Context Manipulation Research Articles

Context Dependency at Recall: Decoupling Context and Targets at Encoding

Research suggests that context influences judgments and implicit evaluations (e.g., attitudes toward a person depend upon the context in which we encounter that person). Importantly, previous research presents contextual cues at encoding, such that participants learn about a target person in context. Here, we decouple the process of learning about targets from manipulations of context. Participants in our studies learned about the intelligence and athleticism of a novel male target in a neutral context. Subsequently, we implicitly measured participants’ attitudes toward the target in an intelligence-related or neutral context (Study 1) and in intelligence-related and athletic-related contexts (Study 2). In both studies, contextual cues (which were absent during encoding) influenced attitudes at retrieval.

Born in the USA: a comparison of modals and nominal quantifiers in child language

One of the challenges confronted by language learners is to master the interpretation of sentences with multiple logical operators (e.g., nominal quantifiers, modals, negation), where different interpretations depend on different scope assignments. Five-year-old children have been found to access some readings of potentially ambiguous sentences much less than adults do (Lidz and Musolino, Lang Acquis 13(2):73–102, 2006; Musolino, Universal Grammar and the acquisition of semantic knowledge, 1998; Musolino and Lidz, Lang Acquis 11(4):277–291, 2003, among many others). Recently, Gualmini et al. (Nat Lang Semant 16:205–237, 2008) have shown that, by careful contextual manipulation, it is possible to evoke some of the putatively unavailable interpretations from young children. Their proposal is quite general, but the focus of their work was on sentences involving nominal quantifiers and negation. The present paper extends this investigation to sentences with modal expressions. The results of our two experimental studies reveal that, in potentially ambiguous sentences with modal expressions, the kinds of contextual manipulations introduced by Gualmini and colleagues do not suffice to explain children’s initial scope interpretations. In response to the recalcitrant data, we propose a new three-stage model of the acquisition of scope relations. Most importantly, at the initial stage, child grammars make available only one interpretation of negative sentences with modal expressions. We call this the Unique Scope Assignment (USA) stage.

Gender Differences in Time Perception During Olfactory Stimulation

In this study, we conducted two experiments to evaluate the effect of different types of odors on a time reproduction task, comparing performances of males to those of females. In the first experiment, subjects had to estimate short (510, 600, 690 ms) and long (1700, 2000, 2300 ms) interval durations under three odor conditions: positive, negative and neutral. A gender specific effect of olfactory stimulation on time estimation was found only for short durations. Namely, females were less accurate (overestimated) in reproducing short time intervals during the unpleasant odor presentation. This effect was confirmed and strengthened in the second experiment in which the intensity of the negative odor was enhanced. The present findings suggest that the neural network underlying time estimation is more “sensitive” to context manipulations in females than in men. Practical Applications The first important point is that there might be relevant gender differences in the processing of time (time estimation) that are mediated by olfactory stimulation. This new evidence might have important implications and applications in health issues and especially in workplace safety, for example in jobs or contexts in which fast processing and rapid decisions or choices are required. Therefore, the knowledge that females are more influenced by unpleasant odors than males during time estimation should be seriously considered in situations in which time plays a crucial role such as during rapid decision-making, where automatic processes should be efficiently activated. Overall, the higher sensitivity to specific olfactory stimulation observed in women probably reflects individual differences in a complex process such as time processing.

Contextual Change After Fear Acquisition Affects Conditioned Responding and the Time Course of Extinction Learning-Implications for Renewal Research.

Context plays a central role in retrieving (fear) memories. Accordingly, context manipulations are inherent to most return of fear (ROF) paradigms (in particular renewal), involving contextual changes after fear extinction. Context changes are, however, also often embedded during earlier stages of ROF experiments such as context changes between fear acquisition and extinction (e.g., in ABC and ABA renewal). Previous studies using these paradigms have however focused exclusively on the context switch after extinction (i.e., renewal). Thus, the possibility of a general effect of context switch on conditioned responding that may not be conditional to preceding extinction learning remains unstudied. Hence, the current study investigated the impact of a context switch between fear acquisition and extinction on immediate conditioned responding and on the time-course of extinction learning by using a multimodal approach. A group that underwent contextual change after fear conditioning (AB; n = 36) was compared with a group without a contextual change from acquisition to extinction (AA; n = 149), while measuring physiological (skin conductance and fear potentiated startle) measures and subjective fear ratings. Contextual change between fear acquisition and extinction had a pronounced effect on both immediate conditioned responding and on the time course of extinction learning in skin conductance responses and subjective fear ratings. This may have important implications for the mechanisms underlying and the interpretation of the renewal effect (i.e., contextual switch after extinction). Consequently, future studies should incorporate designs and statistical tests that disentangle general effects of contextual change from genuine ROF effects.

