Psychology

A recent article in The Conversation by Emma Blakey addressed a widespread concern about exaggerated claims made by developers of brain training products.

Blakey correctly pointed out that the evidence for the effects of brain training on children’s performance at school is weak. But there is a real danger that such articles can swing public opinion too far in one direction. The fact is that developments in the science underlying brain training are pretty exciting.

The most well know attribution of different brain regions to different psychological functions (types of thinking, types of memory, levels of consciousness) is that of hemispheric specialization. ‘Left Brain’ and ‘Right Brain’ is common parlance in both psychology and education. However, a number of writers have suggested that the popularized notion of hemispheric specialisation may be a ‘neuromyth’  (McCrone, 2000; Corbalis, 2012; Tokuma-Espinosa, 2011).This paper explores research on the lateralisation of function within the brain, not just in terms of the traditional ‘cerebral hemispheres’ perspective, but in terms the total brain, that is, including the cerebellum and brain stem. Rather than seeing hemispheric specialisation as a complete myth, this paper presents a more up to date and more realistically complex picture.

"Examining the ontology of pain as a means of self-determination and integration."

This paper will focus on the ontological content of pain and its psychosomatic consequences for modern man living in urban cities. As we know, the familiarity of man with pain begins even before birth. Thus, pain occupies a leading position in human life, as it relates directly to the roots and self-orientation in the world, by acting as a catalyst in the range of emotions and personal integration. Experiencing an internal struggle, man refuses this consistency with the pain because it causes discomfort, though it is transforming or reforming gradually within life's journey. In the course of life, man will realize that pain is merely an integral part of existence and that existence is only one piece of the puzzle that synthesizes the formative power of pain. Moreover, I will try to illuminate those dark aspects of pain affecting the individual, voluntary or involuntary, illustrating with examples taken from the fields of Philosophy, Art and Literature. On the one hand, self-destructive passions, like fear and compulsion and on the other hand, the struggle of Ego within the 'inside-Chaos' strains existential human angst about the future, forcing first the acknowledgement of - and, later on - knowledge of the excess of pain. The moral parameters of pain, such as the concept of sin, passion, pride, envy, jealousy and other related passions are only some of the dimensions or the causes from which pain is emanated and fed. Modern man, living in the urban areas, cut off from nature, realizes that education and culture alone are not enough to lead to consciousness and self awareness in order to overcome these conditions of pain. Both the self-destructive internalization of pain, as well as its violent externalization, contribute negatively to the bulking of the problems of existence, creating an increasing distance between man and a partaking in the miracle of life.

Si potrebbe dire che la letteratura sia la creazione di dimensioni nelle quali agiscono diverse teorie della mente, e nel caso della letteratura contemporanea spesso scrivere è istallare direttamente il lettore nello spazio nel quale si dispiega una teoria della mente.

Intentional inhibition refers to the suppression of ongoing behavior on the basis of internally-generated
decisions. This ability to cancel planned actions at the last moment is thought to be critical for self-
control and has been related to activation in a circumscribed region of the dorsal frontomedian cortex
(dFMC). Preliminary theories of intentional inhibition were based on studies that exclusively examined
the cancellation of motor responses, and consequently concluded that this region serves the suppression
of motor output. Yet recent evidence suggests that the dFMC is also involved in inhibitory control over
more abstract internal states such as emotions or desires that have no immediate behavioral output. In
this review, we therefore wish to put forth a new integrative perspective on the role of the dFMC in
human self-control. We will argue that by virtue of its anatomical location and functional connections,
this area may subserve the disengagement from current urges and  impulses, thus facilitating successful
exertions of self-control across a wide range of contexts by overcoming a self-focused perspective. We
will discuss the fit of this view of the dFMC with the existing literature, identify critical experimental
determinants for engaging the dFMC in intentional inhibition, and outline promising perspectives for
future research.

