Schadenfreude is higher in real-life situations compared to hypothetical scenarios

Schadenfreude (i.e., the pleasure derived from another's misfortune) has been widely studied by having participants imagine how they would feel in hypothetical scenarios describing another person's pain or misfortune. However, research on affective forecasting shows that self-judgments of emotions are inaccurate in hypothetical situations. Here we show a study in which we first presented a hypothetical schadenfreude situation and few months later, due to an exceptional circumstance, the situation turned out to happen in reality. This fortuitous circumstance allowed us to compare people's imagined emotional reactions with their actual feelings. Results showed that schadenfreude was higher in the real situation than in the hypothetical one. More importantly, participants used different proxies to predict their emotional reaction: while out-group dislike served as a proxy of schadenfreude in both types of scenario, the degree of in-group identification also increased schadenfreude in those who had experienced the real event, arguably a mechanism to promote positive self-evaluation. These results highlight the importance of assessing schadenfreude in the heat of the moment.Fil: González Gadea, María Luz. Universidad Favaloro; Argentina. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella; Argentina. Instituto de Neurología Cognitiva; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Ibañez, Agustin Mariano. Universidad Adolfo Ibañez; Chile. Universidad Autónoma Del Caribe; Colombia. Instituto de Neurología Cognitiva; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Sigman, Mariano. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

Bridging psychology and mathematics : can the brain understand the brain?

We are told scientists are divided into experimentalists and theoreticians. The dialectic description of the dynamics of science, with one tribe gathering data and collecting evidence and another tribe providing form to these observations, has striking examples that argue for the importance of synthesis. The 16th century revolution, which settled the way in which we see the sky today, is probably one of the best examples of how comparatively ineffective each of these tribes can be in isolation. Tycho Brahe, the exquisite observer, who built, calibrated, and refined instruments to see in the sky what no one else could, collected the evidence to prove a theory that Copernicus had already stated years before (in a book he dedicated to the Pope). It was only many years later that Galileo established the bridge between theory and observation; he understood the data in terms of the theory and thereby cemented the revolution. Copernicus's statements, showed Galileo, were not only figments of his imagination; they were an adequate description of the universe as he and Brahe had observedFil: Sigman, Mariano. Cognitive Neuroimaging Research Unit of l’Institut National de la Santé et de la recherche Médicale, Orsay, Franc

Corpus specificity in LSA and Word2vec: the role of out-of-domain documents

Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and Word2vec are some of the most widely used word embeddings. Despite the popularity of these techniques, the precise mechanisms by which they acquire new semantic relations between words remain unclear. In the present article we investigate whether LSA and Word2vec capacity to identify relevant semantic dimensions increases with size of corpus. One intuitive hypothesis is that the capacity to identify relevant dimensions should increase as the amount of data increases. However, if corpus size grow in topics which are not specific to the domain of interest, signal to noise ratio may weaken. Here we set to examine and distinguish these alternative hypothesis. To investigate the effect of corpus specificity and size in word-embeddings we study two ways for progressive elimination of documents: the elimination of random documents vs. the elimination of documents unrelated to a specific task. We show that Word2vec can take advantage of all the documents, obtaining its best performance when it is trained with the whole corpus. On the contrary, the specialization (removal of out-of-domain documents) of the training corpus, accompanied by a decrease of dimensionality, can increase LSA word-representation quality while speeding up the processing time. Furthermore, we show that the specialization without the decrease in LSA dimensionality can produce a strong performance reduction in specific tasks. From a cognitive-modeling point of view, we point out that LSA's word-knowledge acquisitions may not be efficiently exploiting higher-order co-occurrences and global relations, whereas Word2vec does

Mind Reading: a neurophilosophical perspective

Hasta ahora, el acceso a otras mentes presuponía las expresiones y narraciones de los individuos. En la actualidad, se han desarrollado varios métodos que pueden medir los estados cerebrales relevantes para valorar las facultades mentales sin que se manifieste en 1ª persona habla o comportamiento externo alguno. La resonancia magnética funcional y el condicionamiento de huella se emplean fuera del ámbito clínico para acceder a la conciencia subjetiva; se utilizan clínicamente para identificar patrones de actividad en el cerebro que sugieran la presencia de conciencia en personas que sufren trastornos graves de conciencia y métodos para comunicarse cerebralmente con pacientes con incapacidad motora para comunicarse. En este capítulo, examinamos las posibilidades y los límites del acceso a otras mentes mediante interfaces cerebro-máquina. Exponemos que estas técnicas auguran importantes avances médicos y abren nuevas perspectivas de comunicación y para entender la conciencia, sin embargo, también plantean preocupaciones éticas, en especial el uso incorrecto como consecuencia de las expectativas creadas y las malas interpretacionesHasta ahora, el acceso a otras mentes presuponía las expresiones y narraciones de los individuos. En la actualidad, se han desarrollado varios métodos que pueden medir los estados cerebrales relevantes para valorar las facultades mentales sin que se manifieste en 1ª persona habla o comportamiento externo alguno. La resonancia magnética funcional y el condicionamiento de huella se emplean fuera del ámbito clínico para acceder a la conciencia subjetiva; se utilizan clínicamente para identificar patrones de actividad en el cerebro que sugieran la presencia de conciencia en personas que sufren trastornos graves de conciencia y métodos para comunicarse cerebralmente con pacientes con incapacidad motora para comunicarse. En este capítulo, examinamos las posibilidades y los límites del acceso a otras mentes mediante interfaces cerebro-máquina. Exponemos que estas técnicas auguran importantes avances médicos y abren nuevas perspectivas de comunicación y para entender la conciencia, sin embargo, también plantean preocupaciones éticas, en especial el uso incorrecto como consecuencia de las expectativas creadas y las malas interpretaciones.Access to other minds once presupposed other individuals’ expressions and narrations. Today, several methods have been developed which can measure brain states relevant for assessments of mental states without 1st person overt external behavior or speech. Functional magnetic resonance imaging and trace conditioning are used non-clinically to access subjective awareness; they are used clinically to identify patterns of activity in the brain that suggest the presence of consciousness in people suffering from severe consciousness disorders and methods to communicate cerebrally with patients who are motorically unable to communicate. In this chapter, we inspect possibilities and limits of brain-machine interface access to other minds. We argue that these techniques hold promises of important medical breakthroughs, open up new vistas of communication, and of understanding consciousness, yet they also give rise to ethical concerns, notably misuse as a consequence of hypes and misinterpretations

