whether these stereotypes affect how people perceive male and female leaders, however. To examine people's stereotypes, we extracted their mental representations of male and female leaders and typical men/women (referred to as nonleaders) using reverse correlation. We then asked perceivers to rate these prototypes’ apparent leadership ability and traits related to power and warmth across contexts that represented typically masculine, feminine, or neutral domains. Leaders in a feminine context appeared more leaderlike than nonleaders, but as equally leaderlike in neutral and masculine contexts. Moreover, female leader faces appeared more powerful than female nonleader faces but male leader and nonleader faces appeared equally powerful. Male leaders were perceived as warmer than male nonleaders, however, whereas female leaders and nonleaders were perceived as equally warm. Thus, people’s gender, social stereotypes, and the context in which leaders are judged influence how people conceive of male and female leaders, with counterstereotypical attributes distinguishing leaders within their gender.

Background People with schizophrenia (PSZ) have profound deficits in context processing, an executive process that guides adaptive behaviors according to goals and stored contextual information. Although various neural processes are involved in context processing and are affected in PSZ, the core underlying neural dysfunction is unclear. Methods To determine the relative importance of neural dysfunctions within prefrontal cognitive control, sensory activity, and motor activity to context processing deficits in PSZ, we examined event-related potentials (ERPs) in 60 PSZ and 51 healthy control subjects during an optimal context processing task. We also analyzed the Ex-Gaussian reaction time distribution to examine abnormalities in motor control variability in PSZ. Results Compared with healthy control subjects, PSZ had lower response accuracy and greater variability in their normal reaction times during high context processing demands. Latencies of normal and slow responses were generally increased in PSZ. High context processing–related reductions in frontal ERPs were indicative of specific deficits in proactive and reactive cognitive controls in PSZ, while ERPs associated with visual and motor processes were reduced regardless of context processing demands, indicating generalized visuomotor deficits. In contrast to previous studies, we found that diminished frontal responses reflective of proactive control of the contextual cue, rather than visual responses of cue encoding, predicted response accuracy deficits in PSZ. In addition, probe-related ERP components of motor preparation, prefrontal reactive control, and frontomotor interaction predicted Ex-Gaussian indices of reaction time instability in PSZ. Conclusions Prefrontal proactive and reactive control deficits associated with failures in using mental representation likely underlie context processing deficits in PSZ.

The effect of traffic signs in the motor behavior of drivers is not fully understood yet. Knowing about how humans process the meaning of signs will improve response time to those signs and the decision making carried out when driving. Literature shows that the signs that are not-well designed produce counterproductive effect on movement. This study sounds out which are precisely the warning, Ecuadorian-traffic signs more ergonomic for participants, from a cognitive point of view, and classifies them by using the criteria of representativity, univocity and numbers of errors provoked by them. With this, it can be detected which traffic signs need to be redesigned. The economic, social and psychological consequences of car accidents are well-known. Every single effort orientated to the solution of this social problem is welcome.

The present cross-sectional study of 230 teachers aimed to test Spilt, Koomen & Thijs's [Educational Psychology Review, 23, 457 (2011)] proposal that teachers' mental representations of their student relationships shape their affective responses to behaviour perceived as problematic. The association between student problematic behaviour and teachers' affective responses was mediated by relational conflict and this indirect effect was lessened by relational closeness. The degree to which teachers' attachment patterns were characterised by compulsive caregiving did not impact on these processes. The present study is consistent with relational theories of teacher wellbeing and argues for relationship-focused reflective practice in teacher training.

Objectives The present paper elucidates some cognitive mechanisms of expertise in sport that have emerged from recent studies of three topics in psychology: motor imagery; flow and “clutch” states; and the “quiet eye” phenomenon. Design A selective narrative review was conducted of research on the three preceding topics. Special consideration was given to recent studies by European researchers on these topics. Method Following a brief overview of theoretical approaches to sport expertise, the paper examines certain cognitive mechanisms of elite athletic performance that have emerged from recent studies of motor imagery; flow and “clutch” states; and the “quiet eye” phenomenon. In the final section, conclusions are drawn about theoretical progress in understanding the cognitive mechanisms of expertise in sport. Results The mechanisms underlying sport expertise reflect both task-specific and universal cognitive processes (e.g., mental representations). Conclusion Considerable progress has been made in identifying the cognitive mechanisms underlying expertise in sport but additional research is required to address certain unresolved issues in this field.

