Action Outcomes Research Articles

Drones are an effective tool to assess the impact of feral horses in an alpine riparian environment

AbstractProtected areas can be impacted by the presence and proliferation of feral species. Effective management of feral species requires reliable tools to monitor their population size and ecological impacts. Here, we used drone‐based image analysis to assess evidence of feral horses and horse‐specific ecological impacts on alpine riparian habitat. Valleys with low (0), medium (1–16) and high (>16) horse abundances were chosen for drone imagery analysis based on independent aerial counts of horses. Data collection trips were carried out pre‐ and post‐2019/2020 wildfires, which unexpectedly burnt valleys with low horse presence. Drone‐based RGB orthomosaic imagery was sufficient to identify seven indicators of horse presence and determine the severity of feral horse impacts. Despite the impact of fire, drone‐derived classifications were able to accurately detect a gradient of horse impacts, showing a significant difference in indicators from low presence valleys compared with medium and high presence valleys, which did not differ significantly from each other. The significance of differences between valleys reveals that regions routinely inhabited by feral horses will display significant environmental impacts. Our results clearly indicated significant differences between valleys with low horse presence compared with either medium or high horse presence regions (0.01 for differences between both low and medium and low and high horse presence). This was evident both before and after the 2019/2020 fires, suggesting that wildfires did not significantly impact horse populations or distribution in the sampled region. Overall, it was evident that feral horses have a clear and definable impact on alpine riparian vegetation, and drone surveying can be used to routinely monitor potential spread and the outcome of management actions.

Temporal Dynamics Underlying Prelimbic Prefrontal Cortical Regulation of Action Selection and Outcome Evaluation during Risk/Reward Decision-Making.

Risk/reward decision-making is a dynamic process that includes periods of deliberation before action selection and evaluation of the action outcomes that bias subsequent choices. Inactivation of the prelimbic (PL) cortex has revealed its integral role in updating decision biases in the face of changes in probabilistic reward contingencies, yet how phasic PL signals during different phases of the decision process influence choice remains unclear. We used temporally specific optogenetic inhibition to selectively disrupt PL activity coinciding with action selection and outcome phases to examine how these signals influence choice. Male rats expressing the inhibitory opsin eArchT within PL excitatory neurons were well trained on a probabilistic discounting task, entailing choice between small/certain versus large/risky rewards, the probability of which varied over a session (50-12.5%). During testing, brief light pulses suppressed PL activity before choice or after different outcomes. Prechoice suppression reduced bias toward more preferred/higher utility options and disrupted how recent outcomes influenced subsequent choice. Inhibition during risky losses induced a similar profile, but here, the impact of reward omissions were either amplified or diminished, relative to the context of the estimated profitability of the risky option. Inhibition during large or small reward receipt reduced risky choice when this option was more profitable, suggesting these signals can both reinforce rewarded risky choices and also act as a relative value comparator signal that augments incentive for larger rewards. These findings reveal multifaceted contributions by the PL in implementing decisions and integrating action-outcome feedback to assign context to the decision space.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The PL prefrontal cortex plays an integral role in guiding risk/reward decisions, but how activity in this region during different phases of the decision process influences choice is unclear. By using temporally specific optogenetic manipulations of this activity, the present study unveiled previously uncharacterized and differential contributions by PL in implementing decision policies and how evaluation of decision outcomes shape subsequent choice. These findings provide novel insight into the dynamic processes engaged by the PL that underlie action selection in situations involving reward uncertainty that may aid in understanding the mechanism underlying normal and aberrant decision-making processes.

