Baruch EitamUniversity of Haifa | haifa · Department of Psychology
Baruch Eitam
PhD.
About
63
Publications
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Introduction
I am an Associate Professor at the University of Haifa - Department of Psychology. My research revolves around interactions between cognition and motivation. Currently, my two central research programs focus on investigating (a) the outcomes of our mind's decision that "it is in control" of, for example, the external environment and (b) whether categorization (as in knowing what something is) can be dissociated from phenomenally experiencing that "something".
Skills and Expertise
Additional affiliations
February 2011 - November 2015
September 2009 - December 2011
January 2009 - December 2011
Publications
Publications (63)
To what degree does our representation of the immediate world depend solely on its relevance to what we are currently doing? We examined whether relevance per se can cause "blindness," even when there is no resource limitation. In a novel paradigm, people looked at a colored circle surrounded by a differently colored ring-the task relevance of whic...
An important model for explaining humans' feeling of agency-the 'Comparator model'-draws on ideas used to explain effective motor control. The model describes how our brain estimates the degree of control over the environment offered by a specific motor program (in short, an action's effectiveness). However, given its current level of specification...
Automatic imitation refers to the act of unintentionally mimicking observed actions. Inspired by a theoretical framework that allows for controlled yet unintentional processes, we tested whether automatic imitation depends on the task relevance of the to-be-imitated movements. Replicating previous results, we find that movements that are part of th...
Humans and other animals live in dynamic environments. To reliably manipulate the environment and attain their goals they would benefit from a constant modification of motor-responding based on responses' current effect on the current environment. It is argued that this is exactly what is achieved by a mechanism that reinforces responses which have...
To what degree do people prefer to choose for themselves and what drives this preference? Is it memory-based and results from a lifelong association between choices and better outcomes, or is the process of choice itself reinforcing? In a new paradigm, across 6 experiments, participants experienced both 'Own Choice' and 'Computer Picks' conditions...
We report that we identified a confound created by our standard use of 'attention probes' and how the removal of the confound affects the results reported in Hemed et al 2020. We also report additional results which together show that what appeared as a robust and interesting (if not predicted) effect is seemingly the outcome of the said confound w...
Automatic imitation refers to the act of unintentionally mimicking observed actions. Inspired by a theoretical framework that allows for controlled yet unintentional processes, we tested whether automatic imitation depends on the task relevance of the to-be-imitated movements. Replicating previous results, we find that movements that are part of th...
While known reinforcers of behavior are outcomes that are valuable to the organism, recent research has demonstrated that the mere occurrence of an own-response effect can also reinforce responding. In this paper we begin investigating whether these two types of reinforcement occur via the same mechanism. To this end, we modified two different task...
An important model for explaining humans' feeling of agency-the Comparator model-draws on ideas used to explain effective motor control. The model describes how our brain estimates the degree of control over the environment offered by a specific motor program (in short, an action's effectiveness). However, given its current level of specification,...
An important model for explaining humans' feeling of agency-the 'Comparator model'-draws on ideas used to explain effective motor control. The model describes how our brain estimates the degree of control over the environment offered by a specific motor program (in short, an action's effectiveness). However, given its current level of specification...
This study examined the role of advance expectations in generating relevance-based selection, using a version of cognitive ‘blindness’ that is driven solely by task relevance. With this irrelevance induced blindness, participants often fail to report a feature of an irrelevant stimulus, even though the levels of perceptual and cognitive load are mi...
As our environment is frequently changing, it is common that our expectations are violated by unexpected stimuli or events, which leaves us uncertain about which pieces of information will be useful in the future. It is unclear how an expectation violation affects the subsequent control settings for processing of information. The current study dire...
How is our strategy for forming memories shaped by experience with a task? Previous work using surprise questions (i.e., unexpected by the participant) has shown a remarkable inability to report attributes of an attended target in a search display. This representational poverty presumably reflects a form of information exploitation, in which contro...
How is our strategy for forming memories shaped by experience with a task? Previous work using surprise questions (i.e. unexpected by the participant) has shown a remarkable inability to report attributes of an attended target in a search display. This representational poverty presumably reflects a form of information exploitation, in which control...
