Research on the cognitive neural mechanism of privacy empowerment illusion cues regarding comprehensibility and interpretability for privacy disclosures.

In the era of artificial intelligence, privacy empowerment illusion has become a crucial means for digital enterprises and platforms to "manipulate" users and create an illusion of control. This topic has also become an urgent and pressing concern for current research. However, the existing studies are limited in terms of their perspectives and methodologies, making it challenging to fully explain why users express concerns about privacy empowerment illusion but repeatedly disclose their personal information. This study combines the associative-propositional evaluation model (APE) and cognitive load theory, using event-related potential (ERP) technology to investigate the underlying mechanisms of how the comprehensibility and interpretability of privacy empowerment illusion cues affect users' immediate attitudes and privacy disclosure behaviours; these mechanisms are mediated by psychological processing and cognitive load differences. Behavioural research results indicate that in the context of privacy empowerment illusion cues with low comprehensibility, users are more inclined to disclose their private information when faced with high interpretability than they are when faced with low interpretability. EEG results show that in the context of privacy empowerment illusion cues with low comprehensibility, high interpretability induces greater P2 amplitudes than does low interpretability; low interpretability induces greater N2 amplitudes than does high interpretability. This study extends the scopes of the APE model and cognitive load theory in the field of privacy research, providing new insights into privacy attitudes. Doing so offers a valuable framework through which digital enterprises can gain a deeper understanding of users' genuine privacy attitudes and immediate reactions under privacy empowerment illusion situations. This understanding can help increase user privacy protection and improve their overall online experience, making it highly relevant and beneficial.

How small changes to one eye's retinal image can transform the perceived shape of a very familiar object.

Vision can provide useful cues about the geometric properties of an object, like its size, distance, pose, and shape. But how the brain merges these properties into a complete sensory representation of a three-dimensional object is poorly understood. To address this gap, we investigated a visual illusion in which humans misperceive the shape of an object due to a small change in one eye's retinal image. We first show that this illusion affects percepts of a highly familiar object under completely natural viewing conditions. Specifically, people perceived their own rectangular mobile phone to have a trapezoidal shape. We then investigate the perceptual underpinnings of this illusion by asking people to report both the perceived shape and pose of controlled stimuli. Our results suggest that the shape illusion results from distorted cues to object pose. In addition to yielding insights into object perception, this work informs our understanding of how the brain combines information from multiple visual cues in natural settings. The shape illusion can occur when people wear everyday prescription spectacles; thus, these findings also provide insight into the cue combination challenges that some spectacle wearers experience on a regular basis.

Fluid face but not gender: Enfacement illusion through digital face filters does not affect gender identity.

It has been shown that observing a face being touched or moving in synchrony with our own face increases self-identification with the former which might alter both cognitive and affective processes. The induction of this phenomenon, termed enfacement illusion, has often relied on laboratory tools that are unavailable to a large audience. However, digital face filters applications are nowadays regularly used and might provide an interesting tool to study similar mechanisms in a wider population. Digital filters are able to render our faces in real time while changing important facial features, for example, rendering them more masculine or feminine according to normative standards. Recent literature using full-body illusions has shown that participants' own gender identity shifts when embodying a different gendered avatar. Here we studied whether participants' filtered faces, observed while moving in synchrony with their own face, may induce an enfacement illusion and if so, modulate their gender identity. We collected data from 35 female and 33 male participants who observed a stereotypically gender mismatched version of themselves either moving synchronously or asynchronously with their own face on a screen. Our findings showed a successful induction of the enfacement illusion in the synchronous condition according to a questionnaire addressing the feelings of ownership, agency and perceived similarity. However, we found no evidence of gender identity being modulated, neither in explicit nor in implicit measures of gender identification. We discuss the distinction between full-body and facial processing and the relevance of studying widely accessible devices that may impact the sense of a bodily self and our cognition, emotion and behaviour.

"It doesn't matter if you are in charge of the trees, you always miss the trees for the forest": Power and the illusion of explanatory depth.

