Narayanan Srinivasan

Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur | IIT Kanpur · Department of Cognitive Science

Applied Cognitive Science and Technology: Implications of interaction between human cognition and technology

A creative idea is always appreciated. However, it is still unclear as to what helps people in coming up with creative ideas. The current chapter explores how mind wandering, mindfulness and meditation influence creative ideation. Most specifically, we explore the cognition behind each of these faculties and how they interact to enable us in naviga...

We describe the creation of an affective film dataset for researchers interested in studying a spectrum of emotional experiences. We followed a two stage process. In the first stage, two hundred twenty-two video clips with 60-seconds long duration were rated in the lab by 407 participants. Based on the selection criteria, 69 audio-visual clips were...

Availability of naturalistic affective stimuli is needed for creating the affective technological solution as well as making progress in affective science. Although a lot of progress in the collection of affective multimedia stimuli has been made in western countries, the technology and findings based on such monocultural datasets may not be scalab...

Understanding the dynamics of emotional experience is an old problem. However, a clear understanding of the mechanism of emotional experience is still far away. In the presented work, we tried to address this problem using a well-established method called microstate analysis using multichannel electroencephalography (EEG). We recorded the brain act...

While naturalistic stimuli, such as movies, better represent the complexity of the real world and are perhaps crucial to understanding the dynamics of emotion processing, there is limited research on emotions with naturalistic stimuli. There is a need to understand the temporal dynamics of emotion processing and their relationship to different dime...

The COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns triggered worldwide changes in the daily routines of human experience. The Blursday database provides repeated measures of subjective time and related processes from participants in nine countries tested on 14 questionnaires and 15 behavioural tasks during the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 2,840 partic...

The way we represent and perceive time has crucial implications for studying temporality in conscious experience. Contrasting positions posit that temporal information is separately abstracted out like any other perceptual property through specialized mechanisms or that time is represented through the temporality of experiences themselves. To add t...

In classification learning of artificial stimuli, participants learn the perfectly diagnostic dimension better than the partially diagnostic dimensions. Also, there is a strong preference for a unidimensional categorization based on the perfectly diagnostic dimension. In a different experimental procedure, called array-based classification task, pa...

While naturalistic stimuli like movies better resemble the complexity of the real world and are perhaps crucial to understanding the dynamics of emotion processing, there is limited research on emotions with naturalistic stimuli. There is a need to understand the temporal dynamics of emotion processing and their relationship to different dimensions...

Integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness proposes an identity between its causal structure and phenomenology. Through this assertion, IIT aims to explain consciousness by prioritizing first-person experience. However, despite its phenomenology-first stance, developments in IIT have overlooked temporality. As such, we argue that at prese...

Our brain continuously interacts with the body as we engage with the world. Although we are mostly unaware of internal bodily processes, such as our heartbeats, they may be influenced by and in turn influence our perception and emotional feelings. Although there is a recent focus on understanding cardiac interoceptive activity and interaction with...

Our brain continuously interacts with the body as we engage with the world. Although we are mostly unaware of internal bodily processes, such as our heartbeats, they may be influenced by and in turn influence our perception and emotional feelings. While there is a recent focus on understanding cardiac interoceptive activity and interaction with bra...

Previous work has reported a relation between pathogen-avoidance motivations and prejudice toward various social groups, including gay men and lesbian women. It is currently unknown whether this association is present across cultures, or specific to North America. Analyses of survey data from adult heterosexuals ( N = 11,200) from 31 countries show...

In classification learning of artificial stimuli, participants learn the perfectly diagnostic dimension better than the partially diagnostic dimensions. Also, there is a strong preference for a unidimensional categorization based on the perfectly diagnostic dimension. In a different experimental procedure, called array-based classification task, pa...

The role of attention in task-irrelevant perceptual learning has been contested. Attention has been studied in the past using distractor-type manipulations. Hence, during an initial exposure phase, we manipulated distractor similarity within a set of six gratings, to study its effects on perceptual learning at task-relevant and task-irrelevant loca...

Marr proposed that the human mind can be thought of as an information processing system, which can be studied at the computational, algorithmic and implementational levels. Individual studies on the specific subsystems of mind like the perceptual system have often focused on individual levels. In this chapter, we show how the results from different...

Anticipation is an important aspect of our mind. Our conscious experiences are directed towards the future both in terms of phenomenological awareness as well as volition. Empirical studies indicate that anticipation influences aspects of consciousness experience and cognitive processing. Phenomenological investigations indicate that the temporal s...

