I see what you mean

The ability to understand and predict others' behavior is essential for successful interactions. When making predictions about what other humans will do, we treat them as intentional systems and adopt the intentional stance, i.e., refer to their mental states such as desires and intentions. In the present experiments, we investigated whether the mere belief that the observed agent is an intentional system influences basic social attention mechanisms. We presented pictures of a human and a robot face in a gaze cuing paradigm and manipulated the likelihood of adopting the intentional stance by instruction: in some conditions, participants were told that they were observing a human or a robot, in others, that they were observing a human-like mannequin or a robot whose eyes were controlled by a human. In conditions in which participants were made to believe they were observing human behavior (intentional stance likely) gaze cuing effects were significantly larger as compared to conditions when adopting the intentional stance was less likely. This effect was independent of whether a human or a robot face was presented. Therefore, we conclude that adopting the intentional stance when observing others' behavior fundamentally influences basic mechanisms of social attention. The present results provide striking evidence that high-level cognitive processes, such as beliefs, modulate bottom-up mechanisms of attentional selection in a top-down manner

Enhancing Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) ambition for soil organic carbon protection and sequestration

An estimated 18 to 37 billion tons of carbon could be sequestered in croplands globally over the next 20 years by implementing best practices for soil organic carbon (SOC) sequestration (Zomer et al. 2017). In addition, more than 380 billion tons of carbon are at risk of loss from carbon dense peatlands in the top 20 countries with the largest peatland stocks alone (Crump 2017). SOC protection and sequestration are therefore major greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation options, especially to contribute to the negative emissions needed to achieve the 2050 global policy targets. Increasing SOC levels can also provide substantial additional benefits for adaptation, food security and biodiversity, including nutrient cycling and water availability

What we observe is biased by what other people tell us: beliefs about the reliability of gaze behavior modulate attentional orienting to gaze cues

For effective social interactions with other people, information about the physical environment must be integrated with information about the interaction partner. In order to achieve this, processing of social information is guided by two components: a bottom-up mechanism reflexively triggered by stimulus-related information in the social scene and a top-down mechanism activated by task-related context information. In the present study, we investigated whether these components interact during attentional orienting to gaze direction. In particular, we examined whether the spatial specificity of gaze cueing is modulated by expectations about the reliability of gaze behavior. Expectations were either induced by instruction or could be derived from experience with displayed gaze behavior. Spatially specific cueing effects were observed with highly predictive gaze cues, but also when participants merely believed that actually non-predictive cues were highly predictive. Conversely, cueing effects for the whole gazed-at hemifield were observed with non-predictive gaze cues, and spatially specific cueing effects were attenuated when actually predictive gaze cues were believed to be non-predictive. This pattern indicates that (i) information about cue predictivity gained from sampling gaze behavior across social episodes can be incorporated in the attentional orienting to social cues, and that (ii) beliefs about gaze behavior modulate attentional orienting to gaze direction even when they contradict information available from social episodes

Attitudes of medical students towards general practice: Effects of gender, a general practice clerkship and a modern curriculum

Aims: Planning a career in general practice depends on positive attitudes towards primary care. The aim of this study was to compare attitudes of medical students of a Modern Curriculum at Hannover Medical School with those of the Traditional Curriculum before (pre) and after (post) a three-week clerkship in general practice. In parallel, we aimed to analyse several other variables such as age and gender, which could influence the attitudes

Assessment of agricultural policies to implement soil organic carbon (SOC) commitments in NDCs: Examples from Brazil and Rwanda

