Статті в журналах з теми "Subliminal cue"

Recent research suggests that people can learn to link the control process of task switching to predictive cues so that switch costs are attenuated following informative precues of switch likelihood. However, the precise conditions that shape such contextual cuing of control are not well understood. Farooqui and Manly (2015) raised the possibility that cued task switching is more effective when cues of control demand are presented subliminally. In the current study, we aimed to replicate and extend these findings by more systematically manipulating whether cues of control demand are consciously perceived or are presented subliminally and whether participants have explicit prior knowledge of the cue meaning or acquire cue knowledge through experience. The direct replication was unsuccessful: We found no evidence for effective subliminal cuing but observed some evidence for participants reducing switch costs with explicit, supraliminal cues. Thus, cognitive control may be guided most effectively by explicitly understood and consciously perceived precues.

This paper presents results from an empirical study conducted with a subliminal teaching technique aimed at enhancing learner's performance in Intelligent Systems through the use of physiological sensors. This technique uses carefully designed subliminal cues (positive) and miscues (negative) and projects them under the learner's perceptual visual threshold. A positive cue, called answer cue, is a hint aiming to enhance the learner's inductive reasoning abilities and projected in a way to help them figure out the solution faster but more importantly better. A negative cue, called miscue, is also used and aims at obviously at the opposite (distract the learner or lead them to the wrong conclusion). The latest obtained results showed that only subliminal cues, not miscues, could significantly increase learner performance and intuition in a logic-based problem-solving task. Nonintrusive physiological sensors (EEG for recording brainwaves, blood volume pressure to compute heart rate and skin response to record skin conductivity) were used to record affective and cerebral responses throughout the experiment. The descriptive analysis, combined with the physiological data, provides compelling evidence for the positive impact of answer cues on reasoning and intuitive decision making in a logic-based problem-solving paradigm.

This paper presents a new warning method for increasing drivers’ sensitivity for recognizing hazardous factors in the driving environment. The method is based on a subliminal effect. In this study, the presentation of a visual cue at a lower contrast ratio than that of the background scenery was investigated as subliminal visual information instead of flashing information quickly. This method was chosen in consideration of its use in real-world driving situations where changes in ambient brightness are among the biggest visual disturbances experienced by drivers. Accordingly, it is necessary to have amethod that is applicable in the context of dynamic changes in brightness. The results of many experiments performed with a threedimensional head-mounted display show that the response time for detecting a flashing mark tended to decrease when a subliminal mark was shown in advance. A priming effect is observed for subliminal visual information. This paper also proposes a scenario for implementing this method in real vehicles.

External transients, such as a flash or a startling sound, are believed to capture attention. Bauer, Cheadle, Parton, Müller, and Usher reported that attention can also be captured by a stimulus that flickers subliminally at 50 Hz, presumably by entrainment of neurons to the flicker frequency. In their reaction time (RT) task, participants had to locate a subtle change in the spatial frequency content of one of three Gabors (the target). Prior to target onset, presumably subliminal 50-Hz flicker in one of the Gabors served as a spatial cue. Bauer et al. found faster RTs when the cued location was congruent with the target location than when the cue was incongruent with the target location. In their experiments, the cue stopped to flicker at 50 Hz at target onset and was replaced by a stimulus flickering at 100 Hz (i.e., the screen refresh rate). In the present study, we show that the transition from 50 to 100 Hz results in a flash-like impression that can be localized above chance. We suggest that the illusory transition flash interfered with the localization of the subtle target, which contributed to the congruency effect. In support of this view, participants selected the flickering object more often than the non-flickering object when they failed to respond to the target. Further, no cueing effects were observed when the cue continued to flicker until the end of the trial or when the target was a salient change in polarity. In our view, the cueing effect occurs because observers confuse the illusory transition flash with the target when the two are similar. When truly subliminal flicker is used (70-Hz flicker), very small cueing effects persist in the absence of an illusory transition flash but may be accounted for by small effects on reaction time unrelated to attention.

Three experiments were performed to examine the effects of masked colour stimuli on the response to masking stimuli. In experiment 1, two coloured squares were presented successively at the same position so that the first one could not be perceived owing to backward masking. The task was to respond to the colour of the second square as quickly as possible. The results showed that the subject's response was affected by the unperceived first square: both error rate and reaction time increased when the two squares had different colours. It was also found that reaction times for wrong responses were shorter than those for correct responses; this suggests that wrong responses occurred when the neural activation representing the first square succeeded in triggering a motor response before being suppressed. In experiment 2 we examined whether spatial attention modulated this effect or not. Eight squares (one coloured and seven white) were displayed and the spatial relation between the coloured square in the first frame (prime) and that in the second frame (target) was varied. The performance of subjects when the target location was pre-cued and when no cue was given was compared. The results indicate that in the no-cue condition the subliminal effect was observed uniformly irrespective of the spatial relation. In contrast, in the pre-cue condition the effect was diminished when prime and target occupied different positions, that is when the prime appeared outside the attended region. The result of experiment 3, with another stimulus configuration, showed a similar attentional modulation. The underlying mechanism is discussed.

We recently reported evidence indicating that selective attention is deployed to a target location in a multi-object display, when the target event (a change of one of the objects) is preceded by subliminal flicker in the gamma range. However, concerns have been raised regarding the stimuli used in this study and the possible contribution of an artifactual cue: a “transition flash” between pretarget flicker offset and target onset. Here, we report a series of experiments investigating the existence and potential contribution to selective attention of this transition-flash cue under different presentation conditions. We find that, although the transition flash is a real phenomenon (detection rates ≃ 15% > chance), it cannot, on its own, explain the original effects of gamma flicker on the response time to target detection. Even after eliminating this flash, detection was significantly faster, or more accurate, for targets preceded (vs. not preceded) by flicker. This congruency effect (≈15 ms) demonstrates that gamma flicker on its own is sufficient to engage selective attention. This interpretation is further strengthened by a reevaluation of 1) experiment 7 reported by van Diepen and colleagues and 2) the validity effect experiment reported by Bauer and colleagues. Possible reasons for the discrepant results are also discussed.

