Short-Term Memory Capacity Predicts Willingness to Expend Cognitive Effort for Reward.

We must often decide whether the effort required for a task is worth the reward. Past rodent work suggests that willingness to deploy cognitive effort can be driven by individual differences in perceived reward value, depression, or chronic stress. However, many factors driving cognitive effort deployment-such as short-term memory ability-cannot easily be captured in rodents. Furthermore, we do not fully understand how individual differences in short-term memory ability, depression, chronic stress, and reward anticipation impact cognitive effort deployment for reward. Here, we examined whether these factors predict cognitive effort deployment for higher reward in an online visual short-term memory task. Undergraduate participants were grouped into high and low effort groups (n HighEffort = 348, n LowEffort = 81; n Female = 332, n Male = 92, M Age = 20.37, Range Age = 16-42) based on decisions in this task. After completing a monetary incentive task to measure reward anticipation, participants completed short-term memory task trials where they could choose to encode either fewer (low effort/reward) or more (high effort/reward) squares before reporting whether or not the color of a target square matched the square previously in that location. We found that only greater short-term memory ability predicted whether participants chose a much higher proportion of high versus low effort trials. Drift diffusion modeling showed that high effort group participants were more biased than low effort group participants toward selecting high effort trials. Our findings highlight the role of individual differences in cognitive effort ability in explaining cognitive effort deployment choices.

Characterizing affiliative touch in humans and its role in advancing haptic design.

An emerging view in cognitive neuroscience holds that the extraction of emotional relevance from sensory experience extends beyond the centralized appraisal of sensation in associative brain regions, including frontal and medial-temporal cortices. This view holds that sensory information can be emotionally valenced from the point of contact with the world. This view is supported by recent research characterizing the human affiliative touch system, which carries signals of soft, stroking touch to the central nervous system and is mediated by dedicated C-tactile afferent receptors. This basic scientific research on the human affiliative touch system is informed by, and informs, technology design for communicating and regulating emotion through touch. Here, we review recent research on the basic biology and cognitive neuroscience of affiliative touch, its regulatory effects across the lifespan, and the factors that modulate it. We further review recent work on the design of haptic technologies, devices that stimulate the affiliative touch system, such as wearable technologies that apply the sensation of soft stroking or other skin-to-skin contact, to promote physiological regulation. We then point to future directions in interdisciplinary research aimed at both furthering scientific understanding and application of haptic technology for health and wellbeing.

Factors perpetuating functional cognitive symptoms after mild traumatic brain injury.

INTRODUCTION: Self-reported memory difficulties (forgetting familiar names, misplacing objects) often persist long after a mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), despite normal neuropsychological test performance. This clinical presentation may be a manifestation of a functional cognitive disorder (FCD). Several mechanisms underlying FCD have been proposed, including metacognitive impairment, memory perfectionism, and misdirected attention, as well as depression or anxiety-related explanations. This study aims to explore these candidate perpetuating factors in mTBI, to advance our understanding of why memory symptoms frequently persist following mTBI. METHODS: A cross-sectional study of 67 adults (n = 39 with mTBI mean = 25 months ago and n = 28 healthy controls). Participants completed standardized questionnaires (including the Functional Memory Disorder Inventory), a metacognitive task (to quantify discrepancies between their trial-by-trial accuracy and confidence), and a brief neuropsychological test battery. We assessed candidate mechanisms in two ways: (1) between-groups, comparing participants with mTBI to healthy controls, and (2) within-group, examining their associations with functional memory symptom severity (FMDI) in the mTBI group. RESULTS: Participants with mTBI performed similarly to controls on objective measures of memory ability but reported experiencing much more frequent memory lapses in daily life. Contrary to expectations, metacognitive efficiency did not differentiate the mTBI and control groups and was not associated with functional memory symptoms. Memory perfectionism was strongly associated with greater functional memory symptoms among participants with mTBI but did not differ between groups when accounting for age. Depression and checking behaviors produced consistent results across between-groups and within-group analyses: these factors were greater in the mTBI group compared to the control group and were associated with greater functional memory symptoms within the mTBI group. CONCLUSIONS: This study highlights promising (e.g., depression, checking behaviors) and unlikely (e.g., metacognitive impairment) mechanisms underlying functional memory symptoms after mTBI, to guide future research and treatment.

