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Reinforcement learning, conditioning, and the brain: Successes and challenges.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article provides an introduction to reinforcement learning followed by an examination of the successes and challenges using reinforcement learning to understand the neural bases of conditioning. Successes reviewed include (1) the mapping of positive and negative prediction errors to the firing of dopamine neurons and neurons in the lateral habenula, respectively; (2) the mapping of model-based and model-free reinforcement learning to associative and sensorimotor cortico-basal ganglia-thalamo-cortical circuits, respectively; and (3) the mapping of actor and critic to the dorsal and ventral striatum, respectively. Chall...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - November 11, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Maia TV Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Aging and the neuroeconomics of decision making: A review.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Neuroeconomics refers to a combination of paradigms derived from neuroscience, psychology, and economics for the study of decision making and is an area that has received considerable scientific attention in the recent literature. Using realistic laboratory tasks, researchers seek to study the neurocognitive processes underlying economic decision making and outcome-based decision learning, as well as individual differences in these processes and the social and affective factors that modulate them. To this point, one question has remained largely unanswered: What happens to decision-making processes and their neural sub...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - November 11, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Brown SB, Ridderinkhof KR Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Emotion and motor preparation: A transcranial magnetic stimulation study of corticospinal motor tract excitability.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In the present study, we examined whether preparing motor responses under different emotional conditions alters motor evoked potentials (MEPs) elicited by transcranial magnetic stimulation delivered to the motor cortex. Analyses revealed three findings: (1) Reaction times were expedited during exposure to unpleasant images, as compared with pleasant and neutral images; (2) force amplitude was greater during exposure to unpleasant images, as compared with pleasant and neutral images; and (3) MEPs were larger while participants viewed unpleasant images, as compared with neutral images. Hence, coupling the preparation of ...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - November 11, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Coombes SA, Tandonnet C, Fujiyama H, Janelle CM, Cauraugh JH, Summers JJ Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Affective processing within 1/10th of a second: High arousal is necessary for early facilitative processing of negative but not positive words.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Lexical decisions to high- and low-arousal negative words and to low-arousal neutral and positive words were examined in an event-related potentials (ERP) study. Reaction times to positive and high-arousal negative words were shorter than those to neutral (low-arousal) words, whereas those to low-arousal negative words were longer. A similar pattern was observed in an early time window of the ERP response: Both positive and high-arousal negative words elicited greater negative potentials in a time frame of 80 to 120 msec after stimulus onset. This result suggests that arousal has a differential impact on early lexical ...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - November 11, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Hofmann MJ, Kuchinke L, Tamm S, Võ ML, Jacobs AM Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Eye-movement assessment of the time course in facial expression recognition: Neurophysiological implications.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Happy, surprised, disgusted, angry, sad, fearful, and neutral faces were presented extrafoveally, with fixations on faces allowed or not. The faces were preceded by a cue word that designated the face to be saccaded in a two-alternative forced-choice discrimination task (2AFC; Experiments 1 and 2), or were followed by a probe word for recognition (Experiment 3). Eye tracking was used to decompose the recognition process into stages. Relative to the other expressions, happy faces (1) were identified faster (as early as 160 msec from stimulus onset) in extrafoveal vision, as revealed by shorter saccade latencies in the 2...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - November 11, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Calvo MG, Nummenmaa L Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Identity modulates short-term memory for facial emotion.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
For some time, the relationship between processing of facial expression and facial identity has been in dispute. Using realistic synthetic faces, we reexamined this relationship for both perception and short-term memory. In Experiment 1, subjects tried to identify whether the emotional expression on a probe stimulus face matched the emotional expression on either of two remembered faces that they had just seen. The results showed that identity strongly influenced recognition short-term memory for emotional expression. In Experiment 2, subjects' similarity/dissimilarity judgments were transformed by multidimensional sca...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - November 11, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Galster M, Kahana MJ, Wilson HR, Sekuler R Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

