Charlotte Desmet

City of Ghent, Belgium · Tourist department - VisitGhent

Theory of Mind research has shown that we spontaneously take into account other's beliefs. In the current study we investigate, with a spontaneous Theory of Mind (ToM) task, if this belief representation also applies to nonhuman-like agents. In a series of 3 experiments, we show here that we do not spontaneously take into account beliefs of nonhuma...

One well documented source of distraction in traffic is phoning. The negative effect of phoning is not only attributed to the effects of operating the device, but it is also caused by the division of attention between driving and the conversation. Therefore, one could argue that handsfree phoning is not per se safer than handheld phoning. Indeed, a...

The concept of pupillary contagion refers to the automatic imitation of observed pupil size and reflects shared autonomic arousal. Previous studies have linked the experience of sadness to changes in pupil size. Accordingly, in a 2006 Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience article, Harrison, Singer, Rotshtein, Dolan, and Critchley found eviden...

Automatic imitation is the finding that movement execution is facilitated by compatible and impeded by incompatible observed movements. In the past 15 years, automatic imitation has been studied to understand the relation between perception and action in social interaction. Although research on this topic started in cognitive science, interest quic...

Humans and dogs have interacted for millennia. As a result, humans (and especially dog owners) sometimes try to interpret dog behaviour. While there is extensive research on the brain regions that are involved in mentalizing about other peoples’ behaviour, surprisingly little is known of whether we use these same brain regions to mentalize about an...

Mean beta values associated with the fMRI task analyses. Columns A till Q represent respectively dog ownership (1 = dog owner), the mean beta values associated with the passive task and the interpretation task for the easy and the difficult video clips extracted in the four regions taken from the localizer task (rTPJ, lSTS, dIFG and vIFG). (XLSX)

There is extensive discussion on whether spontaneous and explicit forms of ToM are based on the same cognitive/neural mechanisms or rather reflect qualitatively different processes. For the first time, we analyzed the BOLD signal for false belief processing by directly comparing spontaneous and explicit task versions. In both versions, participants...

The observation that performance does not improve following errors contradicts the traditional view on error monitoring (Fiehler et al., 2005; Núñez Castellar et al., 2010; Notebaert and Verguts, 2011). However, recent findings suggest that typical laboratory tasks provided us with a narrow window on error monitoring (Jentzsch and Dudschig, 2009; D...

Research on error observation has focused predominantly on situations in which individuals are passive observers of errors. In daily life, however, we are often jointly responsible for the mistakes of others. In the current study, we examined how information on agency is integrated in the error observation network. It was found that activation in t...

The literature on action observation revealed contradictory results regarding the activation of different subregions of the medial prefrontal cortex when observing unusual behaviour. Error observation research has shown that the posterior part of the medial prefrontal cortex is more active when observing unusual behaviour compared to usual behaviou...

Recently, it has been shown that the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) is involved in error execution as well as error observation. Based on this finding, it has been argued that recognizing each other’s mistakes might rely on motor simulation. In the current functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we directly tested this hypothesis by in...

Until now, error and conflict adaptation have been studied extensively using simple laboratory tasks. A common finding is that responses slow down after errors. According to the conflict monitoring theory, performance should also improve after an error. However, this is usually not observed. In this study, we investigated whether the characteristic...

In a previous study, it was proposed that executing a task leads to task strengthening. In other words, task activation at the moment of response execution determines subsequent switch effects (Steinhauser & Hübner, 2006). The authors investigated this issue by comparing switch effects after task and response errors. However, the use of bivalent st...

How errors and conflict are processed in the human brain, has been extensively investigated over the last decades. In this review, we argue that error research has mainly focused on one type of errors, namely errors at the response level. Furthermore, research on conflict and errors has primarily used a very restricted set of experimental paradigms...

In the last decade, research on error and conflict processing has become one of the most influential research areas in the domain of cognitive control. There is now converging evidence that a specific part of the posterior frontomedian cortex (pFMC), the rostral cingulate zone (RCZ), is crucially involved in the processing of errors and conflict. H...

In a recent study, G. Kuhn and Z. Dienes (2005) reported that participants previously exposed to a set of musical tunes generated by a biconditional grammar subsequently preferred new tunes that respected the grammar over new ungrammatical tunes. Because the study and test tunes did not share any chunks of adjacent intervals, this result may be con...