Successful problem solving relies on the availability of suitable mental representations of the task domain. Especially for more complex problems, there might be a wide variety of possible problem representations, and it might even be beneficial to change them during problem solving. In a first part, we argue that investigating the dynamics of understanding in terms of dynamically changing problem representations is an underexplored aspect of problem solving research, and that most classic tasks even preclude the opportunity of such dynamics to occur. Continuing this theoretical discussion, as an illustrative example of a task designed for the exploration of such representational dynamics, the second part of the paper discusses a novel, complex spatial transformation and problem solving task. In this task, one is asked to repeatedly mentally cross-fold a sheet of paper, and to predict the resulting sheet geometry without the use of external aids. Through its deliberate openness and difficulty, this task requires finding new and more efficient representations – ranging from kinaesthetic and visuospatial imagery to symbolic notions. We present an overview of the task domain and discuss various ways of representing the domain as well as potential dynamics between them.

BACKGROUND: Body schema (i.e., the mental representations of the body), vital for motor and cognitive functions, is often distorted in people with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Deficits in body, and especially pelvic, schema can further exacerbate motor and cognitive deficits associated with PD. Such deficits, including those in graphic and metric misjudgments, can manifest in drawing tasks. Mental imagery is a recommended approach for PD rehabilitation with potential for ameliorating body schema. OBJECTIVE: To investigate the effect of a two-week dynamic neuro-cognitive imagery (DNI) training versus in-home learning and exercise control (learning/exercise) on pelvic schema and graphic representation (i.e., drawing height and width). DESIGN: Twenty participants with idiopathic PD (Hoehn&Yahr I-III; M age: 65.75(±)10.13) were randomly allocated into either a DNI or a learning/exercise group. Participants were asked to complete the “Draw Your Pelvis” test in which they drew their pelvis at pre- and post-intervention. Drawings were assessed for pelvic schema score and drawing dimensions (i.e., height and weight). INTERVENTION: DNI anatomical and metaphorical imagery focusing on pelvic anatomy and biomechanics. RESULTS: No difference (p>.05) was detected at baseline between drawn pelvis height and width. Following intervention, improvements were greater in the DNI group for pelvic schema (p

This paper takes as its point of departure David Olson’s contention (as expressed in The Mind on Paper, (2016) CUP, Cambridge) that writing affords a meta-representation of language through allowing linguistic elements to become explicit objects of awareness. In so doing, a tradition of suspicion of writing (e.g. Rousseau and Saussure) that sees it as a detour from and contamination of language is disarmed: writing becomes innocent, becomes naturalised. Also disarmed are some of the concerns given rise to by the observation made in the title of Per Linell’s book of a ‘written language bias in linguistics’ (2005, Routledge, London) with its attendant criticisms of approaches (e.g. Chomsky’s) that assume written language to be transparent to the putative underlying natural object. Taking Chomsky’s position (an unaware scriptism) as a representative point of orientation and target of critique, the paper assembles evidence that problematises the first-order, natural reality of cardinal linguistic constructs: phonemes, words and sentences. It is argued that the facticity of these constructs is artefactual and that that facticity is achieved by way of the introjection of ideal objects which the mind constructs as denotations of elements of an alphabetic writing system: the mental representation of language is transformed by engagement with writing and it is this non-natural artefact to which Structuralist/Generativist linguistics has been answering. Evidence for this position from the psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic literature is presented and discussed. The conclusion arrived at is that the cultural practice of literacy re-configures the cognitive realisation of language. Olson takes writing to be a map of the territory; however, it is suggested that the literate mind re-constructs the territory to answer to the features of the map.

