Michiel M Spapé

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at University of Macau

A reliable experience of time is critical for perception and action in the present, for accurately remembering our past, and for successfully planning a future. Theories of time perception commonly assume a central mechanism keeps time by providing a relatively independent, internal clock. Recent work, however, shows imaginary self-movements alter...

Incorporating the sense of touch through haptics in virtual spaces enables people to communicate emotions and engage in more naturalistic and meaningful social interactions. Advances in haptics and virtual reality technologies and applications have been essential to support researchers in the exploration of mediated social touch in virtual environm...

Subjective estimates of duration are affected by emotional expectations about the future. For example, temporal intervals preceding a threatening event such as an electric shock are estimated as longer than intervals preceding a non-threatening event. However, it has not been unequivocally shown that such temporal overestimation occurs also when an...

Generative models are powerful tools for producing novel information by learning from example data. However, the current approaches require explicit manual input to steer generative models to match human goals. Furthermore, how these models would integrate implicit, diverse feedback and goals of multiple users remains largely unexplored. Here, we p...

Phantom tactile sensation (PTS) is usually experienced by participants in laboratory settings with the assistance and supervision of professionals. Extensive reports from users demonstrate they experience PTS on commercially available virtual reality (VR) platforms. We gathered and analyzed 2885 posts by 1408 users to understand how users obtain PT...

Subjective estimates of duration are affected by emotional expectations about the future. For example, temporal intervals preceding a threatening event such as an electric shock are estimated as longer than intervals preceding a non-threatening event. However, it has not been unequivocally shown that such temporal overestimation occurs also when an...

Visual recognition requires inferring the similarity between a perceived object and a mental target. However, a measure of similarity is difficult to determine when it comes to complex stimuli such as faces. Indeed, people may notice someone “looks like” a familiar face, but find it hard to describe on the basis of what features such a comparison i...

Researchers increasingly explore deploying brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) for able-bodied users, with the motivation of accessing mental states more directly than allowed by existing body-mediated interaction. This motivation seems to contradict the long-standing HCI emphasis on embodiment, namely the general claim that the body is crucial for co...

Affective annotation refers to the process of labeling media content based on the emotions they evoke. Since such experiences are inherently subjective and depend on individual differences, the central challenge is associating digital content with its affective, interindividual experience. Here, we present a first-of-its-kind methodology for affect...

We present a dataset for the analysis of human affective states using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Data were recorded from thirty-one participants who engaged in two tasks. In the emotional perception task the participants passively viewed images sampled from the standard international affective picture system database, which prov...

E-Prime is the leading software suite by Psychology Software Tools for designing and running Psychology lab experiments. The E-Primer is the perfect accompanying guide. It provides all the necessary knowledge to make E-Prime accessible to everyone. You can learn the tools of Psychological science by following the E-Primer through a series of entert...

E-Prime is the leading software suite by Psychology Software Tools for designing and running Psychology lab experiments. The E-Primer is the perfect accompanying guide. It provides all the necessary knowledge to make E-Prime accessible to everyone. You can learn the tools of Psychological science by following the E-Primer through a series of entert...

E-Prime is the leading software suite by Psychology Software Tools for designing and running Psychology lab experiments. The E-Primer is the perfect accompanying guide. It provides all the necessary knowledge to make E-Prime accessible to everyone. You can learn the tools of Psychological science by following the E-Primer through a series of entert...

E-Prime is the leading software suite by Psychology Software Tools for designing and running Psychology lab experiments. The E-Primer is the perfect accompanying guide. It provides all the necessary knowledge to make E-Prime accessible to everyone. You can learn the tools of Psychological science by following the E-Primer through a series of entert...

E-Prime is the leading software suite by Psychology Software Tools for designing and running Psychology lab experiments. The E-Primer is the perfect accompanying guide. It provides all the necessary knowledge to make E-Prime accessible to everyone. You can learn the tools of Psychological science by following the E-Primer through a series of entert...

E-Prime is the leading software suite by Psychology Software Tools for designing and running Psychology lab experiments. The E-Primer is the perfect accompanying guide. It provides all the necessary knowledge to make E-Prime accessible to everyone. You can learn the tools of Psychological science by following the E-Primer through a series of entert...

