28th International Congress of Psychology August 8 ... - U-netSURF

decisions. Damasio (1994) introduces a distinction between emotions and feelings. While
emotions are considered to be unconscious, Damasio defines feelings as the process of 'feeling an
emotion', i.e. experiencing an emotion by becoming consciously aware of the bodily reactions.
Damasio's concepts promote a new perspective regarding how drivers perceive and assess risk.
Emotions and feelings are the very instruments that enable the organism to evaluate and choose
between alternative causes of action. The implications of Damasio's theory regarding elaboration
of road safety measures will be discussed.
5117.3 Performance of primates in a revised concurrent variable interval (VI) task, Ken-Ichiro
Tsutsui, Istvan Hernadi, Wolfram Schultz, Department of Anatomy, University of Cambridge,
UK
Two male macaque monkeys were trained to perform a visual two-cue oculomotor choice task, in
which they had to choose either stimulus A or B by a saccadic eye movement. The task is a revised
version of the concurrent variable interval (VI) task, in which the probability of reward
availability for both stimuli in each trial was independently defined by a simple mathematical
equation. Both monkeys appeared to be optimizing their behavior in order to get the maximum
amount of reward from the task. Intensive analysis of the behavior suggests several possible
strategies in their choice behavior.
5117.4 Daytime Parahypnagogia: A newly identified state of consciousness that interferes with
attentiveness, Emile Gurstelle, William Paterson University, USA
The author reports on a newly identified and previously undescribed state of consciousness,
Daytime Parahypnagogia (DPH). A DPH episode consists of a flash image, dream, thought and/or
creative insight. The content of the experience is often quickly forgotten. The dissociative state is
momentary, spontaneous and unnerving, to some extent akin to almost falling asleep. Of 164
clinical psychologists and 247 college students surveyed, 46 to 54 percent reported experiencing
signs consistent with DPH; of those, approximately half reported that such events interfere with
tasks requiring attentiveness. The paper details the experiential nature of DPH and its impact on
daytime functioning.
5117.5 Unconscious knowledge of an artificial grammar, Zoltan Dienes, University of Sussex,
UK
People who have been exposed to exemplars of an artificial grammar can later classify new
exemplars as obeying the grammar or not. Unconscious knowledge would be involved in
classification if people were in concurrent states of knowing without being aware of being in such
states. Confidence ratings can be used to determine whether subjects know when they knew *that*
a test exemplar was grammatical. I will explore the case left out by this methodology of when the
person has conscious knowledge that an exemplar is grammatical but not of the knowledge that
enabled this judgement.
5117.6 Psychology of ecological consciousness, Irina Schmeleva, Saint Petersburg State
University, Russian Federation
Psychology of ecological consciousness, a new trend in Russian psychology based on
methodology of system approach, holistic thinking, psycho-semantic approach and other
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