Crying is an ubiquitous communicative signal in infancy. This meta‐analysis synthesizes data on parent‐reported infant cry durations from 17 countries and 57 studies until infant age 12 months ...(N = 7580, 54% female from k = 44; majority White samples, where reported, k = 18), from studies before the end Sept. 2020. Most studies were conducted in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada (k = 32), and at the traditional cry “peak” (age 5–6 weeks), where the pooled estimate for cry and fuss duration was 126 mins (SD = 61), with high heterogeneity. Formal modeling of the meta‐analytic data suggests that the duration of crying remains substantial in the first year of life, after an initial decline.
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BFBNIB, DOBA, FZAB, GIS, IJS, IZUM, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
While infant fearfulness, and its expression via crying, may have been adaptive in our evolutionary history, for modern parents, crying can be challenging to respond to. We discuss how and why ...prolonged crying can raise the risk for difficulties with adult care. Given that crying is the most-reported trigger for shaking, its potential to elicit maladaptive responses should not be overlooked.
Convergent research suggests that people with ASD have difficulties localizing sounds in space. These difficulties have implications for communication, the development of social behavior, and quality ...of life. Recently, a theory has emerged which treats perceptual symptoms in ASD as the product of impairments in implicit Bayesian inference; as suboptimalities in the integration of sensory evidence with prior perceptual knowledge. We present the results of an experiment that applies this new theory to understanding difficulties in auditory localization, and we find that adults with ASD integrate prior information less optimally when making perceptual judgments about the spatial sources of sounds. We discuss these results in terms of their implications for formal models of symptoms in ASD.
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DOBA, EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, IZUM, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, ODKLJ, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, VSZLJ, ZAGLJ
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) – and autistic traits more generally – are associated with a heterogeneous pattern of differences in cognitive function. These include differences in associative ...learning, attention, and processing of social information. All three cognitive functions have importance in clinical, educational, and research contexts. The present study investigates the relationships between these functions in the context of autistic traits in the neurotypical population. In an online study, we asked a group of over 400 people to complete the Autism Spectrum Quotient questionnaire. We also asked participants to complete one of two standard attentional learning paradigms – either a Kamin blocking or an attentional highlighting task. To investigate the relation of attention and learning to social information processing, we incorporated social cues in one of each kind of paradigm. We found Kamin blocking increased with increasing number of autistic traits, in particular the sub-trait attention switching, but only for non-social cues. We found that highlighting decreased with increasing number of traits, in particular the sub-trait communication, but only for social cues. We interpret these findings as evidence of a crucial role for attention in other characteristics of the broader autistic phenotype, and discuss the relevance of these results for cognitive explanations of autistic traits and symptoms.
•We demonstrate links between autistic traits and cognitive processes related to attentional learning•We show Kamin blocking increases with autistic traits associated with attention•We show attentional highlighting decreases with autistic traits associated with communication, but only for social cues•We link individual differences in learning to differences in social cognition associated with autism
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Although it is well established that regions of premotor cortex (PMC) are active during action observation, it remains controversial whether they play a causal role in action understanding. In the ...experiment reported here, we used offline continuous theta-burst stimulation (cTBS) to investigate this question. Participants received cTBS over the hand and lip areas of left PMC, in separate sessions, before completing a pantomime-recognition task in which half of the trials contained pantomimed hand actions, and half contained pantomimed mouth actions. The results reveal a double dissociation: Participants were less accurate in recognizing pantomimed hand actions after receiving cTBS over the hand area than over the lip area and less accurate in recognizing pantomimed mouth actions after receiving cTBS over the lip area than over the hand area. This finding constrains theories of action understanding by showing that somatotopically organized regions of PMC contribute causally to action understanding and, thus, that the mechanisms underpinning action understanding and action performance overlap.
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BFBNIB, NMLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Music is a potent source for eliciting emotions, but not everybody experience emotions in the same way. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show difficulties with social and emotional ...cognition. Impairments in emotion recognition are widely studied in ASD, and have been associated with atypical brain activation in response to emotional expressions in faces and speech. Whether these impairments and atypical brain responses generalize to other domains, such as emotional processing of music, is less clear. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated neural correlates of emotion recognition in music in high-functioning adults with ASD and neurotypical adults. Both groups engaged similar neural networks during processing of emotional music, and individuals with ASD rated emotional music comparable to the group of neurotypical individuals. However, in the ASD group, increased activity in response to happy compared to sad music was observed in dorsolateral prefrontal regions and in the rolandic operculum/insula, and we propose that this reflects increased cognitive processing and physiological arousal in response to emotional musical stimuli in this group.