An Exploration of the Role of Social Roles and Rewards in the Monitoring of Athletes' Action Outcome

After years of a dedicated training life, athletes accumulate a wealth of motor skills and knowledge in the sport to which they belong. This study reviews previous research on movement monitoring to examine the effects of social roles and rewards on athletes' movement monitoring. In the field of cognitive neuroscience, the FRN and OFRN are early components of action outcome monitoring, which are indicators of action outcome monitoring of self and others, while the P300 and OP300 are late components of action outcome monitoring, which are indicators of the emotional and motivational evaluation of action outcomes. The amplitude of the FRN and P300 feedback to oneself and its topography are moderated by social roles and are more responsive to teammates than to opponents. The feedback of reward information has a strong influence on the monitoring of action outcomes, as reward information influences the release of dopamine through the reward loop, which further alters the activation of the ACC, which in turn influences the FRN, thus influencing the monitoring of action outcomes for oneself or others. People can more accurately understand the movements they have mastered, i.e. the movements present in their self-motor representations, than unfamiliar movements. The brain can interpret immediate incoming sensorimotor and contextual information based on its own experience, and anticipate the outcome of others' movements, or understand the intentions implied in the movements.The impact of rewards on outcome monitoring is greater for athletes than for the general population in terms of processing more information about gains and losses than about gains and losses; social roles (self, teammates, opponents) and rewards (morerewards, less rewards, more penalties, less penalties) affect athletes' outcome monitoring, in terms of processing more information about gains and losses of self and teammates than about gains and losses of opponents.

The Transformative Potential of Service-Learning in an African Religious Context

Critical reflection is essential for achieving desired service-learning outcomes, including “transformative learning,” as developed by Mezirow (2000). However, critiques of Mezirow’s theory, particularly its focus on the individual learner and prizing of autonomy, raise questions about the relevance of a transformative learning framework for service-learning in diverse global contexts. This article describes a case study of an online service-learning program that resulted in transformative learning for students in East Africa. We offer a method of practical theological reflection that promotes individual and communal reflective praxis. This method contributed to students’ transformative learning outcomes as realized in collective action for sustainable development. Rooted in Christian religious education scholarship, the method is adaptable to service-learning curricula informed by other or non-religious traditions and in non-Western communities. We invite educators to adapt this method to other sociocultural contexts and encourage further research to track longitudinal outcomes of collective action inspired by service-learning.

Using Ecosystem Response Footprints to Guide Environmental Management Priorities

Managing cumulative effects in coastal marine ecosystems and predicting outcomes of mitigation or restorative actions represent a major challenge globally for scientists and decision-makers. Cumulative effects arise from the combined impact of individually minor yet collectively impactful activities. Each activity and the associated stressors generate distinct footprints. However, activity and stressor footprints do not necessarily inform ecosystem responses, which often occupy different space and time scales. Ecosystem responses are characterized by context dependencies (i.e., the same responses do not occur everywhere). In our critical review, we identify the challenges in characterizing ecological footprints based solely on stressors and activities and suggest a shift is needed to emphasize the “ecosystem response footprint”. Our new framework lays out a series of ecological characteristics of responses that can be used to conceptualize footprints that include potential stressor legacy effects and non-additive interactions that lead to nonlinear ecosystem shifts, disturbance-recovery dynamics implicated in recoverability, and the spatial and temporal scales of stressor regimes. We use these characteristics to define the extent and depth of ecosystem response footprints (which are often different to activity and stressor footprints) and link these attributes to suitable actions for generating ecological recovery and resilience. Defining and reframing the focus on ecosystem response footprints can inform a holistic ecosystem-based approach to managing cumulative effects and inform guidelines for marine environmental management.

Adaptation rationales and benefits: A foundation for understanding adaptation impact

