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Publications in Psychology & Cognitive Sciences by NOMIS researchers

On the content of Peripersonal visual experience

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

July 1, 2022

In a recent paper, ‘Peripersonal perception in action’ (Synthese, 2018), Frédérique de Vignemont tackles the problem of defining what is peculiar to the visual perception of objects falling within the peripersonal space of the observer, i.e. the space immediately surrounding the body, and which is commonly described as the space in which action takes place. In this paper, I first discuss the proposal offered by de Vignemont about what characterizes peripersonal perception. Then, I suggest an extension of this account that offers a meticulous description of the nature of the Content of Peripersonal Visual Experience – a topic never explicitly considered in the philosophical literature on vision – by discussing some peculiar features of it that, as recognized also by de Vignemont’s account, still need to be explained. In particular, I offer a philosophical examination of the specificity of peripersonal visual experience, in relation to its phenomenological dimension, its optical mechanisms and its neurophysiological underpinnings, in the light of our best theories from vision science, and in comparison to the visual experience of other visual spaces.

Research field(s)
Health Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Experimental Psychology

DOI
10.1007/s11097-021-09733-2

The Diversity Gap: When Diversity Matters for Knowledge

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

May 1, 2022

Can diversity make for better science? Although diversity has ethical and political value, arguments for its epistemic value require a bridge between normative and mechanistic considerations, demonstrating why and how diversity benefits collective intelligence. However, a major hurdle is that the benefits themselves are rather mixed: Quantitative evidence from psychology and behavioral sciences sometimes shows a positive epistemic effect of diversity, but often shows a null effect, or even a negative effect. Here we argue that to make progress with these why and how questions, we need first to rethink when one ought to expect a benefit of cognitive diversity. In doing so, we highlight that the benefits of cognitive diversity are not equally distributed about collective intelligence tasks and are best seen for complex, multistage, creative problem solving, during problem posing and hypothesis generation. Throughout, we additionally outline a series of mechanisms relating diversity and problem complexity, and show how this perspective can inform metascience questions.

Research field(s)
Health Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Social Psychology

DOI
10.1177/17456916211006070

Rhesus monkeys have an interoceptive sense of their beating hearts

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

April 19, 2022

The sensation of internal bodily signals, such as when your stomach is contracting or your heart is beating, plays a critical role in broad biological and psychological functions ranging from homeostasis to emotional experience and self-awareness. The evolutionary origins of this capacity and, thus, the extent to which it is present in nonhuman animals remain unclear. Here, we show that rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) spend significantly more time viewing stimuli presented asynchronously, as compared to synchronously, with their heartbeats. This is consistent with evidence previously shown in human infants using a nearly identical experimental paradigm, suggesting that rhesus monkeys have a human-like capacity to integrate interoceptive signals from the heart with exteroceptive audiovisual information. As no prior work has demonstrated behavioral evidence of innate cardiac interoceptive ability in nonhuman animals, these results have important implications for our understanding of the evolution of this ability and for establishing rhesus monkeys as an animal model for human interoceptive function and dysfunction.We anticipate that this work may also provide an important model for future psychiatric research, as disordered interoceptive processing is implicated in a wide variety of psychiatric conditions.

Research field(s)
Health Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Experimental Psychology

DOI
10.1073/pnas.2119868119

Many heads are more utilitarian than one

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

March 1, 2022

Moral judgments have a very prominent social nature, and in everyday life, they are continually shaped by discussions with others. Psychological investigations of these judgments, however, have rarely addressed the impact of social interactions. To examine the role of social interaction on moral judgments within small groups, we had groups of 4 to 5 participants judge moral dilemmas first individually and privately, then collectively and interactively, and finally individually a second time. We employed both real-life and sacrificial moral dilemmas in which the character’s action or inaction violated a moral principle to benefit the greatest number of people. Participants decided if these utilitarian decisions were morally acceptable or not. In Experiment 1, we found that collective judgments in face-to-face interactions were more utilitarian than the statistical aggregate of their members compared to both first and second individual judgments. This observation supported the hypothesis that deliberation and consensus within a group transiently reduce the emotional burden of norm violation. In Experiment 2, we tested this hypothesis more directly: measuring participants’ state anxiety in addition to their moral judgments before, during, and after online interactions, we found again that collectives were more utilitarian than those of individuals and that state anxiety level was reduced during and after social interaction. The utilitarian boost in collective moral judgments is probably due to the reduction of stress in the social setting.

