Aging Impairs Disengagement From Negative Words in a Dot Probe Task.

Age differences in emotional processes have been of great interest. Previous studies using the dot probe task show that older adults can be more influenced by negative emotionally valenced faces than younger adults. Subsequent work has demonstrated two distinctive ways people engage with stimuli in this task, namely orienting to and disengaging from emotional stimuli. In the present study, we examined the effects of aging as well as ability to orient to and disengage from emotional words in a dot probe task. Older and younger adults viewed word pairs (positive-neutral, negative-neutral, and neutral-neutral) on a computer screen and pressed a button to identify a probe that replaced one of the words in the pair, responding as quickly as possible. Probes replaced either the emotional or neutral word. This design tests whether effects of aging were larger for disengaging (identifying a probe that replaced a neutral word in an emotional-neutral trial), compared to orienting (identifying a probe that replaced an emotional word in an emotional-neutral trial), and whether the pattern was exaggerated for negative compared to positive stimuli. Attentional bias estimates were calculated with mean reaction times for each trial-type. Older adults showed a specific impairment in disengaging from negative words. These results could reflect challenges with cognitive control and inhibition with age, which in this study are larger for older adults in the presence of negative information.

Cultural specialization of visual cortex.

A growing body of evidence suggests culture influences how individuals perceive the world around them. This study investigates whether these cultural differences extend to a simple object viewing task and visual cortex by examining voxel pattern representations with multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA). During functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning, 20 East Asian and 20 American participants viewed photos of everyday items, equated for familiarity and conceptual agreement across cultures. Whole brain searchlight mapping with non-parametric statistical evaluation tested whether these stimuli evoked multi-voxel patterns that were distinct between cultural groups. We found that participants' cultural identities were successfully predicted from stimuli representations in visual cortex Brodmann areas 18 and 19. This result demonstrates culturally specialized visual cortex during a basic perceptual task ubiquitous to everyday life.

Breathe Easy EDA: A MATLAB toolbox for psychophysiology data management, cleaning, and analysis.

Electrodermal activity (EDA) recordings are widely used in experimental psychology to measure skin conductance responses (SCRs) that reflect sympathetic nervous system arousal. However, irregular respiration patterns and deep breaths can cause EDA fluctuations that are difficult to distinguish from genuine arousal-related SCRs, presenting a methodological challenge that increases the likelihood of false positives in SCR analyses. Thus, it is crucial to identify respiration-related artifacts in EDA data. Here we developed a novel and freely distributed MATLAB toolbox, Breathe Easy EDA (BEEDA). BEEDA is a flexible toolbox that facilitates EDA visual inspection, allowing users to identify and eliminate respiration artifacts. BEEDA further includes functionality for EDA data analyses (measuring tonic and phasic EDA components) and reliability analyses for artifact identification. The toolbox is suitable for any experiment recording both EDA and respiration data, and flexibly adjusts to experiment-specific parameters (e.g., trial structure and analysis parameters).

Cross-cultural differences in the neural correlates of specific and general recognition.

Research suggests that culture influences how people perceive the world, which extends to memory specificity, or how much perceptual detail is remembered. The present study investigated cross-cultural differences (Americans vs East Asians) at the time of encoding in the neural correlates of specific versus general memory formation. Participants encoded photos of everyday items in the scanner and 48 h later completed a surprise recognition test. The recognition test consisted of same (i.e., previously seen in scanner), similar (i.e., same name, different features), or new photos (i.e., items not previously seen in scanner). For Americans compared to East Asians, we predicted greater activation in the hippocampus and right fusiform for specific memory at recognition, as these regions were implicated previously in encoding perceptual details. Results revealed that East Asians activated the left fusiform and left hippocampus more than Americans for specific versus general memory. Follow-up analyses ruled out alternative explanations of retrieval difficulty and familiarity for this pattern of cross-cultural differences at encoding. Results overall suggest that culture should be considered as another individual difference that affects memory specificity and modulates neural regions underlying these processes.

Item strength influences source confidence and alters source memory zROC slopes.

Increasing the number of study trials creates a crossover pattern in source memory zROC slopes; that is, the slope is either below or above 1 depending on which source receives stronger learning. This pattern can be produced if additional learning affects memory processes such as the relative contribution of recollection and familiarity to source performance. However, the pattern can also be produced by decision processes if participants are more willing to make high-confidence source judgments when they are more confident that the test item was studied. We explored the role of memory and decision processes by comparing performance across 3 conditions: (a) words seen once with a male or female face (no repetition), (b) words seen once with a face after being presented twice with a picture of either a bird or a fish (different-source repetition), and (c) words seen 3 times with the same face (same-source repetition). zROC functions for the male-female decision showed that different-source repetition produced the same crossover effect as same-source repetition. This pattern was predicted by the decision process account, because it assumes that increasing item memory affects source confidence ratings even if source memory is not improved. Also supporting this account, we found a strong positive relationship between recognition confidence and source confidence even when analyses were limited to items that were attributed to the incorrect source or items that were not studied in either source.