The effect of trial-to-trial feedback on the error-related negativity and its relationship with anxiety.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Individuals with anxiety disorders and related personality traits are characterized by increased error-related brain activity, as measured by the error-related negativity (ERN) in simple speeded response tasks. An absent, or opposite, relation between anxiety and the ERN has been reported in studies that employed reinforcement learning paradigms with trial-to-trial feedback. Understanding the effect of trial-to-trial feedback on the ERN may help clarify these results and can further elucidate the impact of feedback on performance monitoring. In the present study, 30 undergraduate participants performed two versions of ...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - November 11, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Olvet DM, Hajcak G Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Stimulus and response conflict processing during perceptual decision making.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Encoding and dealing with conflicting information is essential for successful decision making in a complex environment. In the present fMRI study, stimulus conflict and response conflict are contrasted in the context of a perceptual decision-making dot-motion discrimination task. Stimulus conflict was manipulated by varying dot-motion coherence along task-relevant and task-irrelevant dimensions. Response conflict was manipulated by varying whether or not competing stimulus dimensions provided evidence for the same or different responses. The right inferior frontal gyrus was involved specifically in the resolution of st...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - November 11, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Wendelken C, Ditterich J, Bunge SA, Carter CS Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

P50 sensory gating is related to performance on select tasks of cognitive inhibition.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
P50 suppression deficits have been documented in clinical and nonclinical populations, but the behavioral correlates of impaired auditory sensory gating remain poorly understood. In the present study, we examined the relationship between P50 gating and healthy adults' performance on cognitive inhibition tasks. On the basis of load theory (Lavie, Hirst, de Fockert, & Viding, 2004), we predicted that a high perceptual load, a possible consequence of poor auditory P50 sensory gating, would have differential (i.e., positive vs. negative) effects on performance of cognitive inhibition tasks. A dissociation was observed ...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - November 11, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Yadon CA, Bugg JM, Kisley MA, Davalos DB Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

The context counts: Congruent learning and testing environments prevent memory retrieval impairment following stress.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Stress before retention testing impairs memory, whereas memory performance is enhanced when the learning context is reinstated at retrieval. In the present study, we examined whether the negative impact of stress before memory retrieval can be attenuated when memory is tested in the same environmental context as that in which learning took place. Subjects learned a 2-D object location task in a room scented with vanilla. Twenty-four hours later, they were exposed to stress or a control condition before memory for the object location task was assessed in a cued-recall test, either in the learning context or in a differe...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - August 16, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Schwabe L, Wolf OT Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Oxytocin enhances the perception of biological motion in humans.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In this study, we investigated the effect of oxytocin on the perception of biological motion (a walking character) and nonbiological motion (a rotating shape). The participants were 20 healthy volunteers who observed moving dots embedded among a cloud of noise (mask) dots. Sensitivity (d') for motion detection was determined after the administration of oxytocin and placebo. The results showed that oxytocin (relative to placebo) administration increased sensitivity to biological motion but not to nonbiological motion. These results suggest that oxytocin specifically modulates the perception of socially relevant stimuli. ...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - August 16, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Kéri S, Benedek G Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Activation of right parietal cortex during memory retrieval of nonlinguistic auditory stimuli.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In neuroimaging studies, the left ventral posterior parietal cortex (PPC) is particularly active during memory retrieval. However, most studies have used verbal or verbalizable stimuli. We investigated neural activations associated with the retrieval of short, agrammatical music stimuli (Blackwood, 2004), which have been largely associated with right hemisphere processing. At study, participants listened to music stimuli and rated them on pleasantness. At test, participants made old/new recognition judgments with high/low confidence ratings. Right, but not left, ventral PPC activity was observed during the retrieval of...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - August 16, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Klostermann EC, Loui P, Shimamura AP Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Behavioral and neural correlates of memory selection and interference resolution during a digit working memory task.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Neuroimaging studies have shown the involvement of prefrontal and posterior parietal cortexes in regulating information processing. We conducted behavioral and fMRI experiments to investigate the relationship between memory selection and proactive interference (PI), using a delayed recognition task with a selection cue presented during the delay indicating which two of the four studied digits were relevant to the present test. PI was indexed by the response time differences between rejecting probes matching and not matching the no longer relevant digits. By varying the delay intervals, we found that the effect of PI di...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - August 16, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Yi Y, Driesen N, Leung HC Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Auditory context effects in picture naming investigated with event-related fMRI.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Naming an object entails a number of processing stages, including retrieval of a target lexical concept and encoding of its phonological word form. We investigated these stages using the picture-word interference task in an fMRI experiment. Participants named target pictures in the presence of auditorily presented semantically related, phonologically related, or unrelated distractor words or in isolation. We observed BOLD signal changes in left-hemisphere regions associated with lexical-conceptual and phonological processing, including the mid-to-posterior lateral temporal cortex. However, these BOLD responses manifest...