Power can increase overconfidence and illusory thinking. We investigated whether power is also related to the illusion of explanatory depth (IOED), people's tendency to think they understand the world in more detail, coherence, and depth than they actually do. Abstract thinking was reported as a reason for the IOED, and according to the social distance theory of power, power increases abstract thinking. We linked these literatures and tested construal style as a mediator. Further, predispositions can moderate effects of power and we considered narcissism as a candidate because narcissism leads to overconfidence and may thus increase the IOED especially in combination with high power. In three preregistered studies (total N = 607), we manipulated power or measured feelings of power. We found evidence for the IOED (regarding explanatory knowledge about devices). Power led to general overconfidence but had only a small impact on the IOED. Power and narcissism had a small interactive effect on the IOED. Meta-analytical techniques suggest that previous findings on the construal-style-IOED link show only weak evidential value. Implications refer to research on management, power, and overconfidence.

Breaking presence in Immersive Virtual Reality toward behavioral and emotional engagement.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Many recent studies in virtual reality (VR) have managed the sense of Presence to assess the suitability of their designs, mainly when focused on learning goals that require high user engagement, such as in serious games for psychomotor training. However, the place and plausibility illusions needed to promote Presence are achieved by combining different VR-based design cues, and their individual contribution to preserving the Presence's engagement/involvement component is still unclear. This article explored the single effect of breaking the sense of Presence per VR factor, i.e., removing VR cues related to Social Presence (human interactions), Self-Presence (embodiment), and Physical Presence (Scenario realism). METHODS: Thirty-three participants were asked to play an immersive VR simulation of an arcade game three times by experiencing a stepped Break of Illusion in one of the VR factors, i.e., while two factors were kept high, the remaining one was reduced to a low and null (hypothetical) level. The game difficulty was fixed after assessing each person's skills. RESULTS: Results showed that psychophysiology indicators (heart rate and skin conductance) were not affected by the level of illusion, whereas exercise intensity was significantly higher with low body and social presence-based conditions. Moreover, skin conductance was lower in the Social-presence group, which suggests that perspiration is only affected by breaks in realism (scenario and body representations). Based on the obtained evidence, we proposed some guidelines for adapting the design of immersive virtual environments through Breaks in Presence, mainly by changing the realism of the scenario and body representation depending on the skin conductance or the interaction with virtual humans depending on exercise intensity.

Stations Along the Via Dolorosa Towards Good-Enough Endings.

This article focuses on the prevailing aspiration to reach a "good-enough ending" in analysis, a concept that is partly realistic and partly illusional. I discuss some of the obstacles that interfere with achieving this yearned for goal, and lead to endings that are far from the misleading illusion of the good-enough termination, that many of us believe we have achieved and are many more than it is commonly reported. I describe characteristics, obstacles, blockages, dreads within the analysand, within the analyst and in the space in between, which lead to endings which are far from good enough, by any criteria we might choose. These obstacles include the failure to distinguish between "real" versus "similar to"; emotional excess; emptying out of internal resources and toxemia of therapy/analysis; a fascination with certain levels of mind versus a neglect of others; osmotic pressure for oneness and the terror of perfection; and malignant nostalgia. Reflecting on such complex facets in the analytic process is relevant not only for a deeper understanding of illusions that we and our analysands hold with regard to endings, but also, implicitly, to the understanding of illusions, beliefs, and myths we and our patients have regarding beginnings.

Reduced influence of perceptual context in mild traumatic brain injury is not an illusion.