Research field(s)
Health Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Experimental Psychology

DOI
10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104965

Augmenting perception: How artificial intelligence transforms sensory substitution

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

March 1, 2022

What happens when artificial sensors are coupled with the human senses? Using technology to extend the senses is an old human dream, on which sensory substitution and other augmentation technologies have already delivered. Laser tactile canes, corneal implants and magnetic belts can correct or extend what individuals could otherwise perceive. Here we show why accommodating intelligent sensory augmentation devices not just improves but also changes the way of thinking and classifying former sensory augmentation devices. We review the benefits in terms of signal processing and show why non-linear transformation is more than a mere improvement compared to classical linear transformation.

Research field(s)
Health Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Experimental Psychology

DOI
10.1016/j.concog.2022.103280

The effect of feedback valence and source on perception and metacognition: An fMRI investigation

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

January 1, 2022

Receiving feedback from our environment that informs us about the outcomes of our actions helps us assess our abilities (e.g., metacognition) and to flexibly adapt our behavior, consequently increasing our chances of success. However, a detailed examination of the effect of feedback on the brain activation during perceptual and confidence judgments as well as the interrelations between perceptual accuracy, prospective and retrospective confidence remains unclear. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the neural response to feedback valence and source in visual contrast discrimination together with prospective confidence judgments at the beginning of each block and retrospective confidence judgments after every decision. Positive feedback was associated with higher activation (or lower deactivation depending on the area) in areas previously involved in attention, performance monitoring and visual regions during the perceptual judgment than during the confidence judgment. Changes in prospective confidence were positively related to changes in perceptual accuracy as well as to the corresponding retrospective confidence. Thus, feedback information impacted multiple, qualitatively different brain processing states, and we also revealed the dynamic interplay between prospective, perceptual accuracy and retrospective self-assessment.

Research field(s)
Health Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Experimental Psychology

DOI
10.1080/17588928.2020.1828323

Democratic Forecast: Small Groups Predict the Future Better Than Individuals and Crowds

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

January 1, 2022

Predictions pose unique problems. Experts regularly get them wrong, and collective solutions (such as prediction markets and super-forecaster schemes) do better but remain selective and costly. Contrary to the idea that face-to-face discussion hinders collective intelligence, social deliberation improves the resolution of general knowledge problems, with four consensually agreed answers outperforming the aggregate knowledge of 5,000 nondeliberating individuals. Could discussion help predict the future in an efficient, cheap, and inclusive way? We show that smaller groups of lay individuals, when organized, come up with better predictions than those they provide alone. Deliberation and consensus made individual predictions significantly more accurate. Aggregating as few as two consensual predictions did better than classical “wisdom of crowds” aggregation of 100 individual ones. Against the view that discussion can impair decision-making, our results demonstrate that collective intelligence of small groups and consensus-seeking improves accuracy about yet unknown facts, opening the avenue for efficient, inclusive, and inexpensive group forecasting solutions.

Research field(s)
Health Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Experimental Psychology

DOI
10.1037/xap0000424

The role of anticipated regret in choosing for others

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

December 1, 2021

In everyday life, people sometimes find themselves making decisions on behalf of others, taking risks on another’s behalf, accepting the responsibility for these choices and possibly suffering regret for what they could have done differently. Previous research has extensively studied how people deal with risk when making decisions for others or when being observed by others. Here, we asked whether making decisions for present others is affected by regret avoidance. We studied value-based decision making under uncertainty, manipulating both whether decisions benefited the participant or a partner (beneficiary effect) and whether the partner watched the participant’s choices (audience effect) and their factual and counterfactual outcomes. Computational behavioural analysis revealed that participants were less mindful of regret (and more strongly driven by bigger risks) when choosing for others vs for themselves. Conversely, they chose more conservatively (regarding both regret and risk) when being watched vs alone. The effects of beneficiary and audience on anticipated regret counteracted each other, suggesting that participants’ financial and reputational interests impacted the feeling of regret independently.

