Sweet spot in music-Is predictability preferred among persons with psychotic-like experiences or autistic traits?

People prefer music with an intermediate level of predictability; not so predictable as to be boring, yet not so unpredictable that it ceases to be music. This sweet spot for predictability varies due to differences in the perception of predictability. The symptoms of both psychosis and Autism Spectrum Disorder have been attributed to overestimation of uncertainty, which predicts a preference for predictable stimuli and environments.

Seeing minds - a signal detection study of agency attribution along the autism-psychosis continuum.

Introduction: Diametrically aberrant mentalising biases, namely hypermentalising in psychosis and hypomentalising in autism, are postulated by some theoretical models. To test this hypothesis, we measured psychotic-like experiences, autistic traits and mentalising biases in a visual chasing paradigm.

Methods: Participants from the general population (= 300) and psychotic patients (=26) judged the absence or presence of a chase during five-second long displays of seemingly randomly moving dots.

Overestimation of volatility in schizophrenia and autism? A comparative study using a probabilistic reasoning task.

Background And Objectives: A plethora of studies has investigated and compared social cognition in autism and schizophrenia ever since both conditions were first described in conjunction more than a century ago. Recent computational theories have proposed similar mechanistic explanations for various symptoms beyond social cognition. They are grounded in the idea of a general misestimation of uncertainty but so far, almost no studies have directly compared both conditions regarding uncertainty processing.

Insufficient evidence for habituation in Mimosa pudica. Response to Gagliano et al. (2014).

Gagliano et al. (Oecologia 175(1):63-72, 2014) reported that Mimosa pudica habituates to repeated stimulation, as shown by a reduction in response, dishabituation, and stimulus specificity. I argue that Gagliano et al.

Do adjustments in search behavior depend on the precision of spatial memory?

Various forms of uncertainty are important for decision making. How aware are we of the precision of knowledge, and how accessible it is? In three experiments, an assessment of the precision of spatial memory was needed to make optimal decisions. First, we examined search strategies in a search task in which the most efficient strategy was to head to one side of the target by a margin depending on the precision of spatial information, the "where to start" task.