Introduction The current literature highlights the significant role of psychological factors including cognitive (pain related thoughts and beliefs) and acceptance components (pain willingness, activity engagement, psychological inflexibility) in the management of chronic pain. The research is however in the preliminary stages in terms of investigating the specific relationships that exist betw...

Autonomous learning is a complex and multi-faceted construct. It can be defined as the learners’ capacity to self-direct their own learning, which means taking responsibility for the decisions concerning the different aspects of the learning process. In self-directed learning, learners’ choices remain mainly on the learning management level, i.e. behavioral level of learning, and it relates to ...

A primary aspect of the self is the sense of agency – the sense that one is causing an action. In the spirit of recent reductionistic approaches to other complex, multifaceted phenomena (e.g., working memory; cf. Johnson &Johnson, 2009), we attempt to unravel the sense of agency by investigating its most basic components, without invoking high-level conceptual or 'central executive' processes. ...

As people age, their performance on tasks requiring cognitive control often declines. Such a decline is frequently explained as either a general or specific decline in cognitive functioning with age. In the context of hypotheses suggesting a general decline, it is often proposed that processing speed generally declines with age. A further hypothesis is that an age-related compensation mechanism...

This study examines whether the cognitive and affective components of self-reflection can be dissociated using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Using a simple paradigm in which subjects judged the personal relevance of personality characteristics that were either favorable (e.g., "honest") or unfavorable (e.g., "lazy", we found that distinct neural circuits in adjacent regions of the pref...

In this paper we discuss a generic component of a cognitive agent architecture that merges beliefs, obligations, intentions and desires into goals. The output of belief, obligation, intention and desire components may conflict and the way the conflicts are resolved determines the type of the agent. For component based cognitive agents, we introduce an alternative classification of agent types b...

The authors describe a theory of visual information acquisition and visual memory. The theory has 2 major components. First, the visual system's initial sensory response to a short-duration, low-contrast stimulus is generated by a linear, low-pass temporal filter that operates on the stimulus's temporal waveform. Second, information is acquired from a stimulus through an independent-sampling pr...