The hippocampus is known to be recruited during the recall of experiences from our distant past, despite evidence that memory traces in this region vanish over time. Extant theories of systems-level consolidation have yet to accommodate both phenomena. We propose that the hippocampus reconstructs remote memories in the absence of the original trace. It accomplishes this by assembling consolidated neocortical elements into spatially coherent scenes that form the basis of unfolding memory events. This reconstruction is likely facilitated by input from the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. This process-oriented approach to hippocampal recruitment during remote recollection is consistent with its increasingly acknowledged role in constructing mental representations beyond the domain of memory.

The present study examined the holistic representation and processing of lexical bundles in second language (L2) learners of English and native English speakers. This holistic hypothesis suggests that multiword units such as formulaic sequences are represented as single units and retrieved directly from the mental lexicon as wholes and some evidence has become available for the hypothesis (e.g. Jiang & Nekrasova, 2007). However, findings are not clear with respect to lexical bundles. The paper begins with a classification of different types of multiword units, highlighting the differences between formulaic sequences and lexical bundles. To examine if the holistic hypothesis applies to the latter, L2 learners and the native speakers of English were tested using a word monitoring task. The results replicated a formula advantage found in earlier research, but the participants did not respond to lexical bundles faster than the controls for both groups. Potential explanations are discussed about the differences between formulaic sequences and lexical bundles in mental representation.

The notion of simplexity is that complex problems are often solved by novel combinations of simple mechanisms. These solutions aren't simple; they're simplex. Language use, as a complex behavior, is ripe for simplex analysis. In this paper, I argue that the notion of powers—an organism's capacity to instigate or undergo change—is doubly useful. First, powers, as opposed to mental representations, are a suitable object for simplex analysis. So conceptualizing languaging in terms of powers gets us one step closer to a simplex analysis of language. But thinking of languaging in terms of powers has an additional payoff. Berthoz asserts that the concept of simplexity is related to the concept of meaning. How they're related is unclear. Conceptualizing languaging in terms of powers injects meaningfulness into lived world of the organism. Consequently, the concept of powers can act as a bridge between the concepts of meaningfulness and simplexity.

The norm-based face space model (nMDFS) predicts that perceived typicality decreases with distance to the norm. Accordingly, an original face and its corresponding anti-face (deviating in exactly opposite direction from the norm) should inherit equivalent levels of typicality. Similarly, varying distance-to-norm (DTN, in absolute values) should have equivalent effects on typicality for both unfamiliar faces and their anti-faces. Here we reasoned that familiar faces would not follow this rule, due to the special nature of their mental representations. We investigated event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to familiar and unfamiliar faces and their anti-faces with different DTN (±0.33, ±0.66, and ±0.99). Across DTN, rated typicality was highest for original familiar faces, whereas all other face stimuli exhibited the expected gradual decrease of typicality with increasing DTN. ERPs showed pronounced DTN effects in the occipitotemporal P200 (190–260 ms), with progressively smaller amplitudes for faces with higher DTN, for all face types. By contrast, prominent effects of familiarity were found for the subsequent N250 (260–400 ms) and a late occipitotemporal negativity (LN, 400–800 ms). A large increase of occipitotemporal negativity was observed for original familiar faces versus their non-recognizable anti-faces. Analogous effects were small or absent for unfamiliar faces versus their anti-faces. These results confirm the N250 and LN as correlates of the processing of the identity of known faces, and show for the first time that the face-sensitive P200 is primarily modulated by DTN of a face in nMDFS.

Using a sentence recognition task, we investigated whether elementary school children's (N = 92; Mage = 9.3 years, SD = 1.1 years) memory of the text surface, the textbase, and the situation model differed depending on whether the same information was embedded in an expository or a narrative text. Previous research with children that used narrative and expository texts dealing with different topics indicated beneficial effects narrative over expository texts regarding various indicators of processing on the levels of the textbase and the situation model. In contrast, our results did not indicate differences between narrative and expository texts for any of the levels of representation. Thus, the role of text topic in studies investigating the effect of genre on text comprehension should be investigated further.

