scholarly journals The Me-File: An Event-Coding Approach to Self-Representation

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernhard Hommel

Numerous authors have taken it for granted that people represent themselves or even have something like “a self”, but the underlying mechanisms remain a mystery. How do people represent themselves? Here I propose that they do so not any differently from how they represent other individuals, events, and objects: by binding codes representing the sensory consequences of being oneself into a Me-File, that is, into an event file integrating all the codes resulting from the behaving me. This amounts to a Humean bundle-self theory of selfhood, and I will explain how recent extensions of the Theory of Event Coding, a general theory of human perception and action control, provide all the necessary ingredients for specifying the mechanisms underlying such a theory. The Me-File concept is likely to provide a useful mechanistic basis for more specific and more theoretically productive experimentation, as well as for the construction of artificial agents with human-like selves.

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 215-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maximilian Kleimaker ◽  
Alexander Kleimaker ◽  
Christian Beste ◽  
Soyoung Q. Park ◽  
Alexander Maximilian Münchau

Abstract. Gilles de la Tourette syndrome is a common, multifaceted neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by multiple motor and vocal tics. Although numerous neuroanatomical and neurophysiological particularities have been documented, there is no general concept or overarching theory to explain the pathophysiology of Tourette syndrome. Given the premonitory urges that precede tics and the altered sensorimotor processing in Tourette syndrome, the “Theory of Event Coding” (TEC) seems to be an attractive framework. TEC assumes that perceptions and actions are bound together and encoded using the same neural code to form so-called “event files.” Depending on the strength of the binding between perception and action, partial repetition of features of an event file can lead to increasing cost because existing event files need to be reconfigured. This is referred to as “partial repetition costs”, which appear to be increased in Tourette patients. This indicates stronger binding within “event files” in Tourette.


Author(s):  
Bernhard Hommel

AbstractCommonsense and theorizing about action control agree in assuming that human behavior is (mainly) driven by goals, but no mechanistic theory of what goals are, where they come from, and how they impact action selection is available. Here I develop such a theory that is based on the assumption that GOALs guide Intentional Actions THrough criteria (GOALIATH). The theory is intended to be minimalist and parsimonious with respect to its assumptions, as transparent and mechanistic as possible, and it is based on representational assumptions provided by the Theory of Event Coding (TEC). It holds that goal-directed behavior is guided by selection criteria that activate and create competition between event files that contain action-effect codes matching one or more of the criteria—a competition that eventually settles into a solution favoring the best-matching event file. The criteria are associated with various sources, including biological drives, acquired needs (e.g., of achievement, power, or affiliation), and short-term, sometimes arbitrary, instructed aims. Action selection is, thus, a compromise that tries to satisfy various criteria related to different driving forces, which are also likely to vary in strength over time. Hence, what looks like goal-directed action emerges from, and represents an attempt to satisfy multiple constraints with different origins, purposes, operational characteristics, and timescales—which among other things does not guarantee a high degree of coherence or rationality of the eventual outcome. GOALIATH calls for a radical break with conventional theorizing about the control of goal-directed behavior, as it among other things questions existing cognitive-control theories and dual-route models of action control.


2005 ◽  
Vol 94 (1) ◽  
pp. 199-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel M. Merfeld ◽  
Sukyung Park ◽  
Claire Gianna-Poulin ◽  
F. Owen Black ◽  
Scott Wood