Gender Impacts the Relationship between Mood Disorder Symptoms and Effortful Avoidance Performance.

We must often decide how much effort to exert or withhold to avoid undesirable outcomes or obtain rewards. In depression and anxiety, levels of avoidance can be excessive and reward-seeking may be reduced. Yet outstanding questions remain about the links between motivated action/inhibition and anxiety and depression levels, and whether they differ between men and women. Here, we examined the relationship between anxiety and depression scores, and performance on effortful active and inhibitory avoidance (Study 1) and reward seeking (Study 2) in humans. Undergraduates and paid online workers ([Formula: see text] = 545, [Formula: see text] = 310; [Formula: see text] = 368, [Formula: see text] = 450, [Formula: see text] = 22.58, [Formula: see text] = 17-62) were assessed on the Beck Depression Inventory II (BDI) and the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI) and performed an instructed online avoidance or reward-seeking task. Participants had to make multiple presses on active trials and withhold presses on inhibitory trials to avoid an unpleasant sound (Study 1) or obtain points toward a monetary reward (Study 2). Overall, men deployed more effort than women in both avoidance and reward-seeking, and anxiety scores were negatively associated with active reward-seeking performance based on sensitivity scores. Gender interacted with anxiety scores and inhibitory avoidance performance, such that women with higher anxiety showed worse avoidance performance. Our results illuminate effects of gender in the relationship between anxiety and depression levels and the motivation to actively and effortfully respond to obtain positive and avoid negative outcomes.

Decomposing Neural Representational Patterns of Discriminatory and Hedonic Information during Somatosensory Stimulation.

The ability to interrogate specific representations in the brain, determining how, and where, difference sources of information are instantiated can provide invaluable insight into neural functioning. Pattern component modeling (PCM) is a recent analytic technique for human neuroimaging that allows the decomposition of representational patterns in brain into contributing subcomponents. In the current study, we present a novel PCM variant that tracks the contribution of prespecified representational patterns to brain representation across areas, thus allowing hypothesis-guided employment of the technique. We apply this technique to investigate the contributions of hedonic and nonhedonic information to the neural representation of tactile experience. We applied aversive pressure (AP) and appetitive brush (AB) to stimulate distinct peripheral nerve pathways for tactile information (C-/CT-fibers, respectively) while patients underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning. We performed representational similarity analyses (RSAs) with pattern component modeling to dissociate how discriminatory versus hedonic tactile information contributes to population code representations in the human brain. Results demonstrated that information about appetitive and aversive tactile sensation is represented separately from nonhedonic tactile information across cortical structures. This also demonstrates the potential of new hypothesis-guided PCM variants to help delineate how information is instantiated in the brain.

Cognitive-affective processes and suicidality in response to repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation for treatment resistant depression.

BACKGROUND: Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) can elicit 45-55 % response rates and may alleviate suicidality symptoms in treatment resistant depression (TRD). Blunted anticipatory reward sensitivity and negatively biased self-referential processing may predict trajectories of depressive and suicidality symptoms in rTMS for TRD and be modulated during treatment. METHODS: Fifty-five individuals with TRD received four weeks of low-frequency rTMS applied to the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (LFR-rTMS) and were followed until 17 weeks post-baseline. Participants completed behavioral measures of anticipatory reward sensitivity and self-referential processing at baseline and five weeks post-baseline (approximately one-week post-treatment). We examined whether baseline anticipatory reward sensitivity and self-referential processing predicted trajectories of depressive and suicidality symptoms from baseline to follow-up and whether these cognitive-affective variables showed change from baseline to week five. RESULTS: Anticipatory reward sensitivity and negative self-referential encoding at baseline were associated with higher overall depressive symptoms and suicidality from baseline to 17 weeks post-baseline. At week five, participants self-attributed a higher number of positive traits and a lower number of negative traits and had a lesser tendency to remember negative relative to positive traits they had self-attributed, compared to baseline. LIMITATIONS: The specificity of these results to LFR-rTMS is unknown in the absence of a comparison group, and our relatively small sample size precluded the interpretation of null results. CONCLUSIONS: Baseline blunted anticipatory reward sensitivity and negative biases in self-referential processing may be risk factors for higher depressive symptoms and suicidality during and after LFR-rTMS, and LFR-rTMS may modulate self-referential processing.