Evoking Context with Contrastive Stress: Effects on Pragmatic Enrichment.

Although it is widely acknowledged that context influences a variety of pragmatic phenomena, it is not clear how best to articulate this notion of context and thereby explain the nature of its influence. In this paper, we target contextual alternatives that are evoked via focus placement and test how the same contextual manipulation can influence three different phenomena that involve pragmatic enrichment: scalar implicature, presupposition, and coreference. We argue that focus placement influences these three phenomena indirectly by providing the listener with information about the likely question under discussion (QUD) that a particular utterance answers (Roberts, 1996/2012). In three listening experiments, we find that the predicted interpretations are indeed made more available when focus placement is added to the final element (to the scalar adjective, to an entity embedded under the negated presupposition trigger, and to the predicate of a pronoun). These findings bring together several distinct strands of work on the effect of focus placement on interpretation all in the domain of pragmatic enrichment. Together they advance our empirical understanding of the relation between focus placement and QUD and highlight commonalities between implicature, presupposition, and coreference.

Ventriloquial Acts: Critical Reflections on the Art of Foley

Foley, the art of producing additional sound effects in synchrony to actions on screen, only forms a part of the use of sound effects in a film. It is akin to other ‘dark arts’ such as ventriloquism as it relies on the same manipulations of context and space. Because Foley perceptually links us to human gesture it offers a particularly useful model with which to understand not only cinematic reception but also our relationship with everyday sounds and music making. Although within the artificial environment of the cinema our perception is often played with and distorted, the controlled context of cinema is a useful laboratory in which to examine our responses to sound. This is a context from which we can develop a deeper understanding of our reception of sound outside of the cinematic realm. The text below uses our responses to the production of sound effects and in particular Foley, to examine critically different, and sometimes converging, strands of thinking around perception, listening practice, audio...

Health and emergency-care platform for the elderly and disabled people in the Smart City

Emergence of context-aware technologies and IoT devices reflect that the quality of a human life has become one of the most essential aspects in Smart Cities. With this goal health monitoring of elderly and disabled people have got plenty of attention and focus in the research. The healthcare systems rely on the components responsible for context sensing, processing, storage and inference, and response. In order to make the interoperability among the various healthcare systems, a typical standard is needed in order to uniformly access the context-aware healthcare information coming through a fundamental infrastructure. In this paper, we propose people-centric sensing framework for the healthcare of elderly and disabled people. Such platform is aimed to monitor health of the elderly and disabled person and provide them with a service oriented emergency response in case of abnormal health condition. We focus on three aspects: (a) context manipulation from the mobile device in people-centric environment; (b) emergency response using context base information; and (c) modeling mobile context sources as services. The most distinctive feature of current work is that medical resources are efficiently used to provide them real-time medical services in case of emergency simultaneously extending social network of the elderly people. The system implementation shows that the proposed people-centric sensing system is efficient and cost-effective in health and emergency care.

The recognition of a novel-object in a novel context leads to hippocampal and parahippocampal c-Fos involvement

Contextual memory implies recognition based on the association between past and present events experienced. It is important for daily functioning and dysfunctional in many neuropsychological disturbances. The network related to this memory is still open for debate, even though it has been associated with medial temporal lobe regions, including the perirhinal, entorhinal and temporal association cortices, as well as the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. Our work tries to elucidate whether a change in the context, such as differences in the amount of stimuli presented on the walls and floor of an open field during object exploration, affects the recognition of an object that has been experienced before, and whether this context manipulation could be linked to changes in c-Fos expression. For this purpose, we used a one-trial novel-object recognition task. The animals were divided into two different experimental conditions; in the OR-NORMAL group, the sample and probe test were performed in the same context. However, in the OR-CONTEXT group, the probe test was performed in a different context. Our results showed that the OR-NORMAL group presented a greater exploration of objects than the OR-CONTEXT group. However, both groups presented significant exploration of the novel object. To label the brain regions involved in novel-object recognition under these conditions, we marked the expression of c-Fos protein. Results suggest that a neural circuit that includes the hippocampus, entorhinal and temporal association cortices is involved in the recognition of the novel-object in a novel context.

Temporal context manipulations and manual reaction times: The influence of temporal attention on behavioral performance.