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - August 16, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: de Zubicaray GI, McMahon KL Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Neural correlates of arithmetic calculation strategies.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Recent research into math cognition has identified areas of the brain that are involved in number processing (Dehaene, Piazza, Pinel, & Cohen, 2003) and complex problem solving (Anderson, 2007). Much of this research assumes that participants use a single strategy; yet, behavioral research finds that people use a variety of strategies (LeFevre et al., 1996; Siegler, 1987; Siegler & Lemaire, 1997). In the present study, we examined cortical activation as a function of two different calculation strategies for mentally solving multidigit multiplication problems. The school strategy, equivalent to long multiplicati...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - August 16, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Rosenberg-Lee M, Lovett MC, Anderson JR Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Primed picture naming within and across languages: An ERP investigation.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In two experiments, while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded, participants named picture targets that were preceded by masked word primes that corresponded either to the name of the picture target or to an unrelated picture name. Experiment 1 showed significant priming effects in the ERP waveforms, free from articulator artifact, starting as early as 200 msec post target onset. Possible loci of these priming effects were proposed within the framework of generic interactive activation models of word recognition and picture naming. These were grouped into three main components: object-specific structural repre...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - August 16, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Chauncey K, Holcomb PJ, Grainger J Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Modeling the categorical perception of speech sounds: A step toward biological plausibility.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Our native language has a lifelong effect on how we perceive speech sounds. Behaviorally, this is manifested as categorical perception, but the neural mechanisms underlying this phenomenon are still unknown. Here, we constructed a computational model of categorical perception, following principles consistent with infant speech learning. A self-organizing network was exposed to a statistical distribution of speech input presented as neural activity patterns of the auditory periphery, resembling the way sound arrives to the human brain. In the resulting neural map, categorical perception emerges from most single neurons ...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - August 16, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Salminen NH, Tiitinen H, May PJ Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Probing the attentional control theory in social anxiety: An emotional saccade task.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Volitional attentional control has been found to rely on prefrontal neuronal circuits. According to the attentional control theory of anxiety, impairment in the volitional control of attention is a prominent feature in anxiety disorders. The present study investigated this assumption in socially anxious individuals using an emotional saccade task with facial expressions (happy, angry, fearful, sad, neutral). The gaze behavior of participants was recorded during the emotional saccade task, in which participants performed either pro- or antisaccades in response to peripherally presented facial expressions. The results sh...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - August 16, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Wieser MJ, Pauli P, Mühlberger A Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

An electrophysiological investigation into the automaticity of emotional face processing in high versus low trait anxious individuals.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
To examine the extent of automaticity of emotional face processing in high versus low trait anxious participants, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to emotional (fearful, happy) and neutral faces under varying task demands (low load, high load). Results showed that perceptual encoding of emotional faces, as reflected in P1 and early posterior negativity components, was unaffected by the availability of processing resources. In contrast, the postperceptual registration and storage of emotion-related information, as reflected in the late positive potential component at frontal locations, was influenced by the...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - August 16, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Holmes A, Nielsen MK, Tipper S, Green S Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

An investigation of auditory contagious yawning.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Despite a widespread familiarity with the often compelling urge to yawn after perceiving someone else yawn, an understanding of the neural mechanism underlying contagious yawning remains incomplete. In the present auditory fMRI study, listeners used a 4-point scale to indicate how much they felt like yawning following the presentation of a yawn, breath, or scrambled yawn sound. Not only were yawn sounds given significantly higher ratings, a trait positively correlated with each individual's empathy measure, but relative to control stimuli, random effects analyses revealed enhanced hemodynamic activity in the right post...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - August 16, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Arnott SR, Singhal A, Goodale MA Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Coarse threat images reveal theta oscillations in the amygdala: A magnetoencephalography study.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Neurocognitive models propose a specialized neural system for processing threat-related information, in which the amygdala plays a key role in the analysis of threat cues. fMRI research indicates that the amygdala is sensitive to coarse visual threat relevant information-for example, low spatial frequency (LSF) fearful faces. However, fMRI cannot determine the temporal or spectral characteristics of neural responses. Consequently, we used magnetoencephalography to explore spatiotemporal patterns of activity in the amygdala and cortical regions with blurry (LSF) and normal angry, fearful, and neutral faces. Results demo...