Life‐course experiences such as education and bilingualism can be protective against dementia. The cognitive effects of bilingualism are specific while education has a more pervasive effect on general cognitive abilities, indicating that there is a likelihood of a variability in mechanisms underlying resilience. India is characterised by educationa...

We describe the creation of an affective film dataset for researchers interested in studying a broad spectrum of emotional experiences. Two hundred twenty-two 60-seconds long video clips were selected based on multimedia content analysis and screened in the lab with 407 participants. The participants' ratings mapped to 31 emotion categories in the...

The gradedness or discreteness of our visual awareness has been debated. Here, we investigate the influence of spatial scope of attention on the gradedness of visual awareness. We manipulated scope of attention using hierarchical letter-based tasks (global: broad scope; local: narrow scope). Participants reported the identity of a masked hierarchic...

Temporality and the feeling of 'now' is a fundamental property of consciousness. Different conceptualizations of time-consciousness have argued that both the content of our experiences and the representations of those experiences evolve in time, or neither have temporal extension, or only content does. Accounting for these different positions, we p...

The nature of spatiotemporal interactions in visual perception due to modulations of attention is still not well understood. Transient shifts of attention have been shown to induce a trade-off in spatiotemporal acuities at the cued location. Attention also can be varied in terms of scope and the evidence for the effects of scope on the spatiotempor...

The way we represent and perceive time has crucial implications for studying temporality in conscious experience. Contrasting positions posit that temporal information is separately abstracted out like any other perceptual property through specialized mechanisms or that time is represented through the temporality of experiences themselves. To add t...

Information associated with the self is preferentially processed compared to others. However, cultural differences appear to exist in the way information is processed about those close to us like our mothers. In eastern compared to western cultures, information about mother seems to be processed as well as our self. However, it is not clear whether...

The effect of emotions on Intentional binding (IB) is equivocal. In addition, most studies on IB have not manipulated emotional content of intentions. This study investigates the effect of intended and outcome emotions using emotional faces (happy or disgust face in experiment 1 and a happy or angry face in experiment 3). To see whether the effects...

Current theories of procrastination argue that people put things off into the future with the expectation that they will be better able to do them later. In this paper, we rationalize such expectations within the framework of evidence accumulation models of the choice process. Specifically, we show that it is rational for observers to adopt lower d...

We test whether people are able to reason based on incidentally acquired probabilistic and context-specific magnitude information. We manipulated variance of values drawn from two normal distributions as participants perform an unrelated counting task. Our results show that people do learn category-specific information incidentally, and that the pa...

Large, unpredictably variable gaps between Willingness-to-Accept and Willingness-to-Pay (WTA-WTP gaps) are a methodological concern with the Contingent Valuation Method. The present study investigates WTA-WTP gaps as one manifestation of gain-loss asymmetry: the phenomenon that selling prices exceed buying prices. We investigate some causes of this...

We report a supervised category learning experiment in which the training phase contains both classification and observation learning blocks. To explain the use of different categorization strategies, we propose an account in which use of a stimuli dimension depends on how well the dimension is learned. Our results show that there is an overall pre...

The importance of silence has been emphasized in both ancient and modern traditions (Teschner, 1981; Davies and Turner, 2002; Stratton, 2015). In Eastern traditions, silence has been linked to the inner stillness of the mind, a sense of equanimity and unity (Feuerstein, 1996; Lin et al., 2008). At the same time, Western scholars such as Kierkegaard...

A large part of our daily activities involves judging the psychological value of time. This study tested a previously less explored aspect about whether people are loss averse for time – i.e. do losses of time loom larger than corresponding gains? Using comparative hedonic judgments, the impact of prospective gains versus losses of time was examine...

Objectives Meditation practice has shown improvements in perception, attention, and cognitive control. Here, we study the extent of endogenous and exogenous control meditators have over their visual awareness, when they view a bi-stable image. Methods In experiment one, we investigate the differences between meditators and controls in terms of end...

Given top-down effects on perception, we examined the effect of group identity on time perception. We investigated whether the duration of an ambiguous sound clip is processed differently as a function of group congruent or incongruent source attribution. Group congruent (in-group) and incongruent (out-group) context was created by attributing the...

Visual perception is based on periods of stable fixation separated by saccadic eye movements. Although naive perception seems stable (in space) and continuous (in time), laboratory studies have demonstrated that events presented around the time of saccades are misperceived spatially and temporally. Saccadic chronostasis, the "stopped clock illusion...

Objectives Mindfulness meditation is based on Buddhist teachings and meditation practices that promote a reduced identification with thoughts and mental states. Mindfulness meditation is also suggested to promote self-other integration, either by decreasing preference for self-related processing or by rebalancing self and other-related processing....