Manual reaction times (MRTs) are reduced when a warning signal precedes the onset of an imperative stimulus. The decrease in MRTs is modulated by uncertainty about the moment of stimulus occurrence after the warning stimulus. This modulation is related to preparatory mechanisms that occur during the foreperiod between the warning and imperative stimuli. Hence, manipulations within the range of foreperiods influence preparation and thus response latencies. When the moment of the occurrence of the imperative stimulus is highly predictable, volunteers can allocate resources in time to optimize their performance, a mechanism known as the temporal allocation of attention. In the present study, we evaluated the effects of temporal context (i.e., the duration and arrangement of intervals) on MRTs by conducting 2 experiments with different purposes. The first experiment verified which intervals were more susceptible to variations in the temporal context. The second experiment examined whether learning (i.e., practice) that is acquired by volunteers while in a temporal context affects performance if the temporal contexts are changed. Our data showed that short intervals were more susceptible to contextual influences. Participants could implicitly perceive the temporal context of the experiment and used this to optimize performance. Implicit learning obtained during a temporal context influenced response latencies for a period of time, even when the temporal context was changed. Our results complement many aspects of the results reported by other studies and confirm the importance of temporal attention for organizing and optimizing perception and behavioral performance.

Using EEG and stimulus context to probe the modelling of auditory-visual speech

We investigated whether internal models of the relationship between lip movements and corresponding speech sounds [Auditory-Visual (AV) speech] could be updated via experience. AV associations were indexed by early and late event related potentials (ERPs) and by oscillatory power and phase locking. Different AV experience was produced via a context manipulation. Participants were presented with valid (the conventional pairing) and invalid AV speech items in either a ‘reliable’ context (80% AVvalid items) or an ‘unreliable’ context (80% AVinvalid items). The results showed that for the reliable context, there was N1 facilitation for AV compared to auditory only speech. This N1 facilitation was not affected by AV validity. Later ERPs showed a difference in amplitude between valid and invalid AV speech and there was significant enhancement of power for valid versus invalid AV speech. These response patterns did not change over the context manipulation, suggesting that the internal models of AV speech were not updated by experience. The results also showed that the facilitation of N1 responses did not vary as a function of the salience of visual speech (as previously reported); in post-hoc analyses, it appeared instead that N1 facilitation varied according to the relative time of the acoustic onset, suggesting for AV events N1 may be more sensitive to the relationship of AV timing than form.

Comparative difficulty and the strategic regulation of accuracy: The impact of test-list context on monitoring and meta-metacognition

A growing body of research has shown that context manipulations can have little or no impact on accuracy performance, yet still significantly influence metacognitive performance. For example, participants in a test-list context paradigm study one list of words with a medium levels-of-processing task and a second word list with either a shallow or deep task: Recognition for medium words does not differ across conditions, however medium words are significantly more likely to be labeled as “remembered” (vs. merely familiar) if they had been studied with a shallow word list (Bodner & Lindsay, 2003). The goal of the current studies was to extend the test-list context paradigm to strategic regulation (report/withhold recognition test), and broaden it to incorporate different types of stimuli (i.e., face stimuli in place of a medium word list). The paradigm also was modified to include separate answer (studied/new) confidence and decision (report/withhold) confidence ratings at test. Results showed that context did not impact recognition accuracy for faces across the context conditions, however participants were more likely to report (i.e., volunteer) their face responses if they had studied the shallow word list. The results also demonstrated a difference between answer confidence and decision confidence, and the pattern of this difference depended on whether responses were reported or withheld (Experiment 1). Overall, the data are presented as support for the functional account of memory, which views memory states as inferential and attributional rather than static categories.

Early gait development in human infants: Plasticity and clinical applications.

In this paper we focus on how a developmental perspective on plasticity in the control of human movement can promote early therapy and improve gait acquisition in infants with developmental disabilities. Current knowledge about stepping development in healthy infants across the first year of life highlights strong plasticity, both in behavioral outcome and in underlying neuro-muscular activation. These data show that stepping, like other motor skills, emerges from the interaction between infant's maturation and the environment. This view is reinforced by showing that infants with different internal resources (like genetic disorder or neural tube defect) show unique developmental trajectories when supported on a treadmill, yet do respond. Moreover, we will show that their behavior can be improved by context manipulations (mostly sensory stimulation) or practice. Overall, plasticity in the neural, skeletal, and muscle tissues create new opportunities for optimizing early intervention by creatively tapping into the same developmental processes experienced by healthy infants.