Background Little attention has been given to intergenerational transmission of risk, mainly whether caregivers’ history of childhood maltreatment is linked to behavioral symptoms in their children and which protective/risk factors are involved in this transmission process. Objective This study examined if parental Hostile/Helpless (H/H) state of mind with respect to attachment moderated the association between parental childhood trauma and behavior problems in maltreated children. Participants and setting The sample included 61 parents and their children victims or at very high risk of maltreatment, aged between 1 and 6 years old. Method Parents retrospectively reported their childhood trauma and completed a measure of their children’s behavior problems. Independent observers assessed H/H attachment representations. Results Among parents with H/H states of mind, more severe traumatic childhood experiences were associated with more externalizing and internalizing behavior problems in their children. Among non-H/H parents, associations between parental childhood trauma and child behavior problems were not significant. Conclusions In the context of trauma, this study suggests that the absence of a H/H state of mind in parents (i.e., the presence of an organized attachment state of mind) is a protective factor for child adjustment. H/H mental representations of self and attachment experiences as targets of intervention for parents with histories of maltreatment may help reduce the transmission of risk in maltreating families.

Interoception describes the processing and awareness of bodily signals arising from visceral organs, essential for the organism's homeostatic needs. Beyond homeostasis, the integration of exteroceptive and interoceptive signals is required for the coherence of bodily self-awareness. Here, we suggest that interoception also plays a critical role in social cognition. Relating to others as individuals who are distinct from one's self requires the simultaneous yet distinct co-representation of self and others. We propose that interoceptive awareness appears to stabilise the mental representation of one's self as distinct from others. A more nuanced understanding of the role of interoception in the representation of others in relation to ourselves is vital to determine its importance in social cognition.

A listener who focusses on a sound source of interest must continuously integrate the sounds emitted by the attended source and ignore the sounds emitted by the remaining sources in the auditory scene. Little is known about how the ignored sound sources in the background are mentally represented after the source of interest has formed the perceptual foreground. This is due to a key methodological challenge: the background representation is by definition not overtly reportable. Here we developed a paradigm based on event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to assess the mental representation of background sounds. Participants listened to sequences of three repeatedly presented tones arranged in an ascending order (low, middle, high frequency). They were instructed to detect intensity deviants in one of the tones, creating the perceptual foreground. The remaining two background tones contained timing and location deviants. Those deviants were set up such that mismatch negativity (MMN) components would be elicited in distinct ways if the background was decomposed into two separate sound streams (background segregation) or if it was not further decomposed (background integration). Results provide MMN-based evidence for background segregation and integration in parallel. This suggests that mental representations of background integration and segregation can be concurrently available, and that collecting empirical evidence for only one of these background organization alternatives might lead to erroneous conclusions.

Teamwork is indispensable in human societies. However, due to the complexity of studying ecologically valid synchronous team actions, requiring multiple members and a range of subjective and objective measures, the mechanism underlying the impact of synchrony on team performance is still unclear. In this paper, we simultaneously measured groups of nine-participants' (total N = 180) fronto-temporal activations during a drum beating task using functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS)-based hyperscanning and multi-brain network modeling, which can assess patterns of shared neural synchrony and attention/information sharing across entire teams. Participants (1) beat randomly without considering others' drumming (random condition), (2) actively coordinated their beats with the entire group without other external cue (team-focus condition), and (3) beat together based on a metronome (shared-focus condition). Behavioral data revealed higher subjective and objective measures of drum-beat synchronization in the team-focus condition, as well as higher felt interdependence. The fNIRS data revealed that participants in the team-focus condition also showed higher interpersonal neural synchronization (INS) and higher Global Network Efficiency in their left TPJ and mPFC. Higher left TPJ Global Network Efficiency also predicted higher actual synchrony in the team-focus condition, with an effect size roughly 1.5 times that of subjective measures, but not in the metronome-enabled shared-focus condition. This result suggests that shared mental representations with high efficiency of information exchange across the entire team may be a key component of synchrony, adding to the understanding of the actual relation to team work.

