What Influences Physicians’ Online Knowledge Sharing? A Stimulus–Response Perspective

During the COVID-19 pandemic, online health platforms and physicians’ online knowledge sharing played an important role in public health crisis management and disease prevention. What influences physicians’ online knowledge sharing? From the psychological perspective of stimulus–response, this study aims to explore how patients’ visit and patients’ consultation influence physicians’ online knowledge sharing considering the contingent roles of physicians’ online expertise and online knowledge sharing experience. Based on 6-month panel data of 45,449 physician–month observations from an online health platform in China, the results indicate that both patients’ visit and patients’ consultation are positive related to physicians’ online knowledge sharing. Online expertise weakens the positive effect of patients’ consultation on physicians’ online knowledge sharing. Online knowledge sharing experience weakens the positive relationship between visit of patient and physicians’ online knowledge sharing, and enhances the positive relationship between patients’ consultation and physicians’ online knowledge sharing. This study contributes to the literatures about stimulus–response in psychology and knowledge sharing, and provides implications for practice.

Visualization of Speech Perception Analysis via Phoneme Alignment: A Pilot Study

Objective: Speech tests assess the ability of people with hearing loss to comprehend speech with a hearing aid or cochlear implant. The tests are usually at the word or sentence level. However, few tests analyze errors at the phoneme level. So, there is a need for an automated program to visualize in real time the accuracy of phonemes in these tests.Method: The program reads in stimulus-response pairs and obtains their phonemic representations from an open-source digital pronouncing dictionary. The stimulus phonemes are aligned with the response phonemes via a modification of the Levenshtein Minimum Edit Distance algorithm. Alignment is achieved via dynamic programming with modified costs based on phonological features for insertion, deletions and substitutions. The accuracy for each phoneme is based on the F1-score. Accuracy is visualized with respect to place and manner (consonants) or height (vowels). Confusion matrices for the phonemes are used in an information transfer analysis of ten phonological features. A histogram of the information transfer for the features over a frequency-like range is presented as a phonemegram.Results: The program was applied to two datasets. One consisted of test data at the sentence and word levels. Stimulus-response sentence pairs from six volunteers with different degrees of hearing loss and modes of amplification were analyzed. Four volunteers listened to sentences from a mobile auditory training app while two listened to sentences from a clinical speech test. Stimulus-response word pairs from three lists were also analyzed. The other dataset consisted of published stimulus-response pairs from experiments of 31 participants with cochlear implants listening to 400 Basic English Lexicon sentences via different talkers at four different SNR levels. In all cases, visualization was obtained in real time. Analysis of 12,400 actual and random pairs showed that the program was robust to the nature of the pairs.Conclusion: It is possible to automate the alignment of phonemes extracted from stimulus-response pairs from speech tests in real time. The alignment then makes it possible to visualize the accuracy of responses via phonological features in two ways. Such visualization of phoneme alignment and accuracy could aid clinicians and scientists.

Subdividing Stress Groups into Eustress and Distress Groups Using Laterality Index Calculated from Brain Hemodynamic Response

A stress group should be subdivided into eustress (low-stress) and distress (high-stress) groups to better evaluate personal cognitive abilities and mental/physical health. However, it is challenging because of the inconsistent pattern in brain activation. We aimed to ascertain the necessity of subdividing the stress groups. The stress group was screened by salivary alpha-amylase (sAA) and then, the brain’s hemodynamic reactions were measured by functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) based on the near-infrared biosensor. We compared the two stress subgroups categorized by sAA using a newly designed emotional stimulus-response paradigm with an international affective picture system (IAPS) to enhance hemodynamic signals induced by the target effect. We calculated the laterality index for stress (LIS) from the measured signals to identify the dominantly activated cortex in both the subgroups. Both the stress groups exhibited brain activity in the right frontal cortex. Specifically, the eustress group exhibited the largest brain activity, whereas the distress group exhibited recessive brain activity, regardless of positive or negative stimuli. LIS values were larger in the order of the eustress, control, and distress groups; this indicates that the stress group can be divided into eustress and distress groups. We built a foundation for subdividing stress groups into eustress and distress groups using fNIRS.

Is there a lower visual field preference in object affordances? A registered report.

