Mental Representations Research Articles

The Role of Interoceptive Sensitivity and Hypnotizability in Motor Imagery.

Motor imagery (MI) requires the mental representation of the body, obtained by integrating exteroceptive and interoceptive information. This study aimed to investigate the role of interoceptive sensitivity (IS) in MI performed through visual and kinesthetic modalities by participants with low (lows, N = 26; SHSS: A, M + SD: 1.00 + 1.52), medium (mediums, N = 11; SHSS: A, 6.00 + 0.77) and high hypnotizability scores (highs, N = 16; SHSS:A, 9.75 + 1.24), as measured by the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale: Form A. The three groups displayed different MI abilities and IS levels. The efficacy of MI was measured using the chronometric index and self-reported experience, while IS was measured using the Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA) questionnaire. Alpha and beta power spectrum densities (PSDs) were extracted from the EEG signals acquired during baseline, actual movement and visually and kinesthetically imagined movements. The chronometric indices do not reveal significant differences between groups and imagery modalities. The self-report MI efficacy indicates better kinesthetic imagery in highs and mediums than in lows, and no modality difference among lows. The MAIA dimensions sustain the differences in subjective experience and almost all the EEG differences. The latter are slightly different in highs, mediums and lows. This is the first report of the major role played by IS in MI and strongly supports the theory of embodied cognition.

Mental models of aquaculture governance in Indonesia

AbstractAquaculture stakeholders have mental models, which are the internal cognitive representations of how they understand and prioritize the different features of their aquaculture systems. Individuals and stakeholder groups are likely to have different mental models, with implications for making cooperative governance work and guiding the rapidly emerging sector’s sustainable development. We apply a participatory approach called fuzzy cognitive mapping to capture and compare the mental models of community-based coastal pond aquaculture stakeholders in Indonesia, including farmers, government managers, and researchers who need to work together to govern a rapidly expanding aquaculture sector which faces critical sustainability challenges. To conceptually structure our comparison, we use Elinor Ostrom’s social–ecological systems framework. Our results highlight important differences between stakeholder group mental models which represent potential conflicts of interest and barriers for collaborative governance. Fish farmer models emphasize resource system challenges relating to production instability and risk, while government managers emphasize increasing production intensity to meet sectoral growth targets. Researchers, in contrast, tend to focus on pond waste treatment and water quality management. Governance attributes were consistently perceived as less frequent and less influential compared to other social–ecological dimensions, reflecting perceptions of weak governance in the sector. We identify a critical need for programs aimed at strengthening community-level institutional arrangements for governing shared aquaculture resources, increasing technical knowledge capacity, and managing financial risk. By merging all stakeholder models into a single “community” model, we identify key consensus action situations across the three groups as potential focal points for aquaculture development which may serve as a starting point for actors to work together to identify context-appropriate institutional solutions to these sustainability challenges.

The brain simulates actions and their consequences during REM sleep.

Vivid dreams mostly occur during a phase of sleep called REM 1-5 . During REM sleep, the brain's internal representation of direction keeps shifting like that of an awake animal moving through its environment 6-8 . What causes these shifts, given the immobility of the sleeping animal? Here we show that the superior colliculus of the mouse, a motor command center involved in orienting movements 9-15 , issues motor commands during REM sleep, e.g. turn left, that are similar to those issued in the awake behaving animal. Strikingly, these motor commands, despite not being executed, shift the internal representation of direction as if the animal had turned. Thus, during REM sleep, the brain simulates actions by issuing motor commands that, while not executed, have consequences as if they had been. This study suggests that the sleeping brain, while disengaged from the external world, uses its internal model of the world to simulate interactions with it.

Double-Ended Bit-Stealing for Algebraic Data Types

Algebraic data types are central to the development and evaluation of most functional programs. It is therefore important for compilers to choose compact and efficient representations of such types, in particular to achieve good memory footprints for applications. Algebraic data types are most often represented using blocks of memory where the first word is used as a so-called tag, carrying information about the constructor, and the following words are used for carrying the constructor's arguments. As an optimisation, lists are usually represented more compactly, using a technique called bit-stealing, which, in its simplest form, uses the word-alignment property of pointers to byte-addressed allocated memory to discriminate between the nil constructor (often represented as 0x1) and the cons constructor (aligned pointer to allocated pair). Because the representation supports that all values can be held uniformly in one machine word, possibly pointing to blocks of memory, type erasure is upheld. However, on today's 64-bit architectures, memory addresses (pointers) are represented using only a subset of the 64 bits available in a machine word, which leave many bits unused. In this paper, we explore the use, not only of the least-significant bits of pointers, but also of the most-significant bits, for representing algebraic data types in a full ML compiler. It turns out that, with such a particular utilisation of otherwise unused bits, which we call double-ended bit-stealing, it is possible to choose unboxed representations for a large set of data types, while still not violating the principle of uniform data-representations. Examples include Patricia trees, union-find data structures, stream data types, internal language representations for types and expressions, and mutually recursive ASTs for full language definitions. The double-ended bit-stealing technique is implemented in the MLKit compiler and speedup ranges from 0 to 26 percent on benchmarks that are influenced by the technique. For MLKit, which uses abstract data types extensively, compilation speedups of around 9 percent are achieved for compiling MLton (another Standard ML compiler) and for compiling MLKit itself.