Efforts to achieve coordinated, effective, and impactful adaptation outcomes are complicated by factors ranging from the local specificity of adaptation needs to the challenges of politics and prioritization that drive funding decisions. However, these and other challenges are perpetuated and exacerbated by poorly constructed, often implicit, and generally institution- or context-specific impact pathways connecting policy/institutional priorities through their materialization in specific actions to their intended outcomes. We call these impact pathways adaptation rationales, as they represent the logic of an adaptation action. The implicit nature of most current adaptation rationales makes it difficult to identify and test the accuracy and veracity of claims and assumptions underlying everything from policy priorities to intervention selection. In this article, we address this foundational challenge for the adaptation community of practice by proposing a typology of adaptation benefits (reduced exposure, reduced sensitivity, and increased adaptive capacity) that facilitates the construction of meaningful, transparent adaptation rationales. We lay out what these well-understood components of vulnerability mean in the context of adaptation benefits and provide guiding questions for their use in constructing adaptation rationales. Using hypothetical and real-world examples of projects and portfolios, we illustrate how this typology and the adaptation rationales it enables focus attention on the goals of a given action, its likely effectiveness, and for whom it is likely to be effective. Each of these issues offers an opportunity to strengthen project design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation, while also facilitating portfolio-level understandings of adaptation approaches, assumptions, and efficacy. This typology does not, by itself, presume to resolve the many debates in adaptation practice, such as the tension between incremental and transformational goals, the tradeoffs between actions addressing exposure via infrastructure versus those aimed at the underlying structures of inequality that render some populations more vulnerable to these impacts than others. However, by bringing issues of governance and justice the forefront of adaptation conversations, the typology, and the adaptation rationales it enables, allows for the productive, situationally-appropriate negotiation of these debates to improve the outcomes of adaptation policy and action.

Extending the use of the Belief Action Outcome model during COVID-19 pandemic: Technology access review on locational disparities and inequalities for knowledge workers

Remote working has played an increasingly important role in accelerating alternative workplaces. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic emergency demands, this paper seek to demonstrate the resilience of knowledge workers and their ability to work remotely, despite the uneven distribution of enabling infrastructure during the COVID-19 lockdown restrictions. The Belief Action Outcome (BAO) model for information systems was used to support the study as this underexplored theory was found to be worthy of further testing in real-world situations. This qualitative study used a range of sources consisting largely of search data from major online journal databases. The findings highlight that knowledge workers can successfully work from alternative workplaces and still deliver the required outputs, despite socio-economic problems such as locational disparities and inequalities in access to technology. The same technologies that empowered knowledge workers to transform their work locations during the COVID-19 crisis, however, are the same to enable certain sectors of society whilst hindering other cohorts residing in under resourced locations. Therefore, the benefits of working remotely cannot favour everyone because of the existing inequalities and disparities. Applying the BAO model in this context implies environmental issues are likely to play a growing important role in future when decisions are made around alternative workplace and adoption of IS/IT systems. Although the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted working patterns and accelerated the trend towards working in alternative workplaces than the traditional office/factory premises, there are notable implications around this shift. The study confirmed the related behaviours, opportunities, and barriers (social systems and organisations), as well as the structures (both societal and organisational) of the BAO model. In addition, certain aspects of both the remote workers’ and organisations’ adoption behaviour were changed to a greater extent and more rapidly because of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a contribution, this qualitative study reveals in more detail the yet uncharted remote workers' beliefs.

Using bodily displays to facilitating approach action outcomes within the context of a personally relevant task.

Considerable attention has been paid to the effect of bodily (expansive and contractive) displays on affective, behavioral, and hormonal outcomes. However, the majority of past studies are limited by a lack of control groups with neutral displays and low personal relevance of the experimental tasks employed. The present study aimed to investigate the effect of adopting different bodily displays, including neutral displays, within the context of a personally relevant task. In an experiment with healthy participants (N=90), we investigated the effects of two different bodily manipulations (i.e., expansive and contractive), compared to a control group (i.e., neutral displays). Effects were evaluated in terms of completed valued action in addition to processes considered potentially helpful in preparing and motivating the individual to take valued action, including a change in emotion experience, action tendencies, and appraisals. Several main effects were detected and only few significant interaction effects were revealed. In case of group differences, results showed that expansive bodily displays outperformed the control group, leading to more positive emotions, more approach action tendencies, less negative emotion variability, and less avoidance action tendencies toward threat. These results mainly suggest that identifying a valued action and explicating the underlying motivational conflict may be beneficial regardless of bodily displays. This conclusion runs somewhat counter both to our hypotheses and to findings in recent meta-analytic work. However, previous experiments have not evaluated the effect of bodily displays within a personally relevant context.

