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Full-Text Articles in Other Psychology

Theories Of Consciousness And A Life Worth Living, Liad Mudrik, Myrto Mylopoulos, Niccolo Negro, Aaron Schurger Sep 2023

Theories Of Consciousness And A Life Worth Living, Liad Mudrik, Myrto Mylopoulos, Niccolo Negro, Aaron Schurger

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

What is it that makes a life valuable? A popular view is that life’s moral worth depends in some way on its relationship to consciousness or subjective experience. But a practical application of this view requires the ability to test for consciousness, which is currently lacking. Here, we examine how theories of consciousness (ToCs) can help do so, focusing especially on difficult cases where the answer is not clear (e.g. fetuses, nonhuman animals, unresponsive brain-injured patients, and advanced artificial systems). We consider five major ToCs and what predictions they offer: Integrated information theory, Higher-Order Thought Theory, Recurrent Processing Theory, Global …


Implications For Global And Local Visual Processing In Individuals With Learning Disabilities, Riya Mody May 2022

Implications For Global And Local Visual Processing In Individuals With Learning Disabilities, Riya Mody

Psychology Student Papers and Posters

Visual processing in humans is done by integrating and updating multiple streams of global and local sensory input. When this is not done smoothly, it becomes difficult to see the “big picture”, which has been found to have implications on emotion recognition, social skills, and conversation skills in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and other learning disabilities. Previous research in this field has aimed to direct ASD patients toward normative processing of the global features by developing and evaluating a filter which is intended to decrease local interference, or the prioritization of local details. This work attempts to utilize …


Manipulating Image Luminance To Improve Eye Gaze And Verbal Behavior In Autistic Children, Louanne Boyd, Vincent Berardi, Deanna Hughes, Franceli L. Cibrian, Jazette Johnson, Viseth Sean, Eliza Delpizzo-Cheng, Brandon Mackin, Ayra Tusneem, Riya Mody, Sara Jones, Karen Lotich Apr 2022

Manipulating Image Luminance To Improve Eye Gaze And Verbal Behavior In Autistic Children, Louanne Boyd, Vincent Berardi, Deanna Hughes, Franceli L. Cibrian, Jazette Johnson, Viseth Sean, Eliza Delpizzo-Cheng, Brandon Mackin, Ayra Tusneem, Riya Mody, Sara Jones, Karen Lotich

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

Autism has been characterized by a tendency to attend to the local visual details over surveying an image to understand the gist–a phenomenon called local interference. This sensory processing trait has been found to negatively impact social communication. Although much work has been conducted to understand these traits, little to no work has been conducted to intervene to provide support for local interference. Additionally, recent understanding of autism now introduces the core role of sensory processing and its impact on social communication. However, no interventions to the end of our knowledge have been explored to leverage this relationship. This work …


Consciousness Explained Or Described?, Aaron Schurger, Michael S. A. Graziano Jan 2022

Consciousness Explained Or Described?, Aaron Schurger, Michael S. A. Graziano

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

Consciousness is an unusual phenomenon to study scientifically. It is defined as a subjective, first-person phenomenon, and science is an objective, third-person endeavor. This misalignment between the means—science—and the end—explaining consciousness—gave rise to what has become a productive workaround: the search for ‘neural correlates of consciousness’ (NCCs). Science can sidestep trying to explain consciousness and instead focus on characterizing the kind(s) of neural activity that are reliably correlated with consciousness. However, while we have learned a lot about consciousness in the bargain, the NCC approach was not originally intended as the foundation for a true explanation of consciousness. Indeed, it …


Aberrant Maturation Of The Uncinate Fasciculus Follows Exposure To Unpredictable Patterns Of Maternal Signals, Steven J. Granger, Laura M. Glynn, Curt A. Sandman, Steven L. Small, Andre Obenaus, David B. Keator, Tallie Z. Baram, Hal S. Stern, Michael A. Yassa, Elyssia Poggi Davis Feb 2021

Aberrant Maturation Of The Uncinate Fasciculus Follows Exposure To Unpredictable Patterns Of Maternal Signals, Steven J. Granger, Laura M. Glynn, Curt A. Sandman, Steven L. Small, Andre Obenaus, David B. Keator, Tallie Z. Baram, Hal S. Stern, Michael A. Yassa, Elyssia Poggi Davis

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

Across species, unpredictable patterns of maternal behavior are emerging as novel predictors of aberrant cognitive and emotional outcomes later in life. In animal models, exposure to unpredictable patterns of maternal behavior alters brain circuit maturation and cognitive and emotional outcomes. However, whether exposure to such signals in humans alters the development of brain pathways is unknown. In mother–child dyads, we tested the hypothesis that exposure to more unpredictable maternal signals in infancy is associated with aberrant maturation of corticolimbic pathways. We focused on the uncinate fasciculus, the primary fiber bundle connecting the amygdala to the orbitofrontal cortex and a key …


