Sara Milligan, Ayah Elaboudi, Brian Nestor, Elizabeth R Schotter
{"title":"Individual differences in subcomponents of the N400: Comprehension ability predicts contextual support effects while spelling ability predicts orthographic anomaly effects.","authors":"Sara Milligan, Ayah Elaboudi, Brian Nestor, Elizabeth R Schotter","doi":"10.3758/s13415-025-01280-6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-025-01280-6","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The N400 ERP component has been characterized as a response reflecting binding of semantic memory states to create a \"multimodal conceptual representation\" (Kutas & Federmeier, 2011). An assumption of this characterization is that the measured response itself reflects the synchronization of various neural processes required for language comprehension. Less is known, however, about how these processes vary across individuals and how specific language skills may modulate particular underlying subcomponents of the N400. In the current study, we measured the N400 response to words that were (1) unexpected (i.e., low cloze in low constraint) or (2) orthographically related (OR) anomalies compared with expected words (i.e., high cloze in high constraint), and we investigated how these effects were related to participants' reading comprehension ability, vocabulary, and spelling ability. We found that contextual support N400 effects were larger for individuals with superior reading comprehension skills, whereas OR anomaly N400 effects were larger for individuals with superior spelling ability. These findings support the characterization of the N400 as a composite of various comprehension-related neural processes. The current study demonstrates that individual differentiation in the strength of these skills is differentially associated with the N400 subcomponents related to contextual facilitation and orthographic processing. Reading comprehension ability is associated with stronger contextual support effects, which may reflect more effective use of contextual support in facilitating semantic retrieval. Spelling skill is more strongly associated with OR anomaly effects (in contexts supporting an orthographic neighbor of the presented anomalous word), which may reflect more precise word identification.</p>","PeriodicalId":50672,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143617706","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Guillermo Solovey, Alejandro Usaj, Soledad Picco, Juan Cruz Beron, Mariela Sued, María Eugenia Szretter Noste, Luz Bavassi, Maria E Pedreira, Rodrigo S Fernández
{"title":"Trait-anxiety and belief updating: Exploring the role of negativity bias and contrast avoidance.","authors":"Guillermo Solovey, Alejandro Usaj, Soledad Picco, Juan Cruz Beron, Mariela Sued, María Eugenia Szretter Noste, Luz Bavassi, Maria E Pedreira, Rodrigo S Fernández","doi":"10.3758/s13415-025-01282-4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-025-01282-4","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Beliefs play a crucial role in shaping our behaviors and mental health outcomes. Asymmetric belief updating refers to the phenomenon where desirable information is updated more readily than undesirable information. An essential feature of anxiety is threat-overestimation and a tendency to focus on the negative aspects of experience while avoiding sharp negative emotional contrasts. These two characteristics lead to different predictions concerning belief updating. One scenario would suggest a reduction in asymmetric update behavior, indicating negativity bias, whereas the other would indicate an increase in asymmetric update, indicating contrast avoidance. To test these two rival predictions, participants (n = 54) first completed trait-measures and then performed a belief update task. Moreover, memory for the information presented was assessed in the short-term and long-term. Skin conductance response was measured to assess arousal levels. Overall, our findings revealed that higher levels of trait-anxiety predicted a greater integration of desirable information but not undesirable information. Trait-intolerance of uncertainty did not exhibit an association with update behavior. Skin conductance and memory were not associated with trait-measures. We discuss these results in line with the Contrast Avoidance Model of anxiety in terms of avoidance of unexpected negative and positive contrasts induced by relief during belief updating.</p>","PeriodicalId":50672,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143607069","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Unlocking new insights into the somatic marker hypothesis with multilevel logistic models.","authors":"Félix Duplessis-Marcotte, Pier-Olivier Caron, Marie-France Marin","doi":"10.3758/s13415-025-01271-7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-025-01271-7","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The Somatic Marker Hypothesis, an influential neurobiological account of decision-making, states that emotional somatic markers (e.g., skin conductance responses) influence decision-making processes. Despite its prominence, the hypothesis remains controversial partly because of inconsistent results stemming from inappropriate statistical methods. Tasks designed