Legal tests invoking the viewpoint of a so-called reasonable person play an important role in many domains of the law, ranging from intellectual property to free speech. In such cases, a central question involves determining how a hypothetical individual with “an ordinary or average level of care, prudence, or knowledge” would respond. Despite the seemingly commonsensical nature of these tests, their judicial application can be controversial due to concerns about subjectivity and vulnerability to explicit or implicit biases. Here we take a step toward addressing these concerns by using neuroscientific tools to observe, without the use of self-report, the nature of mental representations central to a set of disputes invoking the reasonable person. Specifically, using an fMRI-based measure, repetition suppression, to generate a neural index of subjective visual similarity, we sought to inform the application of the reasonable person test to a class of intellectual property law that evaluates whether a trademark is so similar to another as to generate consumer confusion. We show that, by leveraging well-established neuroscientific knowledge about visual processing, it is possible to construct a parsimonious neural index of subjective similarity using signals from object-sensitive brain regions identified a priori. Moreover, this neural index, aggregated across multiple participants, is sufficiently precise to detect instances of experimenter-induced bias in behavioral reports. Together these findings shed light on the potential evidentiary value of neuroscientific data to inform questions involving the reasonable person and suggest a novel domain for the use of neuroscience in law.

The first part of this paper is a critique of Marmor’s concept of a constitutive convention, which is based on a two-fold assumption of primacy: (i) that constitutive conventions create social practices in the absence of pre-existing coordinative problems; and (ii) that constitutive conventions must necessarily precede coordinative conventions, as the former create institutional agents whose actions are coordinated by the latter. I argue against (i), contending instead that constitutive rules are indispensable components of the conventions adopted to solve coordination problems, and as such, also serve as solutions to coordination problems. I substantiate this claim by deconstructing Marmor’s example of chess as an archetypical practice based on constitutive conventions which do not solve pre-existing coordination problems. I also argue against (ii) and propose that the concept of “accommodation” be used to solve the problem of primacy. This is a redressive action that involves “context-repair”. Constituting an individual’s power can be subsequent to exercising that power, i.e. it can be reversely accommodated. In the second part of the paper, I apply Millikan’s evolutionary model of conventions, and propose to treat constitutive conventions as those used in open coordinations (when coordination is preceded by communication), not in blind coordinations (when communication is hindered or impossible, as in Lewis’s examples of traffic or a broken telephone connection). I argue that constitutive conventions trigger mental representations of statuses and powers of objects and persons. These representations operate on the basis of Lewis’s scorekeeping model, and ultimately serve as tools for solving coordination problems.

Goal progress can be measured using different scales (e.g., lbs., kg, oz., inches lost in weight loss domain). Despite considerable research on perceived goal progress, little is known about the effects of measurement scales on the mental representation of goal attainment. In three studies, we examine how the use of different scales can change the perceptions of progress in the realization of a goal. First, we demonstrate that reaching scale-induced round numbers leads to perceptions of higher accomplishment and lower motivation than corresponding non-round numbers on different scales. For example, if someone is running 2.2 miles a day, running 20 miles feels like a higher accomplishment than its equivalent of running 9 days, whereas running 10 days feel better than its equivalent of running 22 miles. We further show that this effect is moderated by goal specificity (e.g., I want to run as much as I can vs. I want to run for a month or 60 miles) and whether the level of actual progress made is high or low. When the goal is specific scale-induced round numbers lead to higher perceived accomplishment at lower progress levels, whereas when the goal is not specific, they lead to higher perceived accomplishment at higher progress levels.

