Consciousness and cognition
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Simulation process and mirroring mechanism appear to be necessary to the recognition of emotional facial expressions. Prefrontal areas were found to support this simulation mechanism. The present research analyzed the role of premotor area in processing emotional faces with different valence (positive vs. negative faces), considering both conscious and unconscious pathways. ⋯ Error rates (ERs) and response times (RTs) were considered in response to the experimental conditions. ERs and RTs decreased in case of premotor brain activation, specifically in response to fear, for both conscious and unconscious condition. The present results highlight the role of the premotor system for facial expression processing, supporting the existence of two analogous mechanisms for conscious and unconscious condition.
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In this article, we present results from an interdisciplinary research project aimed at assessing consciousness in dreams. For this purpose, we compared lucid dreams with normal non-lucid dreams from REM sleep. Both lucid and non-lucid dreams are an important contrast condition for theories of waking consciousness, giving valuable insights into the structure of conscious experience and its neural correlates during sleep. ⋯ The construction of the Lucidity and Consciousness in Dreams scale (LuCiD) was based on theoretical considerations and empirical observations. Exploratory factor analysis of the data from the first survey identified eight factors that were validated in a second survey using confirmatory factor analysis: INSIGHT, CONTROL, THOUGHT, REALISM, MEMORY, DISSOCIATION, NEGATIVE EMOTION, and POSITIVE EMOTION. While all factors are involved in dream consciousness, realism and negative emotion do not differentiate between lucid and non-lucid dreams, suggesting that lucid insight is separable from both bizarreness in dreams and a change in the subjectively experienced realism of the dream.
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In normal observers, gazing at one's own face in the mirror for a few minutes, at a low illumination level, triggers the perception of strange faces, a new visual illusion that has been named 'strange-face in the mirror'. Individuals see huge distortions of their own faces, but they often see monstrous beings, archetypal faces, faces of relatives and deceased, and animals. In the experiment described here, strange-face illusions were perceived when two individuals, in a dimly lit room, gazed at each other in the face. ⋯ Synchrony of illusions may indicate that unconscious response-coordination is caused by the illusion-conjunction of crossed dissociative strange-faces, which are perceived as projections into each other's visual face of reciprocal embodied representations within the pair. Inter-subjective strange-face illusions may be explained by the subject's embodied representations (somaesthetic, kinaesthetic and motor facial pattern) and the other's visual face binding. Unconscious facial mimicry may promote inter-subjective illusion-conjunction, then unconscious joint-action and response-coordination.
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Attentional scanning was studied in anxious and non-anxious participants, using a modified change detection paradigm. Participants detected changes in pairs of emotional scenes separated by two task irrelevant slides, which contained an emotionally valenced scene (the 'distractor scene') and a visual mask. In agreement with attentional control theory, change detection latencies were slower overall for anxious participants. ⋯ When negative distractor scenes were presented at subliminal exposure durations, anxious participants detected changes more rapidly than when supraliminal negative scenes or subliminal positive scenes were presented. We propose that for anxious participants, subliminal presentation of emotionally negative distractor scenes stimulated attention into a dynamic state in the absence of attentional engagement. Presentation of the same scenes at longer exposure times was accompanied by conscious awareness, attentional engagement, and slower change detection.
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Research has shown repeatedly that attention influences implicit learning effects. In a similar vein, interoceptive awareness might be involved in unaware fear conditioning: The fact that the CS is repeatedly presented in the context of aversive bodily experiences might facilitate the development of conditioned responding. We investigated the role of interoceptive attention in a subliminal conditioning paradigm. ⋯ This task tunes attention to one's own bodily signals. We found that conditioned responding was facilitated in this latter group of participants. These results are in line with the hypothesis that a rise interoceptive attention enhances unaware conditioned responding.