Yi Jiang

We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the interactive effects of perceived competence and task interest on the cognitive and affective responses to negative feedback. Twenty-four undergraduates performed both interesting and uninteresting tasks and received failure feedback. The participants’ perceived competence in the task was manipulated between subjects prior to scanning with bogus feedback. The results showed that negative feedback processing was contingent upon both perceived competence and task interest. The most adaptive coping mechanism, indicated by activation in the cognitive control network and attenuation in the negative affect region, was identified for the high-competence and high-interest combination. When either competence or interest was low, signals in the cognitive control network were weaker. The most detrimental activation patterns were observed for the combination of low-competence and high interest. Our results reveal the combination of task and learner characteristics that best harnesses the potential benefits of negative feedback and illustrate the neuroscientific mechanisms underlying this observation.

Tscha Hung was a member of the Vienna Circle who achieved high international academic recognition. He dedicated his entire life to spreading the philosophy of the Circle to China and developed deep insights in his criticisms to that philosophy. Hung was a witness to the encounter of Western and Chinese philosophy in the twentieth century. His debate with Fung You-lan on metaphysics reflects different understandings of the nature of philosophy and metaphysics as well as different perspectives. Hung defended the position of metaphysics in Chinese philosophy in his own way and engaged in a contemporary reconstruction of Chinese philosophy.

Size perception of visual objects is highly context dependent. Here we report a novel perceptual size illusion that the self-face, being a unique and distinctive self-referential stimulus, can enlarge its perceived size. By using a size discrimination paradigm, we found that the self-face was perceived as significantly larger than the other-face of the same size. This size overestimation effect was not due to the familiarity of the self-face, since it could be still observed when the self-face was directly compared with a famous face. More crucially, such illusion effect could be extended to a new cartoon face that was transiently associated with one's own face and could also exert further contextual influences on visual size perception of other objects. These findings together highlight the role of self-awareness in visual size perception and point to a special mechanism of size perception tuned to self-referential information.