A perceptual glitch in serial perception generates temporal distortions

Precisely estimating event timing is essential for survival, yet temporal distortions are ubiquitous in our daily sensory experience. Here, we tested whether the relative position, duration, and distance in time of two sequentially-organized events—standard S, with constant duration, and comparison C, with duration varying trial-by-trial—are causal factors in generating temporal distortions. We found that temporal distortions emerge when the first event is shorter than the second event. Importantly, a significant interaction suggests that a longer inter-stimulus interval (ISI) helps to counteract such serial distortion effect only when the constant S is in the first position, but not if the unpredictable C is in the first position. These results imply the existence of a perceptual bias in perceiving ordered event durations, mechanistically contributing to distortion in time perception. We simulated our behavioral results with a Bayesian model and replicated the finding that participants disproportionately expand first-position dynamic (unpredictable) short events. Our results clarify the mechanisms generating time distortions by identifying a hitherto unknown duration-dependent encoding inefficiency in human serial temporal perception, something akin to a strong prior that can be overridden for highly predictable sensory events but unfolds for unpredictable ones

Gesture's body orientation modulates the N400 for visual sentences primed by gestures

Body orientation of gesture entails social‐communicative intention, and may thus influence how gestures are perceived and comprehended together with auditory speech during face‐to‐face communication. To date, despite the emergence of neuroscientific literature on the role of body orientation on hand action perception, limited studies have directly investigated the role of body orientation in the interaction between gesture and language. To address this research question, we carried out an electroencephalography (EEG) experiment presenting to participants (n = 21) videos of frontal and lateral communicative hand gestures of 5 s (e.g., raising a hand), followed by visually presented sentences that are either congruent or incongruent with the gesture (e.g., “the mountain is high/low…”). Participants underwent a semantic probe task, judging whether a target word is related or unrelated to the gesture‐sentence event. EEG results suggest that, during the perception phase of handgestures, while both frontal and lateral gestures elicited a power decrease in both the alpha (8–12 Hz) and the beta (16–24 Hz) bands, lateral versus frontal gestures elicited reduced power decrease in the beta band, source‐located to the medial prefrontal cortex. For sentence comprehension, at the critical word whose meaning is congruent/incongruent with the gesture prime, frontal gestures elicited an N400 effect for gesture‐sentence incongruency. More importantly, this incongruency effect was significantly reduced for lateral gestures. These findings suggest that body orientation plays an important role in gesture perception, and that its inferred social‐communicative intention may influence gesture‐language interaction at semantic level

Full throttle:Demonstrating the speed, accuracy, and validity of a new method for continuous two-dimensional self-report and annotation

Research on fine-grained dynamic psychological processes has increasingly come to rely on continuous self-report measures. Recent studies have extended continuous self-report methods to simultaneously collecting ratings on two dimensions of an experience. For all the variety of approaches, several limitations are inherent to most of them. First, current methods are primarily suited for bipolar, as opposed to unipolar, constructs. Second, respondents report on two dimensions using one hand, which may produce method driven error, including spurious relationships between the two dimensions. Third, two-dimensional reports have primarily been validated for consistency between reporters, rather than the predictive validity of idiosyncratic responses. In a series of tasks, the study reported here addressed these limitations by comparing a previously used method to a newly developed two-handed method, and by explicitly testing the validity of continuous two-dimensional responses. Results show that our new method is easier to use, faster, more accurate, with reduced method-driven dependence between the two dimensions, and preferred by participants. The validity of two-dimensional responding was also demonstrated in comparison to one-dimensional reporting, and in relation to post hoc ratings. Together, these findings suggest that our two-handed method for two-dimensional continuous ratings is a powerful and reliable tool for future research