Many traditions in the East have proposed that consciousness without content is possible and could be achieved with mental training. However, it is not clear whether such a state is possible given that intentionality is a critical property of mentality and consciousness in many theories of consciousness. A prominent recent attempt to account for su...

The default mode network (DMN) is thought to capture intrinsic activity of the brain and has been instrumental in understanding the dynamics of the brain. However, the DMN has not been without critics; both conceptual and empirical. The empirical criticisms caution against physiological noise as a source for the reported connectivity in the DMN. Sm...

Previous studies of supervised category learning show that participants often prefer a unidimensional categorization strategy. Studies also report that the perfectly diagnostic feature is learned better compared to the partially diagnostic features. We replicate these results, and we show that better learning of partially diagnostic features leads...

Cooperation declines in repeated public good games because individuals behave as conditional cooperators. This is because individuals imitate the social behaviour of successful individuals when their payoff information is available. However, in human societies, individuals cooperate in many situations involving social dilemmas. We hypothesize that...

Contribution of emotional valence and arousal to attentional processing over time is not fully understood. We employed a rapid serial visual paradigm (RSVP) in three experiments to investigate the role of valence and arousal. In three experiments, participants had to identify the expression of the two targets (experiment 1 - happy and angry; experi...

The reciprocal link between scope of attention and emotional processing is an important aspect of the relationship between emotion and attention. Larger scope of attention or global processing has been linked to positive emotions and narrow scope of attention or local processing has been linked to negative emotions. The nature of this relationship...

Self-generated actions are important for survival; they influence perception, especially the subjective time between the action and its outcome, known as intentional binding (IB). Whereas most studies on IB have examined the role of action being associated with the self or not, the role of the outcome being associated with the self or not has recei...

We characterize difficulties with both absolute and relative accounts of magnitude representation in the absolute identification paradigm and present a resolution for these difficulties. We postulate that people store neither long-term internal refer-ents for stimuli nor operate simply using binary comparisons of size between successive stimuli. Ra...

Prosody processing is an important aspect of language comprehension. Previous research on emotional word-prosody conflict has shown that participants are worse when emotional prosody and word meaning are incongruent. Studies with event-related potentials have shown a congruency effect in N400 component. There has been no study on emotional processi...

Choices are influenced by incidental emotions. To understand the neural mechanisms underlying the potential effects of incidental emotions on outcome processing, we conducted two experiments measuring feedback-related negativity (FRN) as a function of outcome (gain and loss) and emotional context. Experiment 1 used happy, neutral, and sad faces. Ex...

Control of conflict can be seen in reduced effects of conflict following incompatible trials known as conflict adaptation. Such control mechanisms have been shown to depend on emotional content present in stimuli, which could be a motivational force for control adjustments. We explored the neural mechanisms of the interaction between proactive cont...

All of us consciously experience the world around us through our sensory modalities. Empirical studies on the relationship between attention and awareness have shown that attention does influence perceptual experience or appearance in addition to better performance in perceptual tasks. The practice of meditation also changes perceptual experience i...

Emotional databases are important tools to study emotion recognition and their effects on various cognitive processes. Since, well-standardized large-scale emotional expression database is not available in India, we evaluated Radboud faces database (RaFD)—a freely available database of emotional facial expressions of adult Caucasian models, for Ind...

Hit rates (mean values) for individual picture of Radboud database by Indian and Dutch raters. (DOCX)

A link between perceptual processing styles and (pro)social behavior has gathered supporting empirical evidence to show that people raised or trained in traditions of collectiveness, compassion, and prosocial beliefs are biased to the global level in perceptual processing. In this research, we studied the reciprocal link – whether contextually broa...

Gable and Harmon-Jones (Psychological Science, 21(2), 211-215, 2010) reported that sadness broadens attention in a global-local letter task. This finding provided the key test for their motivational intensity account, which states that the level of spatial processing is not determined by emotional valence, but by motivational intensity. However, th...

Conditional cooperation declines over time if heterogeneous ideal conditional agents are involved in repeated interactions. With strict assumptions of rationality and a population consisting of ideal conditional agents who strictly follow a decision rule, cooperation is not expected. However, cooperation is commonly observed in human societies. Hen...

Spatial attention not only enhances early visual processing and improves performance but also alters phenomenology of basic perceptual features. However, in spite of extensive research on attention altering appearance, it is still unknown whether attention also intensifies perceived facial emotional expressions. We investigated the effect of exogen...

