scholarly journals Hypnotic Clever Hands: Agency and Automatic Responding

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vince Polito ◽  
Amanda Barnier ◽  
Michael Connors
Keyword(s):  
Executive Control ◽  
Original Study ◽  
Sense Of Agency ◽  
Implicit Processes ◽  
Thought Insertion ◽  
Random Responding ◽  
Hypnotic Suggestions

The Clever Hands task (Wegner, Fuller, & Sparrow, 2003) is a behavioral illusion in which participants make responses to a trivia quiz for which they have no sense of agency. Sixty high hypnotizable participants completed two versions of the Clever Hands task. Quiz one was a replication of the original study. Quiz two was a hypnotic adaptation using three suggestions that were based on clinical disruptions to the sense of agency. The suggestions were for: Random Responding, Thought Insertion, and Alien Control. These suggestions led to differences in accuracy (action production) and estimates of accuracy (action projection). Specifically, whereas the Random Responding suggestion had little effect, the two clinically based suggestions had opposite impacts on action production: the Thought Insertion suggestion led to an increase in the rate of correct responses (although participants still believed they were responding randomly); while the Alien Control suggestion led to a reduction in the rate of correct answers and a pattern of results that more closely approximated randomness. Contrary to theoretical accounts that claim that hypnosis affects executive monitoring rather than executive control, this result indicates that specific hypnotic suggestions can also influence the implicit processes involved in action production.

scholarly journals Too much or too little? Disorders of agency on a spectrum

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 79-99
Author(s):  
Valentina Petrolini
Keyword(s):  
Mental Disorders ◽  
Mind Wandering ◽  
Sense Of Agency ◽  
False Confessions ◽  
Sense Of Control ◽  
Thought Insertion ◽  
Auditory Verbal Hallucinations ◽  
In Virtue Of ◽  
Frequency Intensity

Disorders of agency could be described as cases where people encounter difficulties in assessing their own degree of responsibility or involvement with respect to a relevant action or event. These disturbances in one’s sense of agency appear to be meaningfully connected with some mental disorders and with some symptoms in particular—i.e. auditory verbal hallucinations, thought insertion, pathological guilt. A deeper understanding of these experiences may thus contribute to better identification and possibly treatment of people affected by such disorders. In this paper I explore disorders of agency to flesh out their phenomenology in more detail as well as to introduce some theoretical distinctions between them. Specifically, I argue that we may better understand disorders of agency by characterizing them as dimensional. In §1 I explore the cases of Auditory Verbal Hallucinations (AVH) and pathological guilt and I show that they lie at opposite ends of the agency spectrum (i.e. hypoagency versus hyperagency). In §2 I focus on two intermediate cases of hypo- and hyper- agency. These are situations that, despite being very similar to pathological ones, may be successfully distinguished from them in virtue of quantitative factors (e.g. duration, frequency, intensity). I first explore the phenomenon of mind wandering as an example of hypoagency, and I then discuss the phenomenon of false confessions as an example of hyperagency. While cases of hypoagency exemplify situations where people experience their own thoughts, bodies, or actions as something beyond their control, experiences of hyperagency provide an illusory sense of control over actions or events.

Simulated thought insertion: Influencing the sense of agency using deception and magic

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
pp. 11-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay A. Olson ◽  
Mathieu Landry ◽  
Krystèle Appourchaux ◽  
Amir Raz
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Agency ◽  
Thought Insertion

scholarly journals Now You See One Letter, Now You See Meaningless Symbols: Perceptual and Semantic Hypnotic Suggestions Reduce Stroop Errors Through Different Neurocognitive Mechanisms

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rinaldo Livio Perri ◽  
Valentina Bianco ◽  
Enrico Facco ◽  
Francesco Di Russo
Keyword(s):  
Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Executive Control ◽  
Temporal Cortex ◽  
Semantic Activation ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Sensory Awareness ◽  
Subject Design ◽  
Medium Level ◽  
Accurate Performance ◽  
Hypnotic Suggestions

Compelling literature has suggested the possibility of adopting hypnotic suggestions to override the Stroop interference effect. However, most of these studies mainly reported behavioral data and were conducted on highly hypnotizable individuals. Thus, the question of the neural locus of the effects and their generalizability remains open. In the present study, we used the Stroop task in a within-subject design to test the neurocognitive effects of two hypnotic suggestions: the perceptual request to focus only on the central letter of the words and the semantic request to observe meaningless symbols. Behavioral results indicated that the two types of suggestions did not alter response time (RT), but both favored more accurate performance compared to the control condition. Both types of suggestions increased sensory awareness and reduced discriminative visual attention, but the perceptual request selectively engaged more executive control of the prefrontal cortex (PFC), and the semantic request selectively suppressed the temporal cortex activity devoted to graphemic analysis of the words. The present findings demonstrated that the perceptual and the semantic hypnotic suggestions reduced Stroop errors through common and specific top-down modulations of different neurocognitive processes but left the semantic activation unaltered. Finally, as we also recruited participants with a medium level of hypnotizability, the present data might be considered potentially representative of the majority of the population.

