Being-in-the-world-with: Presence Meets Social And Cognitive Neuroscience

In this chapter we will discuss the concepts of “presence” (Inner Presence) and “social presence” (Co-presence) within a cognitive and ecological perspective. Specifically, we claim that the concepts of “presence” and “social presence” are the possible links between self, action, communication and culture. In the first section we will provide a capsule view of Heidegger’s work by examining the two main features of the Heideggerian concept of “being”: spatiality and “being with”. We argue that different visions from social and cognitive sciences – Situated Cognition, Embodied Cognition, Enactive Approach, Situated Simulation, Covert Imitation - and discoveries from neuroscience – Mirror and Canonical Neurons - have many contact points with this view. In particular, these data suggest that our conceptual system dynamically produces contextualized representations (simulations) that support grounded action in different situations. This is allowed by a common coding – the motor code – shared by perception, action and concepts. This common coding also allows the subject for natively recognizing actions done by other selves within the phenomenological contents. In this picture we argue that the role of presence and social presence is to allow the process of self-identification through the separation between “self” and “other,” and between “internal” and “external”. Finally, implications of this position for communication and media studies are discussed by way of conclusion

Media Presence and Inner Presence: The Sense of Presence in Virtual Reality Technologies

Abstract. Presence is widely accepted as the key concept to be considered in any research involving human interaction with Virtual Reality (VR). Since its original description, the concept of presence has developed over the past decade to be considered by many researchers as the essence of any experience in a virtual environment. The VR generating systems comprise two main parts: a technological component and a psychological experience. The different relevance given to them produced two different but coexisting visions of presence: the rationalist and the psychological/ecological points of view. The rationalist point of view considers a VR system as a collection of specific machines with the necessity of the inclusion \ud of the concept of presence. The researchers agreeing with this approach describe the sense of presence as a function of the experience of a given medium (Media Presence). The main result of this approach is the definition of presence as the perceptual illusion of non-mediation produced by means of the disappearance of the medium from the conscious attention of the subject. At the other extreme, there \ud is the psychological or ecological perspective (Inner Presence). Specifically, this perspective considers presence as a neuropsychological phenomenon, evolved from the interplay of our biological and cultural inheritance, whose goal is the control of the human activity. \ud Given its key role and the rate at which new approaches to understanding and examining presence are appearing, this chapter draws together current research on presence to provide an up to date overview of the most widely accepted approaches to its understanding and measurement

Title page Chronic duloxetine treatment normalizes altered BDNF expression in serotonin transporter knockout rats through the modulation of specific neurotrophin isoforms. Molecular Pharmacology Fast Forward. Running title page Running title: Duloxetine m

Abstract Dysfunction of the serotonergic system is implicated in the etiology of many psychiatric disorders, including major depression. Major vulnerability genes for mood disorders are also related to the serotonergic system: one of these genes encodes for the serotonin transporter (SERT), which represent a major target for the action of antidepressant drugs. We have recently demonstrated that SERT knockout (KO) rats, generated by ENU-induced mutagenesis, show reduced expression of the neurotrophin BDNF in hippocampus and prefrontal cortex suggesting that depression vulnerability can be associated with impaired neuronal plasticity. In the present study we demonstrate that chronic treatment with the antidepressant duloxetine (DLX) was able to normalize the expression of BDNF mRNA coding exon (IX) in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex of SERT KO rats, through the modulation of selected neurotrophin transcripts, whose expression was up regulated by DLX only in SERT KO rats. Conversely, the modulation of BDNF protein by DLX in frontal cortex was abolished in mutant rats. In summary, these data suggest that animals with a genetic defect of the serotonin transporter maintain the ability to show neuroplastic changes in response to AD drugs. Since these animals show depression-like behavior, the region and isoform-specific increase of BDNF levels may be a mechanism activated by chronic antidepressant treatment to restore normal plasticity that is defective under genetic dysfunction of the serotonin transporter