Joshua Skewes

• PhD
• Managing Director at Aarhus University

Crying in infancy is an important emotional signal that elicits care from adults, and women are often assumed to be more sensitive and reactive to infant crying than men. In a series of studies, we tested whether preparenthood gender differences in sensitivity to infant cries are a potential driver of the unequal share of early parenting. In Study...

Decisions are not necessarily easy to separate into a planning and an execution phase and the decision-making process can often be reflected in the movement associated with the decision. Here, we used formalized definitions of concepts relevant in decision-making and learning to explore if and how these concepts correlate with decision-related move...

While infant fearfulness, and its expression via crying, may have been adaptive in our evolutionary history, for modern parents, crying can be challenging to respond to. We discuss how and why prolonged crying can raise the risk for difficulties with adult care. Given that crying is the most-reported trigger for shaking, its potential to elicit mal...

Inequality affects how people make social decisions. Laboratory research has shown that when income inequality is simulated using cooperative economic games, groups with higher inequality often generate less wealth overall, with poorer group members receiving the worst outcomes. This study links these experimental findings to real world inequality...

This brief note points toward new potentials that lie at the interface between research on landscape archaeology and cognitive science. Recent advances in the cognitive and neural sciences have sharpened our understanding of spatial cognition, by providing new explanations for how the brain reduces the dimensionality of complex topography and geogr...

Crying is an ubiquitous communicative signal in infancy. This meta‐analysis synthesizes data on parent‐reported infant cry durations from 17 countries and 57 studies until infant age 12 months (N = 7580, 54% female from k = 44; majority White samples, where reported, k = 18), from studies before the end Sept. 2020. Most studies were conducted in th...

Perceptual decision-making employs a range of higher order metacognitive processes. Two of the most important of these are perceptual awareness; or the clarity with which one reports seeing a perceptual stimulus, and response confidence; or the certainty one has about the correctness of one's own perceptual categorizations. We used a novel false fe...

We explore the relationship between academic employees’ attitudes to modern sexism and the #MeToo movement to better understand how interventions designed to address sexual harassment might be received in Danish academia. Using a survey of employees at a large Danish university (N = 1128), we categorized employees’ open answers about their attitude...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) – and autistic traits more generally – are associated with a heterogeneous pattern of differences in cognitive function. These include differences in associative learning, attention, and processing of social information. All three cognitive functions have importance in clinical, educational, and research contexts. The...

Problem gambling has been linked to impairments in decision making under uncertainty. Problem gamblers are more likely to favor high-risk, high-reward, and short-term gains over more advantageous choice alternatives, and this preference has been linked to impaired learning about decision outcomes. In this paper we link specific learning processes i...

We designed this study to measure the degree of backlash a specific Danish university would encounter in response to gender equity interventions. To capture this resistance we used two standardized questionnaires: the Modern Sexism Scale, which measures explicit denial of gender discrimination and resentment towards gender equity demands (such as g...

Multisensory processing facilitates perception of our everyday environment and becomes particularly important when sensory information is degraded or close to the discrimination threshold. Here, we used magnetoencephalography and an audiovisual oddball paradigm to assess the complementary role of visual information in subtle pitch discrimination at...

The field of social robotics offers an unprecedented opportunity to probe the process of impression formation and the effects of identity-based stereotypes (e.g. about gender or race) on social judgements and interactions. We present the concept of fair proxy communication—a form of robot-mediated communication that proceeds in the absence of poten...

Schizophrenia is often associated with distinctive or odd social behaviours. Previous work suggests this could be due to a general reduction in conformity; however, this work only assessed the tendency to publicly agree with others, which may involve a number of different mechanisms. In this study, we specifically investigated whether patients disp...

Difficulties in emotion perception are commonly observed in autism spectrum disorder. However, it is unclear whether these difficulties can be attributed to a general problem of relating to emotional states, or whether they specifically concern the perception of others’ expressions. This study addressed this question in the context of pain, a senso...

During copy-editing, the y-axes of Fig. 2 (top) and Fig. 3 (top) were erroneously labelled mean BCG (d') in the version of the paper published as Online First. The correct label is meanCE (d').

Perception is fundamentally a multisensory experience. The principle of inverse effectiveness (PoIE) states how the multisensory gain is maximal when responses to the unisensory constituents of the stimuli are weak. It is one of the basic principles underlying multisensory processing of spatiotemporally corresponding crossmodal stimuli that are wel...

Imitation plays a key role in social learning and in facilitating social interactions and likely constitutes a basic building block of social cognition that supports higher-level social abilities. Recent findings suggest that patients with schizophrenia have imitation impairments that could contribute to the social impairments associated with the d...

Previous research using the dot-perspective task has produced evidence that humans may be equipped with a mechanism that spontaneously tracks others’ gaze direction and thereby acquires information about what they can see. Other findings, however, support the alternative hypothesis that a spatial-cuing mechanism underpins the effect observed in the...

Collaborative decision making is central to the organization of society. Juries deliberate cases, voters elect government officials, open innovation networks converge on innovative solutions. It is common to think of such groups as decision making entities. But this language is imprecise. Real decision processes do not occur within any group or org...

Previous studies suggest that religious prayer can alter the experience of pain via expectation mechanisms. While brain processes related to other types of top-down modulation of pain have been studied extensively, no research has been conducted on the potential effects of active religious coping. Here, we aimed at investigating the neural mechanis...

