"Why can't I say people's names?" Alexinomia as a widespread psychological phenomenon.

Psychological research has recently proposed alexinomia, characterised by an inhibited behaviour in saying names, as a distinct psychosocial phenomenon. Alexinomia is associated with anxiety and avoidance behaviours with regards to saying names and thus severely impacts every day social interactions and relationships. This study aimed to explore the prevalence of this newly established and poorly understood psychological phenomenon and to further determine its impact on everyday life. For this purpose, online advice and discussion forums were systematically searched for threads on and mentions of problems with saying names. We analysed a broad dataset from English-language comments discussing alexinomia-related experiences and behaviours, inclusive of varied demographics and geographical regions. The findings based on the qualitative analysis of 257 unique sources show that alexinomia is a widespread phenomenon. Moreover, the analysed online materials showed affected individual's use of a variety of effective and ineffective coping strategies and experience varying degrees of severity, which can potentially diminish with training. The study's results therefore highlight alexinomia as a relevant, yet highly under researched, field of study, and add to our knowledge on the experience of alexinomia in everyday life and its potential origins, especially relating to social anxiety and early-life familial dynamic.

Alexinomia: The fear of using personal names.

Introduction: Preliminary research based on everyday observations suggests that there are people, who experience severe fear when addressing others with their personal names. The aim of this study was to explore the extent to which this hitherto little-known psychological phenomenon really exists and to investigate its characteristic features, considering the everyday experience of not being able to use names and its impact on affected individuals and their social interactions and relationships. Methods: In this mixed-methods study based on semi-structured interviews and psychometric testing, 13 affected female participants were interviewed and evaluated using self-report measures of social anxiety, attachment-related vulnerability, and general personality traits. An inductive content analysis and inferential statistical methods were used to analyze qualitative and quantitative data, respectively. Results: Our findings show that affected individuals experience psychological distress and a variety of negative emotions in situations in which addressing others with their name is intended, resulting in avoidance behavior, impaired social interactions, and a reduced quality of affected relationships. Discussion: The behavior can affect all relationships and all forms of communication and is strongly linked to social anxiety and insecure attachment. We propose calling this phenomenon Alexinomia, meaning "no words for names".

Do Subliminal Fearful Facial Expressions Capture Attention?

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.

Corrigendum: A Novel Test of Pure Irrelevance-Induced Blindness.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00375.].

Contralateral delay activity during temporal order memory.

In everyday life, we constantly need to remember the temporal sequence of visual events over short periods of time, for example, when making sense of others' actions or watching a movie. While there is increasing knowledge available on neural mechanisms underlying visual working memory (VWM) regarding the identity and spatial location of objects, less is known about how the brain encodes and retains information on temporal sequences. Here, we investigate whether the contralateral-delay activity (CDA), a well-studied electroencephalographic (EEG) component associated with VWM of object identity, also reflects the encoding and retention of temporal order. In two independent experiments, we presented participants with a sequence of four or six images, followed by a 1 s retention period. Participants judged temporal order by indicating whether a subsequently presented probe image was originally displayed during the first or the second half of the sequence. As a main novel result, we report the emergence of a contralateral negativity already following the presentation of the first item of the sequence, which increases over the course of a trial with every presented item, up to a limit of four items. We further observed no differences in the CDA during the temporal-order task compared to one obtained during a task concerning the spatial location of the presented items. Since the characteristics of the CDA appear to be highly similar between different encoded feature dimensions and increases as additional items are being encoded, we suggest this component might be a general characteristic of various types of VWM.

A Novel Test of Pure Irrelevance-Induced Blindness.

Load theory claims that bottom-up attention is possible under conditions of low perceptual load but not high perceptual load. At variance with this claim, a recent one-trial study showed that under low load, with only two colors in the display - a ring and a disk -, an instruction to process only one of the two stimuli led to better memory performance for the color of the relevant than of the irrelevant stimulus. Control experiments showed that if instructed to pay attention to both objects, participants were able to memorize both colors. Thus, stimulus irrelevance diminished the likelihood of memory for a color stimulus under low perceptual-load conditions. Yet, we noted less than optimal design features in that prior study: a lack of more implicit priming measures of memory or attention and an interval between color stimulus presentation and memory test that probably exceeded 500 ms. We took care of these problems in the current one-trial study by improving the retrieval displays while leaving the encoding displays as in the original study and found that the results only partly replicated prior findings. In particular, there was no evidence of irrelevance-induced blindness under conditions in which a ring was designated as relevant, surrounding an irrelevant disk. However, a continuously cumulative meta-analysis across past and present experiments showed that our results do not refute the irrelevance-induced effects entirely. We conclude with recommendations for future tests of load theory.

Same-location costs in peripheral cueing: The role of cue awareness and feature changes.