Motor preparation, based on one’s goals and expectations, allows for prompt reactions to stimulations from the environment. Proactive and reactive inhibitory mechanisms modulate this preparation and interact to allow a flexible control of responses. In this study, we investigate these two control mechanisms with an ad hoc cued Go/NoGo Simon paradigm in a within-subjects design, and by measuring subliminal motor activities through electromyographic recordings. Go cues instructed participants to prepare a response and wait for target onset to execute it (Go target) or inhibit it (NoGo target). Proactive inhibition keeps the prepared response in check, hence preventing false alarms. Preparing the cue-coherent effector in advance speeded up responses, even when it turned out to be the incorrect effector and reactive inhibition was needed to perform the action with the contralateral one. These results suggest that informative cues allow for the investigation of the interaction between proactive and reactive action inhibition. Partial errors’ analysis suggests that their appearance in compatible conflict-free trials depends on cue type and prior preparatory motor activity. Motor preparation plays a key role in determining whether proactive inhibition is needed to flexibly control behavior, and it should be considered when investigating proactive/reactive inhibition.

This article emerges out of the racism debate in Security Dialogue (May 2020). It takes its cue from the passing claim that Orientalism/Eurocentrism is different from racism and that the former is deemed to be relatively innocuous while the latter is viewed as egregious. Here I reveal how Eurocentrism is equivalent to cultural racism. I show how racism has outwardly shapeshifted through time in everyday life and world politics, and how orthodox international relations theory’s racist trajectory has mirrored this. Since 1945, modern orthodox international relations theory has covered its racism with a non-racist mask through a sublimated discourse that focuses on cultural difference but is white racism in disguise. Unmasking modern international relations/international political economy theory exposes this sublimated racist discourse by revealing its racist double move: first, it whitewashes racism and denies its presence in the conduct of world politics and the global economy in the last three centuries, thereby providing an apologia for racist practices; second, it advances subliminal cultural-racist analytical/explanatory frameworks. I close by solving the conundrum as to how white orthodox international relations scholars who are most probably non-racist (though not anti-racist) in their personal lives embrace, albeit unwittingly, racist theories of world politics and the global economy.

AbstractTo what extent do we know our own minds when making decisions? Variants of this question have preoccupied researchers in a wide range of domains, from mainstream experimental psychology (cognition, perception, social behavior) to cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics. A pervasive view places a heavy explanatory burden on an intelligent cognitive unconscious, with many theories assigning causally effective roles to unconscious influences. This article presents a novel framework for evaluating these claims and reviews evidence from three major bodies of research in which unconscious factors have been studied: multiple-cue judgment, deliberation without attention, and decisions under uncertainty. Studies of priming (subliminal and primes-to-behavior) and the role of awareness in movement and perception (e.g., timing of willed actions, blindsight) are also given brief consideration. The review highlights that inadequate procedures for assessing awareness, failures to consider artifactual explanations of “landmark” results, and a tendency to uncritically accept conclusions that fit with our intuitions have all contributed to unconscious influences being ascribed inflated and erroneous explanatory power in theories of decision making. The review concludes by recommending that future research should focus on tasks in which participants' attention is diverted away from the experimenter's hypothesis, rather than the highly reflective tasks that are currently often employed.

The sense of agency is known to be disrupted in Schizophrenia. This article explores the transition from the comparator model to the two-step model of agency, in order to review the paper ‘In and out of control: brain mechanisms linking fluency of action selection to self-agency in patients with Schizophrenia’1. A sense of agency involves using retrospective cues to make causal inferences, but this paper also introduces a new, prospective aspect. This paper shows that subliminal priming, a prospective cue, increases the reported sense of agency over a subsequent action outcome. It also shows that in schizophrenic patients, retrospective cues had more of an influence on their reported sense of agency, while conversely, prospective cues had less influence. This may reflect a greater reliance on retrospective cues in schizophrenia, which could be one of the underlying factors for some of the delusions seen in schizophrenia. Using fMRI measurements during the task, results suggest that angular gyrus activation reflects the experience of non-agency. In healthy controls, they saw altered connectivity between frontal areas and the angular gyrus associated with priming. In schizophrenic patients, there was no effect of priming on activation of the angular gyrus, or frontoparietal connectivity. In our review, we have introduced a putative schema that suggests that the action selection signals from the frontal lobes into the angular gyrus represent the prospective aspect of agency. This connection is disrupted In schizophrenia, and that may be why prospective agency is impaired.

Este artigo examina a Proposta para Base Nacional Comum da Formação de Professores da Educação Básica, texto produzido na gestão do ex-presidente Michel Temer, encaminhada ao Conselho Nacional de Educação (CNE) em dezembro de 2018 e recolhido pelo Ministério da Educação no atual governo. Argumentos como professores bem preparados fazem a diferença no desempenho discente e a universidade não sabe formar professores conforma o consenso discursivo subliminar sob o qual se ergue a visão sistêmica da formação de professores neste documento, que assume o desenvolvimento de competências como referencial básico.

