Looking at Mental Images: Eye-Tracking Mental Simulation During Retrospective Causal Judgment.

How do people evaluate causal relationships? Do they just consider what actually happened, or do they also consider what could have counterfactually happened? Using eye tracking and Gaussian process modeling, we investigated how people mentally simulated past events to judge what caused the outcomes to occur. Participants played a virtual ball-shooting game and then-while looking at a blank screen-mentally simulated (a) what actually happened, (b) what counterfactually could have happened, or (c) what caused the outcome to happen. Our findings showed that participants moved their eyes in patterns consistent with the actual or counterfactual events that they mentally simulated. When simulating what caused the outcome to occur, participants moved their eyes consistent with simulations of counterfactual possibilities. These results favor counterfactual theories of causal reasoning, demonstrate how eye movements can reflect simulation during this reasoning and provide a novel approach for investigating retrospective causal reasoning and counterfactual thinking.

The emotional impact of baseless discrediting of knowledge: An empirical investigation of epistemic injustice.

According to theoretical work on epistemic injustice, baseless discrediting of the knowledge of people with marginalized social identities is a central driver of prejudice and discrimination. Discrediting of knowledge may sometimes be subtle, but it is pernicious, inducing chronic stress and coping strategies such as emotional avoidance. In this research, we sought to deepen the understanding of epistemic injustice's impact by examining emotional responses to being discredited and assessing if marginalized social group membership predicts these responses. We conducted a novel series of three experiments (Total N = 1690) in which participants (1) shared their factual knowledge about how a game worked or their personal feelings about the game; (2) received discrediting feedback (invalidating remarks), validating feedback (affirming remarks), or insulting feedback (general negative social evaluation); and then (3) reported their affect. In all three studies, on average, affective responses to discrediting feedback were less negative than to insulting feedback, and more negative than to validating feedback. Participants who shared their knowledge reported more negative affect after discrediting feedback than participants who shared their feelings. There were consistent individual differences, including a twice-replicated finding of reduced negative affect after receiving discrediting and insulting feedback for Black men compared to White men and women and Black women. Black men's race-based traumatic symptom scores predicted their affective responses to discrediting and insulting feedback, suggesting that experience with discrimination contributed to the emotional processing of a key aspect of epistemic injustice: remarks conveying baseless discrediting of knowledge.

Perceived plausibility modulates hippocampal activity in episodic counterfactual thinking.

Episodic counterfactual thinking (ECT) consists of imagining alternative outcomes to past personal events. Previous research has shown that ECT shares common neural substrates with episodic future thinking (EFT): our ability to imagine possible future events. Both ECT and EFT have been shown to critically depend on the hippocampus, and past research has explored hippocampal engagement as a function of the perceived plausibility of an imagined future event. However, the extent to which the hippocampus is modulated by perceived plausibility during ECT is unknown. In this study, we combine two functional magnetic resonance imaging datasets to investigate whether perceived plausibility modulates hippocampal activity during ECT. Our results indicate that plausibility parametrically modulates hippocampal activity during ECT, and that such modulation is confined to the left anterior portion of the hippocampus. Moreover, our results indicate that this modulation is positive, such that increased activity in the left anterior hippocampus is associated with higher ratings of ECT plausibility. We suggest that neither effort nor difficulty alone can account for these results, and instead suggest possible alternatives to explain the role of the hippocampus during the construction of plausible and implausible ECT.

On the frequency and nature of the cues that elicit déjà vu and involuntary autobiographical memories.

Barzykowski and Moulin suggest that déjà vu and involuntary autobiographical memories recruit similar retrieval processes. Here, we invite the authors to clarify three issues: (1) What mechanism prevents déjà vu to happen more frequently? (2) What is the role of semantic cues in involuntary autobiographical retrieval? and (3) How déjà vu relates to non-believed memories?

Controversies and progress on standardization of large-scale brain network nomenclature.