Politeness, relevance and scalar inferences

Recent behavioural studies in experimental pragmatics investigate the effect of contextual manipulations on the derivation of scalar inferences (e.g. Not all X-ed inferred from an utterance of ‘Some X-ed’). Among these, Bonnefon et al. (2009) and Feeney and Bonnefon (2012) suggest that scalar inferences are less likely to be derived in face-threatening contexts. Indeed, they even suggest that a face-threatening utterance of the form ‘Some X-ed’ can be interpreted as communicating that All X-ed. This paper argues that the experimental evidence provided so far is compatible with two alternative explanations of the empirical data: (i) face-threatening contexts block the derivation of scalar inferences, or (ii) in face-threatening contexts the scalar inference is in fact derived as part of the intended interpretation but is less likely to be accepted (as true). Drawing on the theoretical distinction between ‘comprehension’ and ‘acceptance’ of the communicated content (Sperber et al., 2010), the paper proposes an analysis of the results in light of Relevance Theory. In line with (ii), Relevance Theory predicts that in face-threatening contexts the scalar inference Not all X-ed may be derived as part of the interpretation of the utterance but consideration of the communicator's ‘preferences’ (e.g. her concern to be polite/kind) may lead the hearer to judge the scalar inference to be probably false and so to reject it. In such a case, the hearer may go on to infer that the reality is that All X-ed but not attribute this to the speaker as part of the intended meaning of the utterance.

Contextual reminders fail to trigger memory reconsolidation in aged rats and aged humans

There is strong evidence that hippocampal memory returns to a labile state upon reactivation, initiating a reconsolidation process that restabilizes it and allows for its updating. Normal aging is associated with deficits in episodic memory processes. However, the effects of aging on memory reconsolidation and its neural substrate remain largely unknown, and an animal model is lacking. In this study we investigated the effects of aging on context-dependent reconsolidation using an episodic set-learning task in humans and an analogous set-learning spatial task in rats. In both tasks, young and older subjects learned a set of objects (humans) or feeder locations (rats; Set 1) in Context A on Day 1. On Day 2, a different set (Set 2) was learned in either Context A (Reminder condition) or Context B (No Reminder condition). On Day 3, subjects were instructed (humans) or cued (rats) to recall Set 1. Young rats and humans in the Reminder condition falsely recalled significantly more items from Set 2 than those in the No Reminder condition, suggesting that the reminder context triggered a reactivation of Set 1 on Day 2 and allowed the integration of Set 2 items into Set 1. In both species, older subjects displayed a different pattern of results than young subjects. In aged rats, there was no difference between conditions in the level of falsely recalled Set 2 items (intrusions). Older humans in the No Reminder condition made significantly more intrusions than those in the Reminder condition. Follow-up control experiments in aged rats suggested that intrusions in older animals reflected general interference, independent of context manipulations. We conclude that contextual reminders are not sufficient to trigger memory updating in aged rats or aged humans, unlike in younger individuals. Future studies using this animal model should further our understanding of the role of the hippocampus in memory maintenance and updating during normal aging.

Selection Demands and Working Memory Mediate Interference during Naming

Selection Demands and Working Memory Mediate Interference during Naming

The adapted physical activity as a valuable tool to overcome social prejudice to the disabled persons

Savino, L., Rio, L., & Gomez, F. (2015). The adapted physical activity as a valuable tool to overcome social prejudice to the disabled persons. J. Hum. Sport Exerc., 9(Proc1), pp.S418-S424. The Adapted Physical Activity, in modern times, is defined as the program with an educative target so it promotes the autonomous recovery of the person through direct experience of physicality (Cottini, 2008). The ICF (WHO, 2001) is a guide achieving this objective because it defines disability as the product of the relationship between the health of the person and the context in which he lives. The context creates disability because it doesn’t have the appropriate tools to allow the free expression of the person for the different life contexts (Cottini, 2008). Finally the “conquest” consists in the implementation of Adapted Physical Activity. This activity is expressed in the manipulation of the physical context according to the various needs of the person to improve all their dimensions. The TMA test is the methodology used to evaluate the functionality of Adapted Physical Activity to empower the global person’s self-esteem. This instrument has favored a primary monitoring to understand the initial condition of the four disabled, involved in the research work, and the whole class group. The results obtained in this first phase were classified as negative according to the American standardized sample. The test had determined how the global self-esteem of the disabled person was influenced by his conditions of marginalization determined by the prejudice that limited action. The A.P.A., during the hours of physical education, has facilitated the achievement of positive results compared to those of departure. These results represent a pratical demonstration of how prejudice is an

Interactive effects of trait and state affect on top-down control of attention.

