Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
Language
- English (74) (remove)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (74)
Keywords
- embodied cognition (13)
- SNARC (10)
- Mental number line (9)
- SNARC effect (8)
- numerical cognition (8)
- Embodied cognition (6)
- Numerical cognition (6)
- mental number line (6)
- Mental arithmetic (4)
- Embodiment (3)
Institute
- Department Psychologie (74) (remove)
This study investigated how touching and being touched by a humanoid robot affects human physiology, impressions of the interaction, and attitudes towards humanoid robots. 21 healthy adult participants completed a 3 (touch style: touching, being touched, pointing) x 2 (body part: hand vs buttock) within-subject design using a Pepper robot. Skin conductance response (SCR) was measured during each interaction. Perceived impressions of the interaction (i.e., friendliness, comfort, arousal) were measured per questionnaire after each interaction. Participants' demographics and their attitude towards robots were also considered. We found shorter SCR rise times in the being touched compared to the touching condition, possibly reflecting psychological alertness to the unpredictability of robot-initiated contacts. The hand condition had shorter rise times than the buttock condition. Most participants evaluated the hand condition as most friendly and comfortable and the robot-initiated interactions as most arousing. Interacting with Pepper improved attitudes towards robots. Our findings require future studies with larger samples and improved procedures. They have implications for robot design in all domains involving tactile interactions, such as caring and intimacy.
Mimicking non-verbal emotional expressions and empathy development in simulated consultations
(2018)
Objective: To explore the feasibility of applying an experimental design to study the relationship between non-verbal emotions and empathy development in simulated consultations.
Method: In video-recorded simulated consultations, twenty clinicians were randomly allocated to either an experimental group (instructed to mimic non-verbal emotions of a simulated patient, SP) or a control group (no such instruction). Baseline empathy scores were obtained before consultation, relational empathy was rated by SP after consultation. Multilevel logistic regression modelled the probability of mimicry occurrence, controlling for baseline empathy and clinical experience. ANCOVA compared group differences on relational empathy and consultation smoothness.
Results: Instructed mimicry lasted longer than spontaneous mimicry. Mimicry was marginally related to improved relational empathy. SP felt being treated more like a whole person during consultations with spontaneous mimicry. Clinicians who displayed spontaneous mimicry felt consultations went more smoothly.
Conclusion: The experimental approach improved our understanding of how non-verbal emotional mimicry contributed to relational empathy development during consultations. Further work should ascertain the potential of instructed mimicry to enhance empathy development.
Practice implications: Understanding how non-verbal emotional mimicry impacts on patients’ perceived clinician empathy during consultations may inform training and intervention programme development.
There has been increasing interest in the spatial mapping of various perceptual and cognitive magnitudes, such as expanding the spatial-numerical association of response codes (SNARC) effect into domains outside of numerical cognition. Recently, De Tommaso and Prpic (Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 82, 2765-2773, 2020) reported in this journal that only fast tempos over 104 beats per minute have spatial associations, with more right-sided associations and faster responses for faster tempos. After discussing the role of perceived loudness and possible response strategies, we propose and recommend methodological improvements for further research.
A large number of experimental findings from neuroscience and experimental psychology demonstrated interactions between spatial cognition and numerical cognition. In particular, many researchers posited a horizontal mental number line, where small numbers are thought of as being to the left of larger numbers. This review synthesizes work on the mental association between space and number, indicating the existence of multiple spatial mappings: recent research has found associations between number and vertical space, as well as associations between number and near/far space. We discuss number space in three dimensions with an eye on potential origins of the different number mappings, and how these number mappings fit in with our current knowledge of brain organization and brain-culture interactions. We derive novel predictions and show how this research fits into a general view of cognition as embodied, grounded and situated. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Previous research on the interplay between static manual postures and visual attention revealed enhanced visual selection near the hands (near-hand effect). During active movements there is also superior visual performance when moving toward compared to away from the stimulus (direction effect). The "modulated visual pathways" hypothesis argues that differential involvement of magno- and parvocellular visual processing streams causes the near-hand effect. The key finding supporting this hypothesis is an increase in temporal and a reduction in spatial processing in near-hand space (Gozli et al., 2012). Since this hypothesis has, so far, only been tested with static hand postures, we provide a conceptual replication of Gozli et al.'s (2012) result with moving hands, thus also probing the generality of the direction effect. Participants performed temporal or spatial gap discriminations while their right hand was moving below the display. In contrast to Gozli et al (2012), temporal gap discrimination was superior at intermediate and not near hand proximity. In spatial gap discrimination, a direction effect without hand proximity effect suggests that pragmatic attentional maps overshadowed temporal/spatial processing biases for far/near-hand space.
