Motivation(s) from control: response-effect contingency and confirmation of sensorimotor predictions reinforce different levels of selection.

Humans and other animals live in dynamic environments. To reliably manipulate the environment and attain their goals they would benefit from a constant modification of motor-responding based on responses' current effect on the current environment. It is argued that this is exactly what is achieved by a mechanism that reinforces responses which have led to accurate sensorimotor predictions.

Automatically controlled: Task irrelevance fully cancels otherwise automatic imitation.

Automatic imitation refers to the act of unintentionally mimicking observed actions. Inspired by a theoretical framework that allows for controlled yet unintentional processes, we tested whether automatic imitation depends on the task relevance of the to-be-imitated movements. Replicating previous results, we find that movements that are part of the participant's task set unintentionally influence response.

The Differential Impact of a Response's Effectiveness and its Monetary Value on Response-Selection.

While known reinforcers of behavior are outcomes that are valuable to the organism, recent research has demonstrated that the mere occurrence of an own-response effect can also reinforce responding. In this paper we begin investigating whether these two types of reinforcement occur via the same mechanism. To this end, we modified two different tasks, previously established to capture the influence of a response's effectiveness on the speed of motor-responses (indexed here by participants' reaction times).

Evaluation of an action's effectiveness by the motor system in a dynamic environment.

An important model for explaining humans' feeling of agency-the Comparator model-draws on ideas used to explain effective motor control. The model describes how our brain estimates the degree of control over the environment offered by a specific motor program (in short, an action's effectiveness). However, given its current level of specification, the model is at best vague on how (or even whether) the prediction of effectiveness of an action is dynamically updated.

Positive and negative effects of gender expertise on episodic memory.

In two experiments, we examined the role of differential levels of knowledge between the genders in different domains, which we term gender expertise, in accounting for differences in episodic memory performance. In Experiment 1, we validated the assumption of differential gender expertise among men and women and selected the categories for the subsequent experiments. In Experiment 2, participants from both genders studied exemplars from these female-oriented, male-oriented, and gender-neutral categories and were tested after 24 hours on studied items, critical lures, and unrelated lures.