Utilitarian Qubit, Human Geography, and Pandemic Preparedness in the 21st Century

Human actions are ambivalent in nature and this in turn has an impact on all components of socio-ecological systems. Their ambivalence results from the fact that human actions have both positive and negative outcomes and properties, which occur and manifest concurrently in the ontological realm of human existence. In terms of space–time, both micro-geography and macro-geography of human existence are intertwined during the COVID-19 pandemic, thus affecting pre- and post-pandemic space–time continuum. The utilitarian qubit can be used to describe the nature of human existence, i.e., Homo sapiens has always been experiencing a state of existence where pain and pleasure are co-extensive. In this state, it is impossible to establish to what extent pain, and to what extent pleasure, will have a definitive impact on our status as individuals and humanity as a species. In this article, the authors explore how the record of an individual’s life before and after the COVID-19 pandemic has been impacted by the wellbeing and actions of other humans and prior to one’s existence. Drawing on the utilitarian qubit, the COVID-19 pandemic, and its impacts on the members of Homo sapiens, can be understood as a partial outcome of the cumulative actions of humanity on the biosphere and other elements of the global ecosystem (the Age of the Anthropocene). We argue that this paper is also useful to foster disaster preparedness and resilience in the pandemic and post-pandemic era, at micro- and macro-geographical interfaces of human existence in the 21st century. The existence of individual members of Homo sapiens and humanity as a species is unfolding at the boundary between two levels: fundamental reality and situational reality. The result is the historical accumulation and ontological interconnectedness of humanity’s activities with one’s own actions. Pain and pleasure resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and the Age of Anthropocene, as well as the right and wrong consequences of humanity’s actions, are posited here to be symptoms of the Anthropocenic (phase of) epidemiological transition.

OPEN EDUCATION IN STUDYING SCIENCES – DEVELOPING OF A EUROPEAN FRAMEWORK

The article presents in detail the main outcomes of a recent action – research project PULCHRA – Science in the city (https://pulchra-schools.eu/), funded by Horizon 2020 EU program, promoted by the University of Athens and a consortium of ten academic and research European institutions, including the Education Research Unit from Romania. The project was inspired by the open education principles (Abrioux, 2009) and creates a complex learning by doing framework for secondary students of 14 to 17 years old. The perspective of City as ecosystem creates for the involved partner schools various opportunities for exploiting inquiry-based methods and addresses real life problems (Pedaste, et al., 2015). After three years of implementation, PULCHRA developed a specific methodology, by promoting real life experiments during science classes, in collaboration with community representatives and the support from partners, experts, and other stakeholders. By using a variety of resources, materials, and teaching approaches, specific science teams managed to research,develop, produce and promote solutions to several common issues/opportunities that European cities face due to increased urbanization. Out of the six environmental, social and economic thematic areas of the project, Romanian schools focused on regenerating urban space to connect people in a healthyenvironment. The article explores the outcomes at grass-root level, as documented by monitoring and evaluation activities conducted in six upper secondary schools from Romania. In particular, we highlight the contribution of the project in building students’ good scientific knowledge, in promoting expert and community participation and encouraging active engagement in shared living environments and futures. The contribution of the project on development of STEM competences, in relation with the national curriculum, is also explored. In the context of COVID pandemics, the article will highlight the importance of the City Challenges Platform, set up to facilitate the learning and collaboration of the members of the city science teams and wider network. The contributionto sharing digital educational material, design relevant experiments and develop distance-learning courses on cities as urban eco-systems will also be documented.

