NIGERIA: RESOURCE CONFLICTS AND RURALITY. IMPLICATIONS ON HERITAGE ASSETS

Since its independence in 1960, Nigeria has been ravaged by various categories of resource conflicts with consequential effects on rurality. These conflicts have caused untold hardship on rural communities in Nigeria to the extent that some of the communities have been deserted for safety elsewhere. These rural communities have valued heritage assets where they had leveraged on for meaningful socioeconomic recovery. This study was aimed at identifying these resource conflicts and their impacts on heritage assets in rural Nigeria. However, resource conflicts like Boko Haram, militancy, herdsmen, banditry, and communal conflicts were identified. Evidences show that these conflicts obliterate tangible and intangible heritage assets of rural communities in Nigeria, with correspondence effect on heritage transfer through memory loss. Effective international support among others was recommended as a possible option. This study has implications for the understanding of further effects of resource conflicts on rurality in Nigeria. Keywords: Resource conflicts; heritage assets; heritage preservation; rural communities; conflict theory

Expectancy to Eat Modulates Cognitive Control and Attention Toward Irrelevant Food and Non-food Images in Healthy Starving Individuals. A Behavioral Study

It is thought that just as hunger itself, the expectancy to eat impacts attention and cognitive control toward food stimuli, but this theory has not been extensively explored at a behavioral level. In order to study the effect of expectancy to eat on attentional and cognitive control mechanisms, 63 healthy fasting participants were presented with an affective priming spatial compatibility Simon task that included both food and object (non-food) distracters. The participants (N = 63) were randomly assigned to two groups: an “immediate expectancy” group made up of participants who expected to eat immediately after the task (N = 31; females = 21; age = 26.8 ± 9.6) and a “delayed expectancy” cohort made up of individuals who expected to eat a few hours later (N = 32; females = 21; age = 25.0 ± 8.0). Slower reaction times (RTs) toward the food and non-food distracters and a more pronounced effect on the RTs in the incompatible condition [i.e., the Simon effect (SE)] were noted in both groups. The effect of the food and non-food distracters on the RTs was more pronounced in the immediate with respect to the delayed expectancy group. The magnitude of the SE for the food and the non-food distracters was also greater in the immediate with respect to the delayed expectancy group. These results seem to indicate that when the expectancy to eat is short, the RTs are delayed, and the SE is more pronounced when food and non-food distracters are presented. Instead, when the expectancy to eat is more distant, the distracters have less of an effect on the RTs and the correspondence effect is smaller. Our results suggest that the expectancy to eat can modulate both attention orienting and cognitive control mechanisms in healthy fasting individuals when distracting details are competing with information processing during goal directed behavior.

Capacity-Free Automatic Processing of Facial Expressions of Emotion

Are facial expressions of emotion processed automatically? Some authors have not found this to be the case (Tomasik et al., 2009). Here we revisited the question with a novel experimental logic – the backward correspondence effect (BCE). In three dual-task studies, participants first categorized a sound (Task 1) and then indicated the location of a target face (Task 2). In Experiment 1, Task 2 required participants to search for one facial expression of emotion (angry or happy). We observed positive BCEs, indicating that facial expressions of emotion bypassed the central attentional bottleneck and thus were processed in a capacity-free, automatic manner. In Experiment 2, we replicated this effect but found that morphed emotional expressions (which were used by Tomasik) were not processed automatically. In Experiment 3, we observed similar BCEs for another type of face processing previously shown to be capacity-free – identification of familiar faces (Jung et al., 2013). We conclude that facial expressions of emotion are identified automatically when sufficiently unambiguous.

Audiovisual Crossmodal Correspondence between Bubbles’ Size and Pouring Sounds’ Pitch in Carbonated Beverages

Visual and auditory carbonation have been separately documented as being two sensory markers of perceived freshness in beverages. The aim of the present study is to investigate the cross-modal interactions between these two dimensions of carbonation. Three experiments focused on crossmodal correspondences between bubble size and pouring sound pitch, which have never been investigated with ecological stimuli. Experiment 1, using an implicit association test (IAT), showed a crossmodal correspondence between bubble size and pouring sound pitch. Experiment 2 confirmed this pitch-size correspondence effect by means of a Go/No-Go Association Task (GNAT). Experiment 3 investigated the mutual dependence between pitch, size, and spatial elevation as well as the influence of attentional factors. No dependence was found, however pitch-size correspondences were obtained only in the condition requiring attentional processes, suggesting that these effects might be driven by top-down influences. These results highlight the robustness of the pitch-size crossmodal correspondence across stimulus contexts varying in complexity. Thus, this correspondence might be fruitfully used to modulate consumers’ perceptions and expectations about carbonated beverages.

Deciphering the nature of the joint Simon effect through electromyographic analyses

This study aimed to apply electromyographic techniques and distributional analyses to test whether an increase in the strength of stimulus-response mapping could explain the mechanisms underlying the joint Simon effect. Within a single protocol, participants performed a Simon task and a Go/NoGo task in isolation, and a joint Go/NoGo task with a co-actor (joint Simon task). Results showed that joint-action impairs cognitive control and shortened reaction time by impacting both pre-motor time and motor time. Joint-action induced a larger facilitation on pre-motor time of ipsilateral than contralateral associations. This potentiation of the spatial correspondence effect plausibly explains the larger Simon-like effect usually observed in the joint Go/NoGo task compared to that observed in the isolated Go/NoGo task. The propensity of making incorrect activations and their concentration among fast responses also increased when working co-actively. Together, these findings indicate that joint-action increases the strength of automatic response capture induced by the stimulus location, promotes the delivery of the stronger association in the behavioral repertoire of the individual, and reduces cognitive control.