Lateralization of autonomic output in response to limb-specific threat.

In times of stress or danger, the autonomic nervous system (ANS) signals the fight or flight response. A canonical function of ANS activity is to globally mobilize metabolic resources, preparing the organism to respond to threat. Yet a body of research has demonstrated that, rather than displaying a homogenous pattern across the body, autonomic responses to arousing events - as measured through changes in electrodermal activity (EDA) - can differ between right and left body locations. Surprisingly, an attempt to identify a function of ANS asymmetry consistent with its metabolic role has not been investigated. In the current study, we investigated whether asymmetric autonomic responses could be induced through limb-specific aversive stimulation. Participants were given mild electric stimulation to either the left or right arm while EDA was monitored bilaterally. In a group-level analyses, an ipsilateral EDA response bias was observed, with increased EDA response in the hand adjacent to the stimulation. This effect was observable in ∼50% of individual particpants. These results demonstrate that autonomic output is more complex than canonical interpretations suggest. We suggest that, in stressful situations, autonomic outputs can prepare either the whole-body fight or flight response, or a simply a limb-localized flick, which can effectively neutralize the threat while minimizing global resource consumption. These findings are consistent with recent theories proposing evolutionary leveraging of neural structures organized to mediate sensory responses for processing of cognitive emotional cues.Significance statementThe present study constitutes novel evidence for an autonomic nervous response specific to the side of the body exposed to direct threat. We identify a robust pattern of electrodermal response at the body location that directly receives aversive tactile stimulation. Thus, we demonstrate for the first time in contemporary research that the ANS is capable of location-specific outputs within single effector organs in response to small scale threat. This extends the canonical view of the role of ANS responses in stressful or dangerous stresses - that of provoking a 'fight or flight' response - suggesting a further role of this system: preparation of targeted limb-specific action, i.e., a flick.

Rate of perceived stability as a measure of balance exercise intensity in people post-stroke.

PURPOSE: This study investigates the reproducibility and concurrent validity of the Rate of Perceived Stability (RPS) Scale in people with stroke. METHODS: On two separate days (2-10 days apart), participants provided their RPS ratings during clinical measures: 1)16 tasks from Community Balance and Mobility Scale (CB&M), 2)6-minute walk test (6MWT), and 3)self-paced gait speed. Intraclass correlations (ICCs) assessed between day test-retest reliability of RPS ratings. Standard error of measurement (SEM) and smallest detectable change (SDC) addressed level of between day agreement. Spearman rank correlations (rs) quantified relationships between RPS, and general rating of perceived challenge, task-performance scores. RESULTS: Thirty participants with stroke (50% female) participated. ICC ranged from 0.46 to 0.93 across tasks with 12/19 tasks showing ICCs above 0.75 (good test-retest reliability). SEM was 1-point for each task and SDC ranged from 2 to 4 across tasks. Concurrent validity between RPS and ratings of perceived challenge was good-to-excellent (rs ranged 0.78-0.94, p < 0.01). Higher RPS (indicative of feeling less stable) was associated with lower balance performance scores on CB&M tasks, negative relationships ranged in strength from fair to good-to-excellent in 10/16 tasks (rs ranged -0.46 to -0.81, p ≤ 0.01). CONCLUSIONS: RPS shows promise as a measure of balance intensity in people with stroke.IMPLICATIONS FOR REHABILITATIONThe RPS is a reliable and valid measure of balance intensity in ambulatory people with stroke.The RPS scale may be a useful clinical tool to address the gap in practice of measuring balance intensity during rehabilitation of walking balance post-stroke.

In the hands of the beholder: Wearing a COVID-19 mask is associated with its attractiveness.