Prior studies using the peripheral cueing paradigm have shown that singleton cues that do not match to the top-down search settings of the observer can impair performance in visual search when the cue appears at the target location (in valid conditions) compared with when the cue appears at a location away from the target (in invalid conditions). This pattern, the same-location cost (SLC), has recently been suggested to originate from an awareness-dependent updating of object files in working memory. It has also been argued that the processes underlying the SLC could have obscured results of prior studies by masking attentional capture effects by peripheral cues under certain conditions. Here, we investigated to which extent the object-file updating hypothesis can be generalized and delineate necessary side conditions for object-file updating to produce the SLC. In Experiments 1 to 3, we show that during search for spatial frequencies, SLCs emerged that are at odds with the object-file updating hypothesis. SLCs were not dependent on cue awareness and were, unlike SLCs with color cues and targets (Experiment 4), not entirely eliminated where feature updating was necessary in valid and invalid conditions. We conclude that some instances of the SLC can be explained by object-file updating, but, as the present study shows, other instances of the SLC are at odds with this explanation and are therefore more likely of an attentional origin. We end with a discussion of which side conditions might favor the emergence of SLCs as a result of object-file updating. (PsycINFO Database Record

Measuring the emotion-specificity of rapid stimulus-driven attraction of attention to fearful faces: evidence from emotion categorization and a comparison with disgusted faces.

In the current study, we tested whether a fear advantage-rapid attraction of attention to fearful faces that is more stimulus-driven than to neutral faces-is emotion specific. We used a cueing task with face cues preceding targets. Cues were non-predictive of the target locations. In two experiments, we found enhanced cueing of saccades towards the targets with fearful face cues than with neutral face cues: Saccades towards targets were more efficient with cues and targets at the same position (under valid conditions) than at opposite positions (under invalid conditions), and this cueing effect was stronger with fearful than with neutral face cues. In addition, this cueing effect difference between fearful and neutral faces was absent with inverted faces as cues, indicating that the fear advantage is face-specific. We also show that emotion categorization of the face cues mirrored these effects: Participants were better at categorizing face cues as fearful or neutral with upright than with inverted faces (Experiment 1). Finally, in alternative blocks including disgusted faces instead of fearful faces, we found more similar cueing effects with disgusted faces and neutral faces, and with upright and inverted faces (Experiment 2). Jointly, these results demonstrate that the fear advantage is emotion-specific. Results are discussed in light of evolutionary explanations of the fear advantage.

Using temporally aligned event-related potentials for the investigation of attention shifts prior to and during saccades.

According to the pre-motor theory of attention, attention is shifted to a saccade's landing position before the saccade is executed. Such pre-saccadic attention shifts are usually studied in psychophysical dual-task conditions, with a target-discrimination task before saccade onset. Here, we present a novel approach to investigate pre-saccadic attention shifts with the help of event-related potentials (ERPs). Participants executed one or two saccades to color-defined targets while ERPs and eye-movements were recorded. In single-target blocks participants executed a single saccade. In two-targets blocks participants made either a single saccade to one of the targets, or two successive saccades to both targets. Importantly, in two-targets blocks, targets could appear on the same or on opposite sides of the vertical midline. This allowed us to study contra-to-ipsilateral ERP differences (such as the N2pc or PCN) that reflect attention shifts to the targets, prior to saccade onset and during saccades. If pre-saccadic attention shifts to saccade target locations are necessary for saccade execution and if searched-for saccade targets capture attention, there should be enhanced attentional competition (1) between two targets compared to single targets; (2) between two opposite-sides targets compared to two same-side targets; and (3) in two saccades rather than one saccade conditions: More attentional competition was expected to delay saccade latency and to weaken pre-saccadic laterality effects in ERPs. Hypotheses were tested by means of temporally aligned ERPs that were simultaneously time-locked to stimulus onsets, saccade onsets, and saccade offsets. Predictions (1) and (2) were partly and fully confirmed, respectively, but no evidence was found for (3). We explain the implications of our results for the role of attention during saccade preparation, and we point out how temporally aligned ERPs compare to ICA-based electroencephalogram (EEG) artifact correction procedures and to psychophysical dual-task approaches.

The contribution of color to attention capture effects during search for onset targets.

The literature on top-down contingent capture is concerned with the question of what constitutes a search set. Is it restricted to single stimulus properties such as color or onsets, or can such sets be more complex? In nine experiments (N = 140), we tested whether cueing effects during search for onset targets were affected by cue color. According to the classic theory of contingent capture (Folk, Remington, & Johnston, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 18, 1030-1044, 1992), during search for onset targets, cues capture attention on the basis of a match between the cue's onset and top-down control settings directed to the target onsets. However, such cueing effects were based on cues of a color similar to the target color. Therefore, matches of the cue color to the target color could have contributed to the effects. Indeed, here we found cueing effects when the cues and targets were of the same color, but not when they were of different colors (Exps. 1a, 1b, 4a, and 4b). In addition, same-color cueing effects were stronger than different-color cueing effects (Exps. 2a, 2b, 3a, 3b, and the white-target conditions of Exp. 5). In Experiment 5, we also identified efficient search for only one target color as a critical prerequisite for the differences between cueing by color-similar and -dissimilar onset cues. We conclude with a discussion of the contributions of cue-to-set color matches, deallocation of attention, and intertrial priming to what appear to be top-down contingent-capture effects based on abrupt onsets.

