James Allan CheyneUniversity of Waterloo | UWaterloo · Department of Psychology
James Allan Cheyne
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116
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Introduction
James Allan Cheyne retired in 2005 from the Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo. He persists, however, in dabbling in research in various areas of psychology .
Additional affiliations
January 1969 - December 2005
Publications
Publications (116)
Does one’s stance toward evidence evaluation and belief revision have relevance for actual beliefs? We investigate the role of endorsing an actively open-minded thinking style about evidence (AOT-E) on a wide range of beliefs, values, and opinions. Participants indicated the extent to which they think beliefs (Study 1) or opinions (Studies 2 and 3)...
Cognitive control of action is associated with conscious effort and is hypothesised to be reflected by increased frontal theta activity. However, the functional role of these increases in theta power, and how they contribute to cognitive control remains unknown. We conducted an MEG study to test the hypothesis that frontal theta oscillations intera...
Cognitive control of behavior is often accompanied by theta-band activity in the frontal cortex, and is crucial for overriding habits and producing desired actions. However, the functional role of theta activity in controlled behavior remains to be determined. Here, we used a behavioral task (Isabella et al., 2019) that covertly manipulated the abi...
Does one’s stance toward evidence evaluation and belief revision have relevance for actual beliefs? We investigate the role of having an actively open-minded thinking style about evidence (AOT-E) on a wide range of beliefs, values, and opinions. Participants indicated the extent to which they think beliefs (Study 1) or opinions (Studies 2 and 3) ou...
In previous studies we have provided evidence that performance in speeded response tasks with infrequent target stimuli reflects both automatic and controlled cognitive processes, based on differences in reaction time (RT) and task-related brain responses (Cheyne et al. 2012, Isabella et al. 2015). Here we test the hypothesis that such shifts in co...
Recent claims that people spend 30–50% of their waking lives mind wandering (Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010; Kane et al., 2007) have become widely accepted and frequently cited. While acknowledging attention to be inconstant and wavering, and mind wandering to be ubiquitous, we argue and present evidence that such simple quantitative estimates are m...
Recent claims that people spend 40-50% of their waking lives mind wandering (MW) (Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010; Kane et al. 2007) have become widely accepted and frequently cited. While acknowledging attention to be inconstant and wavering, and MW to be ubiquitous, we argue and present evidence that such simple quantitative estimates are misleadin...
Recent claims that people spend 40-50% of their waking lives mind wandering (MW) (Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010; Kane et al. 2007) have become widely accepted and frequently cited. While acknowledging attention to be inconstant and wavering, and MW to be ubiquitous, we argue and present evidence that such simple quantitative estimates are misleadin...
Abstract
– A restraint-induced immobility traditionally known as animal hypnosis or tonic im
-
mobility (TI) has been suggested as a model for the terrifying “waking nightmare” of sleep paralysis
(SP), on several occasions though no previous systematic review comparing the two phenomena
has been undertaken. Both include, as a central defining fea...
By definition, hallucinations occur only in the full waking state. Yet similarities to sleep-related experiences such as hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations, dreams and parasomnias, have been noted since antiquity. These observations have prompted researchers to suggest a common aetiology for these phenomena based on the neurobiology of rapid...
It is a commonly held notion that in university lectures, the attention of a student wanes as time elapses. Despite widespread endorsement of this belief, research has not yet verified its accuracy in a real lecture setting. Here, we tested this common belief by examining rates of students’ (N = 154, 97 women, 57 men) mind wandering (both intention...
We explored whether students’ (N = 154) engagement in mind wandering (both intentional and unintentional forms) throughout a 12-week undergraduate course was related to their performance on in-class quiz questions and later course exams. Intermittently presented thought-probes sampled mind-wandering rates during lectures, and retention of lecture i...
I raise a
methodological concern regarding the study performed by Pennycook, Cheyne,
Barr, Koehler and Fugelsang (2015), in which they used randomly generated, but
syntactically correct, statements that were rated for profundity by subjects
unaware of the source of the statements. The assessment of each statement’s
profundity was not based on its i...
The notion and the name (Latin “id” = English “it” = German “Es”) are most closely associated with the name of Sigmund Freud. Freud, however, quite explicitly and with due acknowledgement, took the term from Georg Groddeck’s “Das Buch vom Es.” Even before Groddeck, Nietzsche had used the term to refer to the most basic level of human nature along t...