Progress in scientific disciplines is accompanied by standardization of terminology. Network neuroscience, at the level of macroscale organization of the brain, is beginning to confront the challenges associated with developing a taxonomy of its fundamental explanatory constructs. The Workgroup for HArmonized Taxonomy of NETworks (WHATNET) was formed in 2020 as an Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM)-endorsed best practices committee to provide recommendations on points of consensus, identify open questions, and highlight areas of ongoing debate in the service of moving the field toward standardized reporting of network neuroscience results. The committee conducted a survey to catalog current practices in large-scale brain network nomenclature. A few well-known network names (e.g., default mode network) dominated responses to the survey, and a number of illuminating points of disagreement emerged. We summarize survey results and provide initial considerations and recommendations from the workgroup. This perspective piece includes a selective review of challenges to this enterprise, including (1) network scale, resolution, and hierarchies; (2) interindividual variability of networks; (3) dynamics and nonstationarity of networks; (4) consideration of network affiliations of subcortical structures; and (5) consideration of multimodal information. We close with minimal reporting guidelines for the cognitive and network neuroscience communities to adopt.

"Repressed Memory" Makes No Sense.

The expression "repressed memory" was introduced over 100 years ago as a theoretical term purportedly referring to an unobservable psychological entity postulated by Freud's seduction theory. That theory, however, and its hypothesized cognitive architecture, have been thoroughly debunked-yet the term "repressed memory" seems to remain. In this paper, I offer a philosophical evaluation of the meaning of this theoretical term as well as an argument to question its scientific status by comparing it to other cases of theoretical terms that have either survived scientific change-such as "atom" or "gene"-or that have perished, such as "black bile." Ultimately, I argue that "repressed memory" is more like "black bile" than "atom" or "gene" and, thus, recommend its demotion from our scientific vocabulary.

Moralization and self-control strategy selection.

To manage conflicts between temptation and commitment, people use self-control. The process model of self-control outlines different strategies for managing the onset and experience of temptation. However, little is known about the decision-making factors underlying strategy selection. Across three experiments (N = 317), we tested whether the moral valence of a commitment predicts how people advise attentional self-control strategies. In Experiments 1 and 2, people rated attentional focus strategies as significantly more effective for people tempted to break moral relative to immoral commitments, even when controlling for perceived temptation and trait self-control. Experiment 3 showed that as people perceived commitments to have more positive moral valence, they judged attentional focus strategies to be significantly more effective relative to attentional distraction strategies. Moreover, this effect was partly mediated by perceived differences in motivation. These results indicate that moralization informs decision-making processes related to self-control strategy selection.

Mental control and attributions of blame for negligent wrongdoing.

Third-personal judgments of blame are typically sensitive to what an agent knows and desires. However, when people act negligently, they do not know what they are doing and do not desire the outcomes of their negligence. How, then, do people attribute blame for negligent wrongdoing? We propose that people attribute blame for negligent wrongdoing based on perceived mental control, or the degree to which an agent guides their thoughts and attention over time. To acquire information about others' mental control, people self-project their own perceived mental control to anchor third-personal judgments about mental control and concomitant responsibility for negligent wrongdoing. In four experiments (N = 841), we tested whether perceptions of mental control drive third-personal judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing. Study 1 showed that the ease with which people can counterfactually imagine an individual being non-negligent mediated the relationship between judgments of control and blame. Studies 2a and 2b indicated that perceived mental control has a strong effect on judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing and that first-personal judgments of mental control are moderately correlated with third-personal judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing. Finally, we used an autobiographical memory manipulation in Study 3 to make personal episodes of forgetfulness salient. Participants for whom past personal episodes of forgetfulness were made salient judged negligent wrongdoers less harshly compared with a control group for whom past episodes of negligence were not salient. Collectively, these findings suggest that first-personal judgments of mental control drive third-personal judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing and indicate a novel role for counterfactual thinking in the attribution of responsibility. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Not Every Thing Must Go.

In The Entangled Brain, Pessoa criticizes standard approaches in cognitive neuroscience in which the brain is seen as a functionally decomposable, modular system with causal operations built up hierarchically. Instead, he advocates for an emergentist perspective whereby dynamic brain networks are associated, not with traditional psychological categories, but with behavioral functions characterized in evolutionary terms. Here, we raise a number of concerns with such a radical approach. We ultimately believe that although much revision to cognitive neuroscience is welcome and needed, Pessoa's more radical proposals may be counterproductive.

Prestimulus oscillatory brain activity interacts with evoked recurrent processing to facilitate conscious visual perception.