Countries with national agricultural policies providing quantified SOC-related mitigation actions and commitments can increase NDC transparency by referring to such policies and associated actions in their NDCs. Brazil’s updated NDC set an absolute economy-wide mitigation target and for the 2020-2030 period, the ABC+ Plan sets out SOC-related mitigation actions and commitment targets to reduce agricultural GHG emissions for which an MRV mechanism is under development. In Rwanda, quantified SOC-related mitigation actions and an MRV Framework were developed as part of the NDC update process, however, this SOC-related information is not fully reflected in Rwanda’s latest Strategic Plan for Agriculture Transformation, which was published two years prior to the updated NDC. NDC development can be a driver for national SOC-related projects, actions, commitments, mitigation potentials and MRV mechanisms. For developing countries, this process can be enhanced through support programs for NDC development. In countries where quantifying SOC-related agricultural actions is driven by NDC development, relevant agricultural policies need to be updated and aligned to support NDC implementation

Beliefs about the Minds of Others Influence How We Process Sensory Information

Attending where others gaze is one of the most fundamental mechanisms of social cognition. The present study is the first to examine the impact of the attribution of mind to others on gaze-guided attentional orienting and its ERP correlates. Using a paradigm in which attention was guided to a location by the gaze of a centrally presented face, we manipulated participants' beliefs about the gazer: gaze behavior was believed to result either from operations of a mind or from a machine. In Experiment 1, beliefs were manipulated by cue identity (human or robot), while in Experiment 2, cue identity (robot) remained identical across conditions and beliefs were manipulated solely via instruction, which was irrelevant to the task. ERP results and behavior showed that participants' attention was guided by gaze only when gaze was believed to be controlled by a human. Specifically, the P1 was more enhanced for validly, relative to invalidly, cued targets only when participants believed the gaze behavior was the result of a mind, rather than of a machine. This shows that sensory gain control can be influenced by higher-order (task-irrelevant) beliefs about the observed scene. We propose a new interdisciplinary model of social attention, which integrates ideas from cognitive and social neuroscience, as well as philosophy in order to provide a framework for understanding a crucial aspect of how humans' beliefs about the observed scene influence sensory processing

Ambition for soil organic carbon sequestration in the new and updated nationally determined contributions 2020- 2021: Analysis of agricultural sub-sectors in national climate change strategies

Key messages - The share of countries that referenced soil organic carbon (SOC) in new and updated NDCs has increased since the previous round of NDCs. - Among the top 10 countries with the highest mitigation potential for SOC in croplands and grasslands, 6 referred to SOC in mitigation measures. - Among the top 10 countries with the highest mitigation potential in wetlands, 5 referred to wetlands in mitigation measures. - SOC commitments that demonstrated high standards, which may indicate options for other countries, included quantified outcomes, information on reference levels of indicators, mitigation potentials, and policies. - Specification of sub-sector actions in NDCs can improve eligibility for climate finance, but this level of detail can reduce countries’ flexibility for meeting their NDC targets and countries often lack affordable, robust monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) systems

Gaze following is modulated by expectations regarding others’ action goals

Humans attend to social cues in order to understand and predict others' behavior. Facial expressions and gaze direction provide valuable information to infer others' mental states and intentions. The present study examined the mechanism of gaze following in the context of participants' expectations about successive action steps of an observed actor. We embedded a gaze-cueing manipulation within an action scenario consisting of a sequence of naturalistic photographs. Gaze-induced orienting of attention (gaze following) was analyzed with respect to whether the gaze behavior of the observed actor was in line or not with the action-related expectations of participants (i.e., whether the actor gazed at an object that was congruent or incongruent with an overarching action goal). In Experiment 1, participants followed the gaze of the observed agent, though the gaze-cueing effect was larger when the actor looked at an action-congruent object relative to an incongruent object. Experiment 2 examined whether the pattern of effects observed in Experiment 1 was due to covert, rather than overt, attentional orienting, by requiring participants to maintain eye fixation throughout the sequence of critical photographs (corroborated by monitoring eye movements). The essential pattern of results of Experiment 1 was replicated, with the gaze-cueing effect being completely eliminated when the observed agent gazed at an action-incongruent object. Thus, our findings show that covert gaze following can be modulated by expectations that humans hold regarding successive steps of the action performed by an observed agent