A partire dai pesanti condizionamenti culturali che gravavano sull'educazione dei bambini e delle bambine nella società patriarcale, fortemente ancorata alle differenze di genere, l'autore si chiede se e in quale misura persistano, oggi, tali stereotipi. A tal fine, viene analizzata, e, talvolta, smascherata, la logica subliminale sottesa alla pubblicità, ai giocattoli, ai cartoni animati: dai classici ai più recenti, e, finanche, ai libri di testo scolastici. In molti casi, emerge un vero e proprio processo di induzione e allenamento dei più piccoli ad assumere, nel futuro, i tradizionali ruoli stereotipati. Seppure non trascurabili sono i danni causati ai bambini, castrati soprattutto nell'emotività, il bilancio risulta nettamente a sfavore delle bambine. Queste, infatti, vengono avviate a una precoce iperfemminilizzazione e persuase che la seduttività sia l'unico potere di cui dispongano. In chiave pedagogica, questo fenomeno viene colto anche come conseguenza dell'assenza o carenza della figura paterna, in quanto luogo di promozione della differenza. Pertanto, l'apertura progettuale si dà in una inedita paternità tenera. La riflessione si conclude nel segno della speranza, testimoniata da alcune principesse pop-moderne che, emancipandosi, si sono salvate da sole.

Introduction: Exposure to conditioned cues is a common trigger of relapse in addiction. It has been suggested that such cues can activate motivationally relevant neurocircuitry in individuals with substance use disorders even without being consciously perceived. We aimed to see if this could be replicated in a sample with severe amphetamine use disorder and a control group of healthy subjects. Methods: We used fMRI to test the hypothesis that individuals with amphetamine use disorder, but not healthy controls, exhibit a specific neural reactivity to subliminally presented pictures related to amphetamine use. Twenty-four amphetamine users and 25 healthy controls were recruited and left data of sufficient quality to be included in the final analysis. All subjects were exposed to drug-related and neutral pictures of short duration (13.3 ms), followed by a backward visual mask image. The contrast of interest was drug versus neutral subliminal pictures. Results: There were no statistically significant differences in BOLD signal between the drug and neutral cues, neither in the limbic regions of primary interest nor in exploratory whole-brain analyses. The same results were found both in amphetamine users and controls. Discussion/Conclusion: We found no evidence of neural reactivity to subliminally presented drug cues in this sample of subjects with severe amphetamine dependence. These results are discussed in relation to the earlier literature, and the evidence for subliminal drug cue reactivity in substance use disorders is questioned.

In two experiments, we tested whether fearful facial expressions capture attention in an awareness-independent fashion. In Experiment 1, participants searched for a visible neutral face presented at one of two positions. Prior to the target, a backward-masked and, thus, invisible emotional (fearful/disgusted) or neutral face was presented as a cue, either at target position or away from the target position. If negative emotional faces capture attention in a stimulus-driven way, we would have expected a cueing effect: better performance where fearful or disgusted facial cues were presented at target position than away from the target. However, no evidence of capture of attention was found, neither in behavior (response times or error rates), nor in event-related lateralizations (N2pc). In Experiment 2, we went one step further and used fearful faces as visible targets, too. Thereby, we sought to boost awareness-independent capture of attention by fearful faces. However, still, we found no significant attention-capture effect. Our results show that fearful facial expressions do not capture attention in an awareness-independent way. Results are discussed in light of existing theories.

AbstractIn three experiments, we investigated the effect of unconscious social priming on human behavior in a choice reaction time task. Photographs of a basketball player passing a ball to the left/right were used as target stimuli. Participants had to respond to the pass direction either by a whole-body (complex) response or a button-press (simple) response. Visually masked stimuli, showing both a task-relevant cue (pass direction) and a task-irrelevant, social cue (gaze direction), were used as primes. Subliminal social priming was found for kinematic (center of pressure) and chronometric measures (response times): gaze direction in the primes affected responses to the pass direction in the targets. The social priming effect diminished when gaze information was unhelpful or even detrimental to the task. Social priming of a complex behavior does not require awareness or intentionality, indicating automatic processing. Nevertheless, it can be controlled by top-down, strategic processes.

Abstract Background Different types of sound cues have been used to adapt the human gait rhythm. We investigated whether young healthy volunteers followed subliminal metronome rhythm changes during gait. Methods Twenty-two healthy adults walked at constant speed on a treadmill following a metronome sound cue (period 566 msec). The metronome rhythm was then either increased or decreased, without informing the subjects, at 1 msec increments or decrements to reach, respectively, a low (596 msec) or a high frequency (536 msec) plateaus. After 30 steps at one of these isochronous conditions, the rhythm returned to the original period with decrements or increments of 1 msec. Motion data were recorded with an optical measurement system to determine footfall. The relative phase between sound cue (stimulus) and foot contact (response) were compared. Results Gait was entrained to the rhythmic auditory stimulus and subjects subconsciously adapted the step time and length to maintain treadmill speed, while following the rhythm changes. In most cases there was a lead error: the foot contact occurred before the sound cue. The mean error or the absolute mean relative phase increased during the isochronous high (536 msec) or low frequencies (596 msec). Conclusion These results showed that the gait period is strongly “entrained” with the first metronome rhythm while subjects still followed metronome changes with larger error. This suggests two processes: one slow-adapting, supraspinal oscillator with persistence that predicts the foot contact to occur ahead of the stimulus, and a second fast process linked to sensory inputs that adapts to the mismatch between peripheral sensory input (foot contact) and supraspinal sensory input (auditory rhythm).