Correction: Time Adaptation Shows Duration Selectivity in the Human Parietal Cortex.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1002262.].

Time Adaptation Shows Duration Selectivity in the Human Parietal Cortex.

Although psychological and computational models of time estimation have postulated the existence of neural representations tuned for specific durations, empirical evidence of this notion has been lacking. Here, using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) adaptation paradigm, we show that the inferior parietal lobule (IPL) (corresponding to the supramarginal gyrus) exhibited reduction in neural activity due to adaptation when a visual stimulus of the same duration was repeatedly presented. Adaptation was strongest when stimuli of identical durations were repeated, and it gradually decreased as the difference between the reference and test durations increased. This tuning property generalized across a broad range of durations, indicating the presence of general time-representation mechanisms in the IPL. Furthermore, adaptation was observed irrespective of the subject's attention to time. Repetition of a nontemporal aspect of the stimulus (i.e., shape) did not produce neural adaptation in the IPL. These results provide neural evidence for duration-tuned representations in the human brain.

Left insular cortex and left SFG underlie prismatic adaptation effects on time perception: evidence from fMRI.

Prismatic adaptation (PA) has been shown to affect left-to-right spatial representations of temporal durations. A leftward aftereffect usually distorts time representation toward an underestimation, while rightward aftereffect usually results in an overestimation of temporal durations. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the neural mechanisms that underlie PA effects on time perception. Additionally, we investigated whether the effect of PA on time is transient or stable and, in the case of stability, which cortical areas are responsible of its maintenance. Functional brain images were acquired while participants (n=17) performed a time reproduction task and a control-task before, immediately after and 30 min after PA inducing a leftward aftereffect, administered outside the scanner. The leftward aftereffect induced an underestimation of time intervals that lasted for at least 30 min. The left anterior insula and the left superior frontal gyrus showed increased functional activation immediately after versus before PA in the time versus the control-task, suggesting these brain areas to be involved in the executive spatial manipulation of the representation of time. The left middle frontal gyrus showed an increase of activation after 30 min with respect to before PA. This suggests that this brain region may play a key role in the maintenance of the PA effect over time.

Sleep facilitates long-term face adaptation.

Adaptation is an automatic neural mechanism supporting the optimization of visual processing on the basis of previous experiences. While the short-term effects of adaptation on behaviour and physiology have been studied extensively, perceptual long-term changes associated with adaptation are still poorly understood. Here, we show that the integration of adaptation-dependent long-term shifts in neural function is facilitated by sleep. Perceptual shifts induced by adaptation to a distorted image of a famous person were larger in a group of participants who had slept (experiment 1) or merely napped for 90 min (experiment 2) during the interval between adaptation and test compared with controls who stayed awake. Participants' individual rapid eye movement sleep duration predicted the size of post-sleep behavioural adaptation effects. Our data suggest that sleep prevented decay of adaptation in a way that is qualitatively different from the effects of reduced visual interference known as 'storage'. In the light of the well-established link between sleep and memory consolidation, our findings link the perceptual mechanisms of sensory adaptation--which are usually not considered to play a relevant role in mnemonic processes--with learning and memory, and at the same time reveal a new function of sleep in cognition.

Rapid changes in brain structure predict improvements induced by perceptual learning.

Practice-dependent changes in brain structure can occur in task relevant brain regions as a result of extensive training in complex motor tasks and long-term cognitive training but little is known about the impact of visual perceptual learning on brain structure. Here we studied the effect of five days of visual perceptual learning in a motion-color conjunction search task using anatomical MRI. We found rapid changes in gray matter volume in the right posterior superior temporal sulcus, an area sensitive to coherently moving stimuli, that predicted the degree to which an individual's performance improved with training. Furthermore, behavioral improvements were also predicted by volumetric changes in an extended white matter region underlying the visual cortex. These findings point towards quick and efficient plastic neural mechanisms that enable the visual brain to deal effectively with changing environmental demands.

Modulating behavioral inhibition by tDCS combined with cognitive training.