E-Prime is the leading software suite by Psychology Software Tools for designing and running Psychology lab experiments. The E-Primer is the perfect accompanying guide. It provides all the necessary knowledge to make E-Prime accessible to everyone. You can learn the tools of Psychological science by following the E-Primer through a series of entert...

E-Prime is the leading software suite by Psychology Software Tools for designing and running Psychology lab experiments. The E-Primer is the perfect accompanying guide. It provides all the necessary knowledge to make E-Prime accessible to everyone. You can learn the tools of Psychological science by following the E-Primer through a series of entert...

E-Prime is the leading software suite by Psychology Software Tools for designing and running Psychology lab experiments. The E-Primer is the perfect accompanying guide. It provides all the necessary knowledge to make E-Prime accessible to everyone. You can learn the tools of Psychological science by following the E-Primer through a series of entert...

E-Prime is the leading software suite by Psychology Software Tools for designing and running Psychology lab experiments. The E-Primer is the perfect accompanying guide. It provides all the necessary knowledge to make E-Prime accessible to everyone. You can learn the tools of Psychological science by following the E-Primer through a series of entert...

E-Prime is the leading software suite by Psychology Software Tools for designing and running Psychology lab experiments. The E-Primer is the perfect accompanying guide. It provides all the necessary knowledge to make E-Prime accessible to everyone. You can learn the tools of Psychological science by following the E-Primer through a series of entert...

E-Prime is the leading software suite by Psychology Software Tools for designing and running Psychology lab experiments. The E-Primer is the perfect accompanying guide. It provides all the necessary knowledge to make E-Prime accessible to everyone. You can learn the tools of Psychological science by following the E-Primer through a series of entert...

Imitation is an important mechanism for social interaction and learning, and humans tend to imitate others automatically. While imitating others is often useful, it can backfire when imitation is incongruent with one’s goals. For example, in forced-choice reaction time tasks, this tendency results in a reliable slowing of reactions if the observed...

Subjective estimates of elapsed time are sensitive to the fluctuations in an emotional state. While it is well known that dangerous and threatening situations, such as electric shocks or loud noises, are perceived as lasting longer than safe events, it remains unclear whether anticipating a threatening event speeds up or slows down subjective time...

Flow is the experience of deep absorption in a demanding, intrin-sically-motivating task conducted with skill. We consider how to measure behavioural correlates of flow from fine-grained process data extracted from programming environments. Specifically, we propose measuring affective factors related to flow non-intrusively based on log data. Prese...

Space, time and number are key dimensions that underlie how we perceive, identify and act within the environment. They are interconnected in our behaviour and brain. In this study, we examined interdependencies between these dimensions. To this end, left- and right-handed participants performed an object collision task that required space–time proc...

Researchers increasingly explore deploying brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) for able-bodied users, with the motivation of accessing mental states more directly than allowed by existing body-mediated interaction. This motivation seems to contradict the long-standing HCI emphasis on embodiment, namely the general claim that the body is crucial for co...

In this student-friendly, practice-focussed textbook on EEG and biosignal analysis, you will learn how to: · Implement your experiment in E-Prime, PsychoPy, or OpenSesame; · Run your study in the psychophysiological laboratory; · Analyse data in MATLAB by following simple steps. This textbook follows a unique approach by guiding you through a s...

We investigate inferring individual preferences and the contradiction of individual preferences with group preferences through direct measurement of the brain. We report an experiment where brain activity collected from 31 participants produced in response to viewing images is associated with their self-reported preferences. First, we show that bra...

Sensing the passage of time is important for countless daily tasks, yet time perception is easily influenced by perception, cognition, and emotion. Mechanistic accounts of time perception have traditionally regarded time perception as part of central cognition. Since proprioception, action execution, and sensorimotor contingencies also affect time...

Social touch is essential to human development and communication. Mediated social touch is suggested as a solution for circumstances where distance prevents skin-to-skin contact. However, past research aimed at demonstrating efficacy of mediated touch in reducing stress and promoting helping have produced mixed findings. These inconsistent findings...

While we instantaneously recognize a face as attractive, it is much harder to explain what exactly defines personal attraction. This suggests that attraction depends on implicit processing of complex, culturally and individually defined features. Generative adversarial neural networks (GANs), which learn to mimic complex data distributions, can pot...

