Cognitive Conflict in Technological Environment: Cognitive Process and Emotions through Intuitive Errors in Area, Perimeter and Volume

This study was conducted among 28 seventh-grade students. They worked in groups in an activity with modeling features; the activity consisted of three tasks dealing with an intuitive error, namely, same A–same B. The data source was nine video recordings of three groups across the three activities. The results obtained from analyses of students’ discussions and interactions indicate that they moved through three central stages: the intuitive error stage, the revealing of the intuitive error connected with cognitive conflict and the stage of overcoming the intuitive errors. In each of the three stages in the three tasks, we identified similar emotion features among the three groups across the three tasks. In the intuitive error stage, the participants were characterized by confidence, comfort and enjoyment. In revealing the intuitive errors, we identified several indicators and signs of non-comfortable situations by revealing the errors in the three tasks, such as a high sound or sad tone of voice, physical movements such as moving closer to the computer screen and other physical indicators such as opening the mouth and putting a hand on the head or the face. After overcoming and understanding the sources of the errors, the participants showed confidence that was clear in their facial signs, joy and smiles, loud tone and eye contact between students and the teacher, or between students.

The effects of auditory numerosity and magnitude on visual numerosity representation: An ERP study

Numerical representation is not restricted to sensory modalities. It remains unclear how numerosity processing in different modalities interacts within the brain. Moreover, the effect of continuous magnitudes presented in one modality on the representation of numerosity in another modality has not been well studied. By using event-related potential (ERP) and source localization analyses, the present study examined whether there was an interaction between auditory numerosity and continuous magnitude on visual numerosity representation. A visual dot array (visual standard stimulus) was preceded by sound in which numerosity (Multiple-tone vs. One-tone conditions) and magnitude (Loud-tone vs. Soft-tone conditions) information were manipulated. Then, another visual dot array (visual comparison stimulus) was presented, and participants were required to compare the numerosities of the visual dots. Behavioural results revealed that participants showed smaller just-noticeable differences (JNDs) when visual stimuli were preceded by multiple tones than those when visual stimuli were preceded by one tone. The subsequent ERP analysis of visual standard stimuli revealed that the peak amplitude of N1 was more negative under the Loud-tone condition than that under the Soft-tone condition, which could be related to better preparatory attention. Moreover, a significant interaction between auditory numerosity and magnitude was found within the P2p time window for the standard stimuli. Further source localization analysis identified the effect of N1 and P2p to be in the right middle frontal gyrus (MFG) and left inferior parietal lobule (IPL). The present study suggests that numerosity information presented in one sensory modality could spontaneously affect the numerical representation in another modality.

Flexible weighting of body-related effects in action production

A previous study on ideomotor action control showed that predictable action effects in the agent’s environment influenced how an action is carried out. If participants were required to perform a forceful keypress, they exerted more force when these actions would produce a quiet compared to a loud tone, and this observation suggests that anticipated proprioceptive and auditory action effects are integrated with each other during action planning and control. In light of the typically weak influence of body-related effect found in recent work, we aimed to extend this pattern of results to the intra-modal case of integrating proprioceptive/tactile feedback of a movement and following vibro-tactile effects. Our results suggest that the same weighted integration process as for the cross-modal case applies to the intra-modal case. These observations support the idea of a common mechanism which binds all action-related features in an integrated action representation, irrespective of whether these features relate to exafferent or reafferent signals.