Philosophical reflections on the future of construction grammar (or, confessions of a Radical Construction Grammarian)

Abstract Many issues face construction grammar today. I start with the role of usage in construction grammar, and trace the changes in the usage-based model from mental storage to social interaction to evolution of populations of speakers and utterances. Just as speech communities and linguistic categories can be described as evolving populations, so can the construction grammar community and the theoretical concepts and formalisms that have evolved in it. Meaning remains the most challenging question for the future. Meaning is human experience, incredibly rich, and I suggest that construction grammar move away from mental representations to radical embodiment (existential phenomenology).

Effects of gender sensitive language in job listings: A study on real-life user interaction.

The possible impact of gender-sensitive language on readers is among the most controversially debated issues in linguistics and beyond. Previous studies have suggested that there is an effect of gender-sensitive language on mental representations, based on data gathered in laboratory settings with small groups of participants. We add a new perspective by examining correlations of authentic language use with authentic user interaction on a recruitment website. Drawing upon a large dataset provided by the recruitment platform StepStone, we evaluate whether job advertisements using certain kinds of gender-sensitive language in their titles correlate with higher proportions of views by female users. Our results indicate that there are differing effects depending on the type of gender-sensitive language that is used. Overall, the strongest correlation can be found with terms that include the feminine suffix -in.

Is Culture Learned? The Neglected Role of Evoking Events.

Although no one disputes that the transmission of culture depends on social learning, a capacity that has enabled humans, unlike other animals, to modify cultural practices across generations, this review argues that cultural change can also be evoked by environmental events leading to an alteration in the configuration of an habitual behavioural repertoire. An evoked mechanism allows latent or normally suppressed behaviour to emerge. Cannibalism and warfare are put forward as examples. Evoked mechanisms have largely been ignored by one of the few attempts to reconcile biology and culture, namely cumulative cultural evolution (CCE). This review endorses CCE's aim of developing a biocultural conceptual framework but criticises this model for failing to produce a credible analysis of culture into 'units'or 'variants'. The critique of CCE is situated within a discussion of the long-standing separation within academia of science and arts disciplines, each focusing at different levels of analysis and with different aims. It is suggested that the main obstacle to developing a biocultural framework can be attributed to an incompatibility between nomothetic and idiographic research methods, the former being typical of the biological sciences, the latter of the arts. A successful biocultural conceptual framework would therefore have to accommodate the particular and the general. It is suggested that progress in this direction would be made if agreement could be reached on ways of observing or inferring behaviours rather than pursuing an analysis in terms of hypothetical constructs such as mental representations or units of 'cultural information'.

On the role of the UMLS in supporting diagnosis generation proposed by Large Language Models

Objective:Traditional knowledge-based and machine learning diagnostic decision support systems have benefited from integrating the medical domain knowledge encoded in the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) to supplant traditional systems poses questions of the quality and extent of the medical knowledge in the models’ internal knowledge representations and the need for external knowledge sources. The objective of this study is three-fold: to probe the diagnosis-related medical knowledge of popular LLMs, to examine the benefit of providing the UMLS knowledge to LLMs (grounding the diagnosis predictions), and to evaluate the correlations between human judgments and the UMLS-based metrics for generations by LLMs. Methods:We evaluated diagnoses generated by LLMs from consumer health questions and daily care notes in the electronic health records using the ConsumerQA and Problem Summarization datasets. Probing LLMs for the UMLS knowledge was performed by prompting the LLM to complete the diagnosis-related UMLS knowledge paths. Grounding the predictions was examined in an approach that integrated the UMLS graph paths and clinical notes in prompting the LLMs. The results were compared to prompting without the UMLS paths. The final experiments examined the alignment of different evaluation metrics, UMLS-based and non-UMLS, with human expert evaluation. Results:In probing the UMLS knowledge, GPT-3.5 significantly outperformed Llama2 and a simple baseline yielding an F1 score of 10.9% in completing one-hop UMLS paths for a given concept. Grounding diagnosis predictions with the UMLS paths improved the results for both models on both tasks, with the highest improvement (4%) in SapBERT score. There was a weak correlation between the widely used evaluation metrics (ROUGE and SapBERT) and human judgments. Conclusion:We found that while popular LLMs contain some medical knowledge in their internal representations, augmentation with the UMLS knowledge provides performance gains around diagnosis generation. The UMLS needs to be tailored for the task to improve the LLMs predictions. Finding evaluation metrics that are aligned with human judgments better than the traditional ROUGE and BERT-based scores remains an open research question.