Research field(s)
Health Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Social Psychology

DOI
10.1038/s41598-021-91635-z

Taking the pulse of social cognition: Cardiac afferent activity and interoceptive accuracy modulate emotional egocentricity bias

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

December 1, 2021

At the heart of social cognition is our ability to distinguish between self and other and correctly attribute mental and affective states to their origin. Emotional egocentricity bias (EEB) reflects the tendency to use one’s own emotional state when relating to others. Although interoception underpins our emotional experience, little is known about its role on how we affectively relate to others. Here, we assessed how cardiac interoceptive impact, manipulated by presenting affective stimuli across different phases of the cardiac cycle coupled with trait-like levels of interoceptive accuracy, modulate the EEB. Individuals with higher interoceptive accuracy displayed an increased EEB when the other’s emotional state was presented at the point of maximum interoceptive impact (i.e., at systole), whereas the reverse was observed for individuals with lower interoceptive accuracy. These findings show how interoceptive activity provides the physiological context within which we process other’s emotional states in parallel to ours.

Research field(s)
Health Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Experimental Psychology

DOI
10.1016/j.cortex.2021.10.004

The impact of joint attention on the sound-induced flash illusions

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

November 1, 2021

Humans coordinate their focus of attention with others, either by gaze following or prior agreement. Though the effects of joint attention on perceptual and cognitive processing tend to be examined in purely visual environments, they should also show in multisensory settings. According to a prevalent hypothesis, joint attention enhances visual information encoding and processing, over and above individual attention. If two individuals jointly attend to the visual components of an audiovisual event, this should affect the weighing of visual information during multisensory integration. We tested this prediction in this preregistered study, using the well-documented sound-induced flash illusions, where the integration of an incongruent number of visual flashes and auditory beeps results in a single flash being seen as two (fission illusion) and two flashes as one (fusion illusion). Participants were asked to count flashes either alone or together, and expected to be less prone to both fission and fusion illusions when they jointly attended to the visual targets. However, illusions were as frequent when people attended to the flashes alone or with someone else, even though they responded faster during joint attention. Our results reveal the limitations of the theory that joint attention enhances visual processing as it does not affect temporal audiovisual integration.

Research field(s)
Health Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Experimental Psychology

DOI
10.3758/s13414-021-02347-5

Shared Responsibility Decreases the Sense of Agency in the Human Brain

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

October 19, 2021

Sharing responsibility in social decision-making helps individuals use the flexibility of the collective context to benefit them-selves by claiming credit for good outcomes or avoiding the blame for bad outcomes. Using magnetoencephalography, we examined the neuronal basis of the impact that social context has on this flexible sense of responsibility. Participants performed a gambling task in various social contexts and reported feeling less responsibility when playing as a member of a team. A reduced magnetoencephalography outcome processing effect was observed as a function of decreasing responsibility at 200 msec post outcome onset and was centered over parietal, central, and frontal brain regions. Before outcome revelation in socially made decisions, an attenuated motor preparation signature at 500 msec after stimulus onset was found. A boost in reported responsibility for positive outcomes in social contexts was associated with increased activity in regions related to social and reward processing. Together, these results show that sharing responsibility with others reduces agency, influencing pre-outcome motor preparation and post-outcome processing, and provides opportunities to flexibly claim credit for positive outcomes.

Research field(s)
Health Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Experimental Psychology

DOI
10.1162/jocn_a_01896

Helping the waiter to hold his tray: Rigid haptic linkage promotes inter-personal motor coordination

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

October 1, 2021

When a glass is lifted from a tray, there is a challenge for the waiter. He must quickly compensate for the reduction in the weight of the tray to keep it balanced. This compensation is easily achieved if the waiter lifts the glass himself. Because he has, himself, initiated the action, he can predict the timing and the magnitude of the perturbation of the tray and respond (via the holding hand) accordingly. In this study, we examined coordination when either one or two people hold the tray while either one of them or a third person removes the glass. Our results show that there is exquisite coordination between the two people holding the tray. We suggest that this coordination depends upon the haptic link provided by the rigid platform that both people are holding. We conclude that the guest at a reception should not lift his drink from the waiter’s tray until they have the waiter’s attention but, if too thirsty to wait, should lend a hand holding the tray.