Abstract Background Childhood maltreatment is a serious public health concern. The association between child maltreatment, adverse behaviors, mental health outcomes, and alterations to brain function and structure have begun to be characterized. Less is known about the specific associations of maltreatment subtypes with cue-response to evocative cues and the moderating effects of confounding mental health/behavioral variables. Methods Fifty-four emerging adult women (aged 18–24) completed assessments for behaviors, mental health, and childhood maltreatment. They participated in a fMRI task featuring passive viewing of evocative (33 ms) cues presented by “backward masking” to prevent conscious processing. Correlations of abuse/neglect scores, behavioral/mental health factors, and brain function were assessed. Follow-up analyses investigated the moderating effects of behavioral/mental health factors on maltreatment and brain relationships. Results Greater frequency of childhood abuse and neglect were correlated with higher scores of impulsivity, depressive symptoms, and anxious attachment. Childhood abuse was positively associated with increased medial orbitofrontal cortical (mOFC) response to aversive (vs. neutral) cues. Among the behavioral/mental health variables, only impulsivity appeared to have a moderating effect on the relationship between childhood abuse and brain response to aversive cues. Conclusions The link between childhood abuse and a heightened mOFC response to “unseen” aversive stimuli, moderated by impulsivity, adds to the growing literature on the impact of prior adversity on brain function. These findings offer further understanding for the way in which childhood maltreatment affects the brain processing of negative stimuli, helping to explain the well-documented link between childhood maltreatment and a variety of adverse outcomes in adulthood.

Abstract Tourette syndrome is characterized by ‘unvoluntary’ tics, which are compulsive, yet often temporarily suppressible. The inferior frontal gyrus is implicated in motor control, including inhibition of pre-potent actions through influences on downstream subcortical and motor regions. Although tic suppression in Tourette syndrome also engages the inferior frontal gyrus, it is unclear whether such prefrontal control of action is also dysfunctional: Tic suppression studies do not permit comparison with control groups, and neuroimaging studies of motor inhibition can be confounded by the concurrent expression or suppression of tics. Here, patients with Tourette syndrome were directly compared to control participants when performing an intentional inhibition task during functional MRI. Tic expression was recorded throughout for removal from statistical models. Participants were instructed to make a button press in response to Go cues, withhold responses to NoGo cues, and decide whether to press or withhold to ‘Choose’ cues. Overall performance was similar between groups, for both intentional inhibition rates (% Choose-Go) and reactive NoGo inhibition commission errors. A subliminal face prime elicited no additional effects on intentional or reactive inhibition. Across participants, the task activated prefrontal and motor cortices and subcortical nuclei, including pre-supplementary motor area, inferior frontal gyrus, insula, caudate nucleus, thalamus and primary motor cortex. In Tourette syndrome, activity was elevated in the inferior frontal gyrus, insula and basal ganglia, most notably within the right inferior frontal gyrus during voluntary action and inhibition (Choose-Go and Choose-NoGo), and reactive inhibition (NoGo-correct). Anatomically, the locus of this inferior frontal gyrus hyperactivation during control of voluntary action matched that previously reported for tic suppression. In Tourette syndrome, activity within the caudate nucleus was also enhanced during both intentional (Choose-NoGo) and reactive (NoGo-correct) inhibition. Strikingly, despite the absence of overt motor behaviour, primary motor cortex activity increased in patients with Tourette syndrome but decreased in controls during both reactive and intentional inhibition. Additionally, severity of premonitory sensations scaled with functional connectivity of the pre-supplementary motor area to the caudate nucleus, globus pallidus and thalamus when choosing to respond (Choose-Go). Together, these results suggest that patients with Tourette syndrome use equivalent prefrontal mechanisms to suppress tics and withhold non-tic actions, but require greater inferior frontal gyrus engagement than controls to overcome motor drive from hyperactive downstream regions, notably primary motor cortex. Moreover, premonitory sensations may cue midline motor regions to generate tics through interactions with the basal ganglia.

Consumers often use a product's visual design as a mental shortcut to judge its unobservable attributes. Mental associations between visual design and unobservable attributes aid consumers in their judgments, and hypothetically reduce consumers' mental load. This paper describes a study that shows the possibility of quickly creating an association in subjects' minds between a holistic visual cue of a product—its body shape—and the general idea of “environmentally friendly” versus “not environmentally friendly,” a typically unobservable attribute. In this study, products' actual environmental friendliness was not measured. Subjects completed an association-building task, in which they developed mental associations between a product's visual cues and its “environmental friendliness” rating, an arbitrarily predetermined rating the authors supplied. The body shape was successfully used as a cue to subliminally communicate to subjects the product's “environmental friendliness.” As a comparison, an individual feature of the product was also used to cue; however, that was unsuccessful. An eye-tracking device was used to identify where subjects were focusing their eyes and for how long. In both the association-building task and a testing task that followed, subjects spent a greater percentage of time looking at the product's cued areas (the body and the selected feature). But during the testing task, subjects spent an even higher percentage of their time looking at the cued areas than they did during the association-building task. This indicates that mental associations, or cues, work to distribute mental load more efficiently.

BackgroundTo date, various treatments for cystoid macular edema (CME) in retinitis pigmentosa (RP) have been reported. We performed a systematic review and meta-analysis to evaluate the efficacy and safety of current treatments for RP-CME.MethodsPubMed, Embase and the Cochrane library were searched from inception to August 2021. ClinicalTrials.gov, WHO ICTRP and ISRCTN were also searched for relevant studies. Only studies published in English were included. The RoB 2 tool was used to evaluate the risk of bias of randomized controlled trials (RCTs), and the MINORS scale was used to assess the methodological quality of non-RCTs. Review manager (Revman) was used to pool the data. The primary outcomes included the change of central macular thickness (CMT) and best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA) from baseline. The secondary outcomes included fluorescein angiography (FA) leakage, rebound of CME and adverse effects.ResultsThirty-two studies were included in the current systematic review and 7 studies were used for meta-analysis. Treatments for RP-CME included oral and topical carbonic anhydrase inhibitors (CAIs), systematic and local steroids, anti-VEGF therapy, NSAIDS, grid LASER photocoagulation, subliminal micropulse LASER, vitrectomy, lutein supplement and oral minocycline. CAIs and local steroids were proved to be effective in reducing CMT. The effects of anti-VEGF reagents varied among studies. Regarding other treatments, only one study for each method fitted the inclusion criteria, so the evidence was very limited.ConclusionTopical CAIs, oral CAIs and local steroids are effective in treating RP-CME. However, due to the overall inferior design and small patient number of the included studies, the quality of evidence was poor. Systematic steroids, LASER, NSAIDS and vitrectomy may also be effective, nevertheless, considering the limited number of studies, no conclusion could be drawn regarding these treatments. More well-designed and conducted studies are needed in this field.Systematic Review Registrationhttps://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/display_record.php?ID=CRD42021273979, identifier CRD42021273979.