Although bullshit is common in everyday life and has attracted attention from philosophers, its reception (critical or ingenuous) has not, to our knowledge, been subject to empirical investigation. Here we focus on pseudo-profound bullshit, which consists of seemingly impressive assertions that are presented as true and meaningful but are actually...
It has been evident for some time that the Boredom Proneness Scale (BPS), a commonly used measure of trait boredom, does not constitute a single scale. Factor analytic studies have identified anything from two to seven factors, prompting Vodanovich and colleagues to propose an alternative two factor, short form version Boredom Proneness Scale-Short...
The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) is one of the most widely used tools to assess individual differences in intuitive-analytic cognitive styles. The CRT is of broad interest because each of its items reliably cues a highly available and superficially appropriate but incorrect response, conventionally deemed the "intuitive" response. To do well on...
Researchers of mind wandering frequently assume that (a) participants are motivated to do well on the tasks they are given, and (b) task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs) that occur during task performance reflect unintentional, unwanted thoughts that occur despite participants' best intentions to maintain task-focus. Given the relatively boring and tediou...
The study of mind wandering rests upon the assumption that people are able to consistently and accurately introspect and report on these sorts of mental experiences. Although there is some initial evidence that people can indeed accurately report on the subjective experience of mind wandering, to date, no work has directly examined people's degree...
Mind wandering seems to be a prototypical feature of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). However, an important emerging distinction of mind-wandering types hinges on whether a given episode of mind wandering reflects a failure of executive control (spontaneous mind wandering) or the engagement of controlled processes for internal proce...
While individual differences in the willingness and ability to engage analytic processing have long informed research in reasoning and decision making, the implications of such differences have not yet had a strong influence in other domains of psychological research. We claim that analytic thinking is not limited to problems that have a normative...
In the present work, we investigate the hypothesis that failures of task-related executive control that occur during episodes of mind wandering are associated with an increase in extraneous movements (fidgeting). In 2 studies, we assessed mind wandering using thought probes while participants performed the metronome response task (MRT), which requi...
Using a series of online self-report measures, we examine media multitasking, a particularly pervasive form of multitasking, and its relations to three aspects of everyday attention: (1) failures of attention and cognitive errors (2) mind wandering, and (3) attentional control with an emphasis on attentional switching and distractibility. We observ...
Recent research has indicated a negative relation between the propensity for analytic reasoning and religious beliefs and practices. Here, we propose conflict detection as a mechanism underlying this relation, on the basis of the hypothesis that more-analytic people are less religious, in part, because they are more sensitive to conflicts between i...
Numerous studies focused on elucidating the correlates, causes, and consequences of inattention/attention-lapses employ the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART), a GO-NOGO task with infrequent withholds. Although the SART has become popular among inattention researchers, recent work has demonstrated its susceptibility to speed-accuracy trade...
Although objective measures of memory performance typically indicate memory declines with age, self-reported memory failures often show no relation to age. In contrast, self-reported attention failures are reliably negatively correlated with age. This contrast suggests the possibility that age-related awareness and reporting of memory failures migh...
During manually-assisted search, where participants must actively manipulate search items, it has been reported that participants will often select and move the target of search itself without recognizing it (Solman et al., 2012a). In two experiments we explore the hypothesis that this error results from a naturally-arising strategy that decouples...
We provide evidence that religious skeptics, as compared to believers, are both more reflective and effective in logical reasoning tasks. While recent studies have reported a negative association between an analytic cognitive style and religiosity, they focused exclusively on accuracy, making it difficult to specify potential underlying cognitive m...
Sleep paralysis (SP) is a brief paralysis experienced when falling asleep or waking up. It is often accompanied by vivid imagery and extreme fear. In addition to the fear during episodes, people often report marked distress following episodes. With the goal of developing an integrative account of SP postepisode distress, we examined the effects of...
Mind wandering is a pervasive feature of human cognition often associated with the withdrawal of task-related executive control processes. Here, we explore the possibility that, in tasks requiring executive control to sustain consistent responding, moments of mind wandering could be associated with moments of increased behavioral variability. To te...
We evaluated the influence of speed-accuracy trade-offs on performance in the sustained attention to response task (SART), a task often used to evaluate the effectiveness of techniques designed to improve sustained attention. In the present study, we experimentally manipulated response delay in a variation of the SART and found that commission erro...
