The Social Situation Affects How We Process Feedback About Our Actions

Social status determines how we monitor and evaluate our performance.

Since people with low status are more likely to experience social evaluative threat and are therefore more inclined to monitor for these threats and inhibit approach behaviour, we expected that low-status subjects would be more engaged in evaluating their own performance, compared with high-status subjects. We created a highly salient social hierarchy based on the performance of a simple time e...

How the Physicality of Space Affects How We Think about Time

Time is an abstract concept that may be better understood when mapped onto space. For English speakers, typically a timeline is used that runs horizontally from left (past) to right (future) (Boroditsky, Fuhrman, & McCormick, 2011) and can be separated into regions, past and future. However, it is unclear from prior research how these regions along the timeline are differentiated. In addition, ...

How We Know Our Senses

I propose a new criterion by which, I hold, subjects recognize and distinguish their sensory modalities. I argue that, rather than appealing to one of the standard criteria (sense organ, proximal stimulus, phenomenal character, or representational content (Grice 1962, Macpherson 2011a)) or to O’Dea’s (2011) proprioceptive content, we need to introduce the criterion of location in the functional...

How do we predict the consequences of our actions? A functional imaging study.

Humans are readily able to distinguish expected and unexpected sensory events. Whether a single mechanism underlies this ability is unknown. The most common type of expected sensory events are those generated as a consequence of self-generated actions. Using H2 15O PET, we studied brain responses to such predictable sensory events (tones) and to similar unpredictable events and especially how t...

How Visual Feedback Affects Movements