We investigated whether prestimulus alpha-band oscillatory activity and stimulus-elicited recurrent processing interact to facilitate conscious visual perception. Participants tried to perceive a visual stimulus that was perceptually masked through object substitution masking (OSM). We showed that attenuated prestimulus alpha power was associated with greater negative-polarity stimulus-evoked ERP activity that resembled the visual awareness negativity (VAN), previously argued to reflect recurrent processing related to conscious perception. This effect, however, was not associated with better perception. Instead, when prestimulus alpha power was elevated, a preferred prestimulus alpha phase was associated with a greater VAN-like negativity, which was then associated with better cue perception. Cue perception was worse when prestimulus alpha power was elevated but the stimulus occurred at a nonoptimal prestimulus alpha phase and the VAN-like negativity was low. Our findings suggest that prestimulus alpha activity at a specific phase enables temporally selective recurrent processing that facilitates conscious perception in OSM.

A functional neuroimaging investigation of Moral Foundations Theory.

Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) posits that the human mind contains modules (or "foundations") that are functionally specialized to moralize unique dimensions of the social world: Authority, Loyalty, Purity, Harm, Fairness, and Liberty. Despite this strong claim about cognitive architecture, it is unclear whether neural activity during moral reasoning exhibits this modular structure. Here, we use spatiotemporal partial least squares correlation (PLSC) analyses of fMRI data collected during judgments of foundation-specific violations to investigate whether MFT's cognitive modularity claim extends to the neural level. A mean-centered PLSC analysis returned two latent variables that differentiated between social norm and moral foundation violations, functionally segregated Purity, Loyalty, Physical Harm, and Fairness from the other foundations, and suggested that Authority has a different neural basis than other binding foundations. Non-rotated PLSC analyses confirmed that neural activity distinguished social norm from moral foundation violations, and distinguished individualizing and binding moral foundations if Authority is dropped from the binding foundations. Purity violations were persistently associated with amygdala activity, whereas moral foundation violations more broadly tended to engage the default network. Our results constitute partial evidence for neural modularity and motivate further research on the novel groupings identified by the PLSC analyses.

Neural differences between internal and external episodic counterfactual thoughts.

Episodic counterfactual thoughts (eCFT) consist of imagining alternative outcomes to past experiences. A common sub-class of eCFT-upward eCFT-involves imagining how past negative experiences could have been better, either because one could have done something differently (internal) or because something about the circumstances could have been different (external). Although previous neuroimaging research has shown that the brain's default mode network (DMN) supports upward eCFT, it is unclear how it is differentially recruited during internal versus external upward eCFT. We collected functional magnetic resonance imaging data while participants remembered negative autobiographical memories, generated either internal or external upward eCFT for the memory, and then rated the plausibility, perceived control and difficulty of eCFT generation. Both internal and external eCFT engaged midline regions of cingulate cortex, a central node of the DMN. Most activity differentiating eCFT, however, occurred outside the DMN. External eCFT engaged cuneus, angular gyrus and precuneus, whereas internal eCFT engaged posterior cingulate and precentral gyrus. Angular gyrus and precuneus were additionally sensitive to perceived plausibility of external eCFT, while postcentral gyrus and insula activity scaled with perceived plausibility of internal eCFT. These results highlight the key brain regions that might be involved in cases of maladaptive mental simulations. This article is part of the theme issue 'Thinking about possibilities: mechanisms, ontogeny, functions and phylogeny'.

The moderating effects of nostalgia on mood and optimism during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The initial waves of the coronavirus pandemic amplified feelings of depression, psychological fatigue and pessimism for the future. Past research suggests that nostalgia helps to repair negative moods by boosting current and future-oriented positive affect, thereby strengthening psychological resilience. Accordingly, the present study investigated whether nostalgia moderated the relationship between pandemic experience and individual differences in mood and optimism. Across two studies we assessed psychosocial self-report data from a total of 293 online participants (22-72 years old; mean age 38; 109 females, 184 males) during the first two waves of the pandemic. Participants completed comprehensive questionnaires that probed state and trait characteristics related to mood and memory, such as the Profile of Mood States, Nostalgia Inventory and State Optimism Measure. Our findings indicate that during the initial wave of coronavirus cases, higher levels of nostalgia buffered against deteriorating mood states associated with concern over the pandemic. Nostalgia also boosted optimism for participants experiencing negative mood, and optimism predicted subjective mood improvement one week later. This shielding effect of nostalgia on optimism was replicated during the second wave of coronavirus cases. The present findings support the role of nostalgia in promoting emotional homeostasis and resilience during periods of psychological distress.

Episodic Past, Future, and counterfactual thinking in Relapsing-Remitting Multiple sclerosis.

