A Political Economic View of the Digital India Campaign

This paper discusses the proliferation of digital media in developing countries like India whilst dissecting the phenomenon with the tools under political economy. To unravel the various layers of this dense issue, it first explores the discourse on political economy of the digital space and what is now known as new media. Next, it looks at the importance given to the role of digital media to both compete and announce one's competence on a platform which is globalization biased. In order to understand the discourse around the digital wave in India, the role played by the State in terms of policy making, ownership and launching State initiated campaigns is studied. A thematic analysis of the inauguration speech given by the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi on the launch of Digital India shows the persuasive strategies used to influence the attitude of the audience towards the campaign and throws light on the political economy of Digital Communication and Digital Capitalism in the 21st century India

The Vividness of Happiness in Dynamic Facial Displays of Emotion

Rapid identification of facial expressions can profoundly affect social interactions, yet most research to date has focused on static rather than dynamic expressions. In four experiments, we show that when a non-expressive face becomes expressive, happiness is detected more rapidly anger. When the change occurs peripheral to the focus of attention, however, dynamic anger is better detected when it appears in the left visual field (LVF), whereas dynamic happiness is better detected in the right visual field (RVF), consistent with hemispheric differences in the processing of approach- and avoidance-relevant stimuli. The central advantage for happiness is nevertheless the more robust effect, persisting even when information of either high or low spatial frequency is eliminated. Indeed, a survey of past research on the visual search for emotional expressions finds better support for a happiness detection advantage, and the explanation may lie in the coevolution of the signal and the receiver

Self-reference effect for faces is mediated by attention

Self is a central construct for various phenomenon in the history of psychology, and the pattern of being biased towardsthe information related to self is known as self-reference effect. Ones own face presents a unique stimuli to look at thecognitive processing self-reference effect. With help of two experiments, we investigated self-referential effect for facesand its relationship with attention. The first experiment looked at processing advantage for self-face compared to friendsface and a strangers face while participants performed orthogonal task of emotion perception. The second experimentinvolved manipulation of attention prior to emotion perception task used in experiment 1. Results indicate that RT forself-face were significantly shorter compared to friend face and stranger face. This processing advantage disappearedwhen cues were used prior to the attention task. We suggest that self-faces enhance processing by attentional capture

Attentional Bias for Self-Face: Investigation using Drift Diffusion Modelling

Literature has suggested that self-faces are processed differently at various stages of information processing. Although mechanisms like familiarity, implicit positive attitude, emotional arousal, dual-coding, and dopamine reward pathway have been theorized to explain this effect, it may share a fundamental basis in the attentional mechanism resulting in perceptual prioritization for self-face. In this study, we have assessed the attentional bias resulting from the self-face (over other familiar and unfamiliar faces), by using face pairs as cues before a dot-probe task. We looked at reaction time and its underlying latent variables as a function of face pairs used as cues. We find that both self-face and familiar face result in a faster reaction time for subsequent stimuli at cued locations. Though self-face shows this advantage for both short and long cue-time, a familiar face shows the advantage only for longer cue-time. We also found that drift rate bias is found for the location where self-face is presented. Familiar faces show a prior bias (z) as the reason for underlying advantage. We conclude that although, self-face, as well as familiar faces, might bias the processing of subsequent stimuli the underlying latent factor might differ

Context-based Prediction Error Updating of Memory Representations is Modulated by Event Boundaries

Event boundary advantage (EBA) refers to greater memorability of information at boundaries than for any other part of an event. Recent studies have identified post-encoding processes as a likely source of EBA. The current study investigated whether boundaries are distinctly remembered because they act as gateways for retrieval of associated event-elements by using a trace modification paradigm where memory for the last item of an encoded triplet (A-B-C) is suppressed by replacing it with a novel item on re-exposure (A-B-D). Two hierarchical Bayesian models tested whether the immediate associate, boundary item or only the category difference between old and new item of the triplet predicts suppression. Results indicate suppression is predicted by an interaction between memory of A and category, but successful updating is predicted by an interaction between memory of B and category. We discuss the implications of the result for understanding role of event boundaries in trace updating

Dynamics of spatio-temporal scope of attention: Temporal Correlations inreaction time data

Recent studies have emphasized on the idea that attention is a multi-faceted phenomenon that emerges from interactionbetween a number of different selection-based processes, and is influenced both by the expectations from the environmentas well as the constrains of the underlying cognitive system. Dynamical system approach enables us to look at temporalstructure of behavior and talk about the underlying system. With help of three experiments, the study looks at how thetemporal structure of reaction time is influenced by predictability of the environment as well as the task , manipulating bothspatial scope of attention as well as temporal scope of attention. Reaction time of participant is treated as a time-series andHurst component is estimated to measure nature of long-range temporal correlations. Results show an interaction betweentask-demands and predictability of the environment on LRTC, suggesting that task-related constraints and environmentalconstraints are handled by interdependent processes

Encoding or Post Encoding Mechanisms Invoke Enhanced Memory for Event Boundaries?

We perceive our environment by breaking it down into segments known as events. Event segmentation influences memory by enhancing the retention of information at boundaries as compared to information that is contained within the boundaries of an event (the event boundary advantage). This effect has been attributed to changes in attention during perception of events. Prior studies have demonstrated greater attention while perceiving event boundaries but have failed to demonstrate attention as the underlying mechanism for the event-boundary advantage. Two behavioral experiments were conducted to investigate, a) whether the event boundary advantage is observed even for events that are perceived while performing a concurrent task? and b) Is there a decrease in the boundary advantage when the concurrent task complexity is increased? In both experiments, participants watched videos related to performance of daily tasks, while simultaneously performing a probe detection task; either a simple dot detection (Experiment 1) or a go/ no-go task (Experiment 2). The probe was presented either at an event boundary or at pre-defined non-boundary time point and the memory for both temporal locations was measured after the completion of the detection task. A mixed effects logistic regression revealed an interactive effect for both detection accuracy and the boundary advantage; probe detection at event boundaries remained unaffected throughout an event irrespective of the level of the task complexity while, contrary to prediction, a boundary advantage in memory was also observed. But detection and memory accuracy for non-boundaries decreased successively for both low and high secondary task complexity suggesting greater interference for processing non-boundary information. These results indicate that greater attention may not be the only predictor of better memory for event boundaries as postulated by Event Segmentation theory

Naturalizing sense of agency with a hierarchical event-control approach.

Unraveling the mechanisms underlying self and agency has been a difficult scientific problem. We argue for an event-control approach for naturalizing the sense of agency by focusing on the role of perception-action regularities present at different hierarchical levels and contributing to the sense of self as an agent. The amount of control at different levels of the control hierarchy determines the sense of agency. The current study investigates this approach in a set of two experiments using a scenario containing multiple agents sharing a common goal where one of the agents is partially controlled by the participant. The participant competed with other agents for achieving the goal and subsequently answered questions on identification (which agent was controlled by the participant), the degree to which they are confident about their identification (sense of identification) and the degree to which the participant believed he/she had control over his/her actions (sense of authorship). Results indicate a hierarchical relationship between goal-level control (higher level) and perceptual-motor control (lower level) for sense of agency. Sense of identification ratings increased with perceptual-motor control when the goal was not completed but did not vary with perceptual-motor control when the goal was completed. Sense of authorship showed a similar interaction effect only in experiment 2 that had only one competing agent unlike the larger number of competing agents in experiment 1. The effect of hierarchical control can also be seen in the misidentification pattern and misidentification was greater with the agent affording greater control. Results from the two studies support the event-control approach in understanding sense of agency as grounded in control. The study also offers a novel paradigm for empirically studying sense of agency and self