Flexibility Retained: Unimpaired Updating of Expectations in Schizophrenia.

Flexibly and actively updating expectations based on feedback is crucial for navigating daily life. Previous research has shown that people with schizophrenia (PSZ) have difficulty adjusting their expectations. However, there are studies suggesting otherwise. To explore this further, we used a novel trial-based expectation updating paradigm called attribute amnesia. In the task, the participants needed to report the location of a target stimulus among distractors in pre-surprise trials. In the surprise trial, they were unexpectedly asked to report the identity of the target before reporting its location. Afterward, control trials were conducted whereby the participants were asked the same questions as in the surprise trial. Notably, the surprise trial and control trials were nearly identical, except that the participants expected to be asked about identity information in the control trials but not in the surprise trial. Thus, an improvement in identity reporting accuracy in the control trials in comparison with the surprise trial indicated active updating of expectations. In the current study, a total of 63 PSZ and 60 healthy control subjects (HCS) were enrolled. We found that both the PSZ and the HCS were unable to report information that they had fully attended to (i.e., identity) in the surprise trial. However, both groups showed a significant improvement in reporting identity information even in the first control trial. Critically, there was no significant difference in the magnitude of improvement between the two groups. The current findings indicate that PSZ have the ability to update their expectations as quickly and flexibly as HCS, at least in the context of the current task. The possible factors that might contribute to the discrepancy regarding expectation updating are discussed.

Attention with or without working memory: mnemonic reselection of attended information.

Attention has been regarded as the 'gatekeeper' controlling what information gets selected into working memory. However, a new perspective has emerged with the discovery of attribute amnesia, a phenomenon revealing that people are frequently unable to report information they have just attended to moments ago. This report failure is thought to stem from a lack of consolidating the attended information into working memory, indicating a dissociation between attention and working memory. Building on these findings, a new concept called memory reselection is proposed to describe a secondary round of selection among the attended information. These discoveries challenge the conventional view of how attention and working memory are related and shed new light onto modeling attention and memory as dissociable processes.

Working-Memory-Guided Attention Competes with Exogenous Attention but Not with Endogenous Attention.

Recent research has extensively investigated working memory (WM)-guided attention, which is the phenomenon of attention being directed towards information in the external environment that matches the content stored in WM. While prior studies have focused on the potential influencing factors of WM-guided attention, little is known about the nature of it. This attention system exhibits characteristics of two classical distinct attention systems: exogenous attention and endogenous attention, as it can operate automatically like exogenous attention yet persist for a long time and be modulated by cognitive resources like endogenous attention. Thus, the current study aimed to explore the mechanism of WM-guided attention by testing whether it competed with exogenous attention, endogenous attention, or both. Two experiments were conducted within a classic WM-guided attention paradigm. Experiment 1 included an exogenous cue and revealed an interaction between WM-guided attention and exogenous attention. Experiment 2 replaced the exogenous cue with an endogenous cue and demonstrated that endogenous attention had no impact on WM-guided attention. These findings indicate that WM-guided attention shares mechanisms with exogenous attention to some extent while operating in parallel with endogenous attention.

Seeing what's possible: Disconnected visual parts are confused for their potential wholes.

Perception research traditionally investigates how actual states of the world are seen-how we perceive the shapes, colors, and locations that objects actually have. By contrast, everyday life provokes us to consider possible states of the world that have not yet (and may not ever) actually obtain. When assembling furniture or completing a jigsaw puzzle, for example, we may appreciate not only the particular shapes of individual objects but also their potential to combine into new objects with distinct shapes of their own. What is the nature of this experience? Here, we explore how visual processing extracts not only what objects are but also what they could become. In 7 experiments inspired by the puzzle game Tetris, subjects responded to a particular target within a stream of distracting "tetrominoes"; surprisingly, subjects false-alarmed more often to pairs of tetrominoes that could create their target than to pairs of tetrominoes that couldn't-essentially confusing possible objects for real ones. This pattern held for several types of objects and transformations, could not be explained by various forms of response bias, and persisted even when shape information was completely incidental to the task. We suggest that possible states of the world are not only contemplated in deliberate reflection but also automatically represented by more basic mechanisms of perception and attention. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Intracranial Pressure Sensor and Valve to Control Hydrocephalus.

Hydrocephalus is a neurological condition that can result from trauma, hemorrhage, cancer, and infection. To control the intracranial pressure (ICP) a shunt is implanted to drain the cerebro-spinal fluid (CSF). We are working to develop an implantable pressure sensor. When the ICP is too high it will open a valve to relieve the ICP. When the ICP is too low, it will close the valve.