PHYTOCHEMICAL SCREENING AND ANTIMICROBIAL ACTIVITY OF BLUMEA MOLLIS (D.DON) MERRILL

Objective: The objective of this research was to carry out the preliminary phytochemical screening and to evaluate the antimicrobial activity of the methanolic extract of the Blumea mollis. Methods: In the present work, the phytochemicals of the whole plant were extracted using petroleum ether, chloroform, methanol, ethanol, and distilled water. These were then screened for triterpenes/steroids, alkaloids, anthraquinones, coumarins, flavonoids, saponins, tannins, and phenolic acids using standard methods. Further, the antimicrobial activity of the methanolic extract was determined using Gram-positive and negative bacteria. Agar well diffusion method was employed for antimicrobial activity study, and the zone of inhibition was found out. Results: The intensity of the color produced or the precipitate formed was used as the analytical response to these tests. Flavonoids, tannins, and phenolic acids showed positive results for phytochemical screening. The concentration of total phenols and flavonoids of the decoction was 45.5±0.2000 μg/ml gallic acid equivalent and 42.3±0.3606 μg/ml quercetin equivalent, respectively. Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, and Candida albicans were inhibited by the methanolic extract of B. mollis in agar well diffusion test. Conclusion: The results of the present study showed that the methanolic extract of B. mollis contains glycosides, phenolics, tannins, and flavonoids. Plant possesses significant antibacterial and antifungal property; the potent antimicrobial activity of the plant could be attributed to the presence of flavonoids and phenolic compounds in it

Seven-year-olds’ recollection of non-adjacent dependencies after overnight retention

Becoming a successful speaker depends on acquiring and learning grammatical dependencies between neighboring and non-neighboring linguistic elements (non-adjacent dependencies; NADs). Previous studies have demonstrated children’s and adults’ ability to distinguish NADs from NAD violations right after familiarization. However, demonstrating NAD-recollection and processing after retention is crucial to demonstrate NAD-learning. We tested 7-year-old’s NAD-learning in a natural, non-native language on one day and NADrecollection on the next day by means of event-related potentials (ERPs). Our results revealed ERPs with a more positive amplitude to NAD violations than correct NADs after familiarization on day one, but ERPs with a more negative amplitude to NAD violations on day two. This change from more positive to more negative ERPs to NAD violations possibly indicates that children’s representations of NADs changed during an overnight retention period, potentially associated with children’s NAD-learning. Indeed, both ERP patterns (i.e., day one: positive, day two: negative) were related to stronger behavioral improvement (i.e., more correct answers on day two compared to day one) in a grammaticality judgment task from day one to day two. We suggest these findings to indicate that children showing more correct answers at day two, compared to day one, successfully built associative representations of NADs on day one and then successfully strengthened these associations during overnight retention, revealing NAD-recollection on day two. The present results suggest that 7-year-olds readily track NADs in a natural, non-native language and are able to show recollection after a retention period involving sleep, providing strong evidence of NAD recollection

Experiencing musical beauty: emotional subtypes and their physiological and musico-acoustic correlates

A listener’s aesthetic engagement with a musical piece often reaches peaks in response to passages experienced as especially beautiful. The present study examined the extent to which responses to such self-identified beautiful passages (BPs), in self-selected music, may be distinguishable in terms of their affective qualities. In an online survey, participants indicated pieces in which they considered specific passages to be outstandingly beautiful. In the lab, they listened to these pieces while physiological recordings were taken. Afterwards, they provided ratings on their experience of the BPs, where items targeted emotion response, underlying engagement mechanisms, and aesthetic evaluation. Cluster-analyses based on emotion ratings suggested three BP subtypes that we labelled low-Tension-low-Energy (LTLE), low-Tension-high-Energy (LTHE) and high-Tension-high-Energy (HTHE) BPs. LTHE and HTHE BPs induced greater interest and were more liked than LTLE BPs. Further, LTHE and HTHE clusters were associated with increases in skin-conductance, in accordance with the higher arousal reported for these BPs, while LTLE BPs resulted in the increases in smiling and respiration-rate previously associated with processing fluency and positive valence. LTLE BPs were also shown to be lower in tempo and polyphony than the other BP types. Finally, while both HTHE and LTHE BPs were associated with changes in dynamics, they nevertheless also showed distinct patterns whereby HTHE BPs were associated with increases in pitch register and LTHE BPs, with reductions in harmonic ambiguity. Thus, in line with our assumption that there is more than one kind of experience of musical beauty, our study reveals three distinct subtypes, distinguishable on a range of facets