Interpersonal touch is critical for social-emotional development and presents a powerful modality for communicating emotions. Virtual agents of the future could capitalize on touch to establish social bonds with humans and facilitate cooperation in virtual reality (VR). We studied whether the emotional expression of a virtual agent would affect the...

Brain-computer interfaces enable active communication and execution of a pre-defined set of commands, such as typing a letter or moving a cursor. However, they have thus far not been able to infer more complex intentions or adapt more complex output based on brain signals. Here, we present neuroadaptive generative modelling, which uses a participan...

The human brain processes language to optimise efficient communication. Studies have shown extensive evidence that the brain’s response to language is affected both by lower-level features, such as word-length and frequency, and syntactic and semantic violations within sentences. However, our understanding on cognitive processes at discourse level...

Go/No‐Go tasks, which require participants to inhibit automatic responses to images of palatable foods, have shown diagnostic value in quantifying food‐related impulses. Moreover, they have shown potential for training to control impulsive eating. To test the hypothesis that training modulates early neural markers of response inhibition, the curren...

Medial frontal negativity (MFN) is an event-related potential thought to originate in the anterior cingulate cortex. It is evoked by outcomes being worse than expected, such as when presented with unfair economic proposals during the Ultimatum Game (UG). This could mean the MFN indexes a social-emotional response, as commonly suggested in accounts...

Medial frontal negativity (MFN) is an event-related potential thought to originate in the anterior cingulate cortex. It is evoked by outcomes being worse than expected, such as when presented with unfair economic proposals during the Ultimatum Game (UG). This could mean the MFN indexes a social-emotional response, as commonly suggested in accounts...

Go/No-Go tasks, which require participants to inhibit automatic responses to images of palatable foods, have shown diagnostic value in quantifying food-related impulses.Moreover, they have shown potential for training to control impulsive eating. To test a suggested hypothesis that training modulates early neural markers of responseinhibition, the...

Despite advances in the past few decades in studying what kind of queries users input to search engines and how to suggest queries for the users, the fundamental question of what makes human cognition able to estimate goodness of query terms is largely unanswered. For example, a person searching information about "cats'' is able to choose query ter...

Nonverbal communication determines much of how we perceive explicit, verbal messages. Facial expressions and social touch, for example, influence affinity and conformity. To understand the interaction between nonverbal and verbal information, we studied how the psychophysiological time-course of semiotics—the decoding of the meaning of a message—is...

E-Prime® is the leading software suite by Psychology Software Tools for designing and running Psychology lab experiments. The E-Primer is the perfect accompanying guide: It provides all the necessary knowledge to make E-Prime accessible to everyone. You can learn the tools of Psychological science by following the E-Primer through a series of enter...

Nonverbal communication determines much of how we perceive explicit, verbal messages. Facial expressions and social touch, for example, influence affinity and conformity. To understand the interaction between non-verbal and verbal information, we studied how the psychophysiological time-course of decoding the meaning of a message – the semiotics –...

Receiving a touch or smile increases compliance in natural face-to-face settings. It has been unclear, however, whether a virtual agent’s touch and smile also promote compliance or whether there are individual differences in proneness to nonverbal persuasion. Utilising a multimodal virtual reality, we investigated whether touch and smile promoted c...

Time is a fundamental dimension of our behavior and enables us to guide our actions and to experience time such as predicting collisions or listening to music. In this study, we investigate the regulation and covariation of motor timing and time perception functions in left- and right-handers who are characterized by distinct brain processing mecha...

Affective symbiosis for human–computer interaction refers to the dynamic relationship between the user and affective virtual agents. In order to facilitate a true, immersive experience, we believe that it is necessary to adapt the presentation of an affective agent to the user’s affective state. Investigating the experience, behavior, and physiolog...

Automatic annotation of media content has become a critically important task for many digital services as the quantity of available online media content has grown exponentially. One approach is to annotate the content using the physiological responses of the media consumer. In the present paper, we reflect on three case studies that use brain signa...

Receiving a tender caress from a caregiver or spouse reduces stress and promotes emotional well-being, but receiving the same caress from a stranger makes us feel uncomfortable. According to recent neurophysiological findings, we not only react differently to the invited versus uninvited touch but also perceive the touch differently depending on co...

