Mental action and emotion – What happens in the mind when the stimulus changes but not the perceptual intention

Wearing face masks impairs dyadic micro-activities in nonverbal social encounter: A mixed-methods first-person study on the sense of I and Thou

The COVID-19 pandemic has manifold negative consequences for people around the world, of which the psychosocial ones have been rather underrepresented in the public eye. Regarding social distancing measures, there is already some experimental work demonstrating that the use of face masks has detrimental effects on various aspects of social cognition such as emotion reading, face identification, and perceived closeness of persons. However, while these findings provide important clues, they do not shed light on what people experience when interacting in real life in a masked society. Therefore, in critical distance to cognitivist accounts and taking Direct Social Perception (DSP) approaches seriously, we developed a first-person experimental design and conducted a study with thirty-four participants in a dyadic setting with two conditions (without vs. with face mask). Data were analyzed with mixed methods including in-depth qualitative coding at three levels, code relations analyses, and various statistical tests. Results yielded significant differences across conditions at all qualitative levels, comprising, for example, expressive behavior, and, in particular, significant decreases of content-independent, complimentary mental micro-activities. In the context of DSP, we argue in the paper that these activities suggest the constitution of a quasi-sensory modality - conceived as I-Thou sense - that oscillates between strongly and weakly embodied mental activities, as the analyses show. In sum, this study suggests that mask-wearing impairs both functional directions of mental activity in relation to more or less embodied experience and thus intervenes deeply in fundamental processes of social perception and interaction.

Voluntary auditory change: First-person access to agentive aspects of attention regulation

In perceptual psychology, audition and introspection have not yet received as much attention as other topics (e.g., vision) and methods (third-person paradigms). Practical examples and theoretical considerations show that it nevertheless seems promising to treat both topics in conjunction to gain insights into basic structures of attention regulation and respective agentive awareness. To this end, an empirical study on voluntary auditory change was conducted with a non-reactive first-person design. Data were analyzed with a mixed methods approach and compared with an analogous study on visual reversal. Qualitative hierarchical coding and explorative statistics yield a cross-modal replication of frequency patterns of mental activity as well as significant differences between the modalities. On this basis, the role of mental agency in perception is refined in terms of different levels of intention and discussed in the context of the philosophical mental action debate as well as of the Global Workspace/Working Memory account. As a main result, this work suggests the existence and structure of a gradual and developable agentive attention awareness on which voluntary attention regulation can build, and which justifies speaking, in a certain sense, of attentional self-perception.

Perceiving the Other Self: An Experimental First-Person Account of Nonverbal Social Interaction

In psychology, the topics of the self and social perception in nonverbal interaction have been intensively examined but have so far been limited to certain aspects of their interdependence. The self is conceived mostly as a bundle of functions and personality traits that predominantly resist integration, except in the form of mental representations that do not allow conscious access to the processes that generate them. Similarly, in nonverbal interaction, the sending and receiving of particular social cues via different modalities are considered and usually traced back to subpersonal, especially neuronal processes. Because this does not allow the full potential of conscious self-development in social interaction to be exploited, the nexus between the two topics is examined in this study via an empirical first-person method with qualitative and quantitative aspects. A hypothesis about introspectively observable mental activity occurring in dyadic nonverbal interaction is developed and experimentally investigated. The results show that previous theoretical models can be supplemented by a sublayer of potentially conscious mental interaction that, because of its invariance regarding partial personality aspects, suggests a holistic and dynamic concept of the self.

First-person dimensions of mental agency in visual counting of moving objects

Counting objects, especially moving ones, is an important capacity that has been intensively explored in experimental psychology and related disciplines. The common approach is to trace the three counting principles (estimating, subitizing, serial counting) back to functional constructs like the Approximate Number System and the Object Tracking System. While usually attempts are made to explain these competing models by computational processes at the neural level, their first-person dimensions have been hardly investigated so far. However, explanatory gaps in both psychological and philosophical terms may suggest a methodologically complementary approach that systematically incorporates introspective data. For example, the mental-action debate raises the question of whether mental activity plays only a marginal role in otherwise automatic cognitive processes or if it can be developed in such a way that it can count as genuine mental action. To address this question not only theoretically, we conducted an exploratory study with a moving-dots task and analyze the self-report data qualitatively and quantitatively on different levels. Building on this, a multi-layered, consciousness-immanent model of counting is presented, which integrates the various counting principles and concretizes mental agency as developing from pre-reflective to increasingly conscious mental activity.