This paper presents a brief overview of the extant fiscal situation in South Asian countries. In particular, I emphasize low tax/GDP ratios and inelastic expenditure/GDP ratios which then lead to structurally entrenched fiscal deficits. The paper also reports on the sustainability of fiscal and current account deficits in the South Asian countries. Finally, the paper reports on some important i...

This paper presents a first study in which a recently reported intermodal perceptual illusion known as the rubber hand illusion is experimentally investigated under mediated conditions. When one’s own hand is placed out of view and a visible fake hand is repeatedly stroked and tapped in synchrony with the unseen hand, subjects report a strong sense in which the fake hand is experienced as part ...

Using a choice blindness paradigm, it is possible to switch decisions and outcomes in simple choice tasks. Such switches have been found to carry over into later choices, hypothesized to be mediated by beliefs about earlier decisions. Here we investigated participants’ memories for stimuli in a simple choice blindness task involving preferential choices between pairs of faces. We probed partici...

The Kanizsa illusion1 (Kanizsa, 1955), one of typical subtypes of the illusory contour, is a particularly intriguing phenomenon for considering the dynamics of our visual object perception (Fig.1). It has been stimulating interests of many researchers in this field for the last several decades. As Kanizsa (1955) originally discussed, this illusion is characterized by three distinct phenomenal p...