It seems as if modern urban lifestyle disconnects people from nature, this may be associated with adverse health effects. In line with this notion it has been consistently shown that psychiatric diagnoses are more frequent in urban compared to rural regions. Most of the studies addressing potential causal mechanisms of this urban-rural difference focus on detrimental aspects of city living. In contrast, biophilia theory has posited an automatic, potentially deep-rooted need for contact with nature. Acting against this proposed tendency to seek contact to natural environments may affect mental health. As scientific evidence for this psycho-evolutionary biophilia theory is lacking by now, we utilized implicit test strategies developed to assess automatic associations between mental representations and action tendencies to put this theory to test. In an online study (N = 109), we administered three reaction time paradigms: the dot probe task (DPT), the implicit association test (IAT) and the approach avoidance task (AAT). All tasks reveal a tendency to approach nature and avoid cities (DPT: F(1,105) = 11.15, p = .001, ƞ2 = 0.096; IAT: F(1,107) = 17.10, p = 7.068E-5, ƞ2 = 0.138; AAT: F(1,103) = 4.36, p = .039, ƞ2 = 0.041). Interestingly, the results of the AAT, the only test that allows this differentiation, suggest that the tendency to approach nature seems to play a more important role than the avoidance of built environments. The present findings provide clear evidence in support of biophilia theory and can therefore inspire and foster further studies investigating whether acting against an automatic and potentially deep-rooted need for contact with nature, by living in cities e.g., may contribute more prominently to the emergence of mental health problems than (or at least in addition to) environmental or societal stressors individuals are exposed to in cities.

Mentalization is a process by which a subject makes sense of both his own mental representations and of those around him. Disturbances in the mentalization process are found in several psychiatric disorders, notably borderline personality disorders for which mentalization-based treatments (MBT) have been developed and evaluated. Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) display a theory of mind impairments, which corresponds to disturbances in the mentalization process. Although no MBT protocol for patients with ASD has been described in the literature, such treatment appears promising to improve theory of mind and functional outcome of these children. In this paper, we propose to discuss the theoretical ground of MBT therapeutic effect in children with ASD without intellectual disabilities and to describe a clinical protocol to test this perspective.

The sense of body ownership is a fundamental feature that refers to the ability to recognize our body as our own, allowing us to interact properly with the outside world. Usually, it is explored by means of the Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) during which a dummy hand is incorporated in the mental representation of one's own body throughout a multisensory (visuo-tactile) integration mechanism. Particular attention has been paid to the neurofunctional counterparts of this mechanism highlighting the pivotal role of an occipito-parieto-frontal network involving the Ventral Premotor area (PMv). To date, the specific role of the PMv in generating the sense of ownership is still unknown. In this study, we aimed at exploring the role of PMv in generating and experiencing the RHI. Off-line repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) was applied to a group of 24 healthy participants whilst changes in proprioceptive judgment and self-reported illusion sensations were collected and analysed separately. The PMv was not directly implicated in generating the sense of ownership. Indeed, its inhibition affected the explicit detection of the visuo-tactile congruence without interfering with the illusion experience itself. We hypothesized that the conscious visuo-tactile congruence detection may be independent from the conscious illusion experience. Also, our results support the view that the RHI grounds on a complex interaction between bottom-up and top-down processes, as the visuo-tactile integration per se may be not sufficient to trigger the subjective illusion.

Cooking is a daily undertaking that ensures the proper ingestion of food. However, mental representations of home cooking have yet to be quantitatively elucidated. The primary purpose of the series of three studies presented here was to quantitatively describe the conceptualization of cooking among Japanese consumers by employing Internet surveys. The first study extracted superordinate categories of cooking-related operations, (1) core cooking, (2) subsidiary cooking and (3) convenience food preparation, for 100 Japanese consumers by utilizing an exploratory factor analysis of 30 presumably cooking-related operations. The second study made further sub-categorizations within each superordinate category by utilizing hierarchical cluster analyses in 500 newly recruited Japanese consumers. Core cooking was sub-categorized into “to pickle”, “to cut and heat”, “to season”, and “to mix”. Subsidiary cooking was sub-categorized into “to preserve”, “to acquire”, and “to arrange”. Convenience food preparation was not further sub-categorized. In Study 3, based on the fit indices obtained from structural equation modeling, the appropriateness of the categorizations and sub-categorizations of Studies 1 and 2 was confirmed using 500 newly recruited Japanese consumers. Thus, the current study is the first to quantitatively examine the conceptualization of cooking by elucidating the relationships among a variety of cooking-related operations.