A systems approach to a resilience assessment for agility

This work proposes a theoretical approach to assessing agility in terms of a modified version of resilience during large-scale crisis to sustain operational reliability. The proposed method could be used on subsystem optimization or eventually scaled up to global interconnectedness enabling decision makers to optimize resource allocation and so obtain resilience and agility in troubling times along with long-term sustained prosperity. Introducing weights to various parameters can also allow customizing outcomes such as insuring equitable outcomes, environmental stewardship and proper response to emergencies or any national crisis. The provided mathematical formalism can then become a decision maker tool to predict corrective action outcomes from various responses to a crisis or alternatively to determine sensitivity and potential risk for a crisis from apparently ambient or slowly changing conditions. Ad-hoc examples are considered to demonstrate the generality of the approach.

Sense of agency may not improve recollection and familiarity in recognition memory

Sense of agency (SoA) is a feeling of controlling one’s own action. Recognition memory can improve for stimuli that involve SoA perhaps because of the self-reference effect. Recognition memory consists of recollection (i.e., detailed memory of stimuli) and familiarity (i.e., a feeling that stimuli are in memory). The self-reference effect is often observed in the recollection. Here, we investigated whether SoA particularly improves the recollection process. Participants pressed a key to produce an outcome (i.e., box movement followed by word presentation in Experiment 1 or word presentation in Experiment 2) and rated their SoA over the outcome. The outcome was spatially congruent or incongruent with the action. The participants learned the words intentionally (Experiment 1) or incidentally (Experiment 2). Performances of recollection and familiarity were assessed using the remember/know procedure. Our results suggest that the participants’ SoA was successfully manipulated. However, contrary to our hypothesis and previous findings, we found no effects of voluntary action and action–outcome congruence on recollection and familiarity processes of recognition memory, regardless of the latency of word presentation and learning strategies. Further studies are needed to replicate and elucidate the relationship between the SoA and recognition memory.

Curiously exploring affordance spaces of a pouring task

AbstractHuman beings and other biological agents appear driven by curiosity to explore the affordances of their environments. Such exploration is its own reward – children have fun when playing – but it probably also serves the practical purpose of learning theories with which to predict outcomes of actions. Cognitive robots however have yet to match the performance of human beings at learning and reusing manipulation skills. In this paper, we implement a method that emulates the curiosity drive and uses it as a heuristic to guide (simulated) exploration of a particular task – pouring liquids. The result of this exploration is a collection of symbolic rules linking qualitative descriptions of object arrangements and the pouring action with qualitative descriptions of likely outcomes. The manner in which qualitative descriptions of object arrangements and actions are converted to numerical descriptions for the purpose of simulation parametrization is via probability distributions, which themselves are adjusted in the process of simulated exploration. This allows the grounding of the symbolic descriptions to attempt to adapt itself to the task. The resulting symbolic rules form a theory that, together with the probability distributions that ground it in numerical parametrizations, is intended to be used to predict qualitative outcomes or select manners of pouring towards achieving a goal.

ПОПЕРЕДЖЕННЯ ПОРУШЕНЬ ПИСЕМНОГО МОВЛЕННЯ В ДІТЕЙ ДОШКІЛЬНОГО ВІКУ ІЗ ЗАТРИМКОЮ ПСИХІЧНОГО РОЗВИТКУ

This study is devoted to the problem of prevention of written language disorders in preschool children with intellectual disability. Based on the synthesis of previous pedagogical studies, it is known that writing, as higher mental function, is considered to be highly complex system, which involves all components of the structural and functional organization of the brain; it is also known that underdevelopment of any of these components leads to difficulties in the formation of writing abilities. It is determined that underdevelopment or impairment of one of the structural components of writing activity, or the mental functions that complement it, leads to the impairment or underdevelopment of writing activity as a whole; it was identified that in children with an intellectual disability, there is a relationship between a low level of formation of cognitive functions and aspects of independent planning, control and evaluation of outcomes of actions. Based on to the results of a pedagogical experiment, we demonstrated that the insufficient formation of motor control and cognitive skills in preschool children with intellectual disability resulted in these children's inclusion in the dysgraphia's «risk group». We justified the importance of prevention of written language disorders in preschool children with intellectual disability through speech therapy with neuropsychological corrections, which is grounded on the intentional formation of motor (general motor and graphomotor) and cognitive skills, which should positively affect the development of mental functions in preschool children with intellectual disability, and enable them to be better prepared for schooling, including successful acquisition of writing skills. Key words: impairment of written speech, retardation of mental development, prevention of impairments, preschool children, speech therapy work, programming, regulation, control, motor functions, cognitive functions.