Difficult Turned Easy: Suggestion Renders A Challenging Visual Task Simple, Mathieu Landry, Jason Da Silva Castanheira, Jérôme Sackur, Amir Raz Dec 2020

Difficult Turned Easy: Suggestion Renders A Challenging Visual Task Simple, Mathieu Landry, Jason Da Silva Castanheira, Jérôme Sackur, Amir Raz

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

Suggestions can cause some individuals to miss or disregard existing visual stimuli, but can they infuse sensory input with nonexistent information? Although several prominent theories of hypnotic suggestion propose that mental imagery can change our perceptual experience, data to support this stance remain sparse. The present study addressed this lacuna, showing how suggesting the presence of physically absent, yet critical, visual information transforms an otherwise difficult task into an easy one. Here, we show how adult participants who are highly susceptible to hypnotic suggestion successfully hallucinated visual occluders on top of moving objects. Our findings support the idea that, at …


Response To Commentaries On ‘Hard Criteria For Empirical Theories Of Consciousness’, Adrian Doerig, Aaron Schurger, Michael H. Herzog Nov 2020

Response To Commentaries On ‘Hard Criteria For Empirical Theories Of Consciousness’, Adrian Doerig, Aaron Schurger, Michael H. Herzog

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

In consciousness research, we have a very large number of theories, which exceeds by far the number of theories in other fields. We recently presented a set of criteria for evaluating and comparing theories of consciousness, and then applied the criteria to a number of different theories. Our publication sparked strong responses as evident by the many comments published in Cognitive Neuroscience (this issue). Overall, there seems to be consensus that a theory of consciousness (ToC) needs to have an unconscious alternative, but other criteria sparked controversy. The hottest debate is to what extent consciousness needs to work with purely …


Hard Criteria For Empirical Theories Of Consciousness, Adrian Doerig, Aaron Schurger, Michael H. Herzog Jul 2020

Hard Criteria For Empirical Theories Of Consciousness, Adrian Doerig, Aaron Schurger, Michael H. Herzog

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

Consciousness is now a well-established field of empirical research. A large body of experimental results has been accumulated and is steadily growing. In parallel, many Theories of Consciousness (ToCs) have been proposed. These theories are diverse in nature, ranging from computational to neurophysiological and quantum theoretical approaches. This contrasts with other fields of natural science, which host a smaller number of competing theories. We suggest that one reason for this abundance of extremely different theories may be the lack of stringent criteria specifying how empirical data constrains ToCs. First, we argue that consciousness is a well-defined topic from an empirical …


Searching For Neural Mechanisms Of Social Cognition, Chandler Siemonsma, Cristina Uribe, Louanne Boyd, Aaron Schurger, Deanna Hughes, Tian Lan May 2020

Searching For Neural Mechanisms Of Social Cognition, Chandler Siemonsma, Cristina Uribe, Louanne Boyd, Aaron Schurger, Deanna Hughes, Tian Lan

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Social cognition involves the integration and pruning of perceptual information which leads to the formation of an abstract representation, which is also known as the perceptual gist. This study examined 87 differences in visual perception of Mooney face stimuli of differing sizes and the relationship to gist formation in ten individuals with autism compared to neurotypical controls. Parents of both groups completed the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS-2) to assess social functioning in real-world scenarios.


Combining Eye Tracking And Verbal Response To Understand The Impact Of A Global Filter, Franceli L. Cibrian, Jazette Johnson, Viseth Sean, Hollis Pass, Louanne Boyd Apr 2020

Combining Eye Tracking And Verbal Response To Understand The Impact Of A Global Filter, Franceli L. Cibrian, Jazette Johnson, Viseth Sean, Hollis Pass, Louanne Boyd

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

Visual attention guides the integration of two streams: the global, that rapidly processes the scene; and the local, that processes details. For people with autism, the integration of these two streams can be disrupted by the tendency to privilege details (local processing) instead of seeing the big picture (global processing). Consequently, people with autism may struggle with typical visual attention, evidenced by their verbal description of local features when asked to describe overall scenes. This paper aims to explore how one adult with autism see and understand the global filter of natural scenes.


The Project Talent Twin And Sibling Study: Zygosity And New Data Collection, Carol A. Prescott, Ellen E. Walters, Thalida Em Arpawong, Catalina Zavala, Tara L. Gruenewald, Margaret Gatz Feb 2020

The Project Talent Twin And Sibling Study: Zygosity And New Data Collection, Carol A. Prescott, Ellen E. Walters, Thalida Em Arpawong, Catalina Zavala, Tara L. Gruenewald, Margaret Gatz

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

The Project Talent Twin and Sibling (PTTS) study includes 4481 multiples and their 522 nontwin siblings from 2233 families. The sample was drawn from Project Talent, a U.S. national longitudinal study of 377,000 individuals born 1942–1946, first assessed in 1960 and representative of U.S. students in secondary school (Grades 9–12). In addition to the twins and triplets, the 1960 dataset includes 84,000 siblings from 40,000 other families. This design is both genetically informative and unique in facilitating separation of the ‘common’ environment into three sources of variation: shared by all siblings within a family, specific to twin-pairs, and associated with …