Perceptual grouping is impaired following mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). This may affect visual size perception, a process influenced by perceptual grouping abilities. We conducted two experiments to evaluate visual size perception in people with self-reported history of mTBI, using two different size-contrast illusions: the Ebbinghaus Illusion (Experiment 1) and the Müller-Lyer illusion (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, individuals with mTBI and healthy controls were asked to compare the size of two target circles that were either the same size or different sizes. The target circles appeared by themselves (no-context condition), or were surrounded by smaller or larger circles (context condition). Similar levels of accuracy were evident between the groups in the no-context condition. However, size judgements by mTBI participants were more accurate in the context condition, suggesting that they processed the target circles separately from the surrounding circles. In Experiment 2, individuals with mTBI and healthy controls judged the length of parallel lines that appeared with arrowheads (context condition) or without arrowheads (no context condition). Consistent with Experiment 1, size judgements by mTBI participants were more accurate than size judgements by control participants in the context condition. These findings suggest that mTBI influences size perception by impairing perceptual grouping of visual stimuli in near proximity.

Perceptual uncertainty explains activation differences between audiovisual congruent speech and McGurk stimuli.

Face-to-face communication relies on the integration of acoustic speech signals with the corresponding facial articulations. In the McGurk illusion, an auditory /ba/ phoneme presented simultaneously with a facial articulation of a /ga/ (i.e., viseme), is typically fused into an illusory 'da' percept. Despite its widespread use as an index of audiovisual speech integration, critics argue that it arises from perceptual processes that differ categorically from natural speech recognition. Conversely, Bayesian theoretical frameworks suggest that both the illusory McGurk and the veridical audiovisual congruent speech percepts result from probabilistic inference based on noisy sensory signals. According to these models, the inter-sensory conflict in McGurk stimuli may only increase observers' perceptual uncertainty. This functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study presented participants (20 male and 24 female) with audiovisual congruent, McGurk (i.e., auditory /ba/ + visual /ga/), and incongruent (i.e., auditory /ga/ + visual /ba/) stimuli along with their unisensory counterparts in a syllable categorization task. Behaviorally, observers' response entropy was greater for McGurk compared to congruent audiovisual stimuli. At the neural level, McGurk stimuli increased activations in a widespread neural system, extending from the inferior frontal sulci (IFS) to the pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA) and insulae, typically involved in cognitive control processes. Crucially, in line with Bayesian theories these activation increases were fully accounted for by observers' perceptual uncertainty as measured by their response entropy. Our findings suggest that McGurk and congruent speech processing rely on shared neural mechanisms, thereby supporting the McGurk illusion as a valid measure of natural audiovisual speech perception.

The overlooked role of unisensory precision in multisensory research.

Zhu et al. present an alternative explanation for the weaker multisensory illusions in football goalkeepers compared with outfielders and non-athletes, showing that better unisensory precision in goalkeepers can also account for this effect.

Disambiguating vision with sound.

An important task for the visual system is to identify and segregate objects from background. Figure-ground illusions, such as Edgar Rubin's bistable 'vase-faces illusion'1, make the point clearly: we see either a central vase or lateral faces, alternating spontaneously, but never both images simultaneously. The border is perceptually assigned to either faces or vase, which become figure, the other shapeless background2. The stochastic alternation between figure and ground probably reflects mutual inhibitory processes that ensure a single perceptual outcome3. Which shape dominates perception depends on many factors, such as size, symmetry, convexity, enclosure, and so on, as well as attention and intention4. Here we show that the assignment of the visual border can be strongly influenced by auditory input, far more than is possible by voluntary intention. VIDEO ABSTRACT.

Changes in spatial self-consciousness elicit grid cell-like representation in the entorhinal cortex.

Grid cells in the entorhinal cortex (EC) encode an individual's location in space, integrating both environmental and multisensory bodily cues. Notably, body-derived signals are also primary signals for the sense of self. While studies have demonstrated that continuous application of visuo-tactile bodily stimuli can induce perceptual shifts in self-location, it remains unexplored whether these illusory changes suffice to trigger grid cell-like representation (GCLR) within the EC, and how this compares to GCLR during conventional virtual navigation. To address this, we systematically induced illusory drifts in self-location toward controlled directions using visuo-tactile bodily stimulation, while maintaining the subjects' visual viewpoint fixed (absent conventional virtual navigation). Subsequently, we evaluated the corresponding GCLR in the EC through functional MRI analysis. Our results reveal that illusory changes in perceived self-location (independent of changes in environmental navigation cues) can indeed evoke entorhinal GCLR, correlating in strength with the magnitude of perceived self-location, and characterized by similar grid orientation as during conventional virtual navigation in the same virtual room. These data demonstrate that the same grid-like representation is recruited when navigating based on environmental, mainly visual cues, or when experiencing illusory forward drifts in self-location, driven by perceptual multisensory bodily cues.