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a progressive disease characterized by widespread white matter lesions in the brain and spinal cord. In addition to well-characterized motor deficits, MS results in cognitive impairments in several domains, notably in episodic autobiographical memory. Recent studies have also revealed that patients with MS exhibit deficits in episodic future thinking, i.e., our capacity to imagine possible events that may occur in our personal future. Both episodic memory and episodic future thinking have been shown to share cognitive and neural mechanisms with a related kind of hypothetical simulation known as episodic counterfactual thinking: our capacity to imagine alternative ways in which past personal events could have occurred but did not. However, the extent to which episodic counterfactual thinking is affected in MS is still unknown. The current study sought to explore this issue by comparing performance in mental simulation tasks involving either past, future or counterfactual thoughts in relapsing-remitting MS. Diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) measures were also extracted to determine whether changes in structural pathways connecting the brain's default mode network (DMN) would be associated with group differences in task performance. Relative to controls, patients showed marked reductions in the number of internal details across all mental simulations, but no differences in the number of external and semantic-based details. It was also found that, relative to controls, patients with relapsing-remitting MS reported reduced composition ratings for episodic simulations depicting counterfactual events, but not so for actual past or possible future episodes. Additionally, three DWI measures of white matter integrity-fractional anisotropy, radial diffusivity and streamline counts-showed reliable differences between patients with relapsing-remitting MS and matched healthy controls. Importantly, DWI measures associated with reduced white matter integrity in three association tracts on the DMN-the right superior longitudinal fasciculus, the left hippocampal portion of the cingulum and the left inferior longitudinal fasciculus-predicted reductions in the number of internal details during episodic counterfactual simulations. Taken together, these results help to illuminate impairments in episodic simulation in relapsing-remitting MS and show, for the first time, a differential association between white matter integrity and deficits in episodic counterfactual thinking in individuals with relapsing-remitting MS.

Rethinking the distinction between episodic and semantic memory: Insights from the past, present, and future.

On the 50th anniversary of Tulving's introduction of the celebrated distinction between episodic and semantic memory, it seems more than fitting to revisit his proposal in light of recent conceptual and methodological advances in the field. This Special Issue of Memory & Cognition brings together researchers doing cutting-edge work at the intersection between episodic and semantic memory to showcase studies directly probing this psychological distinction, as well as articles that seek to provide conceptual and theoretical accounts to understand their interaction. The 14 articles presented here highlight the need to critically examine the way in which we conceptualize not only the relationship between episodic and semantic memory, but also the interplay between declarative and non-declarative memory, and the myriad implications of such conceptual changes. In many ways, we suggest this Special Issue might serve as a call to action for our field, inspiring future work to challenge pre-existing conceptions and stimulate new directions in this fast-moving field.

Age differences in the functional architecture of the human brain.

The intrinsic functional organization of the brain changes into older adulthood. Age differences are observed at multiple spatial scales, from global reductions in modularity and segregation of distributed brain systems, to network-specific patterns of dedifferentiation. Whether dedifferentiation reflects an inevitable, global shift in brain function with age, circumscribed, experience-dependent changes, or both, is uncertain. We employed a multimethod strategy to interrogate dedifferentiation at multiple spatial scales. Multi-echo (ME) resting-state fMRI was collected in younger (n = 181) and older (n = 120) healthy adults. Cortical parcellation sensitive to individual variation was implemented for precision functional mapping of each participant while preserving group-level parcel and network labels. ME-fMRI processing and gradient mapping identified global and macroscale network differences. Multivariate functional connectivity methods tested for microscale, edge-level differences. Older adults had lower BOLD signal dimensionality, consistent with global network dedifferentiation. Gradients were largely age-invariant. Edge-level analyses revealed discrete, network-specific dedifferentiation patterns in older adults. Visual and somatosensory regions were more integrated within the functional connectome; default and frontoparietal control network regions showed greater connectivity; and the dorsal attention network was more integrated with heteromodal regions. These findings highlight the importance of multiscale, multimethod approaches to characterize the architecture of functional brain aging.

Confidence and gradation in causal judgment.

