Seeing What I Did (Not): Cerebral and Behavioral Effects of Agency and Perspective on Episodic Memory Re-activation

Intuitively, we assume that we remember episodes better when we actively participated in them and were not mere observers. Independently of this, we can recall episodes from either the first-person perspective (1pp) or the third-person perspective (3pp). In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we tested whether agency and perspective modulate neural activity during memory retrieval and subsequently enhance memory performance. Subjects encoded a set of different episodes by either imitating or only observing videos that showed short toy stories. A week later, we conducted fMRI and cued episodic retrieval by presenting the original videos, or slightly modified versions thereof, from 1pp or from 3pp. The hippocampal formation was sensitive to self-performed vs. only observed actions only when there was an episodic mismatch. In a post-fMRI memory test a history of self-performance did not improve behavioral memory performance. However, modified videos were often (falsely) accepted as showing truly experienced episodes when: (i) they were already presented in this modified version during fMRI or (ii) they were presented in their original form during fMRI but from 3pp. While the overall effect of modification was strong, the effects of perspective and agency were more subtle. Together, our findings demonstrate that self-performance and self-perspective modulate the strength of a memory trace in different ways. Even when memory performance remains the same for different agentive states, the brain is capable of detecting mismatching information. Re-experiencing the latter impairs memory performance as well as retrieving encoded episodes from 3pp.

ETHICS: THE JOURNEY IN SEARCH OF A SATISFYING LIFE.

Background: Health professionals must change the ethics of the "third person", where moral actions carried out by other people are judged as correct / incorrect, for the ethics of the first person oriented to personal excellence, vocation to good and to dignity of a person. Objective: To explore the knowledge and ethical training of health professionals working in the field of Nephrology. Method: A survey of 37 items on the basic notions of ethics was applied to the participants of the annual IMIN Meeting. Results: 85 surveys were obtained, 79% think that the laws enacted today respond to economic interests; 82% express that we cannot accept moral absolutes, however, 89% think that practical reason that directs our behavior recognizes human good in search of plenitude. 44% feel that it is not possible to act according to justice on a regular basis, and 94% express that virtue ethics look to the integral good of the person. Conclusions: The philosophical reflection, so typical of the human being, constitutes an ethical requirement in search of the truth of the good that must be chosen to achieve fullness, in the work of health agents in the field of Nephrology. Keywords: bioethics, nephrology, personal autonomy.

Research on the Third-Person Effect of Online Commercial Advertisements – Based on the Students from Guangzhou Huashang College

The third-person effect hypothesis has become one of the most important aspects in the research field within the American empirical school. A large number of studies have adopted empirical research methods to verify the reliability of the third-person effect. With the rise of the network society, local research on the third-person effect has gradually extended to the verification or falsification of the third-person effect in the network environment. This article begins with a study on the third-person effect of online commercial advertisements based on the students from Guangzhou Huashang College. Through the study, the research hypotheses have been proposed and questionnaires have been distributed to the research subjects for analysis. Based on a series of quantitative operations, such as data analysis, empirical observations, and empirical research, this study provides a source of reference and reflection for research in this field.

Predictors of third-person perceptions about media's influence on vaccination against COVID-19

PurposeThe present study aims to unveil the main predictors of perceived media influence (the third-person effect (TPE)) on people's opinions towards COVID-19 vaccination. While the TPE has been researched before in medical contexts, predictors of TPE on the topic of vaccination against COVID-19 are understudied.Design/methodology/approachThis study employs a national survey using an online panel (N = 945) representative for the online population of Romania aged 18 or higher; data were collected during 1–9 April 2021.FindingsResults indicate that people perceive both close and distant others to be more influenced by media information related to COVID-19 vaccination topics. TPE perception is correlated with belief in conspiracy theories about vaccines/vaccination, perceived incidence of fake news about COVID-19 vaccines/vaccination, perceived usefulness of social networking sites and critical thinking.Originality/valueResults from this study might explain the success rate of some communication strategies employed with the help of the media. Key findings could be used as starting points for understanding the profile of those who underestimate the media's impact on themselves with respect to COVID-19 immunization and for designing more successful media strategies.

