Men and women's waking patterns to infant crying: Preparenthood differences are insufficient to explain uneven sharing of nighttime care.

Crying in infancy is an important emotional signal that elicits care from adults, and women are often assumed to be more sensitive and reactive to infant crying than men. In a series of studies, we tested whether preparenthood gender differences in sensitivity to infant cries are a potential driver of the unequal share of early parenting. In Study 1, we tested for differences in men and women's awakening to infant crying and alarms among nonparents in an overnight experiment ( = 142).

The dark side of fear expression: Infant crying as a trigger for maladaptive parental responses.

While infant fearfulness, and its expression via crying, may have been adaptive in our evolutionary history, for modern parents, crying can be challenging to respond to. We discuss how and why prolonged crying can raise the risk for difficulties with adult care. Given that crying is the most-reported trigger for shaking, its potential to elicit maladaptive responses should not be overlooked.

A sense of direction: spatial boundaries in a cognitive, cultural, and deep time perspective.

This brief note points toward new potentials that lie at the interface between research on landscape archaeology and cognitive science. Recent advances in the cognitive and neural sciences have sharpened our understanding of spatial cognition, by providing new explanations for how the brain reduces the dimensionality of complex topography and geography for effective navigation. This research suggests that space is represented in grid-like structures in the brain, and that grid-like forms are a basic ingredient of spatial processing.

Crying in the first 12 months of life: A systematic review and meta-analysis of cross-country parent-reported data and modeling of the "cry curve".

Crying is an ubiquitous communicative signal in infancy. This meta-analysis synthesizes data on parent-reported infant cry durations from 17 countries and 57 studies until infant age 12 months (N = 7580, 54% female from k = 44; majority White samples, where reported, k = 18), from studies before the end Sept. 2020.

How are attention, learning, and social cognition related on the non-clinical autistic spectrum?

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) - and autistic traits more generally - are associated with a heterogeneous pattern of differences in cognitive function. These include differences in associative learning, attention, and processing of social information. All three cognitive functions have importance in clinical, educational, and research contexts.

Socially Learned Attitude Change is not reduced in Medicated Patients with Schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia is often associated with distinctive or odd social behaviours. Previous work suggests this could be due to a general reduction in conformity; however, this work only assessed the tendency to publicly agree with others, which may involve a number of different mechanisms. In this study, we specifically investigated whether patients display a reduced tendency to adopt other people's opinions (socially learned attitude change).

Correction to: Visually induced gains in pitch discrimination: Linking audio-visual processing with auditory abilities.

During copy-editing, the y-axes of Fig. 2 (top) and Fig. 3 (top) were erroneously labelled mean BCG (d') in the version of the paper published as Online First.

Enhanced Automatic Action Imitation and Intact Imitation-Inhibition in Schizophrenia.

Imitation plays a key role in social learning and in facilitating social interactions and likely constitutes a basic building block of social cognition that supports higher-level social abilities. Recent findings suggest that patients with schizophrenia have imitation impairments that could contribute to the social impairments associated with the disorder. However, extant studies have specifically assessed voluntary imitation or automatic imitation of emotional stimuli without controlling for potential confounders.

Visually induced gains in pitch discrimination: Linking audio-visual processing with auditory abilities.

Perception is fundamentally a multisensory experience. The principle of inverse effectiveness (PoIE) states how the multisensory gain is maximal when responses to the unisensory constituents of the stimuli are weak. It is one of the basic principles underlying multisensory processing of spatiotemporally corresponding crossmodal stimuli that are well established at behavioral as well as neural levels.

Typical pain experience but underestimation of others' pain: Emotion perception in self and others in autism spectrum disorder.

Difficulties in emotion perception are commonly observed in autism spectrum disorder. However, it is unclear whether these difficulties can be attributed to a general problem of relating to emotional states, or whether they specifically concern the perception of others' expressions. This study addressed this question in the context of pain, a sensory and emotional state with strong social relevance.

Brief Report: Suboptimal Auditory Localization in Autism Spectrum Disorder: Support for the Bayesian Account of Sensory Symptoms.

Convergent research suggests that people with ASD have difficulties localizing sounds in space. These difficulties have implications for communication, the development of social behavior, and quality of life. Recently, a theory has emerged which treats perceptual symptoms in ASD as the product of impairments in implicit Bayesian inference; as suboptimalities in the integration of sensory evidence with prior perceptual knowledge.

Synchronised and complementary coordination mechanisms in an asymmetric joint aiming task.

Many forms of social interaction require that behaviour be coordinated in the here and now. Much research has been conducted on how people coordinate their actions in real time to achieve a joint goal, showing that people use both synchronised (i.e.

Perceptual inference and autistic traits.

Autistic people are better at perceiving details. Major theories explain this in terms of bottom-up sensory mechanisms or in terms of top-down cognitive biases. Recently, it has become possible to link these theories within a common framework.

Doing what others see: visuomotor conversion to informational social influence.

The effects of other people's opinions on conscious perceptual judgments are pervasive and well studied. Although existing research is suggestive, less is known about how others' opinions affect nonconscious sensorimotor behavior. In the experiment, participants were shown figures containing a visual illusion, along with judgments made by experimental confederates, which conflicted with participants' previous perceptual reports.

Expectations contribute to reduced pain levels during prayer in highly religious participants.

Although the use of prayer as a religious coping strategy is widespread and often claimed to have positive effects on physical disorders including pain, it has never been tested in a controlled experimental setting whether prayer has a pain relieving effect. Religious beliefs and practices are complex phenomena and the use of prayer may be mediated by general psychological factors known to be related to the pain experience, such as expectations, desire for pain relief, and anxiety. Twenty religious and twenty non-religious healthy volunteers were exposed to painful electrical stimulation during internal prayer to God, a secular contrast condition, and a pain-only control condition.

What if I Get Busted? Deception, Choice, and Decision-Making in Social Interaction.

Deception is an essentially social act, yet little is known about how social consequences affect the decision to deceive. In this study, participants played a computerized game of deception without constraints on whether or when to attempt to deceive their opponent. Participants were questioned by an opponent outside the scanner about their knowledge of the content of a display.

Dopaminergic stimulation enhances confidence and accuracy in seeing rapidly presented words.

Liberal acceptance, overconfidence, and increased activity of the neurotransmitter dopamine have been proposed to account for abnormal sensory experiences, for instance, hallucinations in schizophrenia. In normal subjects, increased sensory experience in Yoga Nidra meditation is linked to striatal dopamine release. We therefore hypothesize that the neurotransmitter dopamine may function as a regulator of subjective confidence of visual perception in the normal brain.

How do illusions constrain goal-directed movement: perceptual and visuomotor influences on speed/accuracy trade-off.

Recent research shows that visual processing influences the speed/accuracy trade-off people use when performing goal-directed movement. This raises the question of how this influence is produced in visual cognition. Visual influences on speed/accuracy trade-off could be produced in conscious visual perception, in non-conscious visuomotor transformation, or by some interaction of conscious perceptual and non-conscious visuomotor processes.