Artificial intelligence and illusions of understanding in scientific research.

Scientists are enthusiastically imagining ways in which artificial intelligence (AI) tools might improve research. Why are AI tools so attractive and what are the risks of implementing them across the research pipeline? Here we develop a taxonomy of scientists' visions for AI, observing that their appeal comes from promises to improve productivity and objectivity by overcoming human shortcomings. But proposed AI solutions can also exploit our cognitive limitations, making us vulnerable to illusions of understanding in which we believe we understand more about the world than we actually do. Such illusions obscure the scientific community's ability to see the formation of scientific monocultures, in which some types of methods, questions and viewpoints come to dominate alternative approaches, making science less innovative and more vulnerable to errors. The proliferation of AI tools in science risks introducing a phase of scientific enquiry in which we produce more but understand less. By analysing the appeal of these tools, we provide a framework for advancing discussions of responsible knowledge production in the age of AI.

The effect of measurement error on the positive predictive value of PSW methods for SLD identification: How buffer zones dispel the illusion of inaccuracy.

Patterns of Strengths and Weaknesses (PSW) methods are widely used for identifying specific learning disabilities (SLDs). Several researchers, however, have reported that the diagnostic accuracy of PSW methods is unacceptably low when strict thresholds were used to identify students with SLDs. We believe these findings give a misleading impression of the magnitude of the diagnostic errors that are likely to arise in PSW assessments. In a simulation study of 10 million cases using a simplified PSW method for demonstration, most of what have been called diagnostic errors were cases in which observed scores and true scores fell on opposite sides of a strict threshold but were still within a buffer zone the size of a typical measurement error. Because small score differences do not result in meaningfully different case conceptualizations, the use of buffer zones reveals that previous estimates of the diagnostic accuracy of PSW methods are misleadingly low. We also demonstrate that diagnostic decisions become increasingly reliable when observed scores are comfortably distant from diagnostic thresholds. For practitioners, we present a flowchart and practical guidelines to improve the accuracy and stability of SLD identification decisions.

Acute right opercular stroke-associated polyopic heautoscopy and hallucinations caused by disconnection to the inferior parietal lobule through the superior longitudinal fasciculus III: A single case study.

Illusory neuropsychiatric symptoms such as hallucinations or the feeling of a presence (FOP) can occur in diffuse brain lesion or dysfunction, in psychiatric diseases as well as in healthy individuals. Their occurrence due to focal brain lesions is rare, most probably due to underreporting, which limits progress in understanding their underlying mechanisms and anatomical determinants. In this single case study, an 86-year-old patient experienced, in the context of an acute right central opercular ischemic stroke, visual hallucinatory symptoms (including palinopsia), differently lateralized auditory hallucinations and FOP. This unusual clinical constellation could be precisely documented and illustrated while still present, allowing a realistic and immersive visual experience validated by the patient. The acute stroke appeared to be their most plausible cause (after exclusion of other etiologies). Furthermore, accurate analysis of tractographic data suggested that disruption in the posterior bundle of the superior longitudinal fasciculus connecting the stroke lesion to the inferior parietal lobule was the anatomical substrate explaining the FOP and, indirectly, also hallucinations through whiter matter involvement, in coherence with existing literature. We could finally elaborate on symptoms taxonomy and phenomenology (e.g., polyopic heautoscopy, hallucinatory FOP, etc), and on patient's remarkable distancing from them (with some therapeutic implications supported by plausibly engaged mechanisms). This case not only authentically enriched the description of such rare combination of heterogenous illusory symptoms through this novel visualization-based reporting approach, but disclosed an unrevealed anatomo-clinical link relating all of them to the acute stroke lesion through an association fiber, thereby contributing to the understanding of these intriguing symptoms and their determinants.

