Smartphone Time Machine: Tech-Supported Improvements in Time Perspective and Wellbeing Measures.

Individuals with a balanced time perspective, which includes good thoughts about the past, awareness of present constraints and adaptive planning for a positive future, are more likely to report optimal wellbeing. However, people who have had traumas such as adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are likely to have less balanced time perspectives and lower overall wellbeing when compared to those with fewer or no ACEs. Time perspective can be improved via time-travel narratives that support people in feeling connected to a wise and loving future version of themselves, an approach that has until now only been provided in counseling contexts. Our team used an iterative inclusive design process to shape a scalable time-travel narrative tool - a responsive and progressive web application called Time Machine. Among other functionalities, Time Machine allowed people to record and listen to messages as if they were from and to their past and future selves. Using pre-planned as well as post-hoc analyses, we analyzed quantitative and qualitative data from 96 paid design partners (participants) who were taken through a 26-day pilot study of the technology. Among other effects, the results revealed: (1) high engagement throughout the design process, (2) improvements in self-reported time perspective and overall wellbeing scores that were greater for those using Time Machine during an optional-use period, (3) twice as much improvement in overall wellbeing scores for design partners with high ACEs (16%) versus low ACEs (8%), and (4) feelings of unconditional love apparently mediating the relationship between scores on time perspective and overall wellbeing measures. We discuss the limitations of these results as well as implications for the future role of spiritually informed scalable time-travel narrative technologies in healthcare and wellness.

Exceptional experiences reported by scientists and engineers.

CONTEXT: Throughout history people have reported exceptional experiences that appear to transcend the everyday boundaries of space and time, such as perceiving someone's thoughts from a distance. Because such experiences are associated with superstition, and some violate currently accepted materialist conventions, one might assume that scientists and engineers would be much less likely to report instances of these experiences than the general population. OBJECTIVES: To evaluate 1) the prevalence of exceptional human experiences (EHEs), 2) the level of paranormal belief, 3) the relationship between them, and 4) potential predictors of EHEs in three groups. PARTICIPANTS: Potential volunteers were randomly selected to receive invitations for an anonymous survey. MAIN MEASURES: Data were collected on 25 different types of EHEs, demographics, religious or spiritual affiliations, paranormal beliefs, mental health, and personality traits. Group differences were analyzed with chi-square tests and analysis of variance, and predictors were evaluated with a general linear model. RESULTS: 94.0% of the general population (n = 283), 93.2% of scientists and engineers (n = 175), and 99.3% of enthusiasts (n = 441) endorsed at least one EHE (X2(2) = 21.1, p < 0.0005). Paranormal belief was highest in EHE enthusiasts, followed by scientists and the general population (F(2,769) = 116.2, p < 0.0005). Belief was positively correlated with experience (r = 0.61, p < 0.0005). An exploratory general linear model showed that variables such as mental health, personality, impact and family history predict the endorsement and frequency of EHEs. This study indicates that EHEs occur frequently in both the general population and in scientists and engineers.

Losses and External Outcomes Interact to Produce the Gambler's Fallacy.

When making serial predictions in a binary decision task, there is a clear tendency to assume that after a series of the same external outcome (e.g., heads in a coin flip), the next outcome will be the opposing one (e.g., tails), even when the outcomes are independent of one another. This so-called "gambler's fallacy" has been replicated robustly. However, what drives gambler's fallacy behavior is unclear. Here we demonstrate that a run of the same external outcome by itself does not lead to gambler's fallacy behavior. However, when a run of external outcomes is accompanied by a concurrent run of failed guesses, gambler's fallacy behavior is predominant. These results do not depend on how participants' attention is directed. Thus, it appears that gambler's fallacy behavior is driven by a combination of an external series of events and a concurrent series of failure experiences.

An Association between Auditory-Visual Synchrony Processing and Reading Comprehension: Behavioral and Electrophysiological Evidence.