Convergent research suggests that people with ASD have difficulties localizing sounds in space. These difficulties have implications for communication, the development of social behavior, and quality of life. Recently, a theory has emerged which treats perceptual symptoms in ASD as the product of impairments in implicit Bayesian inference; as subop...

Autistic people are better at perceiving details. Major theories explain this in terms of bottom-up sensory mechanisms or in terms of top-down cognitive biases. Recently, it has become possible to link these theories within a common framework. This framework assumes that perception is implicit neural inference, combining sensory evidence with prior...

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by impairments in language and social–emotional cognition. Yet, findings of emotion recognition from affective prosody in individuals with ASD are inconsistent. This study investigated emotion recognition and neural processing of affective prosody in high-functioning adults with ASD relative to neurot...

Many forms of social interaction require that behaviour be coordinated in the here and now. Much research has been conducted on how people coordinate their actions in real time to achieve a joint goal, showing that people use both synchronised (i.e. symmetric) and complementary (i.e. asymmetric) strategies. These two mechanisms have been mostly stu...

Copyright statement: © 2014 Michael, Sandberg, Skewes, Wolf, Blicher, Overgaard and Frith. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution and reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original...

Music is a potent source for eliciting emotions, but not everybody experience emotions in the same way. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show difficulties with social and emotional cognition. Impairments in emotion recognition are widely studied in ASD, and have been associated with atypical brain activation in response to emotional...

In the midst of on-going hype about the power and potency of the new brain sciences, scholars within “Critical Neuroscience” have called for a more nuanced and sceptical neuroscientific knowledge-practice. Drawing especially on the Frankfurt School, they urge neuroscientists towards a more critical approach—one that re-inscribes the objects and pra...

Although it is well established that regions of premotor cortex (PMC) are active during action observation, it remains controversial whether they play a causal role in action understanding. In the experiment reported here, we used off-line continuous theta-burst stimulation (cTBS) to investigate this question. Participants received cTBS over the ha...

Extreme rituals entail excessive costs without apparent benefits, which raises an evolutionary cost problem (Irons, 2001). It is argued that such intense rituals enhance social cohesion and promote cooperative behaviors (Atran & Henrich, 2010; Durkheim, 1912). However, direct evidence for the relation between ritual intensity and prosociality is la...

Clark acknowledges but resists the indirect mind-world relation inherent in prediction error minimization (PEM). But directness should also be resisted. This creates a puzzle, which calls for reconceptualization of the relation. We suggest that a causal conception captures both aspects. With this conception, aspects of situated cognition, social in...

The effects of other people's opinions on conscious perceptual judgments are pervasive and well studied. Although existing research is suggestive, less is known about how others' opinions affect nonconscious sensorimotor behavior. In the experiment, participants were shown figures containing a visual illusion, along with judgments made by experimen...

Although the use of prayer as a religious coping strategy is widespread and often claimed to have positive effects on physical disorders including pain, it has never been tested in a controlled experimental setting whether prayer has a pain relieving effect. Religious beliefs and practices are complex phenomena and the use of prayer may be mediated...

Deception is an essentially social act, yet little is known about how social consequences affect the decision to deceive. In this study, participants played a computerized game of deception without constraints on whether or when to attempt to deceive their opponent. Participants were questioned by an opponent outside the scanner about their knowled...

Acetazolamide is a potent inhibitor of the reversible hydration of CO(2) catalyzed by the enzyme carbonic anhydrase and is commonly used to increase cerebral blood flow e.g. in order to estimate cerebrovascular reserve. However it is not known whether acetazolamide may positively affect the excitability of neurons in the brain in vivo or cortical p...

Recent research shows that visual processing influences the speed/accuracy trade-off people use when performing goal-directed movement. This raises the question of how this influence is produced in visual cognition. Visual influences on speed/accuracy trade-off could be produced in conscious visual perception, in non-conscious visuomotor transforma...

Is our attitude to money like that to any other tool even though its use is symbolic and is not implemented in its physical structure? Knowledge of the functional use of concrete tools, such as hammers or screwdrivers, has been associated with activation of a left hemisphere network including the posterior temporal cortex, supramarginal gyrus, infe...

Liberal acceptance, overconfidence, and increased activity of the neurotransmitter dopamine have been proposed to account for abnormal sensory experiences, for instance, hallucinations in schizophrenia. In normal subjects, increased sensory experience in Yoga Nidra meditation is linked to striatal dopamine release. We therefore hypothesize that the...

Extensive practice involving sustained attention can lead to changes in brain structure. Here, we report evidence of structural differences in the lower brainstem of participants engaged in the long-term practice of meditation. Using magnetic resonance imaging, we observed higher gray matter density in lower brain stem regions of experienced medita...

The Aristotle-Kant tradition requires that autonomous activity must originate within the self and points toward a new type of causation (different from natural efficient causation) associated with teleology. Notoriously, it has so far proven impossible to uncover a workable model of causation satisfying these requirements without an increasingly un...

This article discusses the increasing use of ideas from, and consistency with, the embodiment program in artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive science. A model is embodied if it is (1) functionally grounded in behavioral regulation and (2) strongly constrained by both the physical and computational parameters of its implementation. The main go...