Can one be fooled into believing that one intended an action that one in fact did not intend? Past experimental paradigms have demonstrated that participants, when provided with false perceptual feedback about their actions, can be fooled into misperceiving the nature of their intended motor act. However, because veridical proprioceptive/perceptual feedback limits the extent to which participants can be fooled, few studies have been able to answer our question and induce the illusion to intend. In a novel paradigm addressing this (...) question, participants were instructed to move a line on the computer screen by use of a phony brain–computer interface. Line movements were actually controlled by computer program. Demonstrating the illusion to intend, participants reported more intentions to move the line when it moved frequently than when it moved infrequently. Consistent with ideomotor theory, the finding illuminates the intimate liaisons among ideomotor processing, the sense of agency, and action production. (shrink)

Kants Musikästhetik wird weithin unterschätzt. Dabei bietet sie die entscheidenden Ansätze zur Befreiung der Musik aus den Fängen der Nachahmungsästhetik, wie sie vor allem E.T.A.Hoffman kongenial umgesetzt hat.

Previous research has focused on the relation between social class and prosocial behavior. However, this relation is yet unclear. In this work, we shed light on this issue by considering the effect of the level of empathy and the social class of the recipient of help on two types of prosociality, namely helping and caring. In one experimental study, we found that for high-class participants, empathy had a positive effect on helping, regardless of the recipient’s social class. However, empathy had (...) no effect for low-class participants. When it comes to caring, empathy had a positive effect for both high and low-class participants, but only when the recipient of help belonged to the same social class. This highlights that empathy by itself is not sufficient to promote cooperative relations and that the social class of the recipient of help should be taken into account to shed light on this issue. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reading As Poets Read: Following Mark StrandCharles BergerFor close to a decade now, in the third or fourth phase of his career, Mark Strand has been giving us poem after poem marked by his familiar voice—luminous, deceptively casual, witty, allusive—as he builds up a body of work that thinks and sings ever more deeply about the poet’s unavoidable life of allegory. This growing summa of poetic knowledge and readerly (...) pleasure demands, as the best lyric poetry always does, that readers give themselves over to the rigorous joys of figurative reading, figurative argument. You stare and stare at the poem until something flashes—linkages, interpretive genealogies, a conjunction of words that opens up arguments. Wittgenstein asked: “How can that which we understand in a flash, be put to a use?” Literary criticism, I think, provides an answer.Reading a poet like Strand shouldn’t send you running to the library for secondary source material; instead, you let your memory for poetry run. This assumes that you indeed possess a memory for poetry. Nowadays—enter the polemics—poems are not considered to be sufficient contexts for critical discourse. They need to be supplemented, bolstered, by “wider” cultural texts. The remarkable poetry being written around us counts for very little in the precincts of academic debate, even though so much of this poetry speaks directly to issues of great polemical importance. And it should go without saying that the deep pleasures of tracking poetic language, wherever you will let it take you, wherever you will take it, goes untasted. The poems Mark Strand has recently been writing show him, I think, at the height of his [End Page 177] power, as he thinks through the question of his place in poetry, the place of poetry in his life and ours, and the strange institution of poetry: so gripping in its hold on those who practice it as readers and writers, so hard to locate among the public monuments. The cultural critics don’t seem to understand how one is chosen by poetry, and how the kind of poetry you choose to read, to write, to teach, to remember, constitutes a deep part of your public and private being.At the same time, we should never espouse a defense of reading that limits us to the “poem-in-itself,” as if poems were not already layered, as if it were so easy to distinguish between imagination and interpretation. Poems have memories, as Rosanna Warren demonstrated so powerfully in her discussion of the formal genealogy of Auden’s Freud elegy. A poet like Mark Strand displays a ghostlier kind of memory that signals to us a little less overtly, but no less hauntingly. This is never more apparent than in the three new poems of his that I will now discuss: “Our Masterpiece is the Private Life,” “The Next Time,” and, briefly, “Great Dog Poem No. 2.” Since these poems have yet to be published in a volume, I need to quote them in their entirety.Our Masterpiece is the Private LifeIIs there something down by the water keeping itself from us, Some shy event, some secret of the light that falls upon the deep, Some source of sorrow that does not wish to be discovered yet? Our happiness says we should not care, that desire Could cast its rainbow over the coarse porcelain of the world’s skin And with its measures fill the air. Why look for more? Why not in the brightness of this weather allow ourselves to be Astonished by the music and the privilege of our passing?IIAnd now, my love, while the advocates of awfulness and sorrow [End Page 178] Push their dripping barge up and down the beach, let’s eat Our brill, and sip this beautiful white Beaune. True, the light is artificial, and we are not well-dressed. So what. We like it here. We like the bullocks in the field next door, We like the sound of wind passing over grass. The way you speak, In that low voice, our late night disclosures... why live For anything else? Our masterpiece is the private life.IIIStanding on... (shrink)

The etiology of Tauopathies, a diverse class of neurodegenerative diseases associated with the Microtubule Associated Protein (MAP) Tau, is usually described by a common mechanism in which Tau dysfunction results in the loss of axonal microtubule stability. Here, we reexamine and build upon the canonical disease model to encompass other Tau functions. In addition to regulating microtubule dynamics, Tau acts as a modulator of motor proteins, a signaling hub, and a scaffolding protein. This diverse array of functions is related to (...) the dynamic nature of Tau isoform expression, post‐translational modification (PTM), and conformational flexibility. Thus, there is no single mechanism that can describe Tau dysfunction. The effects of specific pathogenic mutations or aberrant PTMs need to be examined on all of the various functions of Tau in order to understand the unique etiology of each disease state. (shrink)