On the morning of Thursday, 4 May 2006, the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held an open hearing entitled “Terrorist Use of the Internet.” The Intelligence committee meeting was scheduled to take place in Room 1302 of the Longworth Office Building, a Depression-era structure with a neoclassical façade. Because of a dysfunctional elevator, some of the congressional representatives were late to the meeting. During the testimony about the newest political applications for cutting-edge digital technology, the microphones periodically malfunctioned, and witnesses complained of “technical problems” several times. By the end of the day it seemed that what was to be remembered about the hearing was the shocking revelation that terrorists were using videogames to recruit young jihadists. The Associated Press wrote a short, restrained article about the hearing that only mentioned “computer games and recruitment videos” in passing. Eager to have their version of the news item picked up, Reuters made videogames the focus of their coverage with a headline that announced, “Islamists Using US Videogames in Youth Appeal.” Like a game of telephone, as the Reuters videogame story was quickly re-run by several Internet news services, each iteration of the title seemed less true to the exact language of the original. One Internet news service changed the headline to “Islamic militants recruit using U.S. video games.” Fox News re-titled the story again to emphasise that this alert about technological manipulation was coming from recognised specialists in the anti-terrorism surveillance field: “Experts: Islamic Militants Customizing Violent Video Games.” As the story circulated, the body of the article remained largely unchanged, in which the Reuters reporter described the digital materials from Islamic extremists that were shown at the congressional hearing. During the segment that apparently most captured the attention of the wire service reporters, eerie music played as an English-speaking narrator condemned the “infidel” and declared that he had “put a jihad” on them, as aerial shots moved over 3D computer-generated images of flaming oil facilities and mosques covered with geometric designs. Suddenly, this menacing voice-over was interrupted by an explosion, as a virtual rocket was launched into a simulated military helicopter. The Reuters reporter shared this dystopian vision from cyberspace with Western audiences by quoting directly from the chilling commentary and describing a dissonant montage of images and remixed sound. “I was just a boy when the infidels came to my village in Blackhawk helicopters,” a narrator’s voice said as the screen flashed between images of street-level gunfights, explosions and helicopter assaults. Then came a recording of President George W. Bush’s September 16, 2001, statement: “This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.” It was edited to repeat the word “crusade,” which Muslims often define as an attack on Islam by Christianity. According to the news reports, the key piece of evidence before Congress seemed to be a film by “SonicJihad” of recorded videogame play, which – according to the experts – was widely distributed online. Much of the clip takes place from the point of view of a first-person shooter, seen as if through the eyes of an armed insurgent, but the viewer also periodically sees third-person action in which the player appears as a running figure wearing a red-and-white checked keffiyeh, who dashes toward the screen with a rocket launcher balanced on his shoulder. Significantly, another of the player’s hand-held weapons is a detonator that triggers remote blasts. As jaunty music plays, helicopters, tanks, and armoured vehicles burst into smoke and flame. Finally, at the triumphant ending of the video, a green and white flag bearing a crescent is hoisted aloft into the sky to signify victory by Islamic forces. To explain the existence of this digital alternative history in which jihadists could be conquerors, the Reuters story described the deviousness of the country’s terrorist opponents, who were now apparently modifying popular videogames through their wizardry and inserting anti-American, pro-insurgency content into U.S.-made consumer technology. One of the latest video games modified by militants is the popular “Battlefield 2” from leading video game publisher, Electronic Arts Inc of Redwood City, California. Jeff Brown, a spokesman for Electronic Arts, said enthusiasts often write software modifications, known as “mods,” to video games. “Millions of people create mods on games around the world,” he said. “We have absolutely no control over them. It’s like drawing a mustache on a picture.” Although the Electronic Arts executive dismissed the activities of modders as a “mustache on a picture” that could only be considered little more than childish vandalism of their off-the-shelf corporate product, others saw a more serious form of criminality at work. Testifying experts and the legislators listening on the committee used the video to call for greater Internet surveillance efforts and electronic counter-measures. Within twenty-four hours of the sensationalistic news breaking, however, a group of Battlefield 2 fans was crowing about the idiocy of reporters. The game play footage wasn’t from a high-tech modification of the software by Islamic extremists; it had been posted on a Planet Battlefield forum the previous December of 2005 by a game fan who had cut together regular game play with a Bush remix and a parody snippet of the soundtrack from the 2004 hit comedy film Team America. The voice describing the Black Hawk helicopters was the voice of Trey Parker of South Park cartoon fame, and – much to Parker’s amusement – even the mention of “goats screaming” did not clue spectators in to the fact of a comic source. Ironically, the moment in the movie from which the sound clip is excerpted is one about intelligence gathering. As an agent of Team America, a fictional elite U.S. commando squad, the hero of the film’s all-puppet cast, Gary Johnston, is impersonating a jihadist radical inside a hostile Egyptian tavern that is modelled on the cantina scene from Star Wars. Additional laughs come from the fact that agent Johnston is accepted by the menacing terrorist cell as “Hakmed,” despite the fact that he utters a series of improbable clichés made up of incoherent stereotypes about life in the Middle East while dressed up in a disguise made up of shoe polish and a turban from a bathroom towel. The man behind the “SonicJihad” pseudonym turned out to be a twenty-five-year-old hospital administrator named Samir, and what reporters and representatives saw was nothing more exotic than game play from an add-on expansion pack of Battlefield 2, which – like other versions of the game – allows first-person shooter play from the position of the opponent as a standard feature. While SonicJihad initially joined his fellow gamers in ridiculing the mainstream media, he also expressed astonishment and outrage about a larger politics of reception. In one interview he argued that the media illiteracy of Reuters potentially enabled a whole series of category