II. VOR and perceptual responses during combined Tilt&Translation. To compare and contrast the neural mechanisms that contribute to vestibular perception and action, we measured vestibuloocular reflexes (VOR) and perceptions of tilt and translation. We took advantage of the well-known ambiguity that the otolith organs respond to both linear acceleration and tilt with respect to gravity and investigated the mechanisms by which this ambiguity is resolved. A new motion paradigm that combined roll tilt with inter-aural translation (“ Tilt&Translation”) was used; subjects were sinusoidally (0.8 Hz) roll tilted but with their ears above or below the rotation axis. This paradigm provided sinusoidal roll canal cues that were the same across trials while providing otolith cues that varied linearly with ear position relative to the earth-horizontal rotation axis. We found that perceived tilt and translation depended on canal cues, with substantial roll tilt and inter-aural translation perceptions reported even when the otolith organs measured no inter-aural force. These findings match internal model predictions that rotational cues from the canals influence the neural processing of otolith cues. We also found horizontal translational VORs that varied linearly with radius; a minimal response was measured when the otolith organs transduced little or no inter-aural force. Hence, the horizontal translational VOR was dependent on otolith cues but independent of canal cues. These findings match predictions that translational VORs are elicited by simple filtering of otolith signals. We conclude that internal models govern human perception of tilt and translation at 0.8 Hz and that high-pass filtering governs the human translational VOR at this same frequency.


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (40) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gustavo Rabay Guerra ◽  
Henrique Jerônimo Bezerra Marcos

RESUMOEste artigo tem por objeto a Teoria dos Direitos Humanos em Michel Villey. Seu objetivo é apresentar uma contestação à alegação de Michel Villey de que os direitos humanos não podem ser considerados Direito. Para tanto, realiza uma apresentação da Teoria dos Direitos Humanos em Michel Villey, passando pela criação dos direitos humanos em Thomas Hobbes, a inversão de objetivos dos direitos humanos em John Locke e a expansão dos direitos humanos em Christian Wolff. Em seguida passa a apresentar a crítica de Michel Villey aos direitos humanos e as falhas deste autor ao realizar suas acusações, haja vista a possibilidade de solução das contradições (colisões) entre os direitos humanos, além de que não se pode confundir o critério de validade da norma com sua eficácia. O trabalho conclui pela juridicidade dos direitos humanos ao demonstrar que a suposta contradição não seria razão para retirar esta qualidade.PALAVRAS-CHAVEFilosofia do Direito. Direitos Humanos. Michel Villey. ABSTRACTThe present work deals with the General Theory of Human Rights in Michel Villey. Its purpose is to present a challenge to Michel Villeys’ claim that human rights are not legal norms. To do so, the text presents the General Theory of Human Rights in Michel Villey, including the creation of human rights by Thomas Hobbes, the changing perspective attributed to John Locke and the numerical expansion of human rights attributed to Christian Wolff. The text then presents Michel Villeys’ critics of human rights and the problems with those critics; specifically, that the given conflicts between norms aren’t sufficient to declare that they aren’t legal norms, other than that, the text points that in his critics Michel Villey confuses the concepts of validity of the norm with its effectiveness. The work concludes that human rights are legal norms and its supposed intrinsic contradiction is not sufficient to withdraw this quality.KEYWORDSPhilosophy of Law. Human Rights. Michel Villey.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaroslaw Roman Lelonkiewicz ◽  
Chiara Gambi ◽  
Lisa Weller ◽  
Roland Pfister

Interacting agents may anticipate their partner’s upcoming response and include it in their action plan. In turn, observing an overt response can trigger agents to adapt. But while anticipation and adaptation are known to shape action control, their interplay in social interactions remains largely unexplored. In four experiments, we asked how both of these mechanisms could contribute to one striking phenomenon: Agents initiate actions faster when they know their partner will produce a compatible rather than an incompatible response. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the compatibility between agents’ actions and partners’ responses, and investigated the interplay between adaptation and anticipation within the same dyadic interaction. In Experiments 2-4 we isolated the contribution of each of the two mechanisms by having agents interact with virtual partners whose responses could be experimentally controlled. We found that adaptation and anticipation exert parallel but independent effects on action execution: Participants initiated their actions more quickly when the upcoming partner response was compatible and, independently, when their partner had responded more quickly on the preceding trial. These findings elucidate models of action control in social interactions. [NOTE: Please cite this paper as: Lelonkiewicz, J. R., Gambi, C., Weller, L., & Pfister, R. (2020). Action–effect anticipation and temporal adaptation in social interactions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 46(4), 335–349. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000717 ]


2001 ◽  
Vol 24 (5) ◽  
pp. 897-898 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Oriet ◽  
Biljana Stevanovski ◽  
Pierre Jolicoeur

The Theory of Event Coding (TEC) is a new framework for understanding interactions between perception and action. We are concerned that the theory is underspecified, showing that it can easily be used to make exactly opposite predictions. Precise specification of the time course of activation and binding is needed to make the theory useful for understanding the perception-action interface.