Research field(s)
Health Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Experimental Psychology

DOI
10.1177/17470218211009082

How do we relate to our heart? Neurobehavioral differences across three types of engagement with cardiac interoception

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

October 1, 2021

Standard measures of interoception are typically limited to the conscious perception of heartbeats. However, the fundamental purpose of interoceptive signaling, is to regulate the body. We present a novel biofeedback paradigm to explore the neurobehavioral consequences of three different types of engagement with cardiac interoception (Attend, Feel, Regulate) while participants perform a ‘cardiac recognition’ task. For both the Feel and Regulate conditions, participants displayed enhanced recognition of their own heartbeat, accompanied by larger heartbeat-evoked potentials (HEPs), suggesting that these approaches could be used interchangeably. Importantly, meta-cognitive interoceptive insight was highest in the Regulate condition, indicative of stronger engagement with interoceptive signals in addition to greater ecological validity. Only in the passive interoception condition (Feel) was a significant association found between accuracy in recognising one’s own heartbeat and the amplitude of HEPs. Overall, our results imply that active conditions have an important role to play in future investigation of interoception.

Research field(s)
Health Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Experimental Psychology

DOI
10.1016/j.biopsycho.2021.108198

Does choice change preferences? An incentivized test of the mere choice effect

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

August 15, 2021

Widespread evidence from psychology and neuroscience documents that previous choices unconditionally increase the later desirability of chosen objects, even if those choices were uninformative. This is problematic for economists who use choice data to estimate latent preferences, demand functions, and social welfare. The evidence on this mere choice effect, however, exhibits serious shortcomings which prevent evaluating its possible relevance for economics. In this paper, we present a novel, parsimonious experimental design to test for the economic validity of the mere choice effect addressing these shortcomings. Our design uses well-defined, monetary lotteries, all decisions are incentivized, and we effectively randomize participants’ initial choices without relying on deception. Results from a large, pre-registered online experiment find no support for the mere choice effect. Our results challenge conventional wisdom outside economics. The mere choice effect does not seem to be a concern for economics, at least in the domain of decision making under risk.

Research field(s)
Psychology & Cognitive Sciences

DOI
10.1007/s10683-021-09728-5

Social influence matters: We follow pandemic guidelines most when our close circle does

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

August 1, 2021

Why do we adopt new rules, such as social distancing? Although human sciences research stresses the key role of social influence in behaviour change, most COVID-19 campaigns emphasize the disease’s medical threat. In a global data set (n = 6,675), we investigated how social influences predict people’s adherence to distancing rules during the pandemic. Bayesian regression analyses controlling for stringency of local measures showed that people distanced most when they thought their close social circle did. Such social influence mattered more than people thinking distancing was the right thing to do. People’s adherence also aligned with their fellow citizens, but only if they felt deeply bonded with their country. Self-vulnerability to the disease predicted distancing more for people with larger social circles. Collective efficacy and collectivism also significantly predicted distancing. To achieve behavioural change during crises, policymakers must emphasize shared values and harness the social influence of close friends and family.

Research field(s)
Health Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Experimental Psychology

DOI
10.1111/bjop.12491

Body in the face of uncertainty: The role of autonomic arousal and interoception in decision-making under risk and ambiguity

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

August 1, 2021

Influential theories posit that bodily responses are important for decision-making under uncertainty. However, the evidence of the role of our ability to perceive subtle bodily changes (interoception) in decision-making under uncertainty is mixed. These differences may arise from the fact that uncertainty, a part of daily decision-making, can be fractionated into risk (known probabilities) and ambiguity (unknown probabilities). Here we examine the role of arousal and interoception in shaping risky and ambiguous decisions. We measured skin conductance responses and heart rate changes while participants (N = 40) made gambling decisions in the context of risky and ambiguous lotteries. Results reveal that the anticipation phase produced the largest arousal responses, suggesting that the anticipation is a major contributor to arousal during gambling behavior, regardless of the uncertainty type. Moreover, physiological responses were higher following positive outcomes than negative outcomes. We did not find any direct relation between interoceptive dimensions and the attitudes toward risk and ambiguity. However, in those with higher interoceptive accuracy, skin conductance responses differentiated between risk and ambiguity as well as between the gamble phases (decision, anticipation, and outcome). Together, our findings demonstrate that decision-making under uncertainty is to some extent associated with individual differences in the ability both to generate and to perceive accurately subtle changes in bodily arousal during the decision-making process. However, these changes seem to be moderately related to the type of uncertainty (risk or ambiguity).

Research field(s)
Health Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Experimental Psychology

DOI
10.1111/psyp.13840

Habitual Actions, Propositional Knowledge, Motor Representations and Intentionality

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

July 1, 2021

Habitual actions have a history of practice and repetition that frees us from attending to what we are doing. Nevertheless, habitual actions seem to be intentional. What does account for the intentionality of habitual actions if they are automatically performed and controlled? In this paper, we address a possible response to a particular version of this issue, that is, the problem of understanding how the intention to execute a habitual action, which comes in a propositional format, interlocks with motor representations, which come in a motoric-pragmatic format. In order to solve this issue, we propose an account according to which the propositional intentions and the motor representations related to our habitual actions interlock through executable action concepts. This allows us to maintain that habitual actions can be, at the same time, automatically initiated, performed, and controlled and, still, intentional.