errors, in which harmless gamers could be demonised as terrorists. It wasn’t intended for the purpose what it was portrayed to be by the media. So no I don’t regret making a funny video . . . why should I? The only thing I regret is thinking that news from Reuters was objective and always right. The least they could do is some online research before publishing this. If they label me al-Qaeda just for making this silly video, that makes you think, what is this al-Qaeda? And is everything al-Qaeda? Although Sonic Jihad dismissed his own work as “silly” or “funny,” he expected considerably more from a credible news agency like Reuters: “objective” reporting, “online research,” and fact-checking before “publishing.” Within the week, almost all of the salient details in the Reuters story were revealed to be incorrect. SonicJihad’s film was not made by terrorists or for terrorists: it was not created by “Islamic militants” for “Muslim youths.” The videogame it depicted had not been modified by a “tech-savvy militant” with advanced programming skills. Of course, what is most extraordinary about this story isn’t just that Reuters merely got its facts wrong; it is that a self-identified “parody” video was shown to the august House Intelligence Committee by a team of well-paid “experts” from the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a major contractor with the federal government, as key evidence of terrorist recruitment techniques and abuse of digital networks. Moreover, this story of media illiteracy unfolded in the context of a fundamental Constitutional debate about domestic surveillance via communications technology and the further regulation of digital content by lawmakers. Furthermore, the transcripts of the actual hearing showed that much more than simple gullibility or technological ignorance was in play. Based on their exchanges in the public record, elected representatives and government experts appear to be keenly aware that the digital discourses of an emerging information culture might be challenging their authority and that of the longstanding institutions of knowledge and power with which they are affiliated. These hearings can be seen as representative of a larger historical moment in which emphatic declarations about prohibiting specific practices in digital culture have come to occupy a prominent place at the podium, news desk, or official Web portal. This environment of cultural reaction can be used to explain why policy makers’ reaction to terrorists’ use of networked communication and digital media actually tells us more about our own American ideologies about technology and rhetoric in a contemporary information environment. When the experts come forward at the Sonic Jihad hearing to “walk us through the media and some of the products,” they present digital artefacts of an information economy that mirrors many of the features of our own consumption of objects of electronic discourse, which seem dangerously easy to copy and distribute and thus also create confusion about their intended meanings, audiences, and purposes. From this one hearing we can see how the reception of many new digital genres plays out in the public sphere of legislative discourse. Web pages, videogames, and Weblogs are mentioned specifically in the transcript. The main architecture of the witnesses’ presentation to the committee is organised according to the rhetorical conventions of a PowerPoint presentation. Moreover, the arguments made by expert witnesses about the relationship of orality to literacy or of public to private communications in new media are highly relevant to how we might understand other important digital genres, such as electronic mail or text messaging. The hearing also invites consideration of privacy, intellectual property, and digital “rights,” because moral values about freedom and ownership are alluded to by many of the elected representatives present, albeit often through the looking glass of user behaviours imagined as radically Other. For example, terrorists are described as “modders” and “hackers” who subvert those who properly create, own, legitimate, and regulate intellectual property. To explain embarrassing leaks of infinitely replicable digital files, witness Ron Roughead says, “We’re not even sure that they don’t even hack into the kinds of spaces that hold photographs in order to get pictures that our forces have taken.” Another witness, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and International Affairs, Peter Rodman claims that “any video game that comes out, as soon as the code is released, they will modify it and change the game for their needs.” Thus, the implication of these witnesses’ testimony is that the release of code into the public domain can contribute to political subversion, much as covert intrusion into computer networks by stealthy hackers can. However, the witnesses from the Pentagon and from the government contractor SAIC often present a contradictory image of the supposed terrorists in the hearing transcripts. Sometimes the enemy is depicted as an organisation of technological masterminds, capable of manipulating the computer code of unwitting Americans and snatching their rightful intellectual property away; sometimes those from the opposing forces are depicted as pre-modern and even sub-literate political innocents. In contrast, the congressional representatives seem to focus on similarities when comparing the work of “terrorists” to the everyday digital practices of their constituents and even of themselves. According to the transcripts of this open hearing, legislators on both sides of the aisle express anxiety about domestic patterns of Internet reception. Even the legislators’ own Web pages are potentially disruptive electronic artefacts, particularly when the demands of digital labour interfere with their duties as lawmakers. Although the subject of the hearing is ostensibly terrorist Websites, Representative Anna Eshoo (D-California) bemoans the difficulty of maintaining her own official congressional site. As she observes, “So we are – as members, I think we’re very sensitive about what’s on our Website, and if I retained what I had on my Website three years ago, I’d be out of business. So we know that they have to be renewed. They go up, they go down, they’re rebuilt, they’re – you know, the message is targeted to the future.” In their questions, lawmakers identify Weblogs (blogs) as a particular area of concern as a destabilising alternative to authoritative print sources of information from established institutions. Representative Alcee Hastings (D-Florida) compares the polluting power of insurgent bloggers to that of influential online muckrakers from the American political Right. Hastings complains of “garbage on our regular mainstream news that comes from blog sites.” Representative Heather Wilson (R-New Mexico) attempts to project a media-savvy persona by bringing up the “phenomenon of blogging” in conjunction with her questions about jihadist Websites in which she notes how Internet traffic can be magnified by cooperative ventures among groups of ideologically like-minded content-providers: “These Websites, and particularly the