The perceptual system integrates synchronized auditory-visual signals in part to promote individuation of objects in cluttered environments. The processing of auditory-visual synchrony may more generally contribute to cognition by synchronizing internally generated multimodal signals. Reading is a prime example because the ability to synchronize internal phonological and/or lexical processing with visual orthographic processing may facilitate encoding of words and meanings. Consistent with this possibility, developmental and clinical research has suggested a link between reading performance and the ability to compare visual spatial/temporal patterns with auditory temporal patterns. Here, we provide converging behavioral and electrophysiological evidence suggesting that greater behavioral ability to judge auditory-visual synchrony (Experiment 1) and greater sensitivity of an electrophysiological marker of auditory-visual synchrony processing (Experiment 2) both predict superior reading comprehension performance, accounting for 16% and 25% of the variance, respectively. These results support the idea that the mechanisms that detect auditory-visual synchrony contribute to reading comprehension.

Predicting the unpredictable: critical analysis and practical implications of predictive anticipatory activity.

A recent meta-analysis of experiments from seven independent laboratories (n = 26) indicates that the human body can apparently detect randomly delivered stimuli occurring 1-10 s in the future (Mossbridge etal., 2012). The key observation in these studies is that human physiology appears to be able to distinguish between unpredictable dichotomous future stimuli, such as emotional vs. neutral images or sound vs. silence. This phenomenon has been called presentiment (as in "feeling the future"). In this paper we call it predictive anticipatory activity (PAA). The phenomenon is "predictive" because it can distinguish between upcoming stimuli; it is "anticipatory" because the physiological changes occur before a future event; and it is an "activity" because it involves changes in the cardiopulmonary, skin, and/or nervous systems. PAA is an unconscious phenomenon that seems to be a time-reversed reflection of the usual physiological response to a stimulus. It appears to resemble precognition (consciously knowing something is going to happen before it does), but PAA specifically refers to unconscious physiological reactions as opposed to conscious premonitions. Though it is possible that PAA underlies the conscious experience of precognition, experiments testing this idea have not produced clear results. The first part of this paper reviews the evidence for PAA and examines the two most difficult challenges for obtaining valid evidence for it: expectation bias and multiple analyses. The second part speculates on possible mechanisms and the theoretical implications of PAA for understanding physiology and consciousness. The third part examines potential practical applications.

Seeing the song: left auditory structures may track auditory-visual dynamic alignment.

Auditory and visual signals generated by a single source tend to be temporally correlated, such as the synchronous sounds of footsteps and the limb movements of a walker. Continuous tracking and comparison of the dynamics of auditory-visual streams is thus useful for the perceptual binding of information arising from a common source. Although language-related mechanisms have been implicated in the tracking of speech-related auditory-visual signals (e.g., speech sounds and lip movements), it is not well known what sensory mechanisms generally track ongoing auditory-visual synchrony for non-speech signals in a complex auditory-visual environment. To begin to address this question, we used music and visual displays that varied in the dynamics of multiple features (e.g., auditory loudness and pitch; visual luminance, color, size, motion, and organization) across multiple time scales. Auditory activity (monitored using auditory steady-state responses, ASSR) was selectively reduced in the left hemisphere when the music and dynamic visual displays were temporally misaligned. Importantly, ASSR was not affected when attentional engagement with the music was reduced, or when visual displays presented dynamics clearly dissimilar to the music. These results appear to suggest that left-lateralized auditory mechanisms are sensitive to auditory-visual temporal alignment, but perhaps only when the dynamics of auditory and visual streams are similar. These mechanisms may contribute to correct auditory-visual binding in a busy sensory environment.

Neural activity tied to reading predicts individual differences in extended-text comprehension.

Reading comprehension depends on neural processes supporting the access, understanding, and storage of words over time. Examinations of the neural activity correlated with reading have contributed to our understanding of reading comprehension, especially for the comprehension of sentences and short passages. However, the neural activity associated with comprehending an extended text is not well-understood. Here we describe a current-source-density (CSD) index that predicts individual differences in the comprehension of an extended text. The index is the difference in CSD-transformed event-related potentials (ERPs) to a target word between two conditions: a comprehension condition with words from a story presented in their original order, and a scrambled condition with the same words presented in a randomized order. In both conditions participants responded to the target word, and in the comprehension condition they also tried to follow the story in preparation for a comprehension test. We reasoned that the spatiotemporal pattern of difference-CSDs would reflect comprehension-related processes beyond word-level processing. We used a pattern-classification method to identify the component of the difference-CSDs that accurately (88%) discriminated good from poor comprehenders. The critical CSD index was focused at a frontal-midline scalp site, occurred 400-500 ms after target-word onset, and was strongly correlated with comprehension performance. Behavioral data indicated that group differences in effort or motor preparation could not explain these results. Further, our CSD index appears to be distinct from the well-known P300 and N400 components, and CSD transformation seems to be crucial for distinguishing good from poor comprehenders using our experimental paradigm. Once our CSD index is fully characterized, this neural signature of individual differences in extended-text comprehension may aid the diagnosis and remediation of reading comprehension deficits.