Vertical Mapping of Auditory Loudness: Loud is High, but Quiet is not Always Low

Although the perceptual association between verticality and pitch has been widely studied, the link between loudness and verticality is not fully understood yet. While loud and quiet sounds are assumed to be equally associated crossmodally with spatial elevation, there are perceptual differences between the two types of sounds that may suggest the contrary. For example, loud sounds tend to generate greater activity, both behaviourally and neurally, than quiet sounds. Here we investigated whether this difference percolates into the crossmodal correspondence between loudness and verticality. In an initial phase, participants learned one-to-one arbitrary associations between two tones differing in loudness (82dB vs. 56dB) and two coloured rectangles (blue vs. yellow). During the experimental phase, they were presented with the two-coloured stimuli (each one located above or below a central “departure” point) together with one of the two tones.Participants had to indicate which of the two-coloured rectangles corresponded to the previously-associated tone by moving a mouse cursor from the departure point towards the target. The results revealed that participants were significantly faster responding to the loud tone when the visual target was located above (congruent condition) than when the target was below the departure point (incongruent condition). For quiet tones, no differences were found between the congruent (quiet-down) and the incongruent (quiet-up) conditions. Overall, this pattern of results suggests that possible differences in the neural activity generated by loud and quiet sounds influence the extent to which loudness and spatial elevation share representational content.

The startle response during whiplash: a protective or harmful response?

Whiplash injuries are common following rear-end collisions. During such collisions, initially relaxed occupants exhibit brisk, stereotypical muscle responses consisting of postural and startle responses that may contribute to the injury. Using prestimulus inhibition, we sought to determine if the startle response elicited during a rear-end collision contributes to head stabilization or represents a potentially harmful overreaction of the body. Three experiments were performed. In the first two experiments, two groups of 14 subjects were exposed to loud tones (124 dB) preceded by prestimulus tones at either four interstimulus intervals (100–1,000 ms) or five prestimulus intensities (80–124 dB). On the basis of the results of the first two experiments, 20 subjects were exposed to a simulated rear-end collision (peak sled acceleration = 2 g; speed change = 0.75 m/s) preceded by one of the following: no prestimulus tone, a weak tone (85 dB), or a loud tone (105 dB). The prestimulus tones were presented 250 ms before sled acceleration onset. The loud prestimulus tone decreased the amplitude of the sternocleidomastoid (16%) and cervical paraspinal (29%) muscles, and key peak kinematics: head retraction (17%), horizontal head acceleration (23%), and head angular acceleration in extension (23%). No changes in muscle amplitude or kinematics occurred for the weak prestimulus. The reduced muscle and kinematic responses observed with loud tones suggest that the startle response represents an overreaction that increases the kinematics in a way that potentially increases the forces and strains in the neck tissues. We propose that minimizing this overreaction during a car collision may decrease the risk of whiplash injuries.

Unilateral Hearing Losses Alter Loud Sound-Induced Temporary Threshold Shifts and Efferent Effects in the Normal-Hearing Ear

In animals with bilaterally normal hearing, olivocochlear pathways can protect the cochlea from the temporary shifts in hearing sensitivity (temporary threshold shifts; TTSs) caused by short-duration intense loud sounds. The crossed olivocochlear pathway provides protection during binaural loud sound, and uncrossed pathways protect when monaural or binaural loud sounds occur in noise backgrounds. Here I demonstrate that when there is a chronic unilateral hearing loss, effects of loud sounds, and efferent effects on loud sound, in the normal-hearing ear differ markedly from normal. Three categories of test animals with unilateral hearing loss were tested for effects at the normal-hearing ear. In all categories a monaural loud tone to the normal-hearing ear produced lower-than-normal TTSs, apparently because of a tonic re-setting of that ear's susceptibility to loud sound. Second, in the two test categories in which the hearing-loss ear was only partly damaged, binaural loud sound exacerbated TTSs in the normal-hearing ear because it caused threshold shifts that were a combination of “pure” TTSs and uncrossed efferent suppression of cochlear sensitivity. (In normal cats, this binaural tone results in crossed olivocochlear protection that reduces TTS.) Binaural loud sound did not produce such uncrossed efferent effects in the test category in which the nontest ear had suffered total hearing loss, suggesting that this uncrossed efferent effect required binaural input to the CNS. It is noteworthy that, in the absence of this uncrossed efferent suppression, the pure loud sound-alone induced TTSs after binaural exposure were low. Thus in the absence of any efferent effect, the normal-hearing cochlea had a reduced susceptibility to loud tone-induced damage. Finally, the results suggest that, with respect to cochlear actions at high sound levels, uncrossed and crossed efferent pathways may exert different effects at the one type of receptor cell.