Nutrients ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (7) ◽  
pp. 904 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mensiena Kiewiet ◽  
Marijke Faas ◽  
Paul de Vos

Immunomodulatory protein hydrolysate consumption may delay or prevent western immune-related diseases. In order to purposively develop protein hydrolysates with an optimal and reproducible immunomodulatory effect, knowledge is needed on which components in protein hydrolysates are responsible for the immune effects. Important advances have been made on this aspect. Also, knowledge on mechanisms underlying the immune modulating effects is indispensable. In this review, we discuss the most promising application possibilities for immunomodulatory protein hydrolysates. In order to do so, an overview is provided on reported in vivo immune effects of protein hydrolysates in both local intestinal and systemic organs, and the current insights in the underlying mechanisms of these effects. Furthermore, we discuss current knowledge and physicochemical approaches to identify the immune active protein sequence(s). We conclude that multiple hydrolysate compositions show specific immune effects. This knowledge can improve the efficacy of existing hydrolysate-containing products such as sports nutrition, clinical nutrition, and infant formula. We also provide arguments for why immunomodulatory protein hydrolysates could be applied to manage the immune response in the increasing number of individuals with a higher risk of immune dysfunction due to, for example, increasing age or stress.


2016 ◽  
Vol 115 (4) ◽  
pp. 2237-2245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah M. Krüger ◽  
Thérèse Collins ◽  
Bernhard Englitz ◽  
Patrick Cavanagh

Orienting our eyes to a light, a sound, or a touch occurs effortlessly, despite the fact that sound and touch have to be converted from head- and body-based coordinates to eye-based coordinates to do so. We asked whether the oculomotor representation is also used for localization of sounds even when there is no saccade to the sound source. To address this, we examined whether saccades introduced similar errors of localization judgments for both visual and auditory stimuli. Sixteen subjects indicated the direction of a visual or auditory apparent motion seen or heard between two targets presented either during fixation or straddling a saccade. Compared with the fixation baseline, saccades introduced errors in direction judgments for both visual and auditory stimuli: in both cases, apparent motion judgments were biased in direction of the saccade. These saccade-induced effects across modalities give rise to the possibility of shared, cross-modal location coding for perception and action.


2012 ◽  
Vol 22 (06) ◽  
pp. 543-557 ◽  
Author(s):  
HOOMAN REISI DEHKORDI ◽  
PETER EADES

There is strong empirical evidence that human perception of a graph drawing is negatively correlated with the number of edge crossings. However, recent experiments show that one can reduce the negative effect by ensuring that the edges that cross do so at large angles. These experiments have motivated a number of mathematical and algorithmic studies of “right angle crossing (RAC)” drawings of graphs, where the edges cross each other perpendicularly. In this paper we give an algorithm for constructing RAC drawings of “outer-1-plane” graphs, that is, topological graphs in which each vertex appears on the outer face, and each edge crosses at most one other edge. The drawing algorithm preserves the embedding of the input graph. This is one of the few algorithms available to construct RAC drawings.


2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jochen Hartwig

John Maynard Keynes’s essay “Relative Movements of Real Wages and Output” is widely believed to be an important amendment to his General Theory because, in this essay, Keynes relaxed his core assumption of decreasing marginal returns to labor. I discuss the reasons that prompted Keynes to do so and then examine the consequences of replacing decreasing with non-decreasing returns for the model of effective demand from chapter 3 of the General Theory. I conclude that non-decreasing marginal returns do not sit comfortably with the principle of effective demand. The view that Keynes’s 1939 essay constitutes an important amendment to his General Theory has thus to be put into perspective.


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