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - May 31, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Maratos FA, Mogg K, Bradley BP, Rippon G, Senior C Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Do tests of executive functioning predict ability to downregulate emotions spontaneously and when instructed to suppress?Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Behavioral regulation is a hallmark feature of executive functioning (EF). The present study investigated whether commonly used neuropsychological test measures of EF (i.e., working memory, Stroop, trail making, and verbal fluency) were related to ability to downregulate emotion both spontaneously and when instructed to suppress emotional expressions. To ensure a wide range of EF, 24 frontotemporal lobar degeneration patients, 7 Alzheimer's patients, and 17 neurologically normal controls participated. Participants were exposed to an acoustic startle stimulus (single aversive noise burst) under three conditions: (1) unw...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - May 31, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Gyurak A, Goodkind MS, Madan A, Kramer JH, Miller BL, Levenson RW Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Recognition of affective prosody in brain-damaged patients and healthy controls: A neurophysiological study using EEG and whole-head MEG.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
A passive oddball experiment was used in which stimuli were emotional exclamations differing in their affective tone. In both electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG), deviants elicited an N300 component, sometimes accompanied by a slow wave. Both components had a symmetrical distribution, but the former was more posterior than the latter. The same responses to prosodic stimuli were significant in 6 of 27 patients with severe disorders of consciousness (persistent vegetative state and minimally conscious state) and in all 3 of the examined locked-in patients, indicating that the procedure can be ap...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - May 31, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Kotchoubey B, Kaiser J, Bostanov V, Lutzenberger W, Birbaumer N Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Catechol-O-methyltransferase Val158Met genotype affects neural correlates of aversive stimuli processing.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
It was previously shown that variation of the catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) gene modulates brain activity during the processing of stimuli with negative valence, but not for pleasant stimuli. Here, we tested whether the COMT genotype also modulates the electrophysiological correlates of emotional processing and explored whether the environmental factor of life stress influences this effect. Using the early posterior negativity (EPN) paradigm, event-related brain potentials were measured in 81 healthy individuals during the processing of pictures that evoked emotions of positive and negative valence. As was hypoth...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - May 31, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Herrmann MJ, Würflein H, Schreppel T, Koehler S, Mühlberger A, Reif A, Canli T, Romanos M, Jacob CP, Lesch KP, Fallgatter AJ Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Electrophysiological differences in the processing of affective information in words and pictures.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
It is generally assumed that affective picture viewing is related to higher levels of physiological arousal than is the reading of emotional words. However, this assertion is based mainly on studies in which the processing of either words or pictures has been investigated under heterogenic conditions. Positive, negative, relaxing, neutral, and background (stimulus fragments) words and pictures were presented to subjects in two experiments under equivalent experimental conditions. In Experiment 1, neutral words elicited an enhanced late positive component (LPC) that was associated with an increased difficulty in discrim...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - May 31, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Hinojosa JA, Carretié L, Valcárcel MA, Méndez-Bértolo C, Pozo MA Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

An investigation of the neural correlates of attention and effector switching using ERPs.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were used to examine the neural correlates of attention and effector switching when one or both types of switches were performed on a given trial. The response time data revealed that switch costs tended to increase from attention switches to effector switches to attention+effector switches. For right-hand responses, attention switching was associated with a parietal slow wave and effector switching was associated with a central readiness potential. For left-hand responses, attention switching was associated with a parietal slow wave, and effector switching was associated with a pa...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - May 31, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: West R, Bailey K, Langley MM Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Anticipatory reconfiguration elicited by fully and partially informative cues that validly predict a switch in task.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
We examined this apparent discrepancy using a cued-trials task-switching paradigm with three tasks. The ERP finding of an early cue-locked positivity was replicated for both switch-to cues, which validly predicted an upcoming switch trial and specified the new task set, and switch-away cues, which validly predicted an upcoming switch trial but not the new task set. This component was not elicited by a noninformative cue that did not specify whether the task would switch or repeat. Switch-away cues resulted in more accurate but not faster responding than did noninformative cues. Modeling of decision processes confirmed a sp...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - May 31, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Karayanidis F, Mansfield EL, Galloway KL, Smith JL, Provost A, Heathcote A Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

