Consciousness and cognition
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In the last few years a branch of pain research has been focussing on the modulatory effects of the vision of the body on pain perception. So, for instance, the vision of one's own real body has been proven to induce analgesic effects. ⋯ While the vision of one's own real body has been proven to yield compelling analgesic effects, slightly more controversial are those attributed to the vision of "owned" dummy bodies. This review will discuss the studies that examined the effects on pain perception of the vision of the own body, with or without body ownership illusions.
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It is assumed that the processing of a prime followed by a mask occurs sequentially in a feedforward manner when the three (initiation, takeover, and independence) criteria outlined by the rapid-chase theory are met. The purpose of the current study was to determine if the processing of the prime and mask fit the predictions of the rapid-chase theory when the prime and mask are presented during an ongoing movement. In two experiments, participants made rapid pointing movements to a target indicated by the mask. ⋯ In Experiment 2, the prime-mask SOA was constant but the delay between movement and prime onset was manipulated. Although the results support the initiation and takeover criteria, the data did not support the independence criterion. Consequently, the rapid-chase theory does not appear to extend to movement execution.
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Recently, Vanden Bulcke, Crombez, Durnez, and Van Damme (2015) investigated whether the attentional prioritization of a specific location due to the anticipation of pain is modality specific or multisensory. They used a temporal order judgment task in which participants judged the order of either two tactile or two visual stimuli, one presented on each hand. ⋯ The authors concluded that the anticipation of pain leads to a multisensory prioritization of information presented at the threatened spatial location. Here, we would like to question their conclusion in terms of a genuine attentional modulation of multisensory nature, based on methodological and theoretical grounds.
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Slow wave activity (SWA) generation depends on cortico-thalamo-cortical loops that are disrupted in patients with chronic Disorders of Consciousness (DOC), including the Unresponsive Wakefulness Syndrome (UWS) and the Minimally Conscious State (MCS). We hypothesized that the modulation of SWA by means of a repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) could reveal residual patterns of connectivity, thus supporting the DOC clinical differential diagnosis. ⋯ A preserved sleep-wake cycle, a standard temporal progression of sleep stages, and a SWA perturbation were found in all of the MCS patients and in none of the UWS individuals, only following the real-rTMS. In conclusion, our combined approach may improve the differential diagnosis between MCS patients, who show a partial preservation of cortical plasticity, and UWS individuals, who lack such properties.
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Lying takes more time than telling the truth. Because lying involves withholding the truth, this "lie effect" has been related to response inhibition. We investigated the response inhibition hypothesis of lying using the delta-plot method: A leveling-off of the standard increase of the lie effect with slower reaction times would be indicative of successful response inhibition. ⋯ In two experiments, we found that the delta plot of the lie effect leveled off with longer response latencies, but only in a group of participants who had better inhibitory skills as indexed by relatively small lie effects. This finding supports the role of response inhibition in lying. We elaborate on repercussions for cognitive models of deception and the data analysis of reaction-time based lie tests.