Conserving a sense of self despite significantly impaired short-term memory through songwriting and formative events

This case study reflects on the use of improvisation and songwriting to support a patient with significantly impaired short-term memory and long-term memory interference as a result of acquired brain injury. Memory has long been associated with personal identity, linking the past with the present, and enabling us to project into the future. This continuity of consciousness helps us to learn from, and make sense of our experiences, strengthening our internal representation of self. Disruption to short-term memory can significantly impact decision making, planning and initiation, all of which are key components of personal identity and self-expression. Supporting patient autonomy and self-expression through improvisation, and crafting lyrical content around personal preferences and events, sessions were designed to bolster his internalised sense of self through both revisiting old memories and facilitating new memory formation within the present. While short-term memory has been considered a conduit to long-term memory consolidation, and integral to the individual’s self-expression, this case study implies short-term memory was neither the gatekeeper to formation of long-term memories, nor critical to maintaining a sense of self, and reflects on how music helped the client create and access new learning beyond procedural memories, anchoring the self in newly internalised self-expression.

Parent–child math talk and early math interest: comparing the effects of written versus hands-on materials

ABSTRACT This study investigated the impact of written and hands-on teaching materials on parent–child math talk and children’s interest in mathematics. Thirty parents and their preschool children participated in two play sessions, one using written material and the other using hands-on material, each lasting 12 min. At the end of each session, the children’s interest levels were assessed, and the frequency of math-related conversations was analysed. Regardless of the materials used, discussions primarily revolved around fundamental numerical concepts, with little mention of practical measurement units and conventional nominatives or number comparisons involving the application of mental representation. Ordinal and division concepts were only mentioned by parents in the written scenario rather than in the hands-on one. Overall, using written material led to doubling math discourse compared to hands-on material. However, children showed slightly higher interest levels in the hands-on scenario, where parent–child math talk categories also exhibited greater synchrony. The study highlights the complementary nature of written and hands-on teaching materials and provides recommendations for their future application.

Mind Melds: Verbal Labels Induce Greater Representational Alignment.

What determines whether two people represent something in a similar way? We examined the role of verbal labels in promoting representational alignment. Across two experiments, three groups of participants sorted novel shapes from two visually dissimilar categories. Prior to sorting, participants in two of the groups were pre-exposed to the shapes using a simple visual matching task designed to reinforce the visual category structure. In one of these groups, participants additionally heard one of two nonsense category labels accompanying the shapes. Exposure to these redundant labels led people to represent the shapes in a more categorical way, which led to greater alignment between sorters. We found this effect of label-induced alignment despite the two categories being highly visually distinct and despite participants in both pre-exposure conditions receiving identical visual experience with the shapes. Experiment 2 replicated this basic result using more even more stringent testing conditions. The results hint at the possibly extensive role that labels may play in aligning people's mental representations.

Tracking the brain signature of (mis)spelled logotypes via letter transpositions and replacements

All leading models of visual word recognition assume a hierarchical process that progressively converts the visual input into abstract letter and word representations. However, the results from recent behavioral studies suggest that the mental representations of words with a highly consistent visual format, such as logotypes, may comprise not only purely abstract information but also perceptual information. This hypothesis would explain why participants often misperceive transposed-letter misspellings with the original base words to a larger degree in logotypes (e.g., SASMUNG, but not SARVUNG, is perceived as SAMSUNG) than in common words. The present experiment examined the electrophysiological signature behind the identification of correctly spelled and misspelled logotypes (via letter transposition or replacement) in an ERP go/no-go semantic categorization experiment. Results showed that N400 amplitudes for transposed-letter misspelled logotypes (SASMUNG) and intact logotypes (SAMSUNG) did not differ significantly across various time windows (until 600 ms), whereas replacement-letter misspelled logotypes (SARVUNG) yielded consistently larger N400 amplitudes. These findings reveal that the mental representations of logotypes are particularly resistant to minor orthographic changes, which has important theoretical and applied (e.g., marketing) implications.