Drawing Kafka’s Castle

We investigated the effects of narrative perspective on mental imagery by comparing responses to an English translation of Franz Kafka’s Das Schloß (The Castle) in the published version (narrated in the third person) versus an earlier (first-person) draft. We analysed participants’ pencil drawings of their imaginative experience for presence/absence of specific features (K. and the castle) and for image entropy (a proxy for image unpredictability). We also used word embeddings to perform cluster analysis of participants’ verbal free-response testimony, generating thematic clusters independently of experimenter expectations. We found no effects of text version on feature presence or overall entropy, but an effect on entropy variance, which was higher in the third-person condition. There was also an effect of text version on free responses: Readers of the third-person version were more likely to use words associated with mood and atmosphere. We offer conclusions on “Kafkaesque” aesthetics, cognitive realism, and the future of experimental literary studies.

Association of Resting-state Brain Activity with Wise Advising: an fMRI study

Advice-giving is a common theme of wisdom in daily life. An electroencephalogram (EEG) study indicated that resting-state neural oscillations were associated with wise advising from a second- but not a third-person perspective. We hypothesized that resting-state neural activity should be associated with wise advising as a function of psychological distance. In our study, 52 participants provided advice on various life dilemmas using either a second- or a third- perspective after a resting-state fMRI scanning. The results showed that participants felt a significantly smaller psychological distance when advising from the second- than the third-person perspective. Perspective-taking when advising from the second-person perspective was significantly correlated with the amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (ALFF) in precuneus and calcarine; while that from the third-person perspective was associated with precuneus and precentral gyrus. Moreover, meta-level humility when advising from the third-person perspective was associated with anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). The results supported our hypothesis. Wisdom from different psychological distances may rely on different neural bases and mental processes.

Theatre and storytelling

The narrative arts deal with the presentation of stories via a variety of narrative processes and presentation media. Fictionality is a unique feature of the arts, one that distinguishes the narrative arts from the storytelling of everyday conversation. The plots of stories are grounded in the experientiality of the story’s protagonist in a storyworld, most especially his/her problem-solving dynamics. Literature describes these behaviours in the third person using narration, whereas theatre re-creates these actions in an embodied manner by having actors portray the characters in performance. While role playing is a central part of the presentation of the self in everyday social interactions, actors portray characters who they themselves are not, a re-creative process of impersonation and pretence that comprises the most art-specific feature of the narrative arts.

Seeing what I did (not): Cerebral and behavioral effects of agency and perspective on episodic memory re-activation

Intuitively, we assume that we remember episodes better when we actively participated in them and were not mere observers. Independently of this, we can recall episodes from either the first-person perspective (1pp) or the third-person perspective (3pp). In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we tested whether agency and perspective modulate neural activity during memory retrieval and subsequently enhance memory performance. Subjects encoded a set of different episodes by either imitating or only observing videos that showed short toy stories. A week later, we conducted fMRI and cued episodic retrieval by presenting the original videos, or slightly modified versions thereof, from 1pp or from 3pp. The hippocampal formation responded more strongly to episodic mismatches in previously self-performed vs. only observed actions. In a post-fMRI memory test a history of self-performance did not improve behavioral memory performance. However, modified videos were often (falsely) accepted as showing truly experienced episodes when: (i) they were already presented in this modified version during fMRI or (ii) they were presented in their original form during fMRI but from 3pp. Together, our findings demonstrate that self-performance and self-perspective modulate the strength of a memory trace in different ways. Even when memory performance remains the same for different agentive states, the brain is capable of detecting mismatching information. Re-experiencing the latter impairs memory performance as well as retrieving encoded episodes from 3pp.

Epistemic Overconfidence in Algorithmic News Selection

The process of news consumption has undergone great changes over the past decade: Information is now available in an ever-increasing amount from a plethora of sources. Recent work suggests that most people would favor algorithmic solutions over human editors. This stands in contrast to public and scholarly debate about the pitfalls of algorithmic news selection—i.e., the so-called “filter bubbles.” This study therefore investigates reasons and motivations which might lead people to prefer algorithmic gatekeepers over human ones. We expect that people have more algorithmic appreciation when consuming news to pass time, entertain oneself, or out of escapism than when using news to keep up-to-date with politics (H1). Secondly, we hypothesize the extent to which people are confident in their own cognitive abilities to moderate that relationship: When people are overconfident in their own capabilities to estimate the relevance of information, they are more likely to have higher levels of algorithmic appreciation, due to the third person effect (H2). For testing those two pre-registered hypotheses, we conducted an online survey with a sample of 268 US participants and replicated our study using a sample of 384 Dutch participants. The results show that the first hypothesis cannot be supported by our data. However, a positive interaction between overconfidence and algorithmic appreciation for the gratification of surveillance (i.e., gaining information about the world, society, and politics) was found in both samples. Thereby, our study contributes to our understanding of the underlying reasons people have for choosing different forms of gatekeeping when selecting news.

