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Journal of Neurophysiology Apr 2024The brain engages the processes of multisensory integration and recalibration to deal with discrepant multisensory signals. These processes consider the reliability of...
The brain engages the processes of multisensory integration and recalibration to deal with discrepant multisensory signals. These processes consider the reliability of each sensory input, with the more reliable modality receiving the stronger weight. Sensory reliability is typically assessed via the variability of participants' judgments, yet these can be shaped by factors both external and internal to the nervous system. For example, motor noise and participant's dexterity with the specific response method contribute to judgment variability, and different response methods applied to the same stimuli can result in different estimates of sensory reliabilities. Here we ask how such variations in reliability induced by variations in the response method affect multisensory integration and sensory recalibration, as well as motor adaptation, in a visuomotor paradigm. Participants performed center-out hand movements and were asked to judge the position of the hand or rotated visual feedback at the movement end points. We manipulated the variability, and thus the reliability, of repeated judgments by asking participants to respond using either a visual or a proprioceptive matching procedure. We find that the relative weights of visual and proprioceptive signals, and thus the asymmetry of multisensory integration and recalibration, depend on the reliability modulated by the judgment method. Motor adaptation, in contrast, was insensitive to this manipulation. Hence, the outcome of multisensory binding is shaped by the noise introduced by sensorimotor processing, in line with perception and action being intertwined. Our brain tends to combine multisensory signals based on their respective reliability. This reliability depends on sensory noise in the environment, noise in the nervous system, and, as we show here, variability induced by the specific judgment procedure.
Topics: Humans; Judgment; Visual Perception; Reproducibility of Results; Hand; Movement; Proprioception
PubMed: 38416720
DOI: 10.1152/jn.00451.2023 -
Scientific Reports Jul 2017Mature moral judgments rely both on a perpetrator's intent to cause harm, and also on the actual harm caused-even when unintended. Much prior research asks how intent...
Mature moral judgments rely both on a perpetrator's intent to cause harm, and also on the actual harm caused-even when unintended. Much prior research asks how intent information is represented neurally, but little asks how even unintended harms influence judgment. We interrogate the psychological and neural basis of this process, focusing especially on the role of empathy for the victim of a harmful act. Using fMRI, we found that the 'empathy for pain' network was involved in encoding harmful outcomes and integrating harmfulness information for different types of moral judgments, and individual differences in the extent to which this network was active during encoding and integration of harmfulness information determined severity of moral judgments. Additionally, activity in the network was down-regulated for acceptability, but not blame, judgments for accidental harm condition, suggesting that these two types of moral evaluations are neurobiologically dissociable. These results support a model of "empathic blame", whereby the perceived suffering of a victim colors moral judgment of an accidental harmdoer.
Topics: Adult; Behavioral Symptoms; Empathy; Female; Humans; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; Intention; Judgment; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Male; Morals; Neural Networks, Computer; Young Adult
PubMed: 28701703
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-05299-9 -
Blame and Praise cross-culturally: An fMRI investigation into causal attribution and moral judgment.Biological Psychology Nov 2023People from independent cultures are more likely to causally explain others' behaviors by their disposition [vs. situation] compared to those from interdependent...
People from independent cultures are more likely to causally explain others' behaviors by their disposition [vs. situation] compared to those from interdependent cultures. However, few studies have directly examined how these differences in attribution shape individuals' moral judgment, nor the underlying neural mechanisms of this process. Aiming to address these questions, in the scanner, participants rated the blameworthiness or praiseworthiness of protagonists who did either a negative or positive behavior, respectively. These behaviors were pretested and found to be perceived as dispositionally or situationally caused to different extents on average. Regardless of their self-construal, participants showed enhanced dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) activity in response to the behaviors that were evaluated as more situationally caused on average. Importantly, relatively independent participants reduced their blame for the behaviors that they showed greater dmPFC activity to. Relatively interdependent participants reduced blame for the behaviors that they themselves inferred more situational causes for, but dmPFC activity did not explain their blame. These findings suggest that while dmPFC might support relatively independent participants' effortful consideration of situational contributors to a behavior to make moral judgments, relatively interdependent participants might engage in this process automatically and relied less on dmPFC recruitment.
Topics: Humans; Judgment; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Morals; Social Perception; Prefrontal Cortex
PubMed: 37839520
DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2023.108713 -
Emotion (Washington, D.C.) Oct 2018Life satisfaction judgments are thought to reflect people's overall evaluation of the quality of their lives as a whole. Because the circumstances of these lives...
Life satisfaction judgments are thought to reflect people's overall evaluation of the quality of their lives as a whole. Because the circumstances of these lives typically do not change very quickly, life satisfaction judgments should be relatively stable over time. However, some evidence suggests that these judgments can be easily manipulated, which leads to low stability even over very short intervals. The current study uses a unique data set that includes multiple assessments of life satisfaction over both long (up to 4 years) and short (over the course of a single interview) intervals to assess whether information that is made salient during the course of an interview affects life satisfaction judgments at the end of the interview. Results suggest that this intervening information has only small effects on the final judgment and that placement within an interview has little influence on the judgment that people provide. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).