Understanding and treating body image disturbances in eating disorders through body illusion interventions: a scoping review protocol.

BACKGROUND: We plan a scoping review aimed to synthesize what is known about the use of sensory-driven body illusion (BI) interventions for understanding and treating body image disturbance (BID) in people diagnosed with clinical eating disorders (EDs) and people with subclinical ED symptomatology. Our study will provide an outline of the current literature, identify gaps within the literature, and suggest novel directions for future research. METHODS/DESIGN: The scoping review process will be guided by the methodological framework of Arksey and O'Malley, subsequent recommendations by Levac et al., and the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analysis Protocols Extension for Scoping Reviews guidelines. The following electronic databases will be systematically searched: MEDLINE (via PubMed), Web of Science, PsycINFO, and Scopus. Furthermore, to identify additional studies, we will use a search engine such as Google Scholar, and for grey literature, we will include Proquest for Dissertations and Theses. A search strategy has been identified and agreed upon by the research team in conjunction with a research librarian. Two researchers will screen the titles and abstracts independently and then assess the full text of the selected citations for the inclusion criteria. A third reviewer will be involved in cases of disagreement. Data will be extracted, collated, and charted to summarize all the relevant methods, outcomes, and key findings in the articles. DISCUSSION: A better understanding of this topic will aid in the development and refinement of current treatments aimed at treating BID in people with EDs. Implications and recommendations for research, policy, and practice in the context of the ED community will be discussed. SYSTEMATIC REVIEW REGISTRATION: https://osf.io/3bcm6/?view_only=83b2e8a2445d4266909992e3dfb51929.

Cortical depth profiles in primary visual cortex for illusory and imaginary experiences.

Visual illusions and mental imagery are non-physical sensory experiences that involve cortical feedback processing in the primary visual cortex. Using laminar functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in two studies, we investigate if information about these internal experiences is visible in the activation patterns of different layers of primary visual cortex (V1). We find that imagery content is decodable mainly from deep layers of V1, whereas seemingly 'real' illusory content is decodable mainly from superficial layers. Furthermore, illusory content shares information with perceptual content, whilst imagery content does not generalise to illusory or perceptual information. Together, our results suggest that illusions and imagery, which differ immensely in their subjective experiences, also involve partially distinct early visual microcircuits. However, overlapping microcircuit recruitment might emerge based on the nuanced nature of subjective conscious experience.

Ecological dependencies and the illusion of cooperation in microbial communities.

Ecological dependencies - where organisms rely on other organisms for survival - are a ubiquitous feature of life on earth. Multicellular hosts rely on symbionts to provide essential vitamins and amino acids. Legume plants similarly rely on nitrogen-fixing rhizobia to convert atmospheric nitrogen to ammonia. In some cases, dependencies can arise via loss-of-function mutations that allow one partner to benefit from the actions of another. It is common in microbiology to label ecological dependencies between species as cooperation - making it necessary to invoke cooperation-specific frameworks to explain the phenomenon. However, in many cases, such traits are not (at least initially) cooperative, because they are not selected for because of the benefits they confer on a partner species. In contrast, dependencies in microbial communities may originate from fitness benefits gained from genomic-streamlining (i.e. Black Queen Dynamics). Here, we outline how the Black Queen Hypothesis predicts the formation of metabolic dependencies via loss-of-function mutations in microbial communities, without needing to invoke any cooperation-specific explanations. Furthermore we outline how the Black Queen Hypothesis can act as a blueprint for true cooperation as well as discuss key outstanding questions in the field. The nature of interactions in microbial communities can predict the ability of natural communities to withstand and recover from disturbances. Hence, it is vital to gain a deeper understanding of the factors driving these dynamic interactions over evolutionary time.