Search results for "Human behaviour"
showing 10 items of 27 documents
The two-stage process in visual working memory consolidation
2019
AbstractTwo hypotheses have been proposed to explain the formation manner for visual working memory (VWM) representations during the consolidation process: an all-or-none process hypothesis and a coarse-to-fine process hypothesis. However, neither the all-or-none process hypothesis nor the coarse-to-fine process hypothesis can stipulate clearly how VWM representations are formed during the consolidation process. In the current study, we propose a two-stage process hypothesis to reconcile these hypotheses. The two-stage process hypothesis suggests that the consolidation of coarse information is an all-or-none process in the early consolidation stage, while the consolidation of detailed infor…
Genetic association study of childhood aggression across raters, instruments, and age
2021
AbstractChildhood aggressive behavior (AGG) has a substantial heritability of around 50%. Here we present a genome-wide association meta-analysis (GWAMA) of childhood AGG, in which all phenotype measures across childhood ages from multiple assessors were included. We analyzed phenotype assessments for a total of 328 935 observations from 87 485 children aged between 1.5 and 18 years, while accounting for sample overlap. We also meta-analyzed within subsets of the data, i.e., within rater, instrument and age. SNP-heritability for the overall meta-analysis (AGGoverall) was 3.31% (SE = 0.0038). We found no genome-wide significant SNPs for AGGoverall. The gene-based analysis returned three sign…
Working memory capacity affects trade-off between quality and quantity only when stimulus exposure duration is sufficient : Evidence for the two-phas…
2019
AbstractThe relation between visual working memory (VWM) capacity and attention has attracted much interest. In this study, we investigated the correlation between the participants’ VWM capacity and their ability to voluntarily trade off the precision and number of items remembered. The two-phase resource allocation model proposed by Ye et al. (2017) suggests that for a given set size, it takes a certain amount of consolidation time for an individual to control attention to adjust the VWM resources to trade off the precision and number. To verify whether trade-off ability varies across VWM capacity, we measured each individual’s VWM capacity and then conducted a colour recall task to examin…
Large scale and information effects on cooperation in public good games
2019
AbstractThe problem of public good provision is central in economics and touches upon many challenging societal issues, ranging from climate change mitigation to vaccination schemes. However, results which are supposed to be applied to a societal scale have only been obtained with small groups of people, with a maximum group size of 100 being reported in the literature. This work takes this research to a new level by carrying out and analysing experiments on public good games with up to 1000 simultaneous players. The experiments are carried out via an online protocol involving daily decisions for extended periods. Our results show that within those limits, participants’ behaviour and collec…
Generalization gradients for fear and disgust in human associative learning
2021
AbstractPrevious research indicates that excessive fear is a critical feature in anxiety disorders; however, recent studies suggest that disgust may also contribute to the etiology and maintenance of some anxiety disorders. It remains unclear if differences exist between these two threat-related emotions in conditioning and generalization. Evaluating different patterns of fear and disgust learning would facilitate a deeper understanding of how anxiety disorders develop. In this study, 32 college students completed threat conditioning tasks, including conditioned stimuli paired with frightening or disgusting images. Fear and disgust were divided into two randomly ordered blocks to examine di…
Where There is Smoke There is Fear-Impaired Contextual Inhibition of Conditioned Fear in Smokers
2016
The odds-ratio of smoking is elevated in populations with neuropsychiatric diseases, in particular in the highly prevalent diagnoses of post-traumatic stress and anxiety disorders. Yet, the association between smoking and a key dimensional phenotype of these disorders—maladaptive deficits in fear learning and fear inhibition—is unclear. We therefore investigated acquisition and memory of fear and fear inhibition in healthy smoking and non-smoking participants (N=349, 22% smokers). We employed a well validated paradigm of context-dependent fear and safety learning (day 1) including a memory retrieval on day 2. During fear learning, a geometrical shape was associated with an aversive electric…
The emergence and adaptive use of prestige in an online social learning task
2020
AbstractPrestige-biased social learning occurs when individuals preferentially learn from others who are highly respected, admired, copied, or attended to in their group. This form of social learning is argued to reflect novel forms of social hierarchy in human societies, and, by providing an efficient short-cut to acquiring adaptive information, underpin the cumulative cultural evolution that has contributed to our species’ ecological success. Despite these potentially important consequences, little empirical work to date has tested the basic predictions of prestige-biased social learning. Here we provide evidence supporting the key predictions that prestige-biased social learning is used …
Limitations of concurrently representing objects within view and in visual working memory
2020
AbstractRepresenting visibly present stimuli is as limited in capacity as representing invisible stimuli in visual working memory (WM). In this study, we explored whether concurrently representing stimuli within view affects representing objects in visual WM, and if so, whether this effect is modulated by the storage states (active and silent state) of memory contents? In experiment 1, participants were asked to perform the change-detect task in a simultaneous-representing condition in which WM content and the continuously-visible stimuli in view were simultaneously represented, as well as a baseline condition in which only the representations of visual WM content were maintained. The resul…
Managing Human Factors to Reduce Organisational Risk in Industry
2018
[EN] Human factors are intrinsically involved at virtually any level of most industrial/business activities, and may be responsible for several accidents and incidents, if not correctly identified and managed. Focusing on the significance of human behaviour in industry, this article proposes a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM)-based approach to support organizational risk assessment in industrial environments. The decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) method is proposed as a mathematical framework to evaluate mutual relationships within a set of human factors involved in industrial processes, with the aim of highlighting priorities of intervention. A case study relat…
Decreased intersubject synchrony in dynamic valence ratings of sad movie contents in dysphoric individuals
2021
Emotional reactions to movies are typically similar between people. However, depressive symptoms decrease synchrony in brain responses. Less is known about the effect of depressive symptoms on intersubject synchrony in conscious stimulus-related processing. In this study, we presented amusing, sad and fearful movie clips to dysphoric individuals (those with elevated depressive symptoms) and control participants to dynamically rate the clips’ valences (positive vs. negative). We analysed both the valence ratings’ mean values and intersubject correlation (ISC). We used electrodermal activity (EDA) to complement the measurement in a separate session. There were no group differences in either t…