Lingering Neural Representations of Past Task Features Adversely Affect Future Behavior.

During goal-directed behavior, humans purportedly form and retrieve so-called event files, conjunctive representations that link context-specific information about stimuli, their associated actions, and the expected action outcomes. The automatic formation, and later retrieval, of such conjunctive representations can substantially facilitate efficient action selection. However, recent behavioral work suggests that these event files may also adversely affect future behavior, especially when action requirements have changed between successive instances of the same task context (e.g., during task switching). Here, we directly tested this hypothesis with a recently developed method for measuring the strength of the neural representations of context-specific stimulus-action conjunctions (i.e., event files). Thirty-five male and female adult humans performed a task switching paradigm while undergoing EEG recordings. Replicating previous behavioral work, we found that changes in action requirements between two spaced repetitions of the same task incurred a significant reaction time cost. By combining multivariate pattern analysis and representational similarity analysis of the EEG recordings with linear mixed-effects modeling of trial-to-trial behavior, we then found that the magnitude of this behavioral cost was directly proportional to the strength of the conjunctive representation formed during the most recent previous exposure to the same task, that is, the most recent event file. This confirms that the formation of conjunctive representations of specific task contexts, stimuli, and actions in the brain can indeed adversely affect future behavior. Moreover, these findings demonstrate the potential of neural decoding of complex task set representations toward the prediction of behavior beyond the current trial.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Understanding how the human brain organizes individual components of complex tasks is paramount for understanding higher-order cognition. During complex tasks, the brain forms conjunctive representations that link individual task features (contexts, stimuli, actions), which aids future performance of the same task. However, this can have adverse effects when the required sequence of actions within a task changes. We decoded conjunctive representations from electroencephalographic recordings during a task that included frequent changes to the rules determining the response. Indeed, stronger initial conjunctive representations predicted significant future response-time costs when task contexts repeated with changed response requirements. Showing that the formation of conjunctive task representations can have negative future effects generates novel insights into complex behavior and cognition, including task switching, planning, and problem solving.

Resilience and Resistance Framework Predicts Regional Vegetation Responses to Shrub Reduction Treatments in the Sagebrush Ecosystem

The concepts of ecosystem resilience and resistance (R&R) are being widely used in management planning for the big-sagebrush ecosystem of the western United States. Soil temperature and moisture regimes have been used to map geographic areas that are expected to have high, moderate, or low resilience (recovery of perennial species after disturbance) and resistance (to the spread of invasive annual grasses, most often Bromus tectorum L. or cheatgrass). While the theory underlying this framework is well developed, there have been few empirical tests of the map's utility in predicting on-the-ground management outcomes. We used data from 51 sites in Utah to relate R&R level to changes in plant cover after disturbances, using effect size analyses that standardized the magnitude of postdisturbance change (relative to predisturbance levels) across sites. Sites had been treated mechanically to reduce shrub cover or burned, and most sites were seeded. Perennial grass cover, which included native and non-native species due to the seed mixes used, increased in all R&R classes relative to predisturbance levels, but this increase was greatest at High R&R sites. Perennial forb cover increased only in the High R&R sites and decreased in Low R&R sites. Sagebrush shrub cover decreased across all R&R levels but showed evidence of recovery at High and Moderate R&R sites. These results indicate that outcomes across different disturbance types were generally in line with expectations based on the R&R map. Annual grass cover increased slightly at High and Moderate R&R sites but decreased in the Low R&R sites. These annual grass results illustrate that local site characteristics, and history may be more important factors than broad-scale soil moisture-temperature regime classifications in some cases. Nonetheless, our results overall indicate that the R&R map can be a useful tool for predicting the general outcomes of management actions in the sagebrush ecosystem.