Problems of teaching verb categories (contact, version and passive voice) of the Georgian language to non-native speakers

Teaching Georgian to non-native speakers, it is important to focus on categories students' first languages lack or express them in a different way. The paper discusses the formation of indirect contact, neutral version, and passive voice in verbs. Infixes -in- and -evin- are used to form forms of indirect contact. They are added to infinitive forms without markers - -in- is used with stems containing vowels, and - evin- with stems without vowels. At the same time, prefix a- is added to verbs at the beginning, and the thematic marker -eb at the end. Like all other thematic markers, the latter disappears in the second series of conjugation. Deriving version forms is a little more complicated, as there are neutral version forms without markers and with the prefix a-, subjective and objective version forms with the prefix i- for the first and second persons and u- for the third person in both singular and plural forms. Neutral version is formed with the prefix a- in verbs with eb- and ob- thematic markers apart from several exceptions and verbs with the am- thematic marker, apart from one exception (as version is impossible in the third series of conjugation, examples are in the first and second series of conjugation): a-šen-eb-s - a-a-šena, a-tbob-s - ga-a-tbo, a-b-am-s - da-a-ba). Thematic markers make no difference in forming subjective and objective version forms. If a verb is semantically able to have subjective and/or objective versions, verbs in the first and second series of conjugation take forms of subjective and/or objective version. Forms of subjective version use prefix i-: c'ers – i-c'ers, dac'era – da-i-c'era. In forms of objective version, verbs take the prefix i- in the first and second person and u- in the third person, both singular and plural. Like in the forms of indirect contact, the aforementioned rule of using person markers can be put to use: m-i-c'ers is me, g-i-c'ers is šen, u-c'ers is mas/mat, gv-i-c'ers is čven, g-i-c'ert is tkven, u-c'eren isini mas/mat. As for the passive voice, it can be formed with prefixes (i- and e-), a suffix (-d) and without any markers. Thematic markers and the presence/absence of a vowel in the infinitive play a role in forming verbs in the passive voice. In the passive voice, prefixes are added to verbs with single stems (without thematic markers) and verbs with -av, -am, -op, -i thematic markers, those with vowel interchange, and some verbs with the -ob thematic marker. Verbs with a vowel in the infinitive form the passive voice the thematic stems of the second series of conjugation: xat’va – i-xat’eba, e xat’eba; breca – i-briceba, e-briceba, while stems without vowels form the passive voice from the infinitive without markers. There are several such verbs with -av and -eb thematic markers, verbs with -i, -am and -eb thematic markers and some verbs with the -ob thematic marker: šek’vr-a – i-k’vreba, e-k’vreba; da-d-eba – i-deba, e-deba; č'r-a – i-č'reba, e-č'reba; dadgm-a – i-dgmeba, e-dgmeba; ga-q’op-a – i-q’opa, e-q’opa; da-xrč-oba – i-xrčoba, exrčoba. Verbs with a vowel and the -eb thematic marker, apart from two exceptions, form the passive voice with the suffix -d from the thematic stem of the second series of conjugation: šen-eb-a – šen-d-eba. The passive voice is formed without markers from verbs with the -ob thematic markers. The thematic stems of the second series of conjugation are used as the roots: ga-tb-ob-a – tb-eb-a. The passive voice with suffixes (with the -d suffix) is formed only in verbs with the - eb thematic marker. The passive voice markers is formed only in some verbs with the -ob thematic marker. Other verbs can form the passive voice only with the i- and eprefixes. Verbs in the passive voice with the prefix e- have only two persons (emaleba is mas). Other passive voice forms can have only one person (imaleba is, c'itldeba is, idgmeba is, išleba is, iq’opa is, igrixeba is, xmeba is). The author hopes that this approach to these problems can help Georgian language learners.