When houses wear faces: Reverse correlation applied to architectural design

Reverse correlation (RC) is a data-driven method from social psychology that has been effectively shown to visualize the mental representations that humans hold regarding facial attributes. The method helps to understand what features are relevant in terms of the evaluation of faces, such as dominance or submissiveness. To the best of our knowledge, RC has solely been applied to faces within the area of psychology until this point. However, there are many other areas where it is of interest to understand how humans evaluate and visualize content, one of them being the evaluation of house facades. With this work, we extended the application of RC to architectural design, specifically focusing on the evaluation of house facades with respect to the psychological attributes of facelikeness, invitingness, and likeability. Furthermore, we propose a novel approach to create the base image, by utilizing a generative adversarial network. In an online study with a between-subject design, 121 participants completed the RC task, with 40 to 41 participants assigned to each of the three attributes. The resulting classification images (CIs) from the RC task unveil face-related features for the attribute facelikeness, signifying the potential extension of the RC methodology beyond the established domain of facial analysis to other domains, such as architectural design.

The allocentric nature of ground-surface representation: A study of depth and location perception

When observers perceive 3D relations, they represent depth and spatial locations with the ground as a reference. This frame of reference could be egocentric, that is, moving with the observer, or allocentric, that is, remaining stationary and independent of the moving observer. We tested whether the representation of relative depth and of spatial location took an egocentric or allocentric frame of reference in three experiments, using a blind walking task. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants either observed a target in depth, and then straightaway blind walked for the previously seen distance between the target and the self; or walked to the side or along an oblique path for 3 m and then started blind walking for the previously seen distance. The difference between the conditions was whether blind walking started from the observation point. Results showed that blind walking distance varied with the starting locations. Thus, the represented distance did not seem to go through spatial updating with the moving observer and the frame of reference was likely allocentric. In Experiment 3, participants observed a target in space, then immediately blind walked to the target, or blind walked to another starting point and then blind walked to the target. Results showed that the end location of blind walking was different for different starting points, which suggested the representation of spatial location is likely to take an allocentric frame of reference. Taken together, these experiments convergingly suggested that observers used an allocentric frame of reference to construct their mental space representation.

Erroneous thinking on climate change

The ultimate source of the ongoing human-induced climate change must be found within the thinking that guides actions. This human aspect goes outside the laws of natural science. Human thinking as a cause of anthropogenic or industrial climate change is still an under-researched topic. Here, we focus on how humans think about climate change. We use a content-based analysis of the mind to analyze comments in a Finnish online forum, Suomi24. Our immediate findings are that people have errors in reviewing knowledge and constructing information in their mental representations. Discussions are colored by illusions, false claims, incorrect interpretations, mistakes, and opinions to deny facts. Understanding erroneous thinking is crucial, as it helps to identify ways to correct risky thinking and to understand why people do what they do. Ultimately, erroneous thinking is the root cause of the modern climate crisis.

Space is a latent sequence: A theory of the hippocampus.

Fascinating phenomena such as landmark vector cells and splitter cells are frequently discovered in the hippocampus. Without a unifying principle, each experiment seemingly uncovers new anomalies or coding types. Here, we provide a unifying principle that the mental representation of space is an emergent property of latent higher-order sequence learning. Treating space as a sequence resolves numerous phenomena and suggests that the place field mapping methodology that interprets sequential neuronal responses in Euclidean terms might itself be a source of anomalies. Our model, clone-structured causal graph (CSCG), employs higher-order graph scaffolding to learn latent representations by mapping aliased egocentric sensory inputs to unique contexts. Learning to compress sequential and episodic experiences using CSCGs yields allocentric cognitive maps that are suitable for planning, introspection, consolidation, and abstraction. By explicating the role of Euclidean place field mapping and demonstrating how latent sequential representations unify myriad observed phenomena, our work positions the hippocampus in a sequence-centric paradigm, challenging the prevailing space-centric view.

Recurrent inhibition refines mental templates to optimize perceptual decisions.

