The Insula and Evaluative Processes

Creative and Evaluative Processes in Conversations about Potential Events

This working paper describes preliminary research on creative and evaluative processes in conversations in which alternative courses of action are being developed for a decision at hand. Research has identified five key conversational moves that form the basis of a process for creating, expanding, and evaluating concept networks, which are a type of semantic network. Tentative suggestions are o...

The Insula and Taste Learning

The sense of taste is a key component of the sensory machinery, enabling the evaluation of both the safety as well as forming associations regarding the nutritional value of ingestible substances. Indicative of the salience of the modality, taste conditioning can be achieved in rodents upon a single pairing of a tastant with a chemical stimulus inducing malaise. This robust associative learning...

Evaluative Consequences of Selective Attention: The Impact on Socially Meaningful Stimuli and Underlying Processes

Recently, evidence was found that processes of selective attention modulate affective evaluations (e.g., Raymond, Fenske, & Tavassoli, 2003). Specifically, previously ignored stimuli were found to be affectively devaluated. That is, after a search task, previously ignored stimuli (distractors) were evaluated more negatively than attended stimuli (targets) and previously not seen stimuli (novels...

Distorted evaluative space: the theory of relativity in evaluative judgment

Descriptive and evaluative judgment processes: behavioral and electrophysiological indices of processing symmetry and aesthetics.

Descriptive symmetry and evaluative aesthetic judgment processes were compared using identical stimuli in both judgment tasks. Electrophysiological activity was recorded while participants judged novel formal graphic patterns in a trial-by-trial cuing setting using binary responses (symmetric, not symmetric; beautiful, not beautiful). Judgment analyses of a Phase 1 test and main experiment perf...