Psychophysics studies suggest that our perception of time is different from the objective passage of time. Economics research emphasizes that the value of a reward depends on the delay involved. In this paper, we combine both strands and estimate time perception and time discounting functions at the individual level in an incentivized controlled laboratory environment. We find a negative and statistically significant correlation between time perception and time discounting: subjects who overestimate objective time intervals are less willing to delay gratification. The result suggests that our ability to delay consumption is related to our mental representation of time delays.

According to the context updating theory, the oddball P300 component indexes brain activities underlying revision of the mental representation induced by incoming stimuli. It involves an attention-driven comparison process that evaluates the representation of the previous event in working memory. Delayed latencies have been reported for various types of stroke such as unilateral thalamic stroke. We investigated memory updating effects in patients with putamen stroke. Two groups of patients with putamen and thalamic stroke were recruited along with two control groups of young and old healthy participants. Auditory and visual P300 were elicited respectively in a two-stimulus oddball paradigm. The auditory P300 peak latencies were significantly longer in patients with a putamen lesion than in the aged and young control groups and the same pattern was found in the thalamus-lesioned patient. The delayed auditory P300 component in both patient groups but neither control group suggests impairment of memory updating in patients with putamen stroke comparable with thalamic stroke. Our study illustrates the important role of subcortical structures subserved in context updating.

Since antiquity the mind has been conceived to operate via images and words. Pre-scientific thinkers (and some scientific) who presented the mind as operating in such a way tended to i) bias one representational mode over the other, and ii) claim the dominance of the mode to be the case universally. The rise of empirical psychological science in the late 19th-century rehearses the word/image division of thought but makes universal statements – e.g., that recollection is a verbal process for everyone – untenable. Since then, the investigation of individual differences and case studies of imagery loss have shown rather that words and images present alternative cognitive “strategies” that individuals will be predisposed to employing – but which, should the necessity arise, can be relearned using the other representational mode. The following sketches out this historical shift in understanding, and concludes by inviting consideration of the wider context in which discussion of the relationships between ‘images’ and ‘words’ (as both internal and external forms of representation) must take place.

Musical melodies have "peaks" and "valleys". Although the vertical component of pitch and music is well-known, the mechanisms underlying its mental representation still remain elusive. We show evidence regarding the importance of previous experience with melodies for crossmodal interactions to emerge. The impact of these crossmodal interactions on other perceptual and attentional processes was also studied. Melodies including two tones with different frequency (e.g., E4 and D3) were repeatedly presented during the study. These melodies could either generate strong predictions (e.g., E4-D3-E4-D3-E4-[D3]) or not (e.g., E4-D3-E4-E4-D3-[?]). After the presentation of each melody, the participants had to judge the colour of a visual stimulus that appeared in a position that was, according to the traditional vertical connotations of pitch, either congruent (e.g., high-low-high-low-[up]), incongruent (high-low-high-low-[down]) or unpredicted with respect to the melody. Behavioural and electroencephalographic responses to the visual stimuli were obtained. Congruent visual stimuli elicited faster responses at the end of the experiment than at the beginning. Additionally, incongruent visual stimuli that broke the spatial prediction generated by the melody elicited larger P3b amplitudes (reflecting 'surprise' responses). Our results suggest that the passive (but repeated) exposure to melodies elicits spatial predictions that modulate the processing of other sensory events.

Narrative is a universal form of human information and communication. The generative cognition of narrative will be a core element of a human-like and human-friendly autonomous agent. In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), the knowledge aspect of narrative, including script knowledge and episodic memory, has been studied from a functional perspective. However, this knowledge aspect is rooted in the close relationship between a narrative and how the human mind organizes subjective experiences into a mental representation. We use the term “story” to refer to the uniform mental representation of a piece of a subjective world containing individual meaning and a rich temporal extent. For example, stories include the following types of mental object: an episodic memory, an autobiographical memory, the contextual structure of a current situation, a prospective memory, a planned or imagined future, and a fictional or virtual story. Although narrative cognition is a very complex problem for AI, a cognitive mechanism for dynamically generating mental stories through interacting with external environments is necessary for the ultimate autonomous agent. Considering this long-term goal, in this paper, we provide a structural overview of a subjective world formed by stories as experiences of an agent. In particular, the following structural aspects of mental stories are described: a story-based context of a current situation, association of past, future, and fictional stories, association of others’ mental stories, and the distinction between factual and fictitious stories.