Topics: Humans; Judgment; Male; Personal Satisfaction
PubMed: 28872337
DOI: 10.1037/emo0000357 -
Journal of Experimental Psychology.... Sep 2022Metacognition is defined as the capacity to monitor and control one's own cognitive processes. Recently, Carpenter and colleagues (2019) reported that metacognitive...
Metacognition is defined as the capacity to monitor and control one's own cognitive processes. Recently, Carpenter and colleagues (2019) reported that metacognitive performance can be improved through adaptive training: healthy participants performed a perceptual discrimination task, and subsequently indicated confidence in their response. Metacognitive performance, defined as how much information these confidence judgments contain about the accuracy of perceptual decisions, was found to increase in a group of participants receiving monetary reward based on their confidence judgments over hundreds of trials and multiple sessions. By contrast, in a control group where only perceptual performance was incentivized, metacognitive performance remained constant across experimental sessions. We identified two possible confounds that may have led to an artificial increase in metacognitive performance, namely the absence of reward in the initial session and an inconsistency between the reward scheme and the instructions about the confidence scale. We thus conducted a preregistered conceptual replication where all sessions were rewarded and where instructions were consistent with the reward scheme. Critically, once these two confounds were corrected we found moderate evidence for an absence of metacognitive training. Our data thus suggest that previous claims about metacognitive training are premature, and calls for more research on how to train individuals to monitor their own performance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
Topics: Humans; Judgment; Metacognition
PubMed: 35157481
DOI: 10.1037/xge0001185 -
Acta Psychologica Jun 2019Metamemory research makes extensive use of judgments, such as judgments of learning (JOLs). In a JOL, people predict their chance of remembering a recently studied item...
Metamemory research makes extensive use of judgments, such as judgments of learning (JOLs). In a JOL, people predict their chance of remembering a recently studied item in a memory test. There is a general agreement that JOLs rely on probabilistic cues that are combined in an inference process. Accuracy as measured by the gamma correlation between JOLs and actual performance is usually mediocre, suggesting limited metacognitive abilities. In judgment and decision-making research, Brunswik's lens model is often used to decompose judgmental accuracy: A matching index G measures how adequately people's cue weights match the optimal weights, two reliability indices assess the predictability of judgments and environment, respectively, and a nonlinear component measures systematic variance not captured by the cues. We employed the lens model equation for the first time to analyze four published and one new JOL data sets. There was considerable interindividual variance in metamemory monitoring. Although gamma was on average higher than the Pearson correlation, it still underestimated metacognitive ability in terms of matching (G). Also, the nonlinear component was considerably higher than in other judgment domains, pointing to substantial item-person-interactions that we interpret as idiosyncratic encoding strategies. An exploratory cluster analysis suggests different metacognitive strategies used by subgroups of participants. We suggest the lens model as a potentially promising tool in metacognition research.
Topics: Attention; Decision Making; Female; Humans; Judgment; Male; Mental Recall; Metacognition; Photic Stimulation; Random Allocation; Reproducibility of Results; Time Factors; Young Adult
PubMed: 31158737
DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2019.04.011 -
Psychophysiology Aug 2023The role of the heart in the experience of time has been long theorized but empirical evidence is scarce. Here, we examined the interaction between fine-grained cardiac...
The role of the heart in the experience of time has been long theorized but empirical evidence is scarce. Here, we examined the interaction between fine-grained cardiac dynamics and the momentary experience of subsecond intervals. Participants performed a temporal bisection task for brief tones (80-188 ms) synchronized with the heart. We developed a cardiac Drift-Diffusion Model (cDDM) that embedded contemporaneous heart rate dynamics into the temporal decision model. Results revealed the existence of temporal wrinkles-dilation or contraction of short intervals-in synchrony with cardiac dynamics. A lower prestimulus heart rate was associated with an initial bias in encoding the millisecond-level stimulus duration as longer, consistent with facilitation of sensory intake. Concurrently, a higher prestimulus heart rate aided more consistent and faster temporal judgments through more efficient evidence accumulation. Additionally, a higher speed of poststimulus cardiac deceleration, a bodily marker of attention, was associated with a greater accumulation of sensory temporal evidence in the cDDM. These findings suggest a unique role of cardiac dynamics in the momentary experience of time. Our cDDM framework opens a new methodological avenue for investigating the role of the heart in time perception and perceptual judgment.