Protective facial masks reduce the spread of COVID-19 infection and save lives. Yet a substantial number of people have been resistant to wearing them. Considerable effort has been invested in convincing people to put on a mask, if not for their own sake than for those more vulnerable. Social and cognitive psychologists know that use and liking go both ways: people use what they like, and they like what they use. Here we asked whether positive attitudes towards facial masks were higher in those who had been wearing them longer. We asked participants in a diverse sample (N = 498 from five countries and more than 30 US states) to rate how attractive and emotionally arousing masks and other objects associated with COVID-19 were in comparison to neutral objects, as well as reporting on their mask-wearing habits. To confirm reliability of findings, the experiment was repeated in a subset of participants 8-10 weeks later. The findings show that regular use of protective masks was linked to their positive appraisal, with a higher frequency and a longer history of wearing a mask predicting increased mask attractiveness. These results extended to other COVID-related objects relative to controls. They also provide critical ecological validity for the idea that emotional appraisal of everyday objects is associated with our experience of using them. Practically, they imply that societal measures to encourage mask wearing may have contributed to positive emotional appraisals in those who put them on, whether due to personal choice or societal pressure.

Sense and timing: Localizing objects during emotional distraction.

There is substantial evidence demonstrating that emotional information influences perception. Yet across studies, findings of how it does so have been highly inconsistent. In particular, emotional context (task-unrelated emotional information in the environment) has a variable influence on spatial perceptual accuracy, sometimes improving and sometimes impairing the ability to localize objects. Here, we tested the hypothesis that the heterogenous nature of emotional influences on target localization is influenced by the specific combination of sensory modalities used in the task. In the present series of experiments, we used a cross-modal localization task to identify how emotional context influences the accuracy of spatial perception. By presenting nonemotional target stimuli alongside emotional nonspatial distractor items (facial expressions or vocalizations), we were able to systematically investigate how emotional stimuli presented to individual sensory modalities acted to modulate spatial perception at distinct stages of perception and action. In three separate experiments, distractor items were presented prior to or during target presentation or after presentation during the localization response. Intramodal emotional distractors influenced localization accuracy when they overlapped in timing with targets, and the direction of this effect was both modality and valence specific (Experiment I). Additionally, targeted contrasts revealed that auditory but not visual emotional distractors influenced localization of visual targets when presented during the behavioral response, with negative cues improving localization accuracy compared to neutral or positive cues (Experiment II). We suggest such effects reflect distinct patterns of unimodal versus multimodal processing in brain regions involved in early versus late stages of perceptual processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Assessing the efficacy of tablet-based simulations for learning pseudo-surgical instrumentation.

Nurses and surgeons must identify and handle specialized instruments with high temporal and spatial precision. It is crucial that they are trained effectively. Traditional training methods include supervised practices and text-based study, which may expose patients to undue risk during practice procedures and lack motor/haptic training respectively. Tablet-based simulations have been proposed to mediate some of these limitations. We implemented a learning task that simulates surgical instrumentation nomenclature encountered by novice perioperative nurses. Learning was assessed following training in three distinct conditions: tablet-based simulations, text-based study, and real-world practice. Immediately following a 30-minute training period, instrument identification was performed with comparable accuracy and response times following tablet-based versus text-based training, with both being inferior to real-world practice. Following a week without practice, response times were equivalent between real-world and tablet-based practice. While tablet-based training does not achieve equivalent results in instrument identification accuracy as real-world practice, more practice repetitions in simulated environments may help reduce performance decline. This project has established a technological framework to assess how we can implement simulated educational environments in a maximally beneficial manner.

Warped rhythms: Epileptic activity during critical periods disrupts the development of neural networks for human communication.

It is well established that temporal lobe epilepsy-the most common and well-studied form of epilepsy-can impair communication by disrupting social-emotional and language functions. In pediatric epilepsy, where seizures co-occur with the development of critical brain networks, age of onset matters: The earlier in life seizures begin, the worse the disruption in network establishment, resulting in academic hardship and social isolation. Yet, little is known about the processes by which epileptic activity disrupts developing human brain networks. Here we take a synthetic perspective-reviewing a range of research spanning studies on molecular and oscillatory processes to those on the development of large-scale functional networks-in support of a novel model of how such networks can be disrupted by epilepsy. We seek to bridge the gap between research on molecular processes, on the development of human brain circuitry, and on clinical outcomes to propose a model of how epileptic activity disrupts brain development.