most active ones, are they cross-linked? And do they have kind of hot links to your other favorite sites on them?” At one point Representative Wilson asks witness Rodman if he knows “of your 100 hottest sites where the Webmasters are educated? What nationality they are? Where they’re getting their money from?” In her questions, Wilson implicitly acknowledges that Web work reflects influences from pedagogical communities, economic networks of the exchange of capital, and even potentially the specific ideologies of nation-states. It is perhaps indicative of the government contractors’ anachronistic worldview that the witness is unable to answer Wilson’s question. He explains that his agency focuses on the physical location of the server or ISP rather than the social backgrounds of the individuals who might be manufacturing objectionable digital texts. The premise behind the contractors’ working method – surveilling the technical apparatus not the social network – may be related to other beliefs expressed by government witnesses, such as the supposition that jihadist Websites are collectively produced and spontaneously emerge from the indigenous, traditional, tribal culture, instead of assuming that Iraqi insurgents have analogous beliefs, practices, and technological awareness to those in first-world countries. The residual subtexts in the witnesses’ conjectures about competing cultures of orality and literacy may tell us something about a reactionary rhetoric around videogames and digital culture more generally. According to the experts before Congress, the Middle Eastern audience for these videogames and Websites is limited by its membership in a pre-literate society that is only capable of abortive cultural production without access to knowledge that is archived in printed codices. Sometimes the witnesses before Congress seem to be unintentionally channelling the ideas of the late literacy theorist Walter Ong about the “secondary orality” associated with talky electronic media such as television, radio, audio recording, or telephone communication. Later followers of Ong extend this concept of secondary orality to hypertext, hypermedia, e-mail, and blogs, because they similarly share features of both speech and written discourse. Although Ong’s disciples celebrate this vibrant reconnection to a mythic, communal past of what Kathleen Welch calls “electric rhetoric,” the defence industry consultants express their profound state of alarm at the potentially dangerous and subversive character of this hybrid form of communication. The concept of an “oral tradition” is first introduced by the expert witnesses in the context of modern marketing and product distribution: “The Internet is used for a variety of things – command and control,” one witness states. “One of the things that’s missed frequently is how and – how effective the adversary is at using the Internet to distribute product. They’re using that distribution network as a modern form of oral tradition, if you will.” Thus, although the Internet can be deployed for hierarchical “command and control” activities, it also functions as a highly efficient peer-to-peer distributed network for disseminating the commodity of information. Throughout the hearings, the witnesses imply that unregulated lateral communication among social actors who are not authorised to speak for nation-states or to produce legitimated expert discourses is potentially destabilising to political order. Witness Eric Michael describes the “oral tradition” and the conventions of communal life in the Middle East to emphasise the primacy of speech in the collective discursive practices of this alien population: “I’d like to point your attention to the media types and the fact that the oral tradition is listed as most important. The other media listed support that. And the significance of the oral tradition is more than just – it’s the medium by which, once it comes off the Internet, it is transferred.” The experts go on to claim that this “oral tradition” can contaminate other media because it functions as “rumor,” the traditional bane of the stately discourse of military leaders since the classical era. The oral tradition now also has an aspect of rumor. A[n] event takes place. There is an explosion in a city. Rumor is that the United States Air Force dropped a bomb and is doing indiscriminate killing. This ends up being discussed on the street. It ends up showing up in a Friday sermon in a mosque or in another religious institution. It then gets recycled into written materials. Media picks up the story and broadcasts it, at which point it’s now a fact. In this particular case that we were telling you about, it showed up on a network television, and their propaganda continues to go back to this false initial report on network television and continue to reiterate that it’s a fact, even though the United States government has proven that it was not a fact, even though the network has since recanted the broadcast. In this example, many-to-many discussion on the “street” is formalised into a one-to many “sermon” and then further stylised using technology in a one-to-many broadcast on “network television” in which “propaganda” that is “false” can no longer be disputed. This “oral tradition” is like digital media, because elements of discourse can be infinitely copied or “recycled,” and it is designed to “reiterate” content. In this hearing, the word “rhetoric” is associated with destructive counter-cultural forces by the witnesses who reiterate cultural truisms dating back to Plato and the Gorgias. For example, witness Eric Michael initially presents “rhetoric” as the use of culturally specific and hence untranslatable figures of speech, but he quickly moves to an outright castigation of the entire communicative mode. “Rhetoric,” he tells us, is designed to “distort the truth,” because it is a “selective” assembly or a “distortion.” Rhetoric is also at odds with reason, because it appeals to “emotion” and a romanticised Weltanschauung oriented around discourses of “struggle.” The film by SonicJihad is chosen as the final clip by the witnesses before Congress, because it allegedly combines many different types of emotional appeal, and thus it conveniently ties together all of the themes that the witnesses present to the legislators about unreliable oral or rhetorical sources in the Middle East: And there you see how all these products are linked together. And you can see where the games are set to psychologically condition you to go kill coalition forces. You can see how they use humor. You can see how the entire campaign is carefully crafted to first evoke an emotion and then to evoke a response and to direct that response in the direction that they want. Jihadist digital products, especially videogames, are effective means of manipulation, the witnesses argue, because they employ multiple channels of persuasion and carefully sequenced and integrated subliminal messages. To understand the larger cultural conversation of the hearing, it is important to keep in mind that the related argument that “games” can “psychologically condition” players to be predisposed to violence is one that was