Research field(s)
Health Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Experimental Psychology

DOI
10.1007/s11245-020-09723-0

Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Deep Brain Stimulation Think Tank: Advances in Optogenetics, Ethical Issues Affecting DBS Research, Neuromodulatory Approaches for Depression, Adaptive Neurostimulation, and Emerging DBS Technologies

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

April 19, 2021

We estimate that 208,000 deep brain stimulation (DBS) devices have been implanted to address neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders worldwide. DBS Think Tank presenters pooled data and determined that DBS expanded in its scope and has been applied to multiple brain disorders in an effort to modulate neural circuitry. The DBS Think Tank was founded in 2012 providing a space where clinicians, engineers, researchers from industry and academia discuss current and emerging DBS technologies and logistical and ethical issues facing the field. The emphasis is on cutting edge research and collaboration aimed to advance the DBS field. The Eighth Annual DBS Think Tank was held virtually on September 1 and 2, 2020 (Zoom Video Communications) due to restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The meeting focused on advances in: (1) optogenetics as a tool for comprehending neurobiology of diseases and on optogenetically-inspired DBS, (2) cutting edge of emerging DBS technologies, (3) ethical issues affecting DBS research and access to care, (4) neuromodulatory approaches for depression, (5) advancing novel hardware, software and imaging methodologies, (6) use of neurophysiological signals in adaptive neurostimulation, and (7) use of more advanced technologies to improve DBS clinical outcomes. There were 178 attendees who participated in a DBS Think Tank survey, which revealed the expansion of DBS into several indications such as obesity, post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction and Alzheimer’s disease. This proceedings summarizes the advances discussed at the Eighth Annual DBS Think Tank.

Research field(s)
Health Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Experimental Psychology

DOI
10.3389/fnhum.2021.644593

The impact of cardiac afferent signaling and interoceptive abilities on passive information sampling

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

April 1, 2021

A growing body of research suggests that perception and cognition are affected by fluctuating bodily states. For example, the rate of information sampling is coupled with cardiac phases. However, the benefits of such spontaneous coupling between bodily oscillations and decision-making remains unclear. Here, we studied the role of the cardiac cycle in information sampling by testing whether sequential information sampling phase-locked to systolic or diastolic parts of the cardiac cycle impacts the rate of information gathering and processing. To this aim, we employed a modified Information Sampling Task, a standard measure of the rate of information gathering before reaching a decision, in which the onset of new information delivery in each trial was coupled either to cardiac systole or diastole. Information presented within cardiac systole did not significantly modulate the information processing in a manner that would produce clear behavioral changes. However, we found evidence suggesting that higher interoceptive awareness increased accuracy, especially in the costly version of the task, when new information was sequentially presented at systole. Overall, our results add to a growing body of research on body-brain interactions and suggest that our internal bodily rhythms (i.e., heartbeats) and our awareness of them can interact with the way we process the noisy world around us.

Research field(s)
Health Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Experimental Psychology

DOI
10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2021.02.010

Neural divergence and convergence for attention to and detection of interoceptive and somatosensory stimuli

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in

February 1, 2021

Body awareness is constructed by signals originating from within and outside the body. How do these apparently divergent signals converge? We developed a signal detection task to study the neural convergence and divergence of interoceptive and somatosensory signals. Participants focused on either cardiac or tactile events and reported their presence or absence. Beyond some evidence of divergence, we observed a robust overlap in the pattern of activation evoked across both conditions in frontal areas including the insular cortex, as well as parietal and occipital areas, and for both attention and detection of these signals. Psycho-physiological interaction analysis revealed that right insular cortex connectivity was modulated by the conscious detection of cardiac compared to somatosensory sensations, with greater connectivity to occipito-parietal regions when attending to cardiac signals. Our findings speak in favour of the inherent convergence of bodily-related signals and move beyond the apparent antagonism between exteroception and interoception.

Research field(s)
Health Sciences, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences, Experimental Psychology

DOI
10.1016/j.cortex.2020.11.019

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