From Architecture to Evolution: Multisensory Evidence of Decentralized Emotion.

Emotional appraisal in humans is often considered a centrally mediated process by which sensory signals, void of emotional meaning, are assessed by integrative brain structures steps removed from raw sensation. We review emerging evidence that the emotional value of the environment is coded by nonvisual sensory systems as early as the sensory receptors and that these signals inform the emotional state of an organism independent of sensory cortical processes. We further present evidence for cross-species conservation of sensory projections to central emotion-processing brain regions. Based on this, we argue not only that emotional appraisal is a decentralized process, but that all human emotional experience may reflect the sensory experience of our ancestors.

Affect-biased attention and predictive processing.

In this paper we argue that predictive processing (PP) theory cannot account for the phenomenon of affect-biased attention - prioritized attention to stimuli that are affectively salient because of their associations with reward or punishment. Specifically, the PP hypothesis that selective attention can be analyzed in terms of the optimization of precision expectations cannot accommodate affect-biased attention; affectively salient stimuli can capture our attention even when precision expectations are low. We review the prospects of three recent attempts to accommodate affect with tools internal to PP theory: Miller and Clark's (2018) embodied inference; Seth's (2013) interoceptive inference; and Joffily and Coricelli's (2013) rate of change of free energy. In each case we argue that the account does not resolve the challenge from affect-biased attention. For this reason, we conclude that prediction error minimization is not sufficient to explain all mental phenomena, contrary to the claim that the PP framework provides a unified theory of all mental phenomena or the brain's cognitive functioning. Nevertheless, we suggest that empirical investigation of the interaction between affective salience and precision expectations should prove helpful in understanding the limits of PP theory, and may provide new directions for the application of a Bayesian perspective to perception.

Emotional Objectivity: Neural Representations of Emotions and Their Interaction with Cognition.

Recent advances in our understanding of information states in the human brain have opened a new window into the brain's representation of emotion. While emotion was once thought to constitute a separate domain from cognition, current evidence suggests that all events are filtered through the lens of whether they are good or bad for us. Focusing on new methods of decoding information states from brain activation, we review growing evidence that emotion is represented at multiple levels of our sensory systems and infuses perception, attention, learning, and memory. We provide evidence that the primary function of emotional representations is to produce unified emotion, perception, and thought (e.g., "That is a good thing") rather than discrete and isolated psychological events (e.g., "That is a thing. I feel good"). The emergent view suggests ways in which emotion operates as a fundamental feature of cognition, by design ensuring that emotional outcomes are the central object of perception, thought, and action.

Implicit guidance of attention: The priority state space framework.

Visual selective attention is the process by which we tune ourselves to the world so that, of the millions of bits per second transmitted by the retina, the information that is most important to us reaches awareness and directs action. Recently, new areas of attention research have opened up as classic models dividing attention into top-down and bottom-up systems have been challenged. In this paper, we propose a theoretical framework, the priority state space (PSS) framework, integrating sources of salience that guide visual attention according to a nested hierarchy of goals. Using the PSS framework as a scaffold, we review evidence of selected sources of implicit attentional guidance, including recent research on statistical learning, semantic associations, and motivational and affective salience. We next summarize current understanding of the underlying neural circuitry facilitating guidance of attention by specific sources of salience, including key neuromodulator systems, with an emphasis on affective salience and the noradrenergic system. Finally, we discuss evidence for common mechanisms of prioritization, including integration of sources of salience via priority maps, and introduce the concept of the PSS as a model for mapping a complex dynamic attentional landscape.

Episodic autobiographical memory is associated with variation in the size of hippocampal subregions.