A masked priming ERP study of letter processing using single letters and false fonts.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Previous event-related potential (ERP) research on letter processing has suggested that a P150 reflects low-level, featural processing, whereas a P260 reflects high-level, abstract letter processing. In order to investigate the specificity of these effects, ERPs were recorded in a masked priming paradigm using matching and nonmatching pairs of letters (e.g., g-g, g-j) and false fonts (e.g., , ). If the P150 priming effect indexes featural processing, there should be no effect of condition on the P150, since the letters and false fonts shared visual features. If the P260 priming effect indexes the processing of abstract...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - May 31, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Mitra P, Coch D Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Neuroticism and psychopathy predict brain activation during moral and nonmoral emotion regulation.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Functional neuroimaging has identified brain regions associated with voluntary regulation of emotion, including the prefrontal cortex and amygdala. The neural mechanisms underlying individual differences in emotion regulation have not been extensively studied. We investigated the neural correlates of neuroticism and psychopathic personality traits in the context of an emotion regulation task. Results showed that amygdala activity elicited by unpleasant pictures was positively correlated with neuroticism and negatively correlated with a specific psychopathic trait related to emotional underreactivity. During active atte...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - March 1, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Harenski CL, Kim SH, Hamann S Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Effort discounting in human nucleus accumbens.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
A great deal of behavioral and economic research suggests that the value attached to a reward stands in inverse relation to the amount of effort required to obtain it, a principle known as effort discounting. In the present article, we present the first direct evidence for a neural analogue of effort discounting. We used fMRI to measure neural responses to monetary rewards in the human nucleus accumbens (NAcc), a structure previously demonstrated to encode reference-dependent reward information. The magnitude of accumbens activation was found to vary with both reward outcome and the degree of mental effort demanded to ...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - March 1, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Botvinick MM, Huffstetler S, McGuire JT Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Time course and task dependence of emotion effects in word processing.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
The emotional content of stimuli influences cognitive performance. In two experiments, we investigated the time course and mechanisms of emotional influences on visual word processing in various tasks by recording event-related brain potentials (ERPs). The stimuli were verbs of positive, negative, and neutral valence. In Experiment 1, where lexical decisions had to be performed on single verbs, both positive and negative verbs were processed more quickly than neutral verbs and elicited a distinct ERP component, starting around 370 msec. In Experiment 2, the verbs were embedded in a semantic context provided by single n...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - March 1, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Schacht A, Sommer W Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Precedence-effect-induced enhancement of prepulse inhibition in socially reared but not isolation-reared rats.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This study investigated whether perceived spatial separation between a prepulse and a noise masker enhances PPI in socially reared rats and isolation-reared rats. The results show that both PPI and conditioning-induced PPI enhancement were larger in socially reared rats than in isolation-reared rats. More important, in socially reared, but not isolation-reared, rats, a further PPI enhancement was induced by precedence-effect-induced perceived separation between a prepulse and a masker only after the prepulse became fear conditioned. Thus, perceived separation facilitates normal rats' attention to a conditioned prepulse and...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - March 1, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Du Y, Li J, Wu X, Li L Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

When is an error not a prediction error? An electrophysiological investigation.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
A recent theory holds that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) uses reinforcement learning signals conveyed by the midbrain dopamine system to facilitate flexible action selection. According to this position, the impact of reward prediction error signals on ACC modulates the amplitude of a component of the event-related brain potential called the error-related negativity (ERN). The theory predicts that ERN amplitude is monotonically related to the expectedness of the event: It is larger for unexpected outcomes than for expected outcomes. However, a recent failure to confirm this prediction has called the theory into qu...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - March 1, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Holroyd CB, Krigolson OE, Baker R, Lee S, Gibson J Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Electromyographic evidence for response conflict in the exclude recognition task.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
How do memory retrieval processes lead to overt responses in strategic recognition tasks (responding "old" to one class of familiar stimulus and "new" to another)? Many current theories of memory retrieval ignore the response requirements in such memory tasks, instead modeling them using memory processes (e.g., familiarity and recollection) alone (see Yonelinas, 2002). We argue that strategic recognition involves conflict in response processing similar to canonical conflict tasks (e.g., the Stroop task). The parallel task set (PTS) model (Seymour, 2001) accounts for performance in strategic recognition tasks (e.g., the...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - March 1, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Seymour TL, Schumacher EH Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Catechol-O-methyltransferase polymorphism modulates cognitive control in children with chromosome 22q11.2 deletion syndrome.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Dopamine plays a critical role in regulating neural activity in prefrontal cortex (PFC) and modulates cognition via a hypothesized inverse U function. We investigated PFC function in children with chromosome 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22q11.2DS) in which one copy of catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) is deleted, thereby shifting them toward the lower end of dopamine turnover on the nonlinear function. A common polymorphism with valine to methionine substitution alters COMT activity that results in higher enzyme activity in the valine variant. Twenty-seven children with 22q11.2DS between 7 and 14 years old, and 21 age-...