Obsessions are commonly described as intrusive, ego-dystonic, and ‘coming out-of-nowhere’. This might reflect an experience of low sense of agency (SoA), with SoA referring to the experience of being the source of our thoughts. The current study investigates the relationship between obsessive compulsive (OC) symptoms and the SoA over thoughts. Part...
We contrast two theoretical positions on the relation between phenomenal and access consciousness. First, we discuss previous data supporting a mild Overflow position, according to which transient visual awareness can overflow report. These data are open to two interpretations: (i) observers transiently experience specific visual elements outside a...
Reprints of this poster available upon request! Email reo138@psu.edu
Many models of emotion assume that the emotional response is preceded by an assessment of a stimulus' relevance to the perceiver's goals. Although widely assumed, experimentally controlling and hence empirically testing the effect of a stimulus' relevance on the emotional response has proven challenging. In this study we used stimuli with high ecol...
Pain is an integral part of our lives. Although the effect of ‘control’ on sensed pain has been extensively studied and discussed, recent findings seem to be at odds with the substantial evidence for a robust motor-based sensory attenuation effect – an indirect marker for one’s sense of agency. The goal of the current study was to sensitively re-ex...
Although most research in the field of emotion perception has focused on the isolated face, recent studies have highlighted the integration of emotional faces and bodies. Instructed to be ignored, incongruent emotional body context can automatically alter the categorization of distinct and prototypical facial expressions. Previous work suggested th...
This study examined whether obsessive-compulsive (OC) tendencies are related to an impaired sense of agency (SoA). We examined agency using both indirect (“implicit”) and direct (“explicit”) measures, aiming to tap into different aspects of the sense of agency. We measured the SoA of participants with high vs. low scores on a measure of OC symptoms...
Recent evidence points to the reinforcing impact of a response’s ‘pure’ effectiveness (e.g., generating an action-contingent effect) even when the own-action effects are valueless. The finding raises the fundamental question of whether and how different types of reinforcers (e.g., pure response-effectiveness and positive outcomes) are integrated to...
The sense of agency (SoA) is defined as " the registration that I am the initiator of my actions. " Both " direct " and " indirect " measurement of SoA has focused on specific contextualized perceptual events, however it has also been demonstrated that " higher level " cognitions seemingly affect the SoA. We designed a measure of person's general,...
Successful self-regulation involves both assessment (e.g., making the right choices) and locomotion (e.g., managing change and movement). Regulatory mode theory is a motivational framework that highlights the ways in which these locomotion versus assessment concerns can receive differential emphasis across both individuals and situations. Although...
Some philosophers believe this: We are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our self; we feel its existence and its continuing to exist, and are certainmore even than any demonstration could make us-both of its perfect identity and of its simplicity⋯Unfortunately all these forthright assertions are in conflict with the very experience...
The past few years have brought to light the weaknesses of Social cognition in both paradigms and published results. Although for 'social priming' at least, the need for remedying these weaknesses has not diminished — the effort would benefit from a parallel increase in theoretical rigour. With this goal in mind the current paper charts the develop...
Motivated behavior is considered to be a product of integration of a behavior's subjective benefits and costs. As such, it is unclear what motivates 'habitual behavior' which occurs, by definition, after the outcome's value has diminished. One possible answer is that habitual behavior continues to be selected due to its 'intrinsic' worth. Such an e...
How does information about one’s control over the environment (e.g., having an own-action effect) influence motivation? The control-based response selection framework was proposed to predict and explain such findings. Its key tenant is that control relevant information modulates both the frequency and speed of responses by determining whether a per...
This book focuses on the scientific study of the human sense of agency. It discusses the causes and consequences of the subjective experience of being in control of one's actions, and, through them, of events in the outside world. The book brings together some of the world's leading researchers on the topic. It aims to provide the first structured...
We demonstrate that task relevance dissociates between visual awareness and knowledge activation to create a state of seeing without knowing-visual awareness of familiar stimuli without recognizing them. We rely on the fact that in order to experience a Kanizsa illusion, participants must be aware of its inducers. While people can indicate the orie...
