Relationship between self-evaluative components and moderating contextual factors among university student gymnasium exercisers

Regular physical activity (PA) is known to improve psychological traits such as self-esteem (SE), body image (BI) and body satisfaction (BS). However, there are apparent mixed reports about the role of PA in promoting psychosocial wellbeing and moderating factors. This study investigated the relationship between SE, BI and BS of gym exercisers at a university and contextual factors of exercise principles; frequency, duration and types of activity, and participants’ demographics variables. Rosenberg self-esteem scale, Body image questionnaire and Body satisfaction Scale were administered among randomly selected gym exercisers (n = 92); 60(65.2%) males and 32(34.8 %.) females, aged between 15 and 30 years. Self-esteem showed significant correlations with BS (r = 0.237, p = .023) and with BI (r = 0.287, p = .006). Body satisfaction mean scores were significantly different across duration of exercise sessions (F=3.672, p=.008) in favour of 1.5-hour gym sessions compared to longer or shorter ones. Substantial differences were also observed in BI across favourite physical activities (F = 3.224, p = .026) with post hoc showing Zumba scoring highest. Regression analyses showed significant influence of exercise type (Adjusted R Squared = .040, Beta = .239, p = .023) and gender (Adjusted R Squared = .054, Beta = .239, p = .023) on BI scores. Type and duration of exercise and gender have moderating effects on self-evaluative components. Gym instructors and stakeholders should consider duration for each type of exercise in fitness programmes to optimise participants’ wellbeing. Exercise counselling regarding participants’ self-evaluative components and how these could affect their mental health and overall quality of life in different social-cultural settings need to be explored in future studies

Switch or stay? Automatic classification of internal mental states in bistable perception

The human brain goes through numerous cognitive states, most of these being hidden or implicit while performing a task, and understanding them is of great practical importance. However, identifying internal mental states is quite challenging as these states are difficult to label, usually short-lived, and generally, overlap with other tasks. One such problem pertains to bistable perception, which we consider to consist of two internal mental states, namely, transition and maintenance. The transition state is short-lived and represents a change in perception while the maintenance state is comparatively longer and represents a stable perception. In this study, we proposed a novel approach for characterizing the duration of transition and maintenance states and classified them from the neuromagnetic brain responses. Participants were presented with various types of ambiguous visual stimuli on which they indicated the moments of perceptual switches, while their magnetoencephalogram (MEG) data were recorded. We extracted different spatio-temporal features based on wavelet transform, and classified transition and maintenance states on a trial-by-trial basis. We obtained a classification accuracy of 79.58% and 78.40% using SVM and ANN classifiers, respectively. Next, we investigated the temporal fluctuations of these internal mental representations as captured by our classifier model and found that the accuracy showed a decreasing trend as the maintenance state was moved towards the next transition state. Further, to identify the neural sources corresponding to these internal mental states, we performed source analysis on MEG signals. We observed the involvement of sources from the parietal lobe, occipital lobe, and cerebellum in distinguishing transition and maintenance states. Cross-conditional classification analysis established generalization potential of wavelet features. Altogether, this study presents an automatic classification of endogenous mental states involved in bistable perception by establishing brain-behavior relationships at the single-trial level

錯視と圏論

Tsuchiya and Saigo (2019) proposed the idea that the category theory is the powerful tool for scientific approach towards the mystery of consciousness. Perception, illusion, and consciousness are closely related, and so they also analyzed how to understand the phenomena in some types of visual illusion in terms of the category theory. In this commentary, I discuss about some perceptual phenomena and their theories, such as visual illusion, perceptual constancy, bistable figures, and ill-posed problem of perception, and the limitation of the current theory. Although the power of category theory in the cognitive science is still unclear, I also discuss the potential of category theory to understand illusion and perception from different viewpoint than the existing theories

新しくて古い心理学のかたち

本稿では再現可能性を念頭に置いたエビンデスの強さ及びエビデンスと理論との整合性、この両者の上に共有可能で透明なエビデンスの信頼性評価システムを構築することの意義を論じた。そこでは医学研究に倣ったエビデンスレベルという概念の導入と、理論との整合性も含めた外的要因による確実性評価、そしてそれら評価基準を研究者個人の内的なものとせずに明確化して共有することが重要であり、理論同士の密な結合が必要である

Gaze Cueing by Pareidolia Faces

Visual images that are not faces are sometimes perceived as faces (the pareidolia phenomenon). While the pareidolia phenomenon provides people with a strong impression that a face is present, it is unclear how deeply pareidolia faces are processed as faces. In the present study, we examined whether a shift in spatial attention would be produced by gaze cueing of face-like objects. A robust cueing effect was observed when the face-like objects were perceived as faces. The magnitude of the cueing effect was comparable between the face-like objects and a cartoon face. However, the cueing effect was eliminated when the observer did not perceive the objects as faces. These results demonstrated that pareidolia faces do more than give the impression of the presence of faces; indeed, they trigger an additional face-specific attentional process

Seeing Objects as Faces Enhances Object Detection

The face is a special visual stimulus. Both bottom-up processes for low-level facial features and top-down modulation by face expectations contribute to the advantages of face perception. However, it is hard to dissociate the top-down factors from the bottom-up processes, since facial stimuli mandatorily lead to face awareness. In the present study, using the face pareidolia phenomenon, we demonstrated that face awareness, namely seeing an object as a face, enhances object detection performance. In face pareidolia, some people see a visual stimulus, for example, three dots arranged in V shape, as a face, while others do not. This phenomenon allows us to investigate the effect of face awareness leaving the stimulus per se unchanged. Participants were asked to detect a face target or a triangle target. While target per se was identical between the two tasks, the detection sensitivity was higher when the participants recognized the target as a face. This was the case irrespective of the stimulus eccentricity or the vertical orientation of the stimulus. These results demonstrate that seeing an object as a face facilitates object detection via top-down modulation. The advantages of face perception are, therefore, at least partly, due to face awareness