Self-Concept Clarity And The Bodily Self: Malleability Across Modalities, Sonia A. Krol, Rémi Thériault, Jay A. Olson, Amir Raz, Jennifer A. Bartz Oct 2019

Self-Concept Clarity And The Bodily Self: Malleability Across Modalities, Sonia A. Krol, Rémi Thériault, Jay A. Olson, Amir Raz, Jennifer A. Bartz

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

The self has fascinated scholars for centuries. Although theory suggests that the self-concept (cognitive self-understanding) and bodily self (pre-reflective awareness of one’s body) are related, little work has examined this notion. To this end, in Study 1, participants reported on self-concept clarity (SCC) and completed the rubber hand illusion (RHI), a paradigm in which synchronous (vs. asynchronous) stimulation between a prosthetic hand and one’s own hand leads one to “embody” the prosthetic hand. Whereas participants were equally susceptible to the RHI during synchronous stroking, low-SCC individuals were more vulnerable to the illusion during asynchronous stroking, when the effect is unwarranted. …


The Unfolding Argument: Why Iit And Other Causal Structure Theories Cannot Explain Consciousness, Adrian Doerig, Aaron Schurger, Kathryn Hess, Michael H. Herzog May 2019

The Unfolding Argument: Why Iit And Other Causal Structure Theories Cannot Explain Consciousness, Adrian Doerig, Aaron Schurger, Kathryn Hess, Michael H. Herzog

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

How can we explain consciousness? This question has become a vibrant topic of neuroscience research in recent decades. A large body of empirical results has been accumulated, and many theories have been proposed. Certain theories suggest that consciousness should be explained in terms of brain functions, such as accessing information in a global workspace, applying higher order to lower order representations, or predictive coding. These functions could be realized by a variety of patterns of brain connectivity. Other theories, such as Information Integration Theory (IIT) and Recurrent Processing Theory (RPT), identify causal structure with consciousness. For example, according to …


Ask The Pendulum: Personality Predictors Of Ideomotor Performance, Jay A. Olson, Ewalina Jeyanesan, Amir Raz Aug 2017

Ask The Pendulum: Personality Predictors Of Ideomotor Performance, Jay A. Olson, Ewalina Jeyanesan, Amir Raz

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

For centuries, people have asked questions to hand-held pendulums and interpreted their movements as responses from the divine. These movements occur due to the ideomotor effect, wherein priming or thinking of a motion causes muscle movements that end up swinging the pendulum. By associating particular swinging movements with “yes” and “no” responses, we investigated whether pendulums can aid decision-making and which personality traits correlate with this performance. Participants (N=80) completed a visual detection task in which they searched for a target letter among rapidly presented characters. In the verbal condition, participants stated whether they saw the target in each trial. …


Angels And Demons: Using Behavioral Types In A Real-Effort Moral Dilemma To Identify Expert Traits, Hernan Bejerano, Ellen P. Green, Stephen Rassenti Oct 2016

Angels And Demons: Using Behavioral Types In A Real-Effort Moral Dilemma To Identify Expert Traits, Hernan Bejerano, Ellen P. Green, Stephen Rassenti

ESI Publications

In this article, we explore how independently reported measures of subjects' cognitive capabilities, preferences, and sociodemographic characteristics relate to their behavior in a real-effort moral dilemma experiment. To do this, we use a unique dataset, the Chapman Preferences and Characteristics Instrument Set (CPCIS), which contains over 30 standardized measures of preferences and characteristics. We find that simple correlation analysis provides an incomplete picture of how individual measures relate to behavior. In contrast, clustering subjects into groups based on observed behavior in the real-effort task reveals important systematic differences in individual characteristics across groups. However, while we find more differences, these …


Correlates Of Appearance And Weight Satisfaction In A U.S. National Sample: Personality, Attachment Style, Television Viewing, Self-Esteem, And Life Satisfaction, David Frederick, Gaganjyot Sandhu, Patrick J. Morse, Viren Swami May 2016

Correlates Of Appearance And Weight Satisfaction In A U.S. National Sample: Personality, Attachment Style, Television Viewing, Self-Esteem, And Life Satisfaction, David Frederick, Gaganjyot Sandhu, Patrick J. Morse, Viren Swami

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

We examined the prevalence and correlates of satisfaction with appearance and weight. Participants (N = 12,176) completed an online survey posted on the NBCNews.com and Today.com websites. Few men and women were very to extremely dissatisfied with their physical appearances (6%; 9%), but feeling very to extremely dissatisfied with weight was more common (15%; 20%). Only about one-fourth of men and women felt very to extremely satisfied with their appearances (28%; 26%) and weights (24%; 20%). Men and women with higher body masses reported higher appearance and weight dissatisfaction. Dissatisfied people had higher Neuroticism, more preoccupied and fearful attachment …