Susceptibility to peer modeling influences as a function of birth order was studied by examining the data of 390 boys from grades kindergarten through three who previously had participated in moral transgression experiments. The results indicated that (a) firstborn boys were particularly susceptible to the influence of conforming models; (b) no bir...
In a recent MEG study, we found that the ability to switch motor responses to infrequent targets in a rapidly presented stream of digits (switch task) was associated with increased right frontal theta activity prior to movement and early motor preparation reflected by decreases in beta oscillations in motor cortex (Cheyne et al., submitted). We int...
Human action involves a combination of controlled and automatic behavior. These processes may interact in tasks requiring rapid response selection or inhibition, where temporal constraints preclude timely intervention by conscious, controlled processes over automatized prepotent responses. Such contexts tend to produce frequent errors, but also rap...
Laboratory studies of visual search are generally conducted in contexts with a static observer vantage point, constrained by a fixation cross or a headrest. In contrast, in many naturalistic search settings, observers freely adjust their vantage point by physically moving through space. In two experiments, we evaluate behavior during free vantage p...
An analytic cognitive style denotes a propensity to set aside highly salient intuitions when engaging in problem solving. We assess the hypothesis that an analytic cognitive style is associated with a history of questioning, altering, and rejecting (i.e., unbelieving) supernatural claims, both religious and paranormal. In two studies, we examined a...
We present results from five search experiments using a novel 'unpacking' paradigm in which participants use a mouse to sort through random heaps of distractors to locate the target. We report that during this task participants often fail to recognize the target despite moving it, and despite having looked at the item. Additionally, the missed targ...
Full text: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/AcekGvQwy4P4SBMFbGcc/full
Introduction:
Out-of-body experiences present a unique paradigm to investigate cognitive and neural mechanisms of bodily-self processes and their disorders. Previous work on out-of-body experiences associated with sleep paralysis supported a model in which illusory movement ex...
In two studies of a GO-NOGO task assessing sustained attention, we examined the effects of (1) altering speed-accuracy trade-offs through instructions (emphasizing both speed and accuracy or accuracy only) and (2) auditory alerts distributed throughout the task. Instructions emphasizing accuracy reduced errors and changed the distribution of GO tri...
We develop and assess an auditory version of an increasingly widely used measure of sustained attention, the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART). In two separate studies, the auditory SART generated slower response times and fewer errors than the visual SART. Proportion of errors, response times, and response time variability were, however,...
The feeling of a presence has long been noted in neurology and been discussed under many rubrics including; sensed presence, bipartition fantasy, idea of a presence, false bodily awareness, and false proximate awareness. Although the sensed presence has, in itself, no sensory components, it is not simply an internal feeling state. The sensed presen...
Attention lapses resulting from reactivity to task challenges and their consequences constitute a pervasive factor affecting everyday performance errors and accidents. A bidirectional model of attention lapses (error↔attention-lapse: Cheyne, Solman, Carriere, & Smilek, 2009) argues that errors beget errors by generating attention lapses; resource-d...
Participants' eye-movements were monitored while they searched for a target among a varying number of distractors either with or without a concurrent memory load. Consistent with previous findings, adding a memory load slowed response times without affecting search slopes; a finding normally taken to imply that memory load affects pre- and/or post-...
Investigation of "out-of-body experiences" (OBEs) has implications for understanding both normal bodily-self integration and its vulnerabilities. Beyond reported associations between OBEs and specific brain regions, however, there have been few investigations of neurochemical systems relevant to OBEs. Ketamine, a drug used recreationally to achieve...
Recent research has revealed an age-related reduction in errors in a sustained attention task, suggesting that sustained attention abilities improve with age. Such results seem paradoxical in light of the well-documented age-related declines in cognitive performance. In the present study, performance on the sustained attention to response task (SAR...
The Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) is a widely used tool in cognitive neuroscience increasingly employed to identify brain regions associated with failures of sustained attention. An important claim of the SART is that it is significantly related to real-world problems of sustained attention such as those experienced by TBI and ADHD pa...
Attention lapses are a frequently annoying fact-of-life with which we all have firsthand experience. Technically, attention lapses are taken to be failures of sustained attention. The lapses referred to are therefore usually defined as temporary and often brief shifts of conscious attention away from some primary task to unrelated internal informat...
Sleep paralysis is a transient, conscious state of involuntary immobility occurring immediately prior to falling asleep or upon wakening and is classified as a parasomnia associated with REM (Thorpy, 1990). Although individuals are unable to make gross bodily movements during sleep paralysis many are able to open their eyes and subsequently to repo...