Striking individual differences exist in the human capacity to recollect past events, yet, little is known about the neural correlates of such individual differences. Studies investigating hippocampal volume in relation to individual differences in laboratory measures of episodic memory in young adults suggest that whole hippocampal volume is unrelated (or even negatively associated) with episodic memory. However, anatomical and functional specialization across hippocampal subregions suggests that individual differences in episodic memory may be linked to particular hippocampal subregions, as opposed to whole hippocampal volume. Given that the DG/CA2/3 circuitry is thought to be especially critical for supporting episodic memory in humans, we predicted that the volume of this region would be associated with individual variability in episodic memory. This prediction was supported using high-resolution MRI of the hippocampal subfields and measures of real-world (autobiographical) episodic memory. In addition to the association with DG/CA2/3 , we further observed a relationship between episodic autobiographical memory and subiculum volume, whereas no association was observed with CA1 or with whole hippocampal volume. These findings provide insight into the possible neural substrates that mediate individual differences in real-world episodic remembering in humans.

The Blur of Pleasure: Appetitively Appealing Stimuli Decrease Subjective Temporal Perceptual Acuity.

Anecdotal reports that time "flies by" or "slows down" during emotional events are supported by evidence that the motivational relevance of stimuli influences subsequent duration judgments. Yet it is unknown whether the subjective quality of events as they unfold is altered by motivational relevance. In a novel paradigm, we measured the subjective experience of moment-to-moment visual perception. Participants judged the temporal smoothness of high-approach positive images (desserts), negative images (e.g., of bodily mutilation), and neutral images (commonplace scenes) as they faded to black. Results revealed approach-motivated blurring, such that positive stimuli were judged as smoother and negative stimuli as choppier relative to neutral stimuli. Participants' ratings of approach motivation predicted perceived fade smoothness after we controlled for low-level stimulus features. Electrophysiological data indicated that approach-motivated blurring modulated relatively rapid perceptual activation. These results indicate that stimulus value influences subjective temporal perceptual acuity; approach-motivating stimuli elicit perception of a "blurred" frame rate characteristic of speeded motion.

Genesis and Maintenance of Attentional Biases: The Role of the Locus Coeruleus-Noradrenaline System.

Emotionally arousing events are typically better remembered than mundane ones, in part because emotionally relevant aspects of our environment are prioritized in attention. Such biased attentional tuning is itself the result of associative processes through which we learn affective and motivational relevance of cues. We propose that the locus coeruleus-noradrenaline (LC-NA) system plays an important role in the genesis of attentional biases through associative learning processes as well as their maintenance. We further propose that individual differences in and disruptions of the LC-NA system underlie the development of maladaptive biases linked to psychopathology. We provide support for the proposed role of the LC-NA system by first reviewing work on attentional biases in development and its link to psychopathology in relation to alterations and individual differences in NA availability. We focus on pharmacological manipulations to demonstrate the effect of a disrupted system as well as the ADRA2b polymorphism as a tool to investigate naturally occurring differences in NA availability. We next review associative learning processes that-modulated by the LC-NA system-result in such implicit attentional biases. Further, we demonstrate how NA may influence aversive and appetitive conditioning linked to anxiety disorders as well as addiction and depression.

Alternation between different types of evidence attenuates judgments of severity.

Most real-world judgments and decisions require the consideration of multiple types of evidence. For example, judging the severity of environmental damage, medical illness, or negative economic trends often involves tracking and integrating evidence from multiple sources (i.e. different natural disasters, physical symptoms, or financial indicators). We hypothesized that the requirement to track and integrate across distinct types of evidence would affect severity judgments of multifaceted problems, compared to simpler problems. To test this, we used scenarios depicting crop damage. Each scenario involved either two event types (i.e. mold damage and insect damage), or one event type. Participants judged the quality of the crop following each scenario. In Experiments 1 and 2, subjective judgments were attenuated if the scenario depicted multiple event types, relative to scenarios depicting single event types. This was evident as a shallower slope of subjective severity ratings, as a function of objectively quantifiable severity, for scenarios with multiple event types. In Experiment 3, we asked whether alternation between event types might contribute to this attenuation. Each scenario contained two event types, and the sequence of events either alternated frequently between types or was organized into two sequential groups. Subjective judgments were attenuated for scenarios with frequently alternating sequences. The results demonstrate that alternation between distinct event types attenuates subjective judgments of severity. This suggests that a requirement to integrate evidence across multiple sources places extra demands on the cognitive system, which reduces the perceived evidence strength.