important in other congressional hearings of the period, as well one that played a role in bills and resolutions that were passed by the full body of the legislative branch. In the witness’s testimony an appeal to anti-game sympathies at home is combined with a critique of a closed anti-democratic system abroad in which the circuits of rhetorical production and their composite metonymic chains are described as those that command specific, unvarying, robotic responses. This sharp criticism of the artful use of a presentation style that is “crafted” is ironic, given that the witnesses’ “compilation” of jihadist digital material is staged in the form of a carefully structured PowerPoint presentation, one that is paced to a well-rehearsed rhythm of “slide, please” or “next slide” in the transcript. The transcript also reveals that the members of the House Intelligence Committee were not the original audience for the witnesses’ PowerPoint presentation. Rather, when it was first created by SAIC, this “expert” presentation was designed for training purposes for the troops on the ground, who would be facing the challenges of deployment in hostile terrain. According to the witnesses, having the slide show showcased before Congress was something of an afterthought. Nonetheless, Congressman Tiahrt (R-KN) is so impressed with the rhetorical mastery of the consultants that he tries to appropriate it. As Tiarht puts it, “I’d like to get a copy of that slide sometime.” From the hearing we also learn that the terrorists’ Websites are threatening precisely because they manifest a polymorphously perverse geometry of expansion. For example, one SAIC witness before the House Committee compares the replication and elaboration of digital material online to a “spiderweb.” Like Representative Eshoo’s site, he also notes that the terrorists’ sites go “up” and “down,” but the consultant is left to speculate about whether or not there is any “central coordination” to serve as an organising principle and to explain the persistence and consistency of messages despite the apparent lack of a single authorial ethos to offer a stable, humanised, point of reference. In the hearing, the oft-cited solution to the problem created by the hybridity and iterability of digital rhetoric appears to be “public diplomacy.” Both consultants and lawmakers seem to agree that the damaging messages of the insurgents must be countered with U.S. sanctioned information, and thus the phrase “public diplomacy” appears in the hearing seven times. However, witness Roughhead complains that the protean “oral tradition” and what Henry Jenkins has called the “transmedia” character of digital culture, which often crosses several platforms of traditional print, projection, or broadcast media, stymies their best rhetorical efforts: “I think the point that we’ve tried to make in the briefing is that wherever there’s Internet availability at all, they can then download these – these programs and put them onto compact discs, DVDs, or post them into posters, and provide them to a greater range of people in the oral tradition that they’ve grown up in. And so they only need a few Internet sites in order to distribute and disseminate the message.” Of course, to maintain their share of the government market, the Science Applications International Corporation also employs practices of publicity and promotion through the Internet and digital media. They use HTML Web pages for these purposes, as well as PowerPoint presentations and online video. The rhetoric of the Website of SAIC emphasises their motto “From Science to Solutions.” After a short Flash film about how SAIC scientists and engineers solve “complex technical problems,” the visitor is taken to the home page of the firm that re-emphasises their central message about expertise. The maps, uniforms, and specialised tools and equipment that are depicted in these opening Web pages reinforce an ethos of professional specialisation that is able to respond to multiple threats posed by the “global war on terror.” By 26 June 2006, the incident finally was being described as a “Pentagon Snafu” by ABC News. From the opening of reporter Jake Tapper’s investigative Webcast, established government institutions were put on the spot: “So, how much does the Pentagon know about videogames? Well, when it came to a recent appearance before Congress, apparently not enough.” Indeed, the very language about “experts” that was highlighted in the earlier coverage is repeated by Tapper in mockery, with the significant exception of “independent expert” Ian Bogost of the Georgia Institute of Technology. If the Pentagon and SAIC deride the legitimacy of rhetoric as a cultural practice, Bogost occupies himself with its defence. In his recent book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, Bogost draws upon the authority of the “2,500 year history of rhetoric” to argue that videogames represent a significant development in that cultural narrative. Given that Bogost and his Watercooler Games Weblog co-editor Gonzalo Frasca were actively involved in the detective work that exposed the depth of professional incompetence involved in the government’s line-up of witnesses, it is appropriate that Bogost is given the final words in the ABC exposé. As Bogost says, “We should be deeply bothered by this. We should really be questioning the kind of advice that Congress is getting.” Bogost may be right that Congress received terrible counsel on that day, but a close reading of the transcript reveals that elected officials were much more than passive listeners: in fact they were lively participants in a cultural conversation about regulating digital media. After looking at the actual language of these exchanges, it seems that the persuasiveness of the misinformation from the Pentagon and SAIC had as much to do with lawmakers’ preconceived anxieties about practices of computer-mediated communication close to home as it did with the contradictory stereotypes that were presented to them about Internet practices abroad. In other words, lawmakers found themselves looking into a fun house mirror that distorted what should have been familiar artefacts of American popular culture because it was precisely what they wanted to see. 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Tapper, Jake, and Audery Taylor. “Terrorist Video Game or Pentagon Snafu?” ABC News Nightline 21 June 2006. 30 June 2006 http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/Technology/story?id=2105128&page=1>. U.S. Congressional Record. Panel I of the Hearing of the House Select Intelligence Committee, Subject: “Terrorist Use of the Internet for Communications.” Federal News Service. 4 May 2006. Welch, Kathleen E. Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and the New Literacy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Losh, Elizabeth. "Artificial Intelligence: Media Illiteracy and the SonicJihad Debacle in Congress." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/08-losh.php>. APA Style Losh, E. (Oct. 2007) "Artificial Intelligence: Media Illiteracy and the SonicJihad Debacle in Congress," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/08-losh.php>.