Earlier studies have revealed cross-modal visuo-tactile interactions in endogenous spatial attention. The current research used event-related potentials (ERPs) and virtual reality (VR) to identify how the visual cues of the perceiver’s body affect visuo-tactile interaction in endogenous spatial attention and at what point in time the effect takes p...

Although the previous studies have shown that an emotional context may alter touch processing, it is not clear how visual contextual information modulates the sensory signals, and at what levels does this modulation take place. Therefore, we investigated how a toucher’s emotional expressions (anger, happiness, fear, and sadness) modulate touchee’s...

We present physiological text annotation, which refers to the practice of associating physiological responses to text content in order to infer characteristics of the user information needs and affective responses. Text annotation is a laborious task, and implicit feedback has been studied as a way to collect annotations without requiring any expli...

Virtual reality presents an extraordinary platform for multimodal communication. Haptic technologies have been shown to provide an important contribution to this by facilitating co-presence and allowing affective communication. However, the findings of the affective influences rely on studies that have used myriad different types of haptic technolo...

Manual tasks are an important goal-directed ability. In this EEG work, we studied how handedness affects the hemispheric lateralisation patterns during performance of visually-driven movements with either hand. The neural correlates were assessed by means of EEG coherence whereas behavioural output was measured by motor error. The EEG data indicate...

Finding relevant information from large document collections such as the World Wide Web is a common task in our daily lives. Estimation of a user's interest or search intention is necessary to recommend and retrieve relevant information from these collections. We introduce a brain-information interface used for recommending information by relevance...

Finding relevant information from large document collections such as the World Wide Web is a common task in our daily lives. Estimation of a user's interest or search intention is necessary to recommend and retrieve relevant information from these collections. We introduce a brain-information interface used for recommending information by relevance...

The Simon effect refers to an incompatibility between stimulus and response locations resulting in a conflict situation and, consequently, slower responses. Like other conflict effects, it is commonly reduced after repetitions, suggesting an executive control ability, which flexibly rewires cognitive processing and adapts to conflict. Interestingly...

Human computer interaction (HCI) groups are more and more often exploring the utility of new, lower cost electroencephalography (EEG) interfaces for assessing user engagement and experience as well as for directly controlling computers. While the potential benefits of using EEG are considerable, we argue that research is easily driven by what we te...

Nine-month-olds start to perform sequential actions. Yet, it remains largely unknown how they acquire and control such actions. We studied infants' sequential-action control by employing a novel gaze-contingent eye tracking paradigm. Infants experienced occulo-motor action sequences comprising two elementary actions. To contrast chaining, concurren...

Peripheral physiological signals, as obtained using electrodermal activity and facial electromyography over the corrugator supercilii muscle, are explored as indicators of perceived relevance in information retrieval tasks. An experiment with 40 participants is reported, in which these physiological signals are recorded while participants perform i...

Executive control refers to the ability to withstand interference in order to achieve task goals. The effect of conflict adaptation describes that after experiencing interference, subsequent conflict effects are weaker. However, changes in the source of conflict have been found to disrupt conflict adaptation. Previous studies indicated that this sp...

The Midas touch refers to the altruistic effects of a brief touch. Though these effects have often been replicated, they remain poorly understood. We investigate the psychophysiology of the effect using remotely transmitted, precisely timed, tactile messages in an economic decision-making game called Ultimatum. Participants were more likely to acce...

Sequential modulations of conflict effects, like the reduction of the Simon effect after incompatible trials, have been taken to reflect the operation of a proactive control mechanism commonly called conflict monitoring. However, such modulations are often contaminated by episodic effects like priming and stimulus-response feature integration. It h...

Term-Relevance Prediction from Brain Signals (TRPB) is proposed to automatically detect relevance of text information directly from brain signals. An experiment with forty participants was conducted to record neural activity of participants while providing relevance judgments to text stimuli for a given topic. High-precision scientific equipment wa...

Psychological science has a rich tradition of investigating how interaction with others affects individual affect and cognition. Findings from neuroscience suggest that the reason for this is that we perceive others as fundamentally part of us. However, with the advent of mobile networks and the internet, the physical presence of others has become...