When comparing the roles of the lightning strike and the dry climate in causing the forest fire, one might think that the lightning strike is more of a cause than the dry climate, or one might think that the lightning strike completely caused the fire while the dry conditions did not cause it at all. Psychologists and philosophers have long debated whether such causal judgments are graded; that is, whether people treat some causes as stronger than others. To address this debate, we first reanalyzed data from four recent studies. We found that causal judgments were actually multimodal: although most causal judgments made on a continuous scale were categorical, there was also some gradation. We then tested two competing explanations for this gradation: the confidence explanation, which states that people make graded causal judgments because they have varying degrees of belief in causal relations, and the strength explanation, which states that people make graded causal judgments because they believe that causation itself is graded. Experiment 1 tested the confidence explanation and showed that gradation in causal judgments was indeed moderated by confidence: people tended to make graded causal judgments when they were unconfident, but they tended to make more categorical causal judgments when they were confident. Experiment 2 tested the causal strength explanation and showed that although confidence still explained variation in causal judgments, it did not explain away the effects of normality, causal structure, or the number of candidate causes. Overall, we found that causal judgments were multimodal and that people make graded judgments both when they think a cause is weak and when they are uncertain about its causal role.

Effects of mental simulation of future waterpipe tobacco smoking on attitudes, perceived harms and intended use among young adults.

The desire to engage in waterpipe tobacco smoking (WTS) may occur when smokers and nonsmokers conjure positive mental simulations of WTS. However, effects of these simulations on desire to smoke waterpipe tobacco and potential mediators are unexplored. This research addressed these effects among young adult waterpipe tobacco smokers and nonsmokers. Two online studies were conducted with adults ages 18-30. In Study 1, 200 smokers, 190 susceptible nonsmokers, and 182 nonsusceptible nonsmokers were randomized to mentally simulate or not WTS in the future. In Study 2, 234 smokers and 241 susceptible nonsmokers were randomized to four arms: no simulation or simulations that varied valence of experience (positive, negative or no valence provided). Main outcomes were immediate desire to smoke waterpipe tobacco, cognitive and affective attitudes, and perceived harms. In Study 1, mental simulations increased the desire to smoke waterpipe tobacco among smokers. In Study 2, asking participants to simulate WTS positively or with no valence instruction increased desire to smoke relative to negative valence instruction or no simulation. Negative simulations reduced perceived probability of smoking within a month compared to positive simulations. Effects on desire to engage in WTS were mediated by cognitive and affective attitudes among susceptible nonsmokers and by cognitive attitudes among smokers. These findings suggest that exploring when and how often mental simulations about WTS are evoked and their potency for promoting prevention and cessation of WTS merit further attention.

Effects of category learning strategies on recognition memory.

Extant research has shown that previously acquired categorical knowledge affects recognition memory, and that differences in category learning strategies impact classification accuracy. However, it is unknown whether different learning strategies also have downstream effects on subsequent recognition memory. The present study investigates the effect of two unidimensional rule-based category learning strategies - learning (a) with or without explicit instruction, and (b) with or without supervision - on subsequent recognition memory. Our findings suggest that acquiring categorical knowledge increased both hits (Experiments 1 and 2) and false-alarms (Experiment 1) for category-congruent items regardless of the particular strategy employed in initially learning these categories. There were, however, small processing speed advantages during recognition memory for both explicit instruction and supervised practice relative to neither (Experiment 2). We discuss these findings in the context of how prior knowledge influences recognition memory, and in relation to similar findings showing schematic effects on episodic memory.

The Impact of Error-Consequence Severity on Cue Processing in Importance-Biased Prospective Memory.

Prospective memory (PM) enables people to remember to complete important tasks in the future. Failing to do so can result in consequences of varying severity. Here, we investigated how PM error-consequence severity impacts the neural processing of relevant cues for triggering PM and the ramification of that processing on the associated prospective task performance. Participants role-played a cafeteria worker serving lunches to fictitious students and had to remember to deliver an alternative lunch to students (as PM cues) who would otherwise experience a moderate or severe aversive reaction. Scalp-recorded, event-related potential (ERP) measures showed that the early-latency frontal positivity, reflecting the perception-based neural responses to previously learned stimuli, did not differ between the severe versus moderate PM cues. In contrast, the longer-latency parietal positivity, thought to reflect full PM cue recognition and post-retrieval processes, was elicited earlier by the severe than the moderate PM cues. This faster instantiation of the parietal positivity to the severe-consequence PM cues was then followed by faster and more accurate behavioral responses. These findings indicate how the relative importance of a PM can be neurally instantiated in the form of enhanced and faster PM-cue recognition and processing and culminate into better PM.