Brain dynamics of visual anticipation during spatial occlusion tasks in expert tennis players

Stimulus identification and action outcome understanding for a rapid and accurate response selection, play a fundamental role in racquet sports. Here, we investigated the neurodynamics of visual anticipation in tennis manipulating the postural and kinematic information associated with the body of opponents by means of a spatial occlusion protocol. Event Related Potentials (ERPs) were evaluated in two groups of professional tennis players (N = 37) with different levels of expertise, while they observed pictures of opponents and predicted the landing position as fast and accurately as possible. The observed action was manipulated by deleting different body districts of the opponent (legs, ball, racket and arm, trunk). Full body image (no occlusion) was used as control condition. The worst accuracy and the slowest response time were observed in the occlusion of trunk and ball. The former was associated with a reduced amplitude of the ERP components likely linked to body processing (the N1 in the right hemisphere) and visual-motor integration awareness (the pP1), as well as with an increase of the late frontal negativity (the pN2), possibly reflecting an effort by the insula to recover and/or complete the most correct sensory-motor representation. In both occlusions, a decrease in the pP2 may reflect an impairment of decisional processes upon action execution following sensory evidence accumulation. Enhanced amplitude of the P3 and the pN2 components were found in more experienced players, suggesting a greater allocation of resources in the process connecting sensory encoding and response execution, and sensory-motor representation.

Somatosensory cortical signature of facial nociception and vibrotactile touch-induced analgesia.

Pain relief by vibrotactile touch is a common human experience. Previous neurophysiological investigations of its underlying mechanism in animals focused on spinal circuits, while human studies suggested the involvement of supraspinal pathways. Here, we examine the role of primary somatosensory cortex (S1) in touch-induced mechanical and heat analgesia. We found that, in mice, vibrotactile reafferent signals from self-generated whisking significantly reduce facial nociception, which is abolished by specifically blocking touch transmission from thalamus to the barrel cortex (S1B). Using a signal separation algorithm that can decompose calcium signals into sensory-evoked, whisking, or face-wiping responses, we found that the presence of whisking altered nociceptive signal processing in S1B neurons. Analysis of S1B population dynamics revealed that whisking pushes the transition of the neural state induced by noxious stimuli toward the outcome of non-nocifensive actions. Thus, S1B integrates facial tactile and noxious signals to enable touch-mediated analgesia.

Attention and expectation likely underlie temporal binding measured using the Libet Clock.

An interesting finding that has emerged in studies of the sense of agency is that of a perceived compression of the temporal interval between actions and the outcomes they produce. This is generally referred to as temporal binding. Although temporal binding has been studied using various paradigms, possibly the most popular of these is the Libet Clock task. The Libet task is also interesting because it suggests that temporal binding can be decomposed into two components, one purportedly relating to actions and the other relating to outcomes. These are termed action binding and outcome binding, respectively. In this article, I focus specifically on temporal binding revealed using the Libet Clock task and propose the idea that attention underpins the action binding effect, while outcome binding, on the other hand, is driven by the effects of expectation.

The pleasantness and unpleasantness of an object distinctively drives its grasping prediction: behavioral evidence.

Action and perception share a common sensorimotor network permitting a functional action-perception coupling. This coupling would permit to predict the outcome of others' actions. Moreover, recent findings suggest that action-perception linkage could be sensitive to emotional content of the visual scene. The present study sought to address how emotion inherent to an object (pleasantness and unpleasantness) affects action prediction processing. To this end, we compared the participants' temporal estimative of the hand contact with emotional objects in occlusion and full vision conditions. We found that the emotion strongly interfered in the prediction of its grasping. Indeed, the participants highly anticipated the touch instant for unpleasant valence compared to pleasant and neutral ones. Moreover, the visual conditions (i.e., occlusion and full vision) affect the magnitude of the predictive error except to unpleasant object. Accordingly, the present results unveil that pleasantness and unpleasantness of an object distinctively drive the prediction of its touch instant.