Dynamics of the Central Bottleneck: Dual-Task and Task Uncertainty

Why is the human brain fundamentally limited when attempting to execute two tasks at the same time or in close succession? Two classical paradigms, psychological refractory period (PRP) and task switching, have independently approached this issue, making significant advances in our understanding of the architecture of cognition. Yet, there is an apparent contradiction between the conclusions derived from these two paradigms. The PRP paradigm, on the one hand, suggests that the simultaneous execution of two tasks is limited solely by a passive structural bottleneck in which the tasks are executed on a first-come, first-served basis. The task-switching paradigm, on the other hand, argues that switching back and forth between task configurations must be actively controlled by a central executive system (the system controlling voluntary, planned, and flexible action). Here we have explicitly designed an experiment mixing the essential ingredients of both paradigms: task uncertainty and task simultaneity. In addition to a central bottleneck, we obtain evidence for active processes of task setting (planning of the appropriate sequence of actions) and task disengaging (suppression of the plan set for the first task in order to proceed with the next one). Our results clarify the chronometric relations between these central components of dual-task processing, and in particular whether they operate serially or in parallel. On this basis, we propose a hierarchical model of cognitive architecture that provides a synthesis of task-switching and PRP paradigms

Social validation influences individuals’ judgments about ownership

In all domains, from informal to formal, there are conflicts about property and ownership which resolution demands consideration of alleged claims from more than one party. In this work we asked adults (N = 359) to judge cases in which a character held a property claim over an item, but is challenged by a second character who holds a different, subsequent claim over it. The specific goal of this work is to investigate how the resolution of such conflicts depends on the social endorsement of ownership claims. To achieve this aim, we designed variations of conflictive situations over property in which we manipulated details regarding the knowledge of the second agent of other third-parties about the first agent’s actions. In essence, our questions were: if an agent claims ownership of something which has a previous property claim on (1) does it matter whether said agent knew of the first’s agent actions or not? And (2) does it matter whether third parties were aware or notified of the first one’s claim? The results confirm that adults resolve the settling of property rights based not only on the nature of ownership claims but also on the social acknowledgment of such claims, in accordance with what is stipulated in legal systems worldwide. Participants considered the second character in the stories to hold a lesser right over the object under dispute when she knew of the first character’s claim. Participants also considered that the first character’s claim was reinforced when there were witnesses for her actions, but not when third parties were merely communicated of such actions. This is the first study to our knowledge that studies how social validation of ownership claims drives adults’ judgments on property claims.Fil: Casiraghi, Leandro Pablo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires; Argentina. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella; ArgentinaFil: Faigenbaum, Gustavo. Universidad Autónoma de Entre Ríos. Facultad de Humanidades Artes y Ciencias Sociales; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Chehtman, Alejandro Eduardo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. University Torcuato Di Tella; ArgentinaFil: Sigman, Mariano. University Torcuato Di Tella; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

Parsing a Cognitive Task: A Characterization of the Mind's Bottleneck

Parsing a mental operation into components, characterizing the parallel or serial nature of this flow, and understanding what each process ultimately contributes to response time are fundamental questions in cognitive neuroscience. Here we show how a simple theoretical model leads to an extended set of predictions concerning the distribution of response time and its alteration by simultaneous performance of another task. The model provides a synthesis of psychological refractory period and random-walk models of response time. It merely assumes that a task consists of three consecutive stages—perception, decision based on noisy integration of evidence, and response—and that the perceptual and motor stages can operate simultaneously with stages of another task, while the central decision process constitutes a bottleneck. We designed a number-comparison task that provided a thorough test of the model by allowing independent variations in number notation, numerical distance, response complexity, and temporal asynchrony relative to an interfering probe task of tone discrimination. The results revealed a parsing of the comparison task in which each variable affects only one stage. Numerical distance affects the integration process, which is the only step that cannot proceed in parallel and has a major contribution to response time variability. The other stages, mapping the numeral to an internal quantity and executing the motor response, can be carried out in parallel with another task. Changing the duration of these processes has no significant effect on the variance

Bridging Psychology and Mathematics: Can the Brain Understand the Brain?

Mathematical measures of complexity shed light on why some concepts are inherently more difficult to learn than other