It’s been repeatedly shown that pictures of graspable objects can facilitate visual processing and motor responses, even in the absence of reach-to-grasp actions, an effect often attributed the concept of affordances, originally introduced by Gibson (1979). A classic demonstration of this is the handle compatibility effect, which is characterised by faster reaction times when the orientation of a graspable object’s handle is compatible with the hand used to respond, even when the handle orientation is task irrelevant. Nevertheless, whether faster RTs are due to affordances or spatial compatibility effects has been significantly debated. In the proposed studies, we will use a stimulus-response compatibility paradigm to investigate firstly, whether we can replicate the handle compatibility effect while controlling for spatial compatibility. Here, participants will respond with left- or right-handed keypresses to whether the object is upright or inverted and, in separate blocks, whether the object is red or green. RTs will be analysed using repeated-measures ANOVAs. In line with an affordance account, we hypothesise that there will be larger handle compatibility effects for upright/inverted compared to colour judgements, as colour judgements do not require object identification and are not thought to elicit affordances. Secondly, we will investigate whether the handle compatibility effect shows a lower visual field (VF) advantage in line with functional lower VF advantages observed for hand actions. We expect larger handle compatibility effects for objects viewed in the lower VF than upper VF, given that the lower VF is the space where actions most frequently occur.

Joint Simon effect in movement trajectories

In joint action literature it is often assumed that acting together is driven by pervasive and automatic process of co-representation, that is, representing the co-actor’s part of the task in addition to one’s own. Much of this research employs joint stimulus-response compatibility tasks varying the stimuli employed or the physical and social relations between participants. In this study we test the robustness of co-representation effects by focusing instead on variation in response modality. Specifically, we implement a mouse-tracking version of a Joint Simon Task in which participants respond by producing continuous movements with a computer mouse rather than pushing discrete buttons. We have three key findings. First, in a replication of an earlier study we show that in a classical individual Simon Task movement trajectories show greater curvature on incongruent trials, paralleling longer response times. Second, this effect largely disappears in a Go-NoGo Simon Task, in which participants respond to only one of the cues and refrain from responding to the other. Third, contrary to previous studies that use button pressing responses, we observe no overall effect in the joint variants of the task. However, we also detect a notable diversity in movement strategies adopted by the participants, with some participants showing the effect on the individual level. Our study casts doubt on the pervasiveness of co-representation, highlights the usefulness of mouse-tracking methodology and emphasizes the need for looking at individual variation in task performance.

Assessing Automatic Approach-Avoidance Behavior in an Immersive Virtual Environment

The use of virtual reality (VR) promises enormous potential for studying human behavior. While approach and avoidance tendencies have been explored in various areas of basic and applied psychology, such as attitude and emotion research, basic learning psychology, and behavior therapy, they have rarely been studied in VR. One major focus of this research is to understand the psychological mechanisms underlying automatic behavioral tendencies towards and away from positively or negatively evaluated stimuli. We implemented a whole-body movement stimulus-response compatibility task to explore approach-avoidance behavior in an immersive virtual environment. We chose attitudinal stimuli—spiders and butterflies—on which people widely agree in their general evaluations (in that people evaluate spiders negatively and butterflies positively), while there is still substantial inter-individual variance (i. e., the intensity in which people dislike spiders or like butterflies). We implemented two parallel approach-avoidance tasks, one in VR, one desktop-based. Both tasks revealed the expected compatibility effects that were positively intercorrelated. Interestingly, however, the compatibility effect in the VR measure was unrelated to participants’ self-reported fear of spiders and stimulus evaluations. These results raise important implications about the usage of VR to study automatic behavioral tendencies.

Neural mechanism of experience-dependent sensory gain control in C. elegans

Animals' sensory systems adjust their responsiveness to environmental stimuli that vary greatly in their intensity. Here we report the neural mechanism of experience-dependent sensory adjustment, especially gain control, in the ASH nociceptive neurons in Caenorhabditis elegans. Using calcium imaging under gradual changes in stimulus intensity, we find that the ASH neurons of naive animals respond to concentration increases in a repulsive odor 2-nonanone regardless of the magnitude of the concentration increase. However, after preexposure to the odor, the ASH neurons exhibit significantly weak responses to a small gradual increase in odor concentration while their responses to a large gradual increase remain strong. Thus, preexposure changes the slope of stimulus-response relationships (i.e., gain control). Behavioral analysis suggests that this gain control contributes to the preexposure-dependent enhancement of odor avoidance behavior. Mathematical analysis reveals that the ASH response consists of fast and slow components, and that the fast component is specifically suppressed by preexposure. In addition, genetic analysis suggests that G protein signaling is required for the fast component. Thus, our integrative study demonstrates how prior experience dynamically modulates stimulus-response relationships in sensory neurons, eventually leading to adaptive modulation of behavior.