Effect of within-session breaks in play on responsible gambling behaviour during sustained monetary losses

Rapid, continuous gambling formats are associated with higher risks for gambling-related harm in terms of excessive monetary and time expenditure. The current study investigated the effect on gambling response latency and persistence, of a new form of within-game intervention that required players to actively engage in response inhibition via monitoring for stop signals. Seventy-four experienced electronic gaming machine gamblers, with a mean age of 35.28 years, were recruited to participate in a rapid, continuous gambling task where real money could be won and lost. Participants were randomly allocated to either the control condition where no intervention was presented, or either a condition with a passive three minute break in play or a condition with a three minute intervention that required participants to engage in response inhibition. Although there was no main effect for experimental condition on gambling persistence, both interventions were effective in elevating response latency during a period of sustained losses. It was concluded that within-game interventions that create an enforced break in play are effective in increasing response latency between bets during periods of sustained losses. Furthermore, within-game interventions that require active involvement appear to be more effective in increasing response latency than standard, passive breaks in play

Search procedures during haptic search in an unstructured 3D display

Moringen A, Haschke R, Ritter H. Search procedures during haptic search in an unstructured 3D display. In: Choi S, Kuchenbecker KJ, Gerling G, eds. 2016 IEEE Haptics Symposium (HAPTICS). Proceedings. IEEE; 2016

Primary somatosensory cortical processing in tactile communication

Touch is an essential form of non-verbal communication. While language and its neural basis are widely studied, tactile communication is less well understood. We used fMRI and multivariate pattern analyses in pairs of emotionally close adults to examine the neural basis of human-to-human tactile communication. In each pair, a participant was designated either as sender or as receiver. The sender was instructed to communicate specific messages by touching only the arm of the receiver, who was inside the scanner. The receiver then identified the message based on the touch expression alone. We designed two multivariate decoder algorithms – one based on the sender’s intent (sender-decoder), and another based on the receiver’s response (receiver-decoder). We identified several brain areas that significantly predicted behavioral accuracy of the receiver. Regarding our a priori region of interest, the receiver’s primary somatosensory cortex (S1), both decoders were able to accurately differentiate the messages based on neural activity patterns here. The receiver-decoder, which relied on the receivers’ interpretations of the touch expressions, outperformed the sender-decoder, which relied on the sender’s intent. Our results identified a network of brain areas involved in human-to-human tactile communication and supported the notion of non-sensory factors being represented in S1

The Language of Social Touch

This is the old location of the repository for the paper: McIntyre, S., Hauser, S. C., Kusztor, A., Boehme, R., Moungou, A., Isager, P. M., Homman, L., Novembre, G., Nagi, S. S., Israr, A., Lumpkin, E. A., Abnousi, F., Gerling, G. J., & Olausson, H. (2022). The Language of Social Touch Is Intuitive and Quantifiable. Psychological Science, 33(9), 09567976211059801. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976211059801 The old link was accidentally published in the paper text. Here you can find the repositories: Data: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.5630842.v3 Scripts and analysis: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.685592