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - March 1, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Takarae Y, Schmidt L, Tassone F, Simon TJ Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Development of and change in cognitive control: A comparison of children, young adults, and older adults.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Cognitive control involves adjustments in behavior to conflicting information, develops throughout childhood, and declines in aging. Accordingly, developmental and age-related changes in cognitive control and response-conflict detection were assessed in a response-compatibility task. We recorded performance measures, pre-response time (pre-RT) activity and medial frontal negativity (MFN)-sequentially occurring, putative event-related potential (ERP) indexes, respectively, of cognitive control and response-conflict detection. When response conflict reached the highest levels by requiring incompatible responses on poster...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - March 1, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Friedman D, Nessler D, Cycowicz YM, Horton C Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Selective tuning of the right inferior frontal gyrus during target detection.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In the human brain, a network of frontal and parietal regions is commonly recruited during tasks that demand the deliberate, focused control of thought and action. Previously, using a simple target detection task, we reported striking differences in the selectivity of the BOLD response in anatomically distinct subregions of this network. In particular, it was observed that the right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) followed a tightly tuned function, selectively responding only to the current target object. Here, we examine this functional specialization further, using adapted versions of our original task. Our results demo...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - March 1, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Hampshire A, Thompson R, Duncan J, Owen AM Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Reevaluating split-fovea processing in word recognition: Hemispheric dominance, retinal location, and the word-nonword effect.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Many studies have claimed that hemispheric projections are split precisely at the foveal midline and so hemispheric asymmetry affects word recognition right up to the point of fixation. To investigate this claim, four-letter words and nonwords were presented to the left or right of fixation, either close to fixation in foveal vision or farther from fixation in extrafoveal vision. Presentation accuracy was controlled using an eyetracker linked to a fixation-contingent display. Words presented foveally produced identical performance on each side of fixation, but words presented extrafoveally showed a clear left-hemispher...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - March 1, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Jordan TR, Paterson KB, Kurtev S Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

The neural plasticity of other-race face recognition.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In this study, Caucasian participants were trained to differentiate African American (or Hispanic) faces at the individual level (e.g., Joe, Bob) and to categorize Hispanic (or African American) faces at the basic level of race (e.g., Hispanic, African American). Behaviorally, subordinate-level individuation training led to improved performance on a posttraining recognition test, relative to basic-level training. As measured by event-related potentials, subordinate- and basic-level training had relatively little effect on the face N170 component. However, as compared with basic-level training, subordinate-level training el...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - March 1, 2009 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tanaka JW, Pierce LJ Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Interdisciplinary perspectives on decision making.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
PMID: 19033232 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience)
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - December 1, 2008 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Kalenscher T, Tobler PN Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Introduction.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
PMID: 19033232 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience)
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - November 27, 2008 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Kalenscher T, Tobler PN Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Understanding risk: A guide for the perplexed.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Over the course of the past decade, neurobiologists have become increasingly interested in concepts and models imported from economics. Terms such as "risk," "risk aversion," and "utility" have become commonplace in the neuroscientific literature as single-unit physiologists and human cognitive neuroscientists search for the biological correlates of economic theories of value and choice. Among neuroscientists, an incomplete understanding of these concepts has, however, led to a growing confusion that threatens to check the rapid advances in this area. Adding to the confusion, notions of risk have more recently been imp...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - November 27, 2008 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Glimcher PW Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Dual or unitary system? Two alternative models of decision making.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In recent years, a lively debate in neuroeconomics has focused on what appears to be a fundamental question: Is the brain a unitary or a dual system? We are still far from a consensus view. The accumulating evidence supports both sides of the debate. A reason for the difficulty in reaching a convincing solution is that we do not yet have a clear theoretical model for either position. Here I review the basic elements and potential building blocks for such theories, using sources in large measure from classical decision theory and game theory. PMID: 19033234 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Cognitive, Affective and Beh...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - November 27, 2008 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Rustichini A Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Neurobiological studies of risk assessment: A comparison of expected utility and mean-variance approaches.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