Emotions play a significant role in guiding everyday actions and strongly interact with attention. The processing of emotional information over time and the influence of attention on such processing has been studied through the phenomenon of attentional blink using rapid serial visual presentations (RSVP) tasks. This chapter discusses the interacti...

We suggest that steep intertemporal discounting in individuals of low socioeconomic status (SES) may arise as a rational metacognitive adaptation to experiencing planning and control failures in long-term plans. Low SES individuals' plans fail more frequently because they operate close to budgetary boundaries, in turn because they consistently oper...

In the last 15 years, significant efforts have been made to investigate statistical processing of object information. This includes computing properties such as mean or variance of features of multiple objects present in a visual display. Unlike visual search performance for individual objects, which is typically dependent on set size, mean estimat...

Intentional agents desire specific outcomes and perform actions to obtain those outcomes. However, whether getting such desired (intended) outcomes change our subjective experience of the duration of that outcome is unknown. Using a temporal bisection task, we investigated the changes in temporal perception of the outcome as a function of whether i...

We examined proactive and reactive control effects in the context of task-relevant happy, sad, and angry facial expressions on a face-word Stroop task. Participants identified the emotion expressed by a face that contained a congruent or incongruent emotional word (happy/sad/angry). Proactive control effects were measured in terms of the reduction...

Control exercised by humans through interactions with the environment is critical for sense of agency. Here, we investigate how control at multiple levels influence implicit sense of agency measured using intentional binding. Participants are asked to hit a moving target using a joystick with noisy control followed by an intentional binding task in...

In an anonymous 4-person economic game, participants contributed more money to a common project (i.e., cooperated) when required to decide quickly than when forced to delay their decision (Rand, Greene & Nowak, 2012), a pattern consistent with the “social heuristics” hypothesis proposed by Rand and colleagues. The results of studies using time pres...

We examined the concepts and emotions people associate with their national flag, and how these associations are related to nationalism and patriotism across 11 countries. Factor analyses indicated that the structures of associations differed across countries in ways that reflect their idiosyncratic historical developments. Positive emotions and ega...

Prospect Theory proposed that the (dis)utility of losses is always more than gains due to a phenomena called ‘loss-aversion’, a result obtained in multiple later studies over the years. However, some researchers found reversed or no loss-aversion for affective judgments of small monetary amounts but, those findings have been argued to stem from the...

People who are more avoidant of pathogens are more politically conservative, as are nations with greater parasite stress. In the current research, we test two prominent hypotheses that have been proposed as explanations for these relationships. The first, which is an intragroup account, holds that these relationships between pathogens and politics...

In everyday life we perceive events as having durations. Recent research suggests that the labeling of a stimulus influences the experience of its duration. Plausibly, the social meaning attributed to a stimulus impacts upon the amount of attention allocated to it, with greater attention resulting in better encoding and longer reproduction times. H...

While many studies have shown that meditation enhances attentional processing, very few studies have investigated the effect of enhanced attentional processing on visual awareness. We investigate the attentional effects on visual awareness in focused attention meditators using a task that manipulates scope of attention using hierarchical letter sti...

This is the first attempt at characterizing reading difficulty in Hindi using naturally occurring sentences. We created the Potsdam-Allahabad Hindi Eyetracking Corpus by recording eye-movement data from 30 participants at the University of Allahabad, India. The target stimuli were 153 sentences selected from the beta version of the Hindi-Urdu treeb...

Perceptual load plays a critical role in identification and awareness of stimuli. Given the differences in emotion-attention interactions, we investigated the perception of distractor emotional faces in two different load conditions under divided attention with a task based on the inattentional blindness paradigm. Participants performed a low- or h...

This study investigates the role of incidental emotion and probability on two aspects of decision making: decision time and post-choice satisfaction (regret and rejoice). We used a modified regret paradigm in which people made choices in the context of pleasant, neutral and unpleasant emotional International Affective Picture System (IAPS) pictures...

A key issue for political psychology concerns the processes whereby people come to invest psychologically in socially and politically significant group identities. Since Durkheim, it has been assumed that participation in group-relevant collective events increases one's investment in such group identities. However, little empirical research explici...

We investigated the intensely positive emotional experiences arising from participation in a large-scale collective event. We predicted such experiences arise when those attending a collective event are (1) able to enact their valued collective identity and (2) experience close relations with other participants. In turn, we predicted both of these...

Although attentional (e.g. [[1][1]]) and conscious (e.g. [[2][2]]) processing limitations have been widely acknowledged as interdependent (e.g. [[3][3]–[5][4]]), a unifying theory has been lacking. As an attempt to bridge th