Cognitive control is thought to rely upon a set of distributed brain regions within frontoparietal cortex, but the functional contributions
of these regions remain elusive. Here, we investigated the disruptive effects of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) over the human
prefrontal and parietal cortices in task preparation at different abstraction levels. While participants completed a task-switching paradigm
that assessed the reconfiguration of task goals and response sets independently, TMS was applied over the left inferior frontal
junction (IFJ) and over the left intraparietal sulcus (IPS) during task preparation. In Experiment 1, TMS over the IFJ caused interference
with the updating of task goals, while leaving the updating of response sets unaffected. In Experiment 2, TMS over the IPS created the
opposite pattern of results, perturbing only the ability to update response sets, but not task goals. Experiment 3 furthermore revealed that
TMS over the IPS interfered with task goal updating when the pulses are delivered at a later point in time during preparation. This
dissociation of abstract and action-related components not only reveals distinct cognitive control processes during task preparation, but
also sheds new light on how prefrontal and parietal areas might work in concert to support flexible and goal-oriented control of behavior.

Throughout the past decade, the task-switching paradigm has been used extensively as a tool to delineate the
neural mechanisms underlying flexible and goal-directed action control. Yet, given a large number of experimental
procedures, the task-switching literature has yielded considerable inconsistencies calling for a systematic
evaluation of the impact of methodological parameters. In the present study, we examine a fundamental and implicit
assumption that has guided previous research on task switching. Does switch-related brain activation (i.e.,
the contrast between preparatory activity on switch versus repetition trials) reflect abstract cognitive control
processes that are independent of specific task demands, and thus equivalent across different types of tasks?
To answer this question, we compared the data of two fMRI studies that examined updating of task goals and/
or stimulus–response mappings under almost identical protocols, but using entirely different tasks. In line
with an abstract control process view, our results show that the vast majority of switch-related brain activity is
insensitive to the context in which it occurs. The only region that exhibited a reliable contextual modulation
was the anterior cingulate cortex, indicating that its contribution to preparatory adjustments might be linked
to specific task demands.

The sense of agency refers to the experience of being in control of one’s actions and their
consequences. The 19th century French philosopher Maine de Biran proposed that the
sensation of effort might provide an internal cue for distinguishing self-caused from other
changes in the environment. The present study is the first to empirically test the philosophical
idea that effort promotes self-agency. We used intentional binding, which refers to the
subjective temporal attraction between an action and its sensory consequences, as an
implicit measure of the sense of agency. Effort was manipulated independent of the
primary task by requiring participants to pull stretch bands of varying resistance levels.
We found that intentional binding was enhanced under conditions of increased effort. This
suggests not only that the experience of effort directly contributes to the sense of agency,
but also that the integration of effort as an agency cue is non-specific to the effort requirement
of the action itself.

Ideomotor theory states that the formation of anticipatory representations about the perceptual
consequences of an action [i.e., action-effect (A-E) binding] provides the functional
basis of voluntary action control. A host of studies have demonstrated that A-E binding
occurs fast and effortlessly, yet little is known about cognitive and affective factors that
influence this learning process. In the present study, we sought to test whether the motivational
value of an action modulates the acquisition of A-E associations. To this end, we
linked specific actions with monetary incentives during the acquisition of novel A-E mappings.
In a subsequent test phase, the degree of binding was assessed by presenting the
former effect stimuli as task-irrelevant response primes in a forced-choice response task,
absent reward. Binding, as indexed by response priming through the former action-effects,
was only found for reward-related A-E mappings. Moreover, the degree to which reward
associations modulated the binding strength was predicted by individuals’ trait sensitivity
to reward.These observations indicate that the association of actions and their immediate
outcomes depends on the motivational value of the action during learning, as well as on
the motivational disposition of the individual. On a larger scale, these findings also highlight
the link between ideomotor theories and reinforcement-learning theories, providing
an interesting perspective for future research on anticipatory regulation of behavior.

A biggest task for strategy maker, to perform market insights and its research by
designing, collection of data with analyzing and reporting data (relevant) for specific purpose
and market situation (problem) facing the company. However it requires spending a lot of time
over it so several companies hire many professional experts having a knowledge regarding with
technical operation of research like (syndicated-service research firms, custom-marketing
research firms and specialty-line marketing research firms).

Zajonc (1980) argued that, contrary to what is commonly believed, an affective judgment about a stimulus may be independent of the cognitive processes through which we know what that stimulus is. The evidence Zajonc offered (the exposure effect in the absence of recognition) does not entail this claim. An example of the sort of experiment that could do so is offered. When carried out, however, this study indicated the opposite: An affective judgment about a stimulus depended on how it was cognitively interpreted. We argue that what is commonly believed in this area is presumptively correct: Affective judgments about a stimulus depend on whatever information is possessed about that stimulus.