Foreword for a sixty-year-old triangle

Il contributo presenta la traduzione in inglese del testo, apparso in italiano nel 1954, in cui Gaetano Kanizsa pubblicava per la prima volta il triangolo illusorio

Ovvio e condiviso?

L'articolo discute una tesi sostenuta da Emiliani e Mazzara nel loro articolo bersaglio: quella secondo cui l'approccio neuroscientifico alla dimensione sociale della mente concepisce l'ambiente soltanto come somma di stimoli elementari. Viene evidenziata la debolezza di tale tesi e di altre affermazioni contenute nell'articolo bersaglio, in particolare di quelle tendenti a contrapporre natura biologica e natura sociale

Comparative Psychology: A Perspective Rather than a Discipline. Commentary: A Crisis in Comparative Psychology: Where Have All the Undergraduates Gone?

We criticize two assumptions behind Abramson's emphasis on an academic crisis of comparative psychology: the identification of psychology with the study of behavior; the idea that the study of cognition is based on \u201csuppositions\u201d and \u201cbeliefs\u201d (in Abramson\u2019s words). To answer all Tinbergen\u2019s questions, comparative psychology should complement other perspectives and intersect various levels of analysis (neural, genetic, ecological, evolutionary)

Information-Seeking Time: Only a Subset of Home Page Elements Matters

During goal oriented web navigation does the competition for web selection depend on all navigation options or only those options which are more likely to be functional for information seeking? Here we provide evidence in favour of the latter alternative. Within a representative set of real web sites of variable breadth, the time required to reach a goal located at the depth of two clicks from the home page is accounted for by C, an objective measure of the complexity of the start page, based on the number of links weighted by the number and type of embedding web elements. Our results demonstrate how focusing on links while ignoring other web elements optimizes the deployment of attentional resources necessary to navigation

The Motor Action Mood Induction Procedure Affects the Detection of Facial Emotions

Fantoni and Gerbino (2014) showed that subtle postural shifts associated with reaching can have a strong hedonic impact and affect the actor's global experience. Using a novel Motor Action Mood Induction Procedure (MAMIP), they adapted participants to comfortable/uncomfortable visually-guided reaches and obtained consistent mood-congruency effects in the identification of facial emotions: a face perceived as neutral in a baseline condition appeared slightly happy after comfortable actions and slightly angry after uncomfortable actions. Here, using a detection task, we showed that moodcongruent effects following MAMIP included sensitivity changes, indicating that action affected perception, rather than simply biasing participant’s responses. Such results suggest that models of perceived facial emotions should include action-induced mood as a predictor and support strong links between body feelings and valence of the social environment

Auditory Modeling in Sport: Theoretical Framework and Practical Applications

Visual models, i.e. live demonstrations or film clips, are widely used in sport as training instruments. Nevertheless, in recent years some research demonstrated that the well known property of sounds to effectively represent the temporal structure of a given task and to promote its accurate reproduction, is not valid only for simple motor gestures, but also for the complex movements that characterize sport performances. As a consequence, there is a growing interest towards the study and the implementation of auditory models as an alternative to the visual ones traditionally used. The present work begin by theoretically frameworking the use of auditory modeling in sport according to the Theory of Event Coding. Then, some of the practical applications of the two auditory modeling techniques, i.e. Movement Sonification and Second Order Biofeedback, are synthetically reviewed

Reflective Thinking and Simulated Driving: The Importance of Answering Questions

3noRisky driving behaviors are common among young people, who tend to exhibit excessive speeding, speeding for the thrill, driving too close to the followed vehicle, driving while using a mobile phone, and to violate other road traffic rules. Here, consistently with the question-behavior effect [1, 2 ] we ask whether a specific action of a prevention program involving reflective thinking [3] (i.e., answering a questionnaire on driving and traffic safety) can alert participants and induce a concern capable of modifying simulated driving performance. A sample of 116 high school students, including 46 with car driving licence (DL), participated in two sessions of simulated driving tests, separated by a 60-min rest period during which they answered a written questionnaire on either driving safety (24/31 with/without DL) or ICT (22/39 with/without DL). A simulator – designed by ACI safe driving center at Vallelunga – supported realistic driving experience in urban, suburban, and motorway critical situations and the recording of several test parameters: speed and braking reaction time for emergency braking; number of offences (excess speeding, unsignaled lane change, collision, traveling in the emergency lane) for motorway driving. Simulated driving behavior of young adults (with/without driving license) proved to be malleable. Participants who answered the driving safety questionnaire changed their performance towards greater carefulness in the second session, compared to participants in the control group who answered the ICT questionnaire. The Session × Questionnaire interaction was significant (p < 0.001) for both travelling speed and braking reaction time. In the pre-questionnaire session travelling speed was in the 50-52 km/h range, with licence holders driving slightly faster; in the post-questionnaire session participants who answered the driving safety questionnaire (presumably, thinking about risky behaviors and their effects) slowed down, while participants in the control group (induced to think about ICT) increased they average speed. In the second session participants who answered the driving safety questionnaire reacted to the “Brake” signal much faster (from about 860 ms to 760 ms), while participants who answered the ICT questionnaire reacted slightly slower (from about 800 ms to 830 ms). The overall number of offenses decreased in all participants, with a stronger benefit in participants who answered the driving safety questionnaire. In general, driving licence ownership had limited effects on change of simulated driving behavior during participation in a prevention program. Our study provides strong support for the occurrence of a question-behavior effect within the context of a safe driving program. Results and conclusions are consistent with previous research in which behavioral changes were self-reported [2], but constitute a more convincing source of evidence, given that in our study the dependent measures were referred to objective measures of driving performance (not subjective evaluations) and obtained effects emerged from an experimental design including a control group involved in reflective thinking on a topic only partially related to road safety. [1] Sprott,D.E., Spangenberg, E.R., Block, L.G., Fitzsimons, G.J., Morwitz, V.G., Williams, P. (2006). The question-behavior effect: What we know and where we go from here. Social Influence, 1, 128-137 [2] Falk, B. (2009). Does answering a questionnaire promote traffic safety? In Jern, S. & Näslund, J. (Eds.). (2009). Dynamics Within and Outside the Lab. Proceedings from The 6h Nordic Conference on Group and Social Psychology, May 2008, Lund, pp 67-80. [3] Porter B.E. (2011). Handbook of Traffic Psychology. Elsevier.openopenTamburini, Laura; Fantoni, Carlo; Gerbino, WalterTamburini, Laura; Fantoni, Carlo; Gerbino, Walte

Amodal completion of coincidentally occluded angles: a matter of visual approximation

In the Gerbino illusion a regular but coincidentally occluded polygon appears distorted. Such a display represents a critical condition for amodal completion (AC), in which the smooth continuations of contour fragments—however small—conflict with their possible monotonic interpolation. Smoothness and monotonicity are considered the fundamental constraints of AC at the contour level. To account for the Gerbino illusion we contrasted two models derived from alternative AC frameworks: visual interpolation, based on the literal representation of contour fragments, vs. visual approximation, which tolerates a small misorientation of contour fragments, compatible with smoothness and monotonicity constraints. To measure the perceived misorientation of sides of coincidentally occluded angles we introduced a novel technique for analyzing data from a multiple probe adjustment task. An unsupervised cluster analysis of errors in extrapolation and tilt adjustments revealed that the distortion observed in the Gerbino illusion is consistent with visual approximation and, in particular, with the concatenation of misoriented and locally shrinked amodally completed angles. Implications of our technique and obtained results shed new light on visual completion processes