“Anger Management” is the most popular lay term today for any therapy designed to eliminate destructive rage in relationships. The therapeutic community also uses the expression “anger management” most frequently, in lieu of any other term, when marketing to the public’s needs in this area. From a marketing perspective, this makes good sense. Yet, there is a subtle loss of opportunity if all co...

11 When do children become consciously aware of events in the world? Five possible 12 strategies are considered for their usefulness in determining the age in question. 13 Three of these strategies ask when children show signs of engaging in activities for 14 which conscious awareness seems necessary in adults (verbal communication, exec15 utive control, explicit memory), and two of the strateg...

In recent years it has been suggested that processing of visual information is divided between a ventral stream, responsible for object recognition and conscious processing of object properties, and a dorsal stream mediating automatic integration of visual information into a motor task. We used metacontrast masking to prevent conscious perception of visual cues concerning the load of an object ...

There is something deeply puzzling about the idea that we can be ignorant of our own reasons. Whereas Pascal attributed certain reasons to the heart versus the mind, we may attribute such reasons to the emotional versus the cognitive mind or to the unconscious versus the conscious mind, but the central conviction remains the same: we may be moved by reasons without ever consciously thinking of ...

In two experiments, sequential modulations of prime-target correspondence effects were investigated in a metacontrast paradigm. Primes were either unmasked and thus consciously discriminable, or entirely masked and thus indiscriminable. Mirroring similar findings from Eriksen- and Simon-type tasks, the influence of prime-target correspondence was reduced in trials that followed a noncorrespondi...

Virtual environments (VEs) offer more than just simulation; they allow us to create perceptual effects not feasible in the real world. Arising from perception research, one technique that can be used is visual masking: under certain temporal and spatial conditions a masking stimulus can be used to prevent explicit, visual awareness of a target stimulus although the target may still be processed...

Modern economic theory ignores the influence of emotions on decision-making. Emerging neuroscience evidence suggests that sound and rational decision making, in fact, depends on prior accurate emotional processing. The somatic marker hypothesis provides a systems-level neuroanatomical and cognitive framework for decision-making and its influence by emotion. The key idea of this hypothesis is th...

In his presidential address to the Southwestern Surgical Congress, he examines surgery as a profession from three different perspectives: his experience as a patient, a surgeon, and a photographer. He uses photography to illustrate the importance of perspective and illumination. He respectfully suggests that we should consciously choose to reframe the profession from a different perspective tha...

The extent to which the contents of short-term memory are consciously accessible is a fundamental question of cognitive science. In audition, short-term memory is often studied via the mismatch negativity (MMN), a change-related component of the auditory evoked response that is elicited by violations of otherwise regular stimulus sequences. The prevailing functional view of the MMN is that it o...

Previous research shows that the amygdala automatically responds to a face's trustworthiness when a face is clearly visible. However, it is unclear whether the amygdala could evaluate such high-level facial information without a face being consciously perceived. Using a backward masking paradigm, we demonstrate in two functional neuroimaging experiments that the human amygdala is sensitive to s...