Implicit cognitions in awareness: Three empirical examples and implications for conscious identity.

open accessAcross psychological science the prevailing view of mental events includes unconscious mental representations that result from a separate implicit system outside of awareness. Recently, scientific interest in consciousness of self and the widespread application of mindfulness practice have made necessary innovative methods of assessing awareness during cognitive tasks and validating those assessments wherever they are researched. Studies from three areas of psychology, self-esteem, sustainability thinking, and the learning of control systems questioned the unconscious status of implicit cognitions. The studies replicated published results using methods of investigating (a) unselective learning of a control task (b) implicit attitudes using IAT, and (c) the Name-letter effect. In addition, a common analytic method of awareness assessment and its validation was used. Study 1 demonstrated that learned control of a dynamic system was predicted by the validity of rules of control in awareness. In Study 2, verbal reports of hesitations and trial difficulty predicted IAT scores for 34 participants’ environmental attitudes. In Study 3, the famous Name-letter effect was predicted by the validity of university students’ reported awareness of letter preference reasons. The repeated finding that self knowledge in awareness predicted what should be cognitions outside of awareness, according to the dual processing view, suggests an alternative model of implicit mental events in which associative relations evoke conscious symbolic representations. The analytic method of validating phenomenal reports will be discussed along with its potential contribution to research involving implicit cognitions

Fearless Friday: Casey O\u27Higgins

This week is Spirit week. Because of this, today’s Fearless Friday honors a student who has worked tirelessly to promote education around LGBTQ issues. Casey O’Higgins is a senior from Detriot, Michigan, who is majoring in Women & Gender Studies and minoring in English. He is the President of Outerspace, an LGBTQ organization on campus that provides a safe, social space for students in the LGBTQ community and allies to socialize. Casey also works at the Office of LGBTQA Advocacy and Education as one of their program coordinators. In this role, he is responsible for organizing campus events that are geared towards raising awareness about the problems faced by the LGBTQ community. Spirit Week and Bisexual Awareness Day are among the events that Casey has helped to plan. [excerpt

Episodic memory and episodic future thinking in adults with autism.

The ability to remember past experiences (episodic memory) is thought to be related to the ability to imagine possible future experiences (episodic future thinking). Although previous research has established that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have diminished episodic memory, episodic future thinking has not previously been investigated within this population. In the present study, high-functioning adults with ASD were compared to closely matched typical adults on a task requiring participants to report a series of events that happened to them in the past and a series of events that might happen to them in the future. For each event described, participants completed two modified Memory Characteristics Questionnaire items to assess self-reported phenomenal qualities associated with remembering and imagining, including self-perspective and degree of autonoetic awareness. Participants also completed letter, category, and ideational fluency tasks. Results indicated that participants with ASD recalled/imagined significantly fewer specific events than did comparison participants and that participants with ASD demonstrated impaired episodic memory and episodic future thinking. In line with this finding, participants with ASD were less likely than comparison participants to report taking a field (first-person) perspective and were more likely to report taking an observer (third-person) perspective during retrieval of past events (but not during simulation of future events), highlighting that they were less likely to mentally reexperience past events from their own point of view. There were no group differences in self-reported levels of autonoetic awareness or fluency task performance

Fearless Friday: Tiarra Riggins

As we conclude Yik Yak Awareness Week, we’d like to recognize Tiarra Riggins ’17, the fearless organizer behind this week’s events. ”People don’t realize how words can damage a soul,” says Tiarra. Her efforts this week have been aimed at stopping cyberbullying and changing the culture of Yik Yak to a more positive and uplifting space. The events during this past week ranged from a discussion on the effects of cyberbullying to daily CUB tables, encouraging students to sign a banner against cyberbullying and the negative aspects of Yik Yak. [excerpt

Implicit and explicit knowledge: One representational medium or many?