Rapid volitional control of apparent motion during percept generation.

How rapidly can one voluntarily influence percept generation? The time course of voluntary visual-spatial attention is well studied, but the time course of intentional control over percept generation is relatively unknown. We investigated the latter question using "one-shot" apparent motion. When a vertical or horizontal pair of squares is replaced by its 90º-rotated version, the bottom-up signal is ambiguous. From this ambiguous signal, it is known that people can intentionally generate a percept of rotation in a desired direction (clockwise or counterclockwise). To determine the time course of this intentional control, we instructed participants to voluntarily induce rotation in a precued direction (clockwise rotation when a high-pitched tone was heard, and counterclockwise rotation when a low-pitched tone was heard), and then to report the direction of rotation that was actually perceived. We varied the delay between the instructional cue and the rotated frame (cue-lead time) from 0 to 1,067 ms. Intentional control became more effective with longer cue-lead times (asymptotically effective at 533 ms). Notably, intentional control was reliable even with a zero cue-lead time; control experiments ruled out response bias and the development of an auditory-visual association as explanations. This demonstrates that people can interpret an auditory cue and intentionally generate a desired motion percept surprisingly rapidly, entirely within the subjectively instantaneous moment in which the visual system constructs a percept of apparent motion.

Predictive physiological anticipation preceding seemingly unpredictable stimuli: a meta-analysis.

This meta-analysis of 26 reports published between 1978 and 2010 tests an unusual hypothesis: for stimuli of two or more types that are presented in an order designed to be unpredictable and that produce different post-stimulus physiological activity, the direction of pre-stimulus physiological activity reflects the direction of post-stimulus physiological activity, resulting in an unexplained anticipatory effect. The reports we examined used one of two paradigms: (1) randomly ordered presentations of arousing vs. neutral stimuli, or (2) guessing tasks with feedback (correct vs. incorrect). Dependent variables included: electrodermal activity, heart rate, blood volume, pupil dilation, electroencephalographic activity, and blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) activity. To avoid including data hand-picked from multiple different analyses, no post hoc experiments were considered. The results reveal a significant overall effect with a small effect size [fixed effect: overall ES = 0.21, 95% CI = 0.15-0.27, z = 6.9, p < 2.7 × 10(-12); random effects: overall (weighted) ES = 0.21, 95% CI = 0.13-0.29, z = 5.3, p < 5.7 × 10(-8)]. Higher quality experiments produced a quantitatively larger effect size and a greater level of significance than lower quality studies. The number of contrary unpublished reports that would be necessary to reduce the level of significance to chance (p > 0.05) was conservatively calculated to be 87 reports. We explore alternative explanations and examine the potential linkage between this unexplained anticipatory activity and other results demonstrating meaningful pre-stimulus activity preceding behaviorally relevant events. We conclude that to further examine this currently unexplained anticipatory activity, multiple replications arising from different laboratories using the same methods are necessary. The cause of this anticipatory activity, which undoubtedly lies within the realm of natural physical processes (as opposed to supernatural or paranormal ones), remains to be determined.

Interactive coding of visual spatial frequency and auditory amplitude-modulation rate.

Spatial frequency is a fundamental visual feature coded in primary visual cortex, relevant for perceiving textures, objects, hierarchical structures, and scenes, as well as for directing attention and eye movements. Temporal amplitude-modulation (AM) rate is a fundamental auditory feature coded in primary auditory cortex, relevant for perceiving auditory objects, scenes, and speech. Spatial frequency and temporal AM rate are thus fundamental building blocks of visual and auditory perception. Recent results suggest that crossmodal interactions are commonplace across the primary sensory cortices and that some of the underlying neural associations develop through consistent multisensory experience such as audio-visually perceiving speech, gender, and objects. We demonstrate that people consistently and absolutely (rather than relatively) match specific auditory AM rates to specific visual spatial frequencies. We further demonstrate that this crossmodal mapping allows amplitude-modulated sounds to guide attention to and modulate awareness of specific visual spatial frequencies. Additional results show that the crossmodal association is approximately linear, based on physical spatial frequency, and generalizes to tactile pulses, suggesting that the association develops through multisensory experience during manual exploration of surfaces.