Translating sensory inputs to perceptual decisions relies on building internal representations of features critical for solving complex tasks. Yet, we still lack a mechanistic account of how the brain forms these mental templates of task-relevant features to optimize decision-making. Here, we provide evidence for recurrent inhibition: an experience-dependent plasticity mechanism that refines mental templates by enhancing γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA)-mediated (GABAergic) inhibition and recurrent processing in superficial visual cortex layers. We combine ultrahigh-field (7 T) functional magnetic resonance imaging at submillimeter resolution with magnetic resonance spectroscopy to investigate the fine-scale functional and neurochemical plasticity mechanisms for optimized perceptual decisions. We demonstrate that GABAergic inhibition increases following training on a visual (i.e., fine orientation) discrimination task, enhancing the discriminability of orientation representations in superficial visual cortex layers that are known to support recurrent processing. Modeling functional and neurochemical plasticity interactions reveals that recurrent inhibitory processing optimizes brain computations for perpetual decisions and adaptive behavior.

Memory Reflections of the Microbiota-Gut and Oligodendrocyte Axis.

Memory is the persisting consequence of cognitive activities instigated by and engrossed on exterior information from the environment and commenced by an intensive on internal mental representations. Establishing a gut-brain axis (GBA) in health and disease has recently brought the gut, the main portal of communication with the external environment, to the forefront of this interaction. Dietary stimuli have long been linked to brain development, behavioral responses, and memory reflections. Vagus nerve, immune system, bacterial metabolites and products are just a few of the linkages that make up the GBA, a bidirectional arrangement of signaling pathways that connects the neurological system with the gastrointestinal tract. GBA involves two-way communication between central and enteric neural systems, connecting the brain's affective and cognitive regions to peripheral activities of the intestine. Recent scientific progress has highlighted the significance of gut microbiota in affecting these relationships. By controlling myelination at the prefrontal cortex, a crucial area for multifaceted cognitive behavior forecast and decision-making, this axis influences social behavior, including memory reflections. Humans may experience late myelination of the prefrontal cortex's axonal projections into the third decade of life, making it vulnerable to outside factors like microbial metabolites. It has been demonstrated that changes in the gut microbiome can change the microbial metabolome's composition, impacting highly permeable bioactive chemicals like p-cresol that may hinder oligodendrocyte differentiation. This review will discuss the memory reflections of the microbiota-gut and oligodendrocyte axis. Adopting this concept should encourage a new arena of thinking that recognizes the intricate central and periphery dynamics influencing behavior and uses that knowledge to develop novel therapies and interventions for maladjusted memory and learning systems.

Orientation and mental representations in the decision-making process: a comparison between junior and senior professional

In the workplace, professionals have an orientation to individual or group decision-making based on ideal or real representation of the group situation. However, no previous studies investigated these dimensions in professionals of different ages. A total of 216 professionals were enrolled in this study based on their work experience and seniority. Specifically, senior professionals were from different Italian consulting companies, while juniors had not yet approached the world of work, but were completing their professional education. Participants were asked to read a realistic decision-making scenario and rate their individual or group decision-making orientation, thinking of an ideal and real group situation. A stronger group decision-making orientation was found in both groups of professionals, independent of age. However, professionals appear less group-oriented when they mentally self-represent their real compared to their ideal group. Additionally, in senior professionals, a positive correlation between individual and group orientation was found in the ideal group situation. Indeed, in junior professionals, a positive correlation between individual and group orientation was found in the real situation. Therefore, it might be that becoming older and increasing professionalism level correlate with awareness of the difference between real and ideal group representations.

Spatial memory and frames of reference: How deeply do we rely on the body and the environment?

How do we mentally represent the world out there? Psychology, philosophy and neuroscience have given two classical answers: as a living space where we act and perceive, dependent on our bodies; as an enduring physical space with its feature, independent of our bodily interactions. The first would be based on egocentric frames of reference anchored to the body, while the second on allocentric frames of reference centred on the environment itself or on objects. This raises some questions concerning how deep the reliance on the body and the environment is when using these reference frames, and whether they are affected differently by the duration of time and the scale (small or large) of space. To answer these questions, I have brought empirical evidence of the effect of motor interference, blindness, environmental characteristics and temporal factors on egocentric and allocentric spatial representational capacity. The results suggest that egocentric representations are deeply rooted in the body, with its sensory and motor properties, and are closely linked to acting now in small-scale or peripersonal space. Allocentric representations are more influenced by environmental than by bodily characteristics, by visual than by motor properties, and seem particularly related to large-scale or extrapersonal space. In line with neurophysiological evidence and a Kantian perspective, it appears that we are endowed with an internal spatial representation system ready to structure environmental information for our purposes. To what extent this system is innate and pervasive in cognition and what is its relationship to the neural 'positioning' substrate discovered by O'Keefe and colleagues requires further scientific investigation.