In Dienes & Perner’s analysis, implicitly represented knowledge differs from explicitly represented knowledge only in the attribution of properties to specific events and to self-awareness of the knower. This commentary questions whether implicit knowledge should be thought of as being represented in the same conceptual vocabulary; rather, it may involve a quite different form of representation

World Rabies Day - a decade of raising awareness

World Rabies Day was set up in 2007 to raise global awareness about rabies, to provide information on how to prevent the disease in at-risk communities and support advocacy for increased efforts in rabies control. It is held annually on September 28th, with events, media outreach and other initiatives carried out by individuals, professionals, organisations and governments from the local to the international level. The Global Alliance for Rabies Control coordinates World Rabies Day, amplifying the campaign's reach through the provision of a central event platform and resources to support events across the world, the promotion of messages through key rabies stakeholders, and the implementation of specific activities to highlight particular issues. Over the last decade, more than 1,700 registered events have been held across the world and shared with others in the global rabies community. Events in canine rabies endemic countries, particularly in Africa and Asia, have increased over time. Beyond the individual events, World Rabies Day has gained the support of governments and international agencies that recognise its value in supporting existing rabies control initiatives and advocating for improvements. As the rabies landscape has changed, World Rabies Day remains a general day of awareness but has also become an integral part of national, regional and global rabies elimination strategies. The global adoption of 2030 as the goal for the elimination of rabies as a public health threat has led to even greater opportunities for World Rabies Day to make a sustainable impact on rabies, by bringing the attention of policy makers and donors to the ongoing situation and elimination efforts in rabies-endemic countries

Success Factors of European Syndromic Surveillance Systems: A Worked Example of Applying Qualitative Comparative Analysis

Introduction: Syndromic surveillance aims at augmenting traditional public health surveillance with timely information. To gain a head start, it mainly analyses existing data such as from web searches or patient records. Despite the setup of many syndromic surveillance systems, there is still much doubt about the benefit of the approach. There are diverse interactions between performance indicators such as timeliness and various system characteristics. This makes the performance assessment of syndromic surveillance systems a complex endeavour. We assessed if the comparison of several syndromic surveillance systems through Qualitative Comparative Analysis helps to evaluate performance and identify key success factors. Materials and Methods: We compiled case-based, mixed data on performance and characteristics of 19 syndromic surveillance systems in Europe from scientific and grey literature and from site visits. We identified success factors by applying crisp-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis. We focused on two main areas of syndromic surveillance application: seasonal influenza surveillance and situational awareness during different types of potentially health threatening events. Results: We found that syndromic surveillance systems might detect the onset or peak of seasonal influenza earlier if they analyse non-clinical data sources. Timely situational awareness during different types of events is supported by an automated syndromic surveillance system capable of analysing multiple syndromes. To our surprise, the analysis of multiple data sources was no key success factor for situational awareness. Conclusions: We suggest to consider these key success factors when designing or further developing syndromic surveillance systems. Qualitative Comparative Analysis helped interpreting complex, mixed data on small-N cases and resulted in concrete and practically relevant findings

Awareness-Dependent Subjective Expected Utility

We develop awareness-dependent subjective expected utility by taking unawareness structures introduced in Heifetz, Meier, and Schipper (2006, 2008, 2011a) as primitives in the Anscombe-Aumann approach to subjective expected utility. We observe that a decision maker is unaware of an event if and only if her choices reveal that the event is ``null'' and the negation of the event is ``null''. Moreover, we characterize ``impersonal'' expected utility that is behaviorally indistinguishable from awareness-dependent subject expected utility and assigns probability zero to some subsets of states that are not necessarily events. We discuss in what sense probability zero can model unawareness.unawareness, awareness, unforeseen contingencies, null, probability zero, subjective probability, Anscombe-Aumann, small worlds

A Review of Neurogenic Stunned Myocardium.

Neurologic stunned myocardium (NSM) is a phenomenon where neurologic events give rise to cardiac abnormalities. Neurologic events like stroke and seizures cause sympathetic storm and autonomic dysregulation that result in myocardial injury. The clinical presentation can involve troponin elevation, left ventricular dysfunction, and ECG changes. These findings are similar to Takotsubo cardiomyopathy and acute coronary syndrome. It is difficult to distinguish NSM from acute coronary syndrome based on clinical presentation alone. Because of this difficulty, a patient with NSM who is at high risk for coronary heart disease may undergo cardiac catheterization to rule out coronary artery disease. The objective of this review of literature is to enhance physician\u27s awareness of NSM and its features to help tailor management according to the patient\u27s clinical profile