Few studies have investigated how attentional control is affected by transient affective states while taking individual differences in affective traits into consideration. In this study, participants completed a color-word Stroop task immediately after undergoing a positive, neutral or negative affective context manipulation (ACM). Behavioral performance was unaffected by any ACM considered in isolation. For individuals high in trait negative affect (NA), performance was impaired by the negative but not the positive or neutral ACM. Neuroimaging results indicate that activity in primarily top-down control regions of the brain (inferior frontal gyrus and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex) was suppressed in the presence of emotional arousal (both negative and positive ACMs). This effect appears to have been exacerbated or offset by co-occurring activity in other top-down control regions (parietal) and emotion processing regions (orbitofrontal cortex, amygdala and nucleus accumbens) as a function of the valence of state affect (positive or negative) and trait affect (trait NA or trait PA). Neuroimaging results are consistent with behavioral findings. In combination, they indicate both additive and interactive influences of trait and state affect on top-down control of attention.

The decimal effect: behavioral and neural bases for a novel influence on intertemporal choice in healthy individuals and in ADHD.

We identify a novel contextual variable that alters the evaluation of delayed rewards in healthy participants and those diagnosed with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). When intertemporal choices are constructed of monetary outcomes with rounded values (e.g., $25.00), discount rates are greater than when the rewards have nonzero decimal values (e.g., $25.12). This finding is well explained within a dual system framework for temporal discounting in which preferences are constructed from separate affective and deliberative processes. Specifically, we find that round dollar values produce greater positive affect than do nonzero decimal values. This suggests that relative involvement of affective processes may underlie our observed difference in intertemporal preferences. Furthermore, we demonstrate that intertemporal choices with rounded values recruit greater brain responses in the nucleus accumbens to a degree that correlates with the size of the behavioral effect across participants. Our demonstration that a simple contextual manipulation can alter self-control in ADHD has implications for treatment of individuals with disorders of impulsivity. Overall, the decimal effect highlights mechanisms by which the properties of a reward bias perceived value and consequent preferences.

Relative valuation of pain in human orbitofrontal cortex.

The valuation of health-related states, including pain, is a critical issue in clinical practice, health economics, and pain neuroscience. Surprisingly the monetary value people associate with pain is highly context-dependent, with participants willing to pay more to avoid medium-level pain when presented in a context of low-intensity, rather than high-intensity, pain. Here, we ask whether context impacts upon the neural representation of pain itself, or alternatively the transformation of pain into valuation-driven behavior. While undergoing fMRI, human participants declared how much money they would be willing to pay to avoid repeated instances of painful cutaneous electrical stimuli delivered to the foot. We also implemented a contextual manipulation that involved presenting medium-level painful stimuli in blocks with either low- or high-level stimuli. We found no evidence of context-dependent activity within a conventional "pain matrix," where pain-evoked activity reflected absolute stimulus intensity. By contrast, in right lateral orbitofrontal cortex, a strong contextual dependency was evident, and here activity tracked the contextual rank of the pain. The findings are in keeping with an architecture where an absolute pain valuation system and a rank-dependent system interact to influence willing to pay to avoid pain, with context impacting value-based behavior high in a processing hierarchy. This segregated processing hints that distinct neural representations reflect sensory aspects of pain and components that are less directly nociceptive whose integration also guides pain-related actions. A dominance of the latter might account for puzzling phenomena seen in somatization disorders where perceived pain is a dominant driver of behavior.

Semantics for consistent activation in context-oriented systems

ContextContext-oriented programming languages provide dedicated programming abstractions to define behavioral adaptations and means to combine those adaptations dynamically according to sensed context changes. Some of these languages feature programming abstractions to explicitly define interaction dependencies among contexts. However, the semantics of context activation and the meaning of dependency relations have been described only informally, which in some cases has led to incorrect specifications, faulty implementations and inconsistent system behavior. ObjectiveWith the aim of avoiding faulty implementations and inconsistencies during system execution, this paper proposes both a formal and run-time model of contexts, context activation and context interaction. MethodAs a formal and computational basis, we introduce context Petri nets, a model based on Petri nets, which we found to match closely the structure of contexts in context-oriented systems. The operational semantics of Petri nets permits the modeling of run-time context activations. Existing Petri net analyses allow us to reason about system properties. As validation, we carried out small and medium-sized case studies. ResultsIn the cases explored, context Petri nets served effectively as underlying run-time model to ensure that declared context interaction constraints remain consistent during context manipulation. Moreover, context Petri nets enabled us to analyze certain properties regarding the activation state of particular contexts. ConclusionContext Petri nets thus proved to be appropriate to encode and manage the semantics of context activation, both formally and computationally, so as to preserve the consistency of context-oriented systems.