Patterns of Implicit Learning Below the Level of Conscious Knowledge

2010 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 91-101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliana Yordanova ◽  
Rolf Verleger ◽  
Ullrich Wagner ◽  
Vasil Kolev
Keyword(s):  
Implicit Learning ◽  
Explicit Knowledge ◽  
Implicit Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Generation ◽  
Sleep Stages ◽  
Implicit Processing ◽  
Implicit Processes ◽  
Late Night ◽  
On Line ◽  
On Line Learning

The objective of the present study was to evaluate patterns of implicit processing in a task where the acquisition of explicit and implicit knowledge occurs simultaneously. The number reduction task (NRT) was used as having two levels of organization, overt and covert, where the covert level of processing is associated with implicit associative and implicit procedural learning. One aim was to compare these two types of implicit processes in the NRT when sleep was or was not introduced between initial formation of task representations and subsequent NRT processing. To assess the effects of different sleep stages, two sleep groups (early- and late-night groups) were used where initial training of the task was separated from subsequent retest by 3 h full of predominantly slow wave sleep (SWS) or rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. In two no-sleep groups, no interval was introduced between initial and subsequent NRT performance. A second aim was to evaluate the interaction between procedural and associative implicit learning in the NRT. Implicit associative learning was measured by the difference between the speed of responses that could or could not be predicted by the covert abstract regularity of the task. Implicit procedural on-line learning was measured by the practice-based increased speed of performance with time on task. Major results indicated that late-night sleep produced a substantial facilitation of implicit associations without modifying individual ability for explicit knowledge generation or for procedural on-line learning. This was evidenced by the higher rate of subjects who gained implicit knowledge of abstract task structure in the late-night group relative to the early-night and no-sleep groups. Independently of sleep, gain of implicit associative knowledge was accompanied by a relative slowing of responses to unpredictable items suggesting reciprocal interactions between associative and motor procedural processes within the implicit system. These observations provide evidence for the separability and interactions of different patterns of processing within implicit memory.

Intelligence and Personality

2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 124-132
Author(s):  
Marc-André Bédard ◽  
Yann Le Corff
Keyword(s):  
Personality Traits ◽  
Big Five ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Big Five Personality Traits ◽  
Original Study ◽  
Life Assessment ◽  
Big Five Personality ◽  
Verbal Intelligence ◽  
Nonverbal Intelligence ◽  
French Canadian

Abstract. This replication and extension of DeYoung, Quilty, Peterson, and Gray’s (2014) study aimed to assess the unique variance of each of the 10 aspects of the Big Five personality traits ( DeYoung, Quilty, & Peterson, 2007 ) associated with intelligence and its dimensions. Personality aspects and intelligence were assessed in a sample of French-Canadian adults from real-life assessment settings ( n = 213). Results showed that the Intellect aspect was independently associated with g, verbal, and nonverbal intelligence while its counterpart Openness was independently related to verbal intelligence only, thus replicating the results of the original study. Independent associations were also found between Withdrawal, Industriousness and Assertiveness aspects and verbal intelligence, as well as between Withdrawal and Politeness aspects and nonverbal intelligence. Possible explanations for these associations are discussed.

The Two Sides of Temporal Orienting

2010 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 142-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ángel Correa ◽  
Paola Cappucci ◽  
Anna C. Nobre ◽  
Juan Lupiáñez
Keyword(s):  
Executive Control ◽  
Stroop Effect ◽  
Traffic Situation ◽  
Target Onset ◽  
Stimulus Features ◽  
Two Sides ◽  
Spatial Stroop Effect ◽  
Probable Interval ◽  
Spatial Stroop ◽  
Temporal Orienting

Would it be helpful to inform a driver about when a conflicting traffic situation is going to occur? We tested whether temporal orienting of attention could enhance executive control to select among conflicting stimuli and responses. Temporal orienting was induced by presenting explicit cues predicting the most probable interval for target onset, which could be short (400 ms) or long (1,300 ms). Executive control was measured both by flanker and Simon tasks involving conflict between incompatible responses and by the spatial Stroop task involving conflict between perceptual stimulus features. The results showed that temporal orienting facilitated the resolution of perceptual conflict by reducing the spatial Stroop effect, whereas it interfered with the resolution of response conflict by increasing flanker and Simon effects. Such opposite effects suggest that temporal orienting of attention modulates executive control through dissociable mechanisms, depending on whether the competition between conflicting representations is located at perceptual or response levels.

Conscious and Unconscious Reward Cues Can Affect a Critical Component of Executive Control

2011 ◽  
Vol 58 (5) ◽  
pp. 370-375 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rémi L. Capa ◽  
Gaëlle M. Bustin ◽  
Axel Cleeremans ◽  
Michel Hansenne
Keyword(s):  
Correct Response ◽  
Executive Control ◽  
Critical Component ◽  
Arithmetic Operations ◽  
Component Process

The present study investigates whether updating an important function of executive control can be driven by unconscious reward cues. Participants had to memorize several numbers and update those numbers independently according to a sequence of arithmetic operations. At the beginning of each trial, a reward (1 euro or 5 cents) was presented, either subliminally or supraliminally. Participants could earn the reward if they found the correct response on the updating task. Results showed better performance when a high (conscious or unconscious) reward was at stake compared to a low reward. This suggests that subliminal information can influence a component process of executive control traditionally thought to require consciousness.

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