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Seeing a person preparing to perform an action and later remembering having seen subsequent phases of the action, but not previous phases. This is what a theory on the role of the motor system in the creation and recovery of memories predicts can happen. We investigate memory for action after viewing an image representing an actor acting on a series of everyday objects. The participants in one experiment viewed a series of still photos of unfolding actions on objects (e.g., blowing the nose), and 15 minutes later they were asked to complete a recognition task. At recognition, participants viewed photos representing temporally distant moments, backward or forward in time compared to the original, along with the same photos seen at encoding. Results showed that participants tended to accept forward photos more than backward photos. In a pilot study, we explored the role of the temporal distance between encoding and recognition. Results showed that when 3 days elapsed between the encoding and recognition phases, participants did not tend to accept forward photos more than backward photos.

AbstractPeer-tutoring (PT) is a widely studied learning strategy. No studies, to our knowledge, have examined the effects of PT on tutors’ metacognitive abilities, particularly in relation to implicit theories of intelligence. Study 1 aimed to determine the effects of PT on tutors’ theory and beliefs of intelligence and self-confidence in their own intelligence. Study 2 aimed to explore the efficacy of a metacognitive training administered to tutors on some metacognitive dimensions for both tutors and tutees. In Study 1, we compared tutors and no-tutors before and after PT; in Study 2 we compared tutors, who completed a brief metacognitive training, with a group of standard tutors, as well as their relative tutees. Participants were assigned to experimental conditions and assessed using various standardised questionnaires. Study 1 revealed a surprising negative effect: after PT, tutors tended to abandon the idea of intelligence as a modifiable construct and adopt a more dysfunctional theory of entity intelligence (Cohen’s d = .66). Study 2 also showed that the PT experience negatively affected tutors’ theory of intelligence (Cohen’s d = .94), but this held only for untrained tutors. We also found a positive indirect effect of the training on tutees’ attitudes towards maths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autonomous weapons are systems that, once activated, can identify, select and engage targets by themselves. Scharre (2018. Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War. New York: Norton) has given a definition of autonomy based on three dimensions: the automatized tasks, the relationship with the human user and the sophistication of the machine's decision-making process. Based on this definition of autonomy, this article provides an overview of systematic biases that may occur in each of these three dimensions. Before the deployment of autonomous systems in war it is important to know how various biases can affect the functioning of the machines and how these biases can be compensated for. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main assumption underlying the present investigation is that action observation elicits a mandatory mental simulation representing the action forward in time. In Experiment 1, participants observed pairs of photos portraying the initial and the final still frames of an action video; then they observed a photo depicting the very same action but either forward or backward in time. Their task was to tell whether the action in the photo portrayed something happened before or after the action seen at encoding. In this explicit task, the evaluation was faster for forward photos than for backward photos. Crucially, the effect was replicated when instructions asked only to evaluate at test whether the photo depicted a scene congruent with the action seen at encoding (implicit task from two still frames, Experiment 2), and when at encoding, they were presented a single still frame and evaluated at test whether a photo depicted a scene congruent with the action seen at encoding (implicit task from single still frame; Experiment 3). Overall, the results speak in favour of a mandatory mechanism through which our brain simulates the action also in tasks that do not explicitly require action simulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]