Stimulus Sequence and the Exponent of the Power Function for Loudness

In two experiments, 15 and 13 subjects estimated the loudness of 12 sound-pressure levels (38–104 dB; 6-dB intervals) of a 1000-Hz tone by the method of magnitude estimation with a modulus assigned to the first stimulus presented. The tone duration was 1 sec. and the interstimulus interval was 6 sec. The presentation order was systematically ascending-descending in one experiment and balanced-irregular in the other. The results indicate that (1) loudness is a power function of sound pressure with an exponent of 0.60 for the systematic order and 0.29 for the irregular order. (2) For both the irregular and systematic orders, a large step-size (12 or 18 dB) between the stimulus on Trial n and on Trial n-1 (or n-3) results in a slight assimilation effect. This also occurs for the small step-size (6 dB) in the irregular order. (3) The size of momentary exponents (based on two points, Trials n and n-l or n-3) depends on the sound pressures of successive stimuli, whether the steps are positive or negative, and whether the stimuli have been presented in systematic or irregular order. For positive steps, the momentary exponent is lower for a soft tone (Trial n) than for a loud tone, whereas for negative steps the momentary exponent is lower for a loud tone than for a soft tone. These effects are more pronounced when these stimuli are presented in an irregular order. A relative judgment model is offered for magnitude estimation. It assumes that subjects judge the loudness of a stimulus in terms of three reference markers: the minimum and maximum sound pressures as well as the sound pressure of the previous stimulus.

The dissonance mutant of courtship song in Drosophila melanogaster: isolation, behavior and cytogenetics.

The dissonance mutant of courtship song was induced by chemical mutagenesis. This X-chromosomal mutation causes the D. melanogaster male's acoustical output, resulting from his wing vibrations directed at a female, to include very long and loud tone "pulses." Yet, a given train of pulses starts out as normal, with the signals in all but the shortest singing bouts eventually becoming polycyclic and high-amplitude. The aberrant songs caused by diss (map position, 1-52; cytological interval, 14C1-2 to 14C4-5) were quantitatively compared to those produced by mutant cacophony males, whose pulses are much more uniformly polycyclic (due to a mutation mapping elsewhere on the X chromosome). Males or females expressing diss are normal in several "general" behaviors. Yet diss males not only sing abnormally, but they also exhibit longer-than-normal mating latencies in their courtship of females. These decrements seem to be associated, at least in part, with visually aberrant behavior of diss flies--measured with regard to male courtship per se, and also in tests of more general visual responses. Such defects were found when testing diss males or females, and the genetic etiology of the visual impairments were provisionally mapped to the same locus to which the song abnormality has been localized. Neurogenetic connections between the control of courtship singing behavior and visual system functions are discussed with respect to the new song mutation (diss) and the older one (cac)--which also turned out to be genetically related to a mutation that causes abnormalities of light-induced behavior and physiology.

Reflex Modification of the Human Auditory Startle Blink by Antecedent Interruption of a Visual Stimulus

The effect of a preceding brief interruption in the illumination of a small numeral eight on the auditory startle blink was investigated in human subjects. In Exp. 1 ( n = 9) trials were given in which a 20-msec. interruption of the visual stimulus preceded elicitation of the startle blink by a loud tone at intervals from 80 to 200 msec. Compared to trials on which the digit was continuously lit but the reflex was elicited, the blink was augmented at 80 msec. and depressed at longer intervals. Exp. 2 ( n = 24) showed that the depressive effect peaked at about 200 msec. and did not depend upon requiring subjects to make judgements concerning the stimuli. In Exp. 3 ( n = 17) dark intervals ranged from 1.25 msec. to 40 msec. and preceded the loud tone by 200 msec. Reflex effects paralleled subjects' reports: dark intervals of 10 msec. or greater reliably inhibited the reflex and subjects reported seeing the dark interval at least 50% of the time at intervals of 8 msec. or greater, suggesting that the reflex method may be useful as an alternative objective technique for measuring visual temporal resolution.