We report a novel task designed to elicit transient attention-lapse induced alienation (ALIA) of agency experiences in normal participants. When attention-related action slips occur during the task, participants reported substantially decreased self control as well as a high degree of perceived agency attributed to the errant hand. In addition, par...
We present arguments and evidence for a three-state attentional model of task engagement/disengagement. The model postulates three states of mind-wandering: occurrent task inattention, generic task inattention, and response disengagement. We hypothesize that all three states are both causes and consequences of task performance outcomes and apply ac...
The earliest known explicit and unambiguous employment of representation in external media is in the form of figurative depictions of large mammals during the Upper Palaeolithic. These images, though often created with evident technical skill and intimate knowledge of the subject matter, are frequently characterised by curious and pronounced distor...
Over the course of the past century there have been three curious phenomena in the social sciences that are both significant and related: (1) the rise in I.Q. scores in developed countries, (2) the decline in religious belief and commitment in these same countries, and (3) the negative correlation between intelligence and religious belief. The conn...
We examined the affective consequences of everyday attention lapses and memory failures. Significant associations were found between self-report measures of attention lapses (MAAS-LO), attention-related cognitive errors (ARCES), and memory failures (MFS), on the one hand, and boredom (BPS) and depression (BDI-II), on the other. Regression analyses...
Among the varied hallucinations associated with sleep paralysis (SP), out-of-body experiences (OBEs) and vestibular-motor (V-M) sensations represent a distinct factor. Recent studies of direct stimulation of vestibular cortex report a virtually identical set of bodily-self hallucinations. Both programs of research agree on numerous details of OBEs...
Previously we reported a three-factor structure for hallucinations accompanying sleep paralysis (SP). These earlier analyses were, however, based on retrospective accounts. In a prospective study, 383 individuals reported individual episodes online providing further evidence for the three-factor structure as well as clearer conceptually meaningful...
Nielsen [Nielsen, T. (2007). Felt presence: Paranoid delusion or hallucinatory social imagery? Consciousness and Cog-nition, 16(4), 975–983.] raises a number of issues and presents several provocative arguments worthy of discussion regarding the experience of the felt presence (FP) during sleep paralysis (SP). We consider these issues beginning wit...
Three-dimensional spatial distributions of hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations associated with sleep paralysis were used to investigate the internal representation of space. Left-right asymmetries in human preferences and abilities are well established. Parallel effects are also observed as lower-upper asymmetries. These parallels could refle...
A brief self-report scale was developed to assess everyday performance failures arising directly or primarily from brief failures of sustained attention (attention-related cognitive errors-ARCES). The ARCES was found to be associated with a more direct measure of propensity to attention lapses (Mindful Attention Awareness Scale--MAAS) and to errors...
The objective of this prospective naturalistic field study was to determine the distribution of naturally occurring sleep-paralysis (SP) episodes over the course of nocturnal sleep and their relation to bedtimes. Regular SP experiencers (N = 348) who had previously filled out a screening assessment for SP as well as a general sleep survey were recr...
Sleep paralysis (SP) episodes are often accompanied by vivid hallucinoid experiences that have been found to fall into three major categories thought to be organized according to intrinsic rapid eye movement (REM) processes. Prior research has, however, combined data for individuals with varying degrees of experience with SP episodes, rendering int...
Spatial properties of hallucinations have received relatively little systematic investigation. We present evidence from a web-based study of the spatial properties of a broad array of hallucinations associated with sleep paralysis. Predictions regarding spatial characteristics of hallucinations were based on proposed neurophysiological mechanisms u...
Individual differences were investigated in the lateralisation of two general categories of hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations associated with sleep paralysis: (1) Vestibular-motor (V-M) hallucinations; comprising sensations of floating, flying, illusory locomotion and postural adjustments, out-of-body experiences (OBE), and autoscopy; and (...
Sleep paralysis (SP) entails a period of paralysis upon waking or falling asleep and is often accompanied by terrifying hallucinations. These hallucinations constitute a waking nightmare (w-nightmare) REM experience and are the original referents of the term nightmare. W-nightmare hallucinations are described by a three-factor structure involving e...
The Waterloo Sleep Experiences Scale was developed to assess the prevalence of sleep paralysis and a variety of associated hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinoid experiences: sensed presence, felt pressure, floating sensations, auditory and visual hallucinations, and fear. Consistent with results of recent surveys, almost 30% of 870 university stud...
