Embracing beauty through leftward movements: An ERP study on metaphorical association between hand actions and aesthetic judgments.

In this study, we examined the metaphorical association between aesthetic judgments of faces and horizontal hand movements as well as their cognitive neural mechanisms using a joint categorical response task. In the "aesthetic-action" metaphorical representation situation, participants were asked to classify beautiful/ugly faces by moving the mouse to the left or the right. The results showed that the joint categorization condition "judge beautiful-move mouse left, judge ugly-move mouse right" had a shorter reaction time than the "judge beautiful-move mouse right, judge ugly-move mouse left" condition, which was accompanied by larger amplitudes of the early component N170, EPN, and the late component P300. Combining the behavioral and event-related potentials (ERPs) results, the present study demonstrated a metaphorical association between horizontal hand actions and aesthetic judgments. It suggested that horizontal hand actions can affect the speed of aesthetic judgments by influencing processing fluency, emotional arousal level, categorization motivation, and attentional resources. These findings provide new perspectives to better understand the cognitive process of aesthetic judgments and provide a basis for applying embodied cognition and metaphor theory to the field of aesthetic psychology.

Gender Differences in Mental Rotational Training Based on Computer Adaptive Tests.

Mental rotation tasks have been widely used to assess individuals' spatial cognition and the ability to mentally manipulate objects. This study employed a computerized adaptive training method to investigate the behavioral performance of participants of different genders in mental rotation tasks with different rotation angles before and after training. A total of 44 Chinese university students participated in the experiment, with the experimental group undergoing a five-day mental rotation training program. During the training phase, a three-down/one-up staircase procedure was used to adjust the stimulus levels (response time) based on participants' responses. The results showed that the training had a facilitative effect on the mental rotation ability of both male and female participants, and it was able to eliminate the gender differences in mental rotation performance. Regarding the angles, we observed that the improvement in the angles involved in the training was significantly higher compared to untrained angles. However, no significant differences in improvement were found among the three trained angles. In summary, these findings demonstrate the effectiveness of computerized adaptive training methods in improving mental rotation ability and highlight the influence of gender and angles on learning outcomes.

Short-term monocular pattern deprivation reduces the internal additive noise of the visual system.

Previous studies have shown that short-term monocular pattern deprivation can shift perceptual dominance in favor of the deprived eye. However, little is known about the effect of monocular pattern deprivation on contrast sensitivity (CS) and its corresponding mechanisms. Here, contrast sensitivity function (CSF) in the nondominant eye of normal subjects was evaluated before and after 150 min of monocular pattern deprivation. To obtain a CSF with high precision and efficiency before deprivation effect washout, a quick CSF (qCSF) method was used to assess CS over a wide range of spatial frequencies and at two external noise levels. We found that (1) monocular pattern deprivation effectively improved the CS of the deprived eye with larger effect on high spatial frequencies, (2) CS improvement only occurred when external noise was absent and its amount was spatial frequency dependent, and (3) a perceptual template model (PTM) revealed that decreased internal additive noise accounted for the mechanism of the monocular pattern derivation effect. These findings help us better understand the features of short-term monocular pattern deprivation and shed light on the treatment of amblyopia.

Interactions of indole alkaloids with myoglobin: A mass spectrometry based spectrometric and computational method.

RATIONALE: Interactions of drug molecules and proteins play important roles in physiological and pathological processes in vivo. It is of significance to establish a reliable strategy for studying protein-drug ligand interactions and would be helpful for the design and screening of new drugs in pharmacological research. METHODS: The interactions between four indole alkaloids (IAs) extracted from Ophiorrhiza japonica (O. japonica) and myoglobin (Mb) protein were investigated using a multi-spectrometric and computational method of native electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (native ESI-MS), hydrogen/deuterium exchange mass spectrometry (HDX-MS), circular dichroism (CD) and molecular docking (MD). RESULTS: The IA-bound Mb complexes were analyzed using native ESI-MS, with the obtained protein-to-ligand stoichiometry at 1:1, 1:2 and 1:3. Binding constants were measured according to the interpretation of MS spectra. MD complemented MS measurements, probing the binding sites and modes of the four IAs to Mb. Analyses involving CD and HDX-MS demonstrated that exposure to IAs could affect the conformation of Mb by decreasing the α-helix content and made Mb more susceptible to HDX at the backbone. CONCLUSIONS: A new MS-based integrated analysis method has been developed to successfully study the interactions of Mb and IAs extracted from O. japonica. The experimental and calculation results have good consistency, revealing all of the four IA molecules could bind to Mb to form 1:1, 1:2 and 1:3 Mb-IA complexes. The order of binding ability of these IAs to Mb was ophiorrhine B > compound C > ophiorrhine A > compound D. CD and HDX-MS results indicated that binding with IAs destabilizes Mb. HDX-MS analysis suggests that Mb becomes more susceptible to HDX, indicating that binding with IAs destabilizes the structure of Mb. In addition, the interaction with IAs affected the overall structure of Mb, ascribed to the decrease of α-helix content and less folding of the backbone.