DOCUMENTS

Although meditation and hypnosis appear to be similar, both in skills demanded (e.g., imaginative involvement) and in their use as therapies, this chapter argues that the two are essentially different. Whereas mindfulness meditation aims to develop accurate meta-awareness, the hypnotic experience results from a lack of awareness of intentions; hypnosis is effectively a form of self-deception. The claim is supported by reviewing evidence that (a) meditators are not very hypnotizable; (b) highly hypnotizable people become aware of their intentions especially late while meditators have awareness
especially early; and (c) meditators show particularly strong intentional binding but highly hypnotizable people do not. We suggest that one path to high hypnotizability is hypofrontality.

Instructions are known to have a profound impact on human behavior. Nevertheless, research
on the effects of instructions is relatively scarce and scattered across different areas of
research in psychology and neuroscience. The current issue of this journal contains six papers
that review research on instructions in different research areas. In this introduction to the
special section, we provide the outline of a framework that focuses on five components that
can be varied in research on this topic (sender, message, receiver, context, and outcome). The
framework brings order to the boundless potential variability in research on the effects of
messages (i.e., it has heuristic value) and highlights that past research explored only a tiny
fraction of what is possible (i.e., it has predictive value). Moreover, it reveals that research in
different areas tends to examine different instantiations of the five components. The latter
observation implies that much can be gained from closer interactions between researchers
from different areas.

Evaluative conditioning (EC) is sometimes portrayed as a primitive way of changing attitudes
that is fundamentally different from persuasion via arguments. We provide a new perspective
on the nature of EC and its relation to persuasion by exploring the idea that stimulus pairings
can function as a symbol that conveys the nature of the relation between stimuli. We put
forward the concept of symbolic EC to refer to changes in liking that occur because stimulus
pairings function as symbols. The idea of symbolic EC is consistent with at least some current
theories of persuasion. It clarifies what EC research can add to the understanding of the origins
of our preferences and has implications for how (symbolic and non-symbolic) EC can be
established, the boundaries of EC research, and cognitive and functional models of EC.

This is the minutes of the COOL4 administrative meeting

This document contains the Agenda and the Minutes of the COOL3 Administrative Meeting held on December 11th, 2014

Powerpoint slides used for the progress report of WP3 at the annual IUAP meeting, Leuven, 11 December 2014

The role of letter category in visual word perception - some background for the future work on learning artificial scripts

An update on WP7 progress.

Update on WP6: Mechanisms of instrumental learning and the conscious experience of agency