Topics: Humans; Time Perception; Attention; Heart; Reaction Time; Judgment
PubMed: 36864822
DOI: 10.1111/psyp.14270 -
Clinical Psychology Review Jun 2017Numerous studies have reported that time perception and temporal processing are impaired in schizophrenia. In a meta-analytical review, we differentiate between time... (Meta-Analysis)
Meta-Analysis Review
Numerous studies have reported that time perception and temporal processing are impaired in schizophrenia. In a meta-analytical review, we differentiate between time perception (judgments of time intervals) and basic temporal processing (e.g., judgments of temporal order) as well as between effects on accuracy (deviation of estimates from the veridical value) and precision (variability of judgments). In a meta-regression approach, we also included the specific tasks and the different time interval ranges as covariates. We considered 68 publications of the past 65years, and meta-analyzed data from 957 patients with schizophrenia and 1060 healthy control participants. Independent of tasks and interval durations, our results demonstrate that time perception and basic temporal processing are less precise (more variable) in patients (Hedges' g>1.00), whereas effects of schizophrenia on accuracy of time perception are rather small and task-dependent. Our review also shows that several aspects, e.g., potential influences of medication, have not yet been investigated in sufficient detail. In conclusion, the results are in accordance with theoretical assumptions and the notion of a more variable internal clock in patients with schizophrenia, but not with a strong effect of schizophrenia on clock speed. The impairment of temporal precision, however, may also be clock-unspecific as part of a general cognitive deficiency in schizophrenia.
Topics: Humans; Judgment; Schizophrenic Psychology; Time Perception
PubMed: 28391027
DOI: 10.1016/j.cpr.2017.03.007 -
Developmental Science Mar 2019When evaluating norm transgressions, children begin to show some sensitivity to the agent's intentionality around preschool age. However, the specific developmental...
When evaluating norm transgressions, children begin to show some sensitivity to the agent's intentionality around preschool age. However, the specific developmental trajectories of different forms of such intent-based judgments and their cognitive underpinnings are still largely unclear. The current studies, therefore, systematically investigated the development of intent-based normative judgments as a function of two crucial factors: (a) the type of the agent's mental state underlying a normative transgression, and (b) the type of norm transgressed (moral versus conventional). In Study 1, 5- and 7-year-old children as well as adults were presented with vignettes in which an agent transgressed either a moral or a conventional norm. Crucially, she did so either intentionally, accidentally (not intentionally at all) or unknowingly (intentionally, yet based on a false belief regarding the outcome). The results revealed two asymmetries in children's intent-based judgments. First, all age groups showed greater sensitivity to mental state information for moral compared to conventional transgressions. Second, children's (but not adults') normative judgments were more sensitive to the agent's intention than to her belief. Two subsequent studies investigated this asymmetry in children more closely and found evidence that it is based on performance factors: children are able in principle to take into account an agent's false belief in much the same way as her intentions, yet do not make belief-based judgments in many existing tasks (like that of Study 1) due to their inferential complexity. Taken together, these findings contribute to a more systematic understanding of the development of intent-based normative judgment.
Topics: Adult; Biological Ontologies; Child; Child, Preschool; Ethical Theory; Female; Humans; Infant; Intention; Judgment; Male; Morals; Theory of Mind
PubMed: 30276934
DOI: 10.1111/desc.12728 -
The Journals of Gerontology. Series B,... Mar 2022With age, decision makers rely more on heuristic and affect-based processing. However, age differences have not been quantified with respect to the affect heuristic,...
OBJECTIVES
With age, decision makers rely more on heuristic and affect-based processing. However, age differences have not been quantified with respect to the affect heuristic, which derives judgments based on positive and negative feelings toward stimuli and concepts. This study examined whether reliance on the affect heuristic is associated with age, whether these patterns vary by task type, and which covariates account for age effects.
METHOD
In a preregistered study, an adult life-span sample (N = 195, 21-90 years, Mage = 52.95, 50% female, 71% non-Hispanic White) completed a battery of cognitive, personality, and socioemotional covariates as well as 3 established affect heuristic tasks: (a) a risk-benefit task, (b) a dread-inference task, and (c) an affect-impact task. Reliance on affect was indexed through (a) a negative relationship between perceived food risks and benefits, (b) a positive relationship between feelings of dread and statistical inferences about mortality risks, and (c) a positive relationship between affective responses and impact judgments when evaluating catastrophes.
RESULTS
For all 3 tasks, usage of the affect heuristic was documented at the group and the individual levels. Contrary to hypotheses, age was not associated with affect heuristic use for any of the tasks. Affect heuristic indices did not correlate across tasks and showed no consistent associations with the covariates.
DISCUSSION
Results suggest that the use of affect-based heuristics is context- or stimulus-dependent rather than a stable, age-associated trait. Further research is needed to validate the present results across additional domains, tasks, and stimulus types.
Topics: Affect; Emotions; Female; Heuristics; Humans; Judgment; Male; Personality; Risk Assessment
PubMed: 34216213
DOI: 10.1093/geronb/gbab126