Cognitive training is an effective tool to improve a variety of cognitive functions, and a small number of studies have now shown that brain stimulation accompanying these training protocols can enhance their effects. In the domain of behavioral inhibition, little is known about how training can affect this skill. As for transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), it was previously found that stimulation over the right inferior frontal gyrus (rIFG) facilitates behavioral inhibition performance and modulates its electrophysiological correlates. This study aimed to investigate this behavioral facilitation in the context of a learning paradigm by giving tDCS over rIFG repetitively over four consecutive days of training on a behavioral inhibition task (stop signal task (SST)). Twenty-two participants took part; ten participants were assigned to receive anodal tDCS (1.5 mA, 15 min), 12 were assigned to receive training but not active stimulation. There was a significant effect of training on learning and performance in the SST, and the integration of the training and rIFG-tDCS produced a more linear learning slope. Better performance was also found in the active stimulation group. Our findings show that tDCS-combined cognitive training is an effective tool for improving the ability to inhibit responses. The current study could constitute a step toward the use of tDCS and cognitive training as a therapeutic tool for cognitive control impairments in conditions such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or schizophrenia.

Face adaptation effects show strong and long-lasting transfer from lab to more ecological contexts.

A review on recent experiments on figural face aftereffects reveals that adaptation effects in famous faces can last for hours up to days. Such adaptations seem to be highly reliable regarding test-retest designs as well as regarding the generalizability of adaptation across different adaptation routines and adaptations toward different kinds of facial properties. However, in the studies conducted so far, adaptation and the subsequent test phase were carried out in typical laboratory environments. Under these circumstances, it cannot be ruled out that the observed effects are, in fact, episodic learn-test compatibility effects. To test for ecological validity in adaptation effects we used an adaptation paradigm including environmental and social properties that differed between adaptation and test phase. With matched samples (n1 = n2 = 54) we found no main effects of experimental setting compatibility resulting from varying where the tests where conducted (environmental condition) nor any interaction with effects of stimulus compatibility resulting from varying stimulus similarity between adaptation and test phase using the same picture, different pictures of the same person, or different persons (transfer). This indicates that these adaptation effects are not artificial or merely lab-biased effects. Adaptation to face stimuli may document representational adaptations and tuning mechanisms that integrate new visual input in a very fast, reliable, and sustainable way.

Long-term adaptation effects of highly familiar faces are modulated by adaptation duration.

Adaptation to manipulated versions of face images can induce strong adaptation effects in face perception and the adjustment of memory representations has been suggested to underlie this effect. In previous studies such effects have been observed after short as well as long delays between adaptation and test (5 min and 24 h) and they were evident in face images identical to the adapting stimuli as well as in new images of the same individual and in faces that were not shown during adaptation (factor transferability). By using regression analysis, here we show that adaptation duration modulates the size of the adaptation effect, which was evident after both short and long time delays and across all levels of transferability tested.

Sustained effects of adaptation on the perception of familiar faces.

Figural aftereffects are commonly believed to be transient and to fade away in the course of milliseconds. We tested face aftereffects using familiar faces and found sustained effects lasting up to 1 week. In 3 experiments, participants were first exposed to distorted pictures of famous persons and then had to select the veridical face in a 2-alternative forced choice task. Veridicality aftereffects were found in a direction opposite to the adapting distortion; these effects generalized to other pictures of the same individual and also to pictures of celebrities that had not been shown during adaptation. The findings support hierarchical theories of norm-based face coding and suggest that face adaptation effects have a representational basis. They also point toward multiple timescales in the operation of adaptation mechanisms, thereby providing a link between high-level adaptation and more general aspects of neuro-cognitive plasticity, that is, learning and memory.

Disruption of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex facilitates the consolidation of procedural skills.

In explicit sequence learning tasks, an improvement in performance (skill) typically occurs after sleep-leading to the recent literature on sleep-dependent motor consolidation. Consolidation can also be facilitated during wakefulness if declarative knowledge for the sequence is reduced through a secondary cognitive task. Accordingly, declarative and procedural consolidation processes appear to mutually interact. Here we used TMS to test the hypothesis that functions in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) that support declarative memory formation indirectly reduce the formation of procedural representations. We hypothesize that disrupting the DLPFC immediately after sequence learning would degrade the retention or the consolidation of the sequence within the declarative memory system and thus facilitate consolidation within procedural memory systems, evident as wakeful off-line skill improvement. Inhibitory theta-burst TMS was applied to the left DLPFC (n = 10), to the right DLPFC (n = 10), or to an occipital cortical control site (n = 10) immediately after training on the serial reaction time task (SRTT). All groups were retested after eight daytime hours without sleep. TMS of either left or right DLPFC lead to skill improvements on the SRTT. Increase in skill was greater following right DLPFC stimulation than left DLPFC stimulation; there was no improvement in skill for the control group. Across all participants, free recall of the sequence was inversely related to the improvements in performance on the SRTT. These results support the hypothesis of interference between declarative and procedural consolidation processes and are discussed in the framework of the interactions between memory systems.