Anhedonia (i.e., diminished capacity to experience pleasure) has traditionally been viewed as a core symptom of schizophrenia (SZ). However, modern laboratory-based studies suggest that this definition may be incorrect, as hedonic capacity may be intact. Alternative conceptualizations have proposed that anhedonia may reflect an impairment in generating mental representations of affective value that are needed to guide decision-making and initiate motivated behavior. The current study evaluated this hypothesis in 42 outpatients with SZ and 19 healthy controls (CN) who completed two tasks: (a) an emotional experience task that required them to indicate how positive, negative, and calm/excited they felt in response to a single emotional or neutral photograph; (b) a relative value judgment task where they selected which of 2 photographs they preferred. Results indicated that SZ and CN reported similar levels of positive emotion and arousal in response to emotional and neutral stimuli; however, SZ reported higher negative affect for neutral and pleasant stimuli than CN. In the relative value judgment task, CN displayed clear preference for stimuli differing in valence; however, SZ showed less distinct preferences for positive over neutral stimuli. Findings suggest that although in-the-moment experiences of positive emotion to singular stimuli may be intact in SZ, the ability to make relative value judgments that are needed to guide decision-making is impaired. Original conceptualizations of anhedonia as a diminished capacity for pleasure in SZ may be inaccurate; anhedonia may more accurately reflect a deficit in relative value judgment that results from impaired value representation.

This paper demonstrates how psycholinguistics is, or can be, relevant for historical linguistics, giving center stage to frequency in dialogic uses of language as a key factor in language change. Frequency of co-occurrence of linguistic forms in linear strings leads to linguistic ‘compression’, a cognitive process by which the forms involved undergo an increase in the degree of their mutual association and come to be processed under a new, holistic meaning and thus by fewer bits of information than the originally compositional sequence. As a result, pieces of syntax over time lose their compositional character and come to develop meanings and uses that are not fully derivable from the meanings and uses of the components parts. The process of linguistic compression is exemplified with data from the development of the general extender and stuff in the history of English and shown to be an example of how frequency affects mental representation and leads to the development of new processing routines that manifest themselves in structural changes.

Eye movements constitute an important cue to understanding how readers connect textual information, particularly when an encapsulator pronoun must be anaphorically resolved in order to construct a coherent mental representation of the text being read. While existing research into anaphoric reference has predominantly focused on the distance between pronouns and referents and on their morphosyntactic features, no previously published studies have addressed the effect in causal contexts of varying extensions of the referent being encapsulated by a neuter pronoun. In the present research, we help fill this gap by studying the effects of online processing of the anaphoric neuter Spanish pronoun ello (‘this’ in English) in causally-related texts using two varying referent extensions: short and long antecedent. A one factor repeated measures design was implemented. The results of three eye reading measures showed a fine-grained picture of encapsulation processes for seventy-two Chilean university students as they each read twelve texts. On the one hand, the reading times for processing the neuter pronoun ello AOI did not show statistically significant differences between the short and long conditions. On the other, the findings indicate that, in constructing referential and relational coherence in causally-related texts in Spanish, resolution of the neuter pronoun is in fact influenced by the extension of the referent.

The most current conceptualization of personality pathology emphasizes the assessment of the severity of selected domains of functioning involving lack of accurate perceptions of self and others that are common across the personality disorder categories. Advances in our understanding of personality pathology have stimulated further development of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy (TFP) for patients with borderline personality disorder, including treatment focus on both behavior and mental representations of self and others, the trajectory of change in TFP, and the extension of TFP principles to the entire domain of personality pathology.