Pairing and sharing: The birth of the sense of us

The goal of this paper is to show that a particular view of emotion sharing and a specific hypothesis on infant social perception strengthen each other. The view of emotion sharing is called “the straightforward view.” The hypothesis on infant social perception is called “the pairing account.” The straightforward view suggests that participants in emotion sharing undergo one and the same overarching emotion. The pairing account posits that infants perceive others’ embodied experiences as belonging to someone other than the self through a process of assimilation to, and accommodation of, their own embodied experience. The connection between the two theories lies in the domain-general process of association by similarity, which functions both in the individuation of a unitary emotion and in the interpretation of the sensory stimulus. By elaborating on this connection, the straightforward view becomes more solid from the cognitive-developmental standpoint and the pairing account expands its explanatory power. Since the straightforward view requires minimal forms of self- and other-awareness, the paper provides a characterization of the developmental origin of the sense of us, i.e., the experience of self and other as co-subjects of a shared emotional state.

Analysis of Pungency Sensation Effects from an Oral Processing, Sensorial and Emotions Detection Perspective—Case Study with Grilled Pork Meat

Pungency is an interesting sensory stimulus analyzed from different perspectives, in particular the underpinning mechanisms of its sensation and perception. In this study, grilled pork meat coated with three types of hot sauces were investigated regarding its main food oral processing characteristics and evaluated using time-intensity and temporal dominance of pungency sensations methods analyzing the pungency descriptors and intensities. Besides these methods, facial expressions obtained from video capturing were subject to emotion detection. Mastication parameters showed a slight, but not statistically significant, trend of an increased number of chews and consumption time associated with pungency intensity, while saliva incorporation indicated an increasing trend depending on the pungency intensity, especially after 25 strokes and before swallowing. Both time intensity and temporal dominance of pungency sensations showed that the complexity of understanding these sensations is in relation to intensity and type. Finally, the use of emotion detection software in analyzing the faces of panelists during mastication confirmed the increase in non-neutral emotions associated with the increase in pungency intensity.

Some rats take more time to make easier perceptual decisions

When subjects control the duration of sampling a sensory stimulus before making a decision, they generally take more time to make more difficult sensory discriminations. This has been found to be true of many rats performing visual tasks. But two rats performing visual motion discrimination were found to have inverted chronometric response functions: their average response time paradoxically increased with stimulus strength. We hypothesize that corrective decision reversals may underlie this unexpected observation.

Persepsi Penggemar Pasangan Boys Love (BL Ship) terhadap Homoseksualitas

These past few years, Thailand’s entertainment industry has been increasing their production of Boys’ Love series and movies. The genre blew up in 2014, and until 2020, around 57 BL series had been produced and released. This has led to the phenomenon of the escalation of the number of Thai BL fans in Indonesia. The aim of this research was to find out how BL Ship’s fans or shippers perceive homosexuality. Perception is a meaning making activity of a sensory stimulus through gathering and interpreting process of information or message. To elaborate it, this research used the qualitative research method with case studies approach towards the members of BL ship Off Jumpol-Gun Atthaphan’s fans kingdom. Data was gathered by interview, observation, and documentation. To analyze it, researcher conducted Glaser and Strauss’s constant comparative method, and Mahpur’s coding steps. The results showed that shippers’ perception of homosexuality more or less got affected by what they consumed through media, such as BL series and ships. Along the way, their cultural background, religious views, personal experiences and values also influenced their views of the meaning of homosexuality. Researcher suggest that the professionals who are working in the industry of this genre to be mindful and take extra care since it’s going to affect the audience’s perception.Beberapa tahun terakhir, industri hiburan Thailand semakin gencar memproduksi drama serial dan film romantis bergenre Boys’ Love (BL). Sejak pertama kali meledak tahun 2014 hingga 2020, terdapat setidaknya 57 serial drama BL yang telah dibuat dan ditayangkan. Hal ini menyebabkan fenomena peningkatan penggemar pasangan Thai Boys’ Love (BL Ship) di Indonesia. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk melihat bagaimana persepsi penggemar BL Ship terhadap homoseksualitas. Persepsi merupakan kegiatan pemberian makna pada stimulus sensorik yang diperoleh melalui proses menyimpulkan dan menafsirkan informasi dan atau pesan. Metode yang digunakan adalah metode penelitian kualitatif dengan pendekatan studi kasus. Subjek dalam penelitian ini adalah anggota kelompok penggemar pasangan BL Off Jumpol-Gun Atthaphan. Teknik pengumpulan data yang digunakan adalah teknik wawancara, observasi, dan dokumentasi. Data yang telah terkumpul kemudian direduksi, dikategorisasi, disintesisasi, dan kemudian ditarik kesimpulannya. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa terdapat faktor personal dan situasional yang mempengaruhi persepsi individu terhadap homoseksualitas. Latar belakang budaya, kepercayaan secara religius, dan nilai-nilai dari sekitar maupun pribadi individu turut mengambil peran dalam proses pembentukan persepsi individu atas homoseksualitas. Penting bagi pegiat genre ini untuk memerhatikan apa yang diproduksi karena apa yang ditampilkan akan mempengaruhi persepsi yang diterpanya.

Sequential sampling from memory underlies action selection during abstract decision making

The process of deciding what a sensory stimulus is and how to act on that decision seem distinct, yet they appear to be coupled at the neural level. Neurons in the parietal cortex of monkeys represent both the integration of evidence toward a decision and the behavior used to report the decision. This raises the possibility that monkeys evaluate sensory percepts in terms of their motor affordances rather than their abstract identity. It is not clear how monkeys can evaluate sensory percepts when unaware of the motor actions they bear upon. We investigated this by training monkeys to make perceptual decisions about the direction of motion in a noisy random-dot display. They learned to associate leftward and rightward with two colors, and to select from a pair of colored targets, which were displayed after the motion at unpredictable locations. Surprisingly we found that monkeys postpone decision formation until the pertinent motor actions are revealed. Neurons in parietal cortex represent the accumulation of evidence sampled from short term memory of the motion display. The findings demonstrate that abstract decisions are framed in terms of their motor affordances and highlight the capacity for integration of evidence from memory.

The Neural Correlates of Cued Reward Omission

Compared to our understanding of positive prediction error signals occurring due to unexpected reward outcomes, less is known about the neural circuitry in humans that drives negative prediction errors during omission of expected rewards. While classical learning theories such as Rescorla–Wagner or temporal difference learning suggest that both types of prediction errors result from a simple subtraction, there has been recent evidence suggesting that different brain regions provide input to dopamine neurons which contributes to specific components of this prediction error computation. Here, we focus on the brain regions responding to negative prediction error signals, which has been well-established in animal studies to involve a distinct pathway through the lateral habenula. We examine the activity of this pathway in humans, using a conditioned inhibition paradigm with high-resolution functional MRI. First, participants learned to associate a sensory stimulus with reward delivery. Then, reward delivery was omitted whenever this stimulus was presented simultaneously with a different sensory stimulus, the conditioned inhibitor (CI). Both reward presentation and the reward-predictive cue activated midbrain dopamine regions, insula and orbitofrontal cortex. While we found significant activity at an uncorrected threshold for the CI in the habenula, consistent with our predictions, it did not survive correction for multiple comparisons and awaits further replication. Additionally, the pallidum and putamen regions of the basal ganglia showed modulations of activity for the inhibitor that did not survive the corrected threshold.