This study examined whether relevance per-se can cause blindness (i.e., failure to report clearly visible stimuli) even when there is no resources limitation. In a novel paradigm, employed in 2 similar experiments, a colored circle surrounded by a differently colored ring was presented for 500 ms, without masking. One of these stimuli was labelled...
A funny thing happened along the way of researchers using priming techniques to study psychological questions. Rather than priming being just a tool to study mind-dealing with questions like the nature of and the mechanisms underlying mental representation, semantic organization and judgment-priming became the object of study. In other words, it mo...
Faces are one of the most important signals for reading people’s mental states. In sync with their apparent ‘chronic’ (cross-situational) relevance, faces have been argued to be processed independently of the task one is currently performing. Many of these demonstrations have involved ‘capture of attention’ or increased interference by faces functi...
We argue that it is possible to go beyond the “selfish goal” metaphor and make an even stronger case for the role of unconscious motivation in cognition and action. Through the relevance of a representation (ROAR) framework, we describe how not only value motivation, which relates to “selfish goals,” but also truth motivation and control motivation...
We argue that it is possible to go beyond the "selfish goal" metaphor and make an even stronger case for the role of unconscious motivation in cognition and action. Through the relevance of a representation (ROAR) framework, we describe how not only value motivation, which relates to "selfish goals," but also truth motivation and control motivation...
Learning the structure of the environment (e.g., what usually follows what) enables animals to behave in an effective manner and prepare for future events. Unintentional learning is capable of efficiently producing such knowledge as has been demonstrated with the Artificial Grammar Learning paradigm (AGL), among others. It has been argued that sele...
Human motivation is sensitive to value-to the outcomes of actions. People invest mental and physical resources for obtaining desired results or for stopping and reversing undesired ones. Accordingly, people's motivation is sensitive to information about their standing in relation to outcome attainment ('outcome feedback'). In this paper, we argue a...
In this chapter we present a novel framework that integrates motivational relevance and accessibility and outlines its implications for the study of memory. We first review a recent analysis of motivation (Higgins, 2011) and a recent framework linking motivational relevance and accessibility (Eitam & Higgins, 2010). We then propose and demonstrate...
In their paper: "Learning of Predictive Relations Between Events Depends on Attention, Not on Awareness" Custers & Aarts demonstrate that when one is first exposed to a clear predictive relationship - a consequent predictive relationship will be represented as a unidirectional association ("predictor" to "predicted") in the percievers' minds regard...
The notion of accessibility of mental representations has been invaluable in explaining and predicting human thought and action. Focusing on social cognition, we review the large corpus of data that has accumulated since the first models of mental activation dynamics were outlined. We then outline a framework that we call Relevance of a Representat...
This investigation used a newly developed artificial grammar learning (AGL) paradigm in which participants were exposed to sequences of stimuli that varied in two dimensions (colours and letters) that were superimposed on each other. Variation within each dimension was determined by a different grammar. The results of two studies strongly suggest t...
In the last decade, there has been a tremendous surge of research on the mechanisms of human action. This volume brings together this new knowledge in a single, concise source, covering most if not all of the basic questions regarding human action: what are the mechanisms by which action plans are acquired, mentally represented, activated, selected...
Is nonconscious goal pursuit useful in novel environments? The prevalent view of automaticity and control implies that an unconscious mode of goal pursuit can only reproduce formerly learned actions, and therefore that its usefulness in novel environments is very limited. Our results demonstrate that this conclusion is not always warranted, as nonc...
Questions
Questions (2)
We brought a few good response boxes, happily began running our experiments with them and yes they reduce RT's by an average of ~40ms but they also really f%$#ked up a few of our rt effects that we have replicated numerous times using keyboards as response media. for example, we have repeatedly shown that inserting a >300ms temporal lag between an action and its perceptual effect "kills" the speeding up of the response (vs. a no own-action effect condition). using the response box -- participants with the 450ms lag actually performed faster than the no effect group. any thoughts? similar experiences?
USB connection?
(Data) output format?
Simple programability?