Sleep paralysis (SP) entails a period of paralysis upon waking or falling asleep and is often accompanied by terrifying hallucinations. Two situational conditions for sleep paralysis, body position (supine, prone, and left or right lateral decubitus) and timing (beginning, middle, or end of sleep), were investigated in two studies involving 6730 su...
In a repeated measures factorial experiment, private speech was recorded while young adult university students worked on computer and paper-folding tasks during two ses-sions. Each session included an easy computer task, a difficult computer task, a repeti-tion of the difficult task, and three trials copying an origami model. All 53 participants us...
A 'sensed presence' often accompanies hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations associated with sleep paralysis. Qualitative descriptions of the sensed presence during sleep paralysis are consistent with the experience of a monitoring, stalking predator. It is argued that the sensed presence during sleep paralysis arises because of REM-related endo...
Threat themes are clearly over-represented in dreams. Threat is, however, not the only theme with potential evolutionary significance. Even for hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations during sleep paralysis, for which threat themes are far commoner than for ordinary dreaming, consistent non-threat themes have been reported. Revonsuo's simulation...
The Waterloo Sleep Experiences Scale was developed to assess the prevalence of sleep paralysis and a variety of associated hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinoid experiences: sensed presence, felt pressure, floating sensations, auditory and visual hallucinations, and fear. Consistent with results of recent surveys, almost 30% of 870 university stud...
Hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences (HHEs) accompanying sleep paralysis (SP) are often cited as sources of accounts of supernatural nocturnal assaults and paranormal experiences. Descriptions of such experiences are remarkably consistent across time and cultures and consistent also with known mechanisms of REM states. A three-factor structural m...
A self-report questionnaire assessing the use of self-directed speech was administered to 1,132 undergraduate university students. In general, self-verbalization scores were high. Exploratory factor analysis produced a four-factor solution that was readily interpretable in terms of Vygotskian theory. Consistent with the view that private speech ser...
In recent years many similarities, especially centering on the notion of dialogue, have been noted in the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin and Lev Vygotsky. Although both attend to the dialogical character of speech and thought and the role of dialogue in the social constitution and genesis of mind, we argue that their understandings of dialogue are dif...
Structural and conceptual parallels between paradigmatic and narrative discourse are drawn and a single taxonomy of genres is applied to each. In particular, we argue that narrative depictions of person, place, and time, as reflected in Bakhtin's account of novelistic genres, find their parallels in the paradigmatic discourse of scientific psycholo...
Previous research examining adolescent girls'conversations suggests that interruptions may serve dominance and/or affiliative functions. More recent research has offered the alternative interpretation that interruptions in adolescent girls' conversations reflect conversational style similarities or differences. This study extends previous research...
Two groups of five 20-month-old Kibbutz toddlers were studied in order to examine relationships and alliances. The toddlers were observed during free-play periods over a two-month period. Evidence of relationships is found when children make special adjustments in their interactions with specific partners that would not be predicted based on the in...
A sequential observational approach was used to compare peer interactions in 10 mixed dyads of ADD-H and non-Add-H boys and 10 dyads of non-ADD-H boys in laboratory cooperative and school classroom task analogue activities. Mixed dyads were found to have a greater frequency of aggression and less joint activity than control dyads in specific situat...
Research (e.g., J. Bruner, 1972; B. Vandenberg, 1980, 1981) has suggested that play serves to create specific skills as well as a special, flexible set for innovative thinking and problem solving. In the present study, object play components were analyzed to determine whether the specific skills evidenced in the combinatorial activity of play and/o...
The results of a number of recent studies suggest that play serves to create specific
skills as well as a special, flexible set for innovative thinking and problem solving.
In this study, an analysis was made of object play components to determine
whether the specific skills evidenced in the combinatorial activity of play and/or
the flexible set su...
The effects of protein malnutrition in the early stages of mammalian life have been found to be pervasive and frequently very persistent. We conducted this experiment to investigate the relative effects of protein deficiency during prenatal and/or postnatal (preweaning) stages of development in order to evaluate the effects of the timing of protein...
Required 29 male undergraduates to intrude on the shared space of 2 conversing confederates. It was hypothesized that these Ss would experience greater affective arousal and display more agonistic gestures than would 10 control Ss who were not forced to intrude on the space of others. As predicted, Ss in the intrusion conditions displayed more agon...