Moving arms
(2018)
Embodied cognition postulates a bi-directional link between the human body and its cognitive functions. Whether this holds for higher cognitive functions such as problem solving is unknown. We predicted that arm movement manipulations performed by the participants could affect the problem-solving solutions. We tested this prediction in quantitative reasoning tasks that allowed two solutions to each problem (addition or subtraction). In two studies with healthy adults (N=53 and N=50), we found an effect of problem-congruent movements on problem solutions. Consistent with embodied cognition, sensorimotor information gained via right or left arm movements affects the solution in different types of problem-solving tasks.
The embodied cognition framework suggests that neural systems for perception and action are engaged during higher cognitive processes. In an event-related fMRI study, we tested this claim for the abstract domain of numerical symbol processing: is the human cortical motor system part of the representation of numbers, and is organization of numerical knowledge influenced by individual finger counting habits? Developmental studies suggest a link between numerals and finger counting habits due to the acquisition of numerical skills through finger counting in childhood. In the present study, digits 1 to 9 and the corresponding number words were presented visually to adults with different finger counting habits, i.e. left- and right-starters who reported that they usually start counting small numbers with their left and right hand, respectively. Despite the absence of overt hand movements, the hemisphere contralateral to the hand used for counting small numbers was activated when small numbers were presented. The correspondence between finger counting habits and hemispheric motor activation is consistent with an intrinsic functional link between finger counting and number processing.
Stimulating numbers
(2018)
Finger counting is one of the first steps in the development of mature number concepts. With a one-to-one correspondence of fingers to numbers in Western finger counting, fingers hold two numerical meanings: one is based on the number of fingers raised and the second is based on their ordinal position within the habitual finger counting sequence. This study investigated how these two numerical meanings of fingers are intertwined with numerical cognition in adults. Participants received tactile stimulation on their fingertips of one hand and named either the number of fingers stimulated (2, 3, or 4 fingers; Experiment 1) or the number of stimulations on one fingertip (2, 3, or 4 stimulations; Experiment 2). Responses were faster and more accurate when the set of stimulated fingers corresponded to finger counting habits (Experiment 1) and when the number of stimulations matched the ordinal position of the stimulated finger (Experiment 2). These results show that tactile numerosity perception is affected by individual finger counting habits and that those habits give numerical meaning to single fingers.
1 + 2 is more than 2 + 1: Violations of commutativity and identity axioms in mental arithmetic
(2015)
Over the past decade or so, a large number of studies have revealed that conceptual meaning is sensitive to situational context. More recently, similar contextual influences have been documented in the domain of number knowledge. Here we show such context dependency in a length production task. Adult participants saw single digit addition problems of the form n1 + n2 and produced the sum by changing bi-directionally the length of a horizontally extended line, using radially arranged buttons. We found that longer lines were produced when n1 < n2 compared to n1 > n2 and that unit size increased with result size. Thus, the mathematical axioms of commutativity and identity do not seem to hold in mental addition. We discuss implications of these observations for our understanding of cognitive mechanisms involved in mental arithmetic and for situated cognition generally.
Western adults associate small numbers with left space and large numbers with right space. Where does this pervasive spatial-numerical association come from? In this study, we first recorded directional counting preferences in adults with different reading experiences (left to right, right to left, mixed, and illiterate) and observed a clear relationship between reading and counting directions. We then recorded directional counting preferences in pre-schoolers and elementary school children from three of these reading cultures (left to right, right to left, and mixed). Culture-specific counting biases existed before reading acquisition in children as young as 3 years and were subsequently modified by early reading experience. Together, our results suggest that both directional counting and scanning activities contribute to number-space associations.