We explore the relationship between academic employees' attitudes to modern sexism and the #MeToo movement to better understand how interventions designed to address sexual harassment might be ...received in Danish academia. Using a survey of employees at a large Danish university (N = 1128), we categorized employees' open answers about their attitudes to the #MeToo Movement as (a) positive, (b) ambivalent, or (c) negative. These categories were associated with employees' modern sexism scores, such that those higher in modern sexism were more likely to be negative about the movement, while those with lower scores were more likely to be positive. To better understand possible sources of resistance to policy interventions, we used an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design to analyse the open comments for themes related to employee's negative attitudes towards #MeToo. The two most prominent themes were: (1) delegitimisation of the purposes of the movement, and (2) perception that the rights of potential sexual perpetrators were more important than those of potential victims. We discuss the implications for the implementation of interventions targeting sexual harassment.
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BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
8.
Perceptual inference and autistic traits Skewes, Joshua C; Jegindø, Else-Marie; Gebauer, Line
Autism : the international journal of research and practice,
04/2015, Volume:
19, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Autistic people are better at perceiving details. Major theories explain this in terms of bottom-up sensory mechanisms or in terms of top-down cognitive biases. Recently, it has become possible to ...link these theories within a common framework. This framework assumes that perception is implicit neural inference, combining sensory evidence with prior perceptual knowledge. Within this framework, perceptual differences may occur because of enhanced precision in how sensory evidence is represented or because sensory evidence is weighted much higher than prior perceptual knowledge. In this preliminary study, we compared these models using groups with high and low autistic trait scores (Autism-Spectrum Quotient). We found evidence supporting the cognitive bias model and no evidence for the enhanced sensory precision model.
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NUK, OILJ, SAZU, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Perception is fundamentally a multisensory experience. The principle of inverse effectiveness (PoIE) states how the multisensory gain is maximal when responses to the unisensory constituents of the ...stimuli are weak. It is one of the basic principles underlying multisensory processing of spatiotemporally corresponding crossmodal stimuli that are well established at behavioral as well as neural levels. It is not yet clear, however, how modality-specific stimulus features influence discrimination of subtle changes in a crossmodally corresponding feature belonging to another modality. Here, we tested the hypothesis that reliance on visual cues to pitch discrimination follow the PoIE at the interindividual level (i.e., varies with varying levels of auditory-only pitch discrimination abilities). Using an oddball pitch discrimination task, we measured the effect of varying visually perceived vertical position in participants exhibiting a wide range of pitch discrimination abilities (i.e., musicians and nonmusicians). Visual cues significantly enhanced pitch discrimination as measured by the sensitivity index
d’
, and more so in the crossmodally congruent than incongruent condition. The magnitude of gain caused by compatible visual cues was associated with individual pitch discrimination thresholds, as predicted by the PoIE
.
This was not the case for the magnitude of the congruence effect, which was unrelated to individual pitch discrimination thresholds, indicating that the pitch-height association is robust to variations in auditory skills. Our findings shed light on individual differences in multisensory processing by suggesting that relevant multisensory information that crucially aids some perceivers’ performance may be of less importance to others, depending on their unisensory abilities.
•Income inequality predicts decreased contributions in a public goods game.•Income inequality predicts initially lower optimism about others’ contributions.•Income inequality predicts higher ...sensitivity towards others’ contributions.•Trust and adherence to civic norms might explain these effects.•Income inequality also predicts decreased social volunteering.
Inequality affects how people make social decisions. Laboratory research has shown that when income inequality is simulated using cooperative economic games, groups with higher inequality often generate less wealth overall, with poorer group members receiving the worst outcomes. This study links these experimental findings to real world inequality and applies a decision model to explain the effects in terms of social decision-making dynamics. Using a pre-existing dataset from 255 groups playing a public goods game in thirteen economically diverse societies, we show that in nations with higher inequality, groups contribute less (Research question (RQ) 1). Further, we find that higher inequality is associated with lower optimism regarding others’ contributions at the outset of the game and increased sensitivity to others’ contributions, which accelerates the decay of cooperation (RQ2). These effects might be explained by national differences in social capital as expressed by trust and adherence to civic norms (RQ3). Using the European Values Survey, we replicate the negative association between inequality and contributions to a public good by examining national volunteering rates (RQ4).
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
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