E-Prime is the leading software suite by Psychology Software Tools for designing and running Psychology lab experiments. The E-Primer is the perfect accompanying guide. It provides all the necessary knowledge to make E-Prime accessible to everyone. You can learn the tools of Psychological science by following the E-Primer through a series of entert...

IN DAILY LIFE, WE OFTEN COPY THE GESTURES AND EXPRESSIONS OF THOSE WE COMMUNICATE WITH, BUT RECENT EVIDENCE SHOWS THAT SUCH MIMICRY HAS A PHYSIOLOGICAL COUNTERPART: interaction elicits linkage, which is a concordance between the biological signals of those involved. To find out how the type of social interaction affects linkage, pairs of participan...

Ideomotor theory considers bidirectional action-effect associations to be the fundamental building blocks for intentional action. The present study employed a novel pupillometric and oculomotor paradigm to study developmental changes in the role of action-effects in the acquisition of voluntary action. Our findings suggest that both 7- and 12-month...

Manual dexterity is known to gradually progress with developmental age. In this study, we evaluate the performance of unimanual and bimanual actions under perturbed and unperturbed conditions in children between 4 and 10 years of age. Behavior was assessed by means of trajectory measurements and degree of bimanual coupling. The results showed that...

Objective: Bimanual movements are a fundamental motor skill. Whereas substantial research is available from right-handers, much less is known from left-handers. Accordingly, in the present electroencephalography (EEG) study we evaluated bimanual behavior in left- versus right-handers. Method: Thirteen left-handers and 13 right-handers took part...

In the masked priming paradigm, motor responses to targets are influenced by previously presented subliminal primes, and are guided by facilitatory and inhibitory mechanisms that depend on prime-target compatibility/duration. In this study, we evaluate subliminal-driven priming in right- and left-handers during unimanual as well as bimanual tasks....

Dopamine-β-hydroxylase (DβH) deficiency is a rare genetic syndrome characterized by the complete absence of norepinephrine in the peripheral and the central nervous system. DβH-deficient patients suffer from several physical symptoms, which can be treated successfully with L-threo-3,4-dihydroxyphenylserine, a synthetic precursor of norepinephrine....

The present study evaluated the performance of a tracking task during which no, a small (subliminal: 20°) or a large (conscious: 60°) rotational perturbation was implemented. The instantaneous as well as carry-over effects of the perturbations were assessed. The subjective reports revealed that the subjects did not discriminate between the 0° and 2...

A common daily-life task is the interaction with moving objects for which prediction of collision events is required. To evaluate the sources of information used in this process, this EEG study required participants to judge whether two moving objects would collide with one another or not. In addition, the effect of a distractor object is evaluated...

The present study evaluated the neural and behavioural correlates associated with a visuomotor tracking task during which a sensory perturbation was introduced that created a directional bias between moving hand and cursor position. The results revealed that trajectory error increased as a result of the perturbation in conjunction with a dynamic ne...

Time is an important parameter in behaviour, especially when synchronization with external events is required. To evaluate the nature of the association between perception and action timing, this study introduced pitch accented tones during performance of a sensorimotor tapping task. Furthermore, regularity of the pacing cues was modified by small...

The present study evaluated the neural changes due to effector use (unimanual left, unimanual right, and bimanual) and visuomotor conflict induced by mirror-reversed vision during drawing behavior. EEG phase synchronization, expressing interregional communication, showed that visuomotor incongruence perturbed information processing in both hemisphe...

Interactions between brain regions are necessary for compound activities to take place. Accordingly, evaluating hemispheric information processing during skilled behaviour provides valuable knowledge about brain regulation. To this end, the present study assessed the neural changes in response to task complexity and visuomotor discrepancy during mo...

People respond more slowly if an irrelevant feature of a target stimulus is incompatible with the relevant feature or the correct response. Such compatibility effects are often reduced in trials following an incompatible trial, which has been taken to reflect increased cognitive control. This pattern holds only if two trials share some similarities...

Moving a visual object is known to lead to an update of its cognitive representation. Given that object representations have also been shown to include codes describing the actions they were accompanied by, we investigated whether these action codes "move" along with their object. We replicated earlier findings that repeating stimulus and action fe...