When modeling valuation under uncertainty, economists generally prefer expected utility because it has an axiomatic foundation, meaning that the resulting choices will satisfy a number of rationality requirements. In expected utility theory, values are computed by multiplying probabilities of each possible state of nature by the payoff in that state and summing the results. The drawback of this approach is that all state probabilities need to be dealt with separately, which becomes extremely cumbersome when it comes to learning. Finance academics and professionals, however, prefer to value risky prospects in terms of a...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - November 27, 2008 Category: Neuroscience Authors: d'Acremont M, Bossaerts P Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Cortico-limbic-striatal circuits subserving different forms of cost-benefit decision making.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Research on the neural basis that underlies decision making in humans has revealed that these processes are mediated by distributed neural networks that incorporate different regions of the frontal lobes, the amygdala, the ventral striatum, and the dopamine system. In the present article, we review recent studies in rodents investigating the contribution of these systems to different forms of cost-benefit decision making and focus on evaluations related to delays, effort, or risks associated with certain rewards. Anatomically distinct regions of the medial and orbital prefrontal cortex make dissociable contributions to...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - November 27, 2008 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Floresco SB, Onge JR, Ghods-Sharifi S, Winstanley CA Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

The role of moral utility in decision making: An interdisciplinary framework.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
In conclusion, we suggest that moral capabilities can employ and benefit from a variety of nonmoral decision-making and learning mechanisms. PMID: 19033237 [PubMed - in process] (Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience)
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - November 27, 2008 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tobler PN, Kalis A, Kalenscher T Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Weakness of will, akrasia, and the neuropsychiatry of decision making: An interdisciplinary perspective.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
This article focuses on both daily forms of weakness of will as discussed in the philosophical debate (usually referred to as akrasia) and psychopathological phenomena as impairments of decision making. We argue that both descriptions of dysfunctional decision making can be organized within a common theoretical framework that divides the decision making process in three different stages: option generation, option selection, and action initiation. We first discuss our theoretical framework (building on existing models of decision-making stages), focusing on option generation as an aspect that has been neglected by previous ...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - November 27, 2008 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Kalis A, Mojzisch A, Schweizer TS, Kaiser S Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Conceptual representations in goal-directed decision making.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Emerging evidence suggests that the long-established distinction between habit-based and goal-directed decision-making mechanisms can also be sustained in humans. Although the habit-based system has been extensively studied in humans, the goal-directed system is less well characterized. This review brings to that task the distinction between conceptual and nonconceptual representational mechanisms. Conceptual representations are structured out of semantic constituents (concepts)-the use of which requires an ability to perform some language-like syntactic processing. Decision making-as investigated by neuroscience and p...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - November 27, 2008 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Shea N, Krug K, Tobler PN Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Decision theory, reinforcement learning, and the brain.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Decision making is a core competence for animals and humans acting and surviving in environments they only partially comprehend, gaining rewards and punishments for their troubles. Decision-theoretic concepts permeate experiments and computational models in ethology, psychology, and neuroscience. Here, we review a well-known, coherent Bayesian approach to decision making, showing how it unifies issues in Markovian decision problems, signal detection psychophysics, sequential sampling, and optimal exploration and discuss paradigmatic psychological and neural examples of each problem. We discuss computational issues conc...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - November 27, 2008 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Dayan P, Daw ND Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals

Making decisions with a continuous mind.Email this article to a colleague. Save this article to My Clippings. Discuss or comment on this article.
Neuroeconomics is a rapidly expanding field at the interfaces of the human sciences. The interdisciplinary nature of this field results in several challenges when attempts are made to solve puzzling questions in human decision making, such as why and how people discount future gains. We argue that an empirical approach based on dynamic systems theory (DST) could inspire and advance the neuroeconomic investigation of decision-making processes in three ways: by enriching the mental model, by extending the empirical tool set, and by facilitating interdisciplinary exchange. The present article addresses the challenges neur...
Source: Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience - November 27, 2008 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Scherbaum S, Dshemuchadse M, Kalis A Tags: Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci Source Type: journals