Changes in auditory frequency guide visual-spatial attention.

How do the characteristics of sounds influence the allocation of visual-spatial attention? Natural sounds typically change in frequency. Here we demonstrate that the direction of frequency change guides visual-spatial attention more strongly than the average or ending frequency, and provide evidence suggesting that this cross-modal effect may be mediated by perceptual experience. We used a Go/No-Go color-matching task to avoid response compatibility confounds. Participants performed the task either with their heads upright or tilted by 90°, misaligning the head-centered and environmental axes. The first of two colored circles was presented at fixation and the second was presented in one of four surrounding positions in a cardinal or diagonal direction. Either an ascending or descending auditory-frequency sweep was presented coincident with the first circle. Participants were instructed to respond to the color match between the two circles and to ignore the uninformative sounds. Ascending frequency sweeps facilitated performance (response time and/or sensitivity) when the second circle was presented at the cardinal top position and descending sweeps facilitated performance when the second circle was presented at the cardinal bottom position; there were no effects of the average or ending frequency. The sweeps had no effects when circles were presented at diagonal locations, and head tilt entirely eliminated the effect. Thus, visual-spatial cueing by pitch change is narrowly tuned to vertical directions and dominates any effect of average or ending frequency. Because this cross-modal cueing is dependent on the alignment of head-centered and environmental axes, it may develop through associative learning during waking upright experience.

Learning and generalization on asynchrony and order tasks at sound offset: implications for underlying neural circuitry.

Normal auditory perception relies on accurate judgments about the temporal relationships between sounds. Previously, we used a perceptual-learning paradigm to investigate the neural substrates of two such relative-timing judgments made at sound onset: detecting stimulus asynchrony and discriminating stimulus order. Here, we conducted parallel experiments at sound offset. Human adults practiced approximately 1 h/d for 6-8 d on either asynchrony detection or order discrimination at sound offset with tones at 0.25 and 4.0 kHz. As at sound onset, learning on order-offset discrimination did not generalize to the other task (asynchrony), an untrained temporal position (onset), or untrained frequency pairs, indicating that this training affected a quite specialized neural circuit. In contrast, learning on asynchrony-offset detection generalized to the other task (order) and temporal position (onset), though not to untrained frequency pairs, implying that the training on this condition influenced a less specialized, or more interdependent, circuit. Finally, the learning patterns induced by single-session exposure to asynchrony and order tasks differed depending on whether these tasks were performed primarily at sound onset or offset, suggesting that this exposure modified circuitry specialized to separately process relative-timing tasks at these two temporal positions. Overall, it appears that the neural processes underlying relative-timing judgments are malleable, and that the nature of the affected circuitry depends on the duration of exposure (multihour or single-session) and the parameters of the judgment(s) made during that exposure.

Perceptual-learning evidence for separate processing of asynchrony and order tasks.

Normal perception depends, in part, on accurate judgments of the temporal relationships between sensory events. Two such relative-timing skills are the ability to detect stimulus asynchrony and to discriminate stimulus order. Here we investigated the neural processes contributing to the performance of auditory asynchrony and order tasks in humans, using a perceptual-learning paradigm. In each of two parallel experiments, we tested listeners on a pretest and a posttest consisting of auditory relative-timing conditions. Between these two tests, we trained a subset of listeners approximately 1 h/d for 6-8 d on a single relative-timing condition. The trained listeners practiced asynchrony detection in one experiment and order discrimination in the other. Both groups were trained at sound onset with tones at 0.25 and 4.0 kHz. The remaining listeners in each experiment, who served as controls, did not receive multihour training during the 8-10 d between the pretest and posttest. These controls improved even without intervening training, adding to evidence that a single session of exposure to perceptual tasks can yield learning. Most importantly, each of the two groups of trained listeners learned more on their respective trained conditions than controls, but this learning occurred only on the two trained conditions. Neither group of trained listeners generalized their learning to the other task (order or asynchrony), an untrained temporal position (sound offset), or untrained frequency pairs. Thus, it appears that multihour training on relative-timing skills affects task-specific neural circuits that are tuned to a given temporal position and combination of stimulus components.