to assess decision-making often use repeated measures designs, such as the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), which requires participants to maximize profits by selecting 100 cards among four decks offering varying win-loss contingencies. Researchers often aggregate repeated measures into a single averaged value to simplify analyses, potentially committing an ecological fallacy by erroneously generalizing results obtained from aggregated data (i.e., interindividual effects) to individual repeated measurements (i.e., intraindividual effects). This paper addresses this issue by demonstrating how to analyze concurrent repeated measures of both independent and dependent variables using multilevel logistic models. First, the principles of logistic multilevel models are explained. Then, simulated and empirical IGT data are analyzed to compare the performance of traditional statistical approaches (i.e., general linear models) with multilevel logistic models. Our proposed multilevel logistic analyses address critical methodological gaps in decision-making research, ensuring more accurate interpretations of repeated measures data. This approach not only advances the study of the Somatic Marker Hypothesis but also provides a robust framework for similar research protocols, ultimately enhancing the reliability and validity of findings.</p>","PeriodicalId":50672,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143574407","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Acute psychological stress promotes implicit aggression: Evidence from behavior and ERPs.","authors":"Yu Zhang, Xiaoyu Chen, Yuncheng Jia, Yixin Duan, Meihe Liu, Qingyu Xu, Lingrong Jia, Lili Wu","doi":"10.3758/s13415-025-01276-2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-025-01276-2","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Acute stress affects explicit aggressive behavior through two distinct behavioral patterns: \"fight or flight\" and \"tend and befriend\". However, the impact of acute stress on implicit aggression remains less explored. We investigated the effect of acute stress on implicit aggression with event-related potentials (ERPs; N2, P2, P3, and N400) measures. A total of 55 healthy individuals were randomly allocated to either the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) group (N = 31, 14 females) or a neutral control group (N = 24, 15 females). Following this, participants completed the Single Target-Implicit Association Test (ST-IAT) while electroencephalogram (EEG) data were collected. We found that acute stress strengthens the associations between self-related words and aggressive words relative to nonaggressive words. At the neural level, N2 and N400 components amplitudes were significantly smaller following the TSST relative to the control group. The compatible task in the ST-IAT elicited a larger P2 amplitude than that in the incompatible task. Our results support the model of \"fight or flight\" where humans choose to attack or escape to survive under stress.</p>","PeriodicalId":50672,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143568714","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The impact of impulsivity and compulsivity on error processing in different motivational contexts.","authors":"Rebecca Overmeyer, Tanja Endrass","doi":"10.3758/s13415-025-01281-5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-025-01281-5","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Neural correlates of performance monitoring, specifically the error-related negativity (ERN), are not only sensitive to motivation, but also altered in mental disorders marked by high levels of impulsivity and compulsivity. We explored the relationship between the ERN and individual differences in impulsivity and compulsivity. A total of 221 participants were recruited along the dimensions of impulsivity and compulsivity, and they performed a flanker task with a potential gain and a loss avoidance motivational context to assess error-related brain activity. We examined the ERN and theta power. Single trial regression was employed to analyze effects of motivational context and the relation to impulsivity and compulsivity. High impulsivity and compulsivity predicted higher ERN amplitudes within the gain context, but not the loss context. The interaction between both resulted in ERN amplitudes in the gain context being largest when impulsivity was high and compulsivity was low, and smallest when both were low. The ERN amplitude difference between gain and loss trials was highest if both impulsivity and compulsivity were low. Results indicate that both impulsivity and compulsivity are associated with larger ERN in the gain context, probably indicating higher subjective error significance. Both show a reduced modulation of the ERN with motivational context suggesting deficits in adaptive regulation of performance monitoring. Exploring transdiagnostic markers and their interactions could provide valuable insights into unraveling the complex dynamics that arise when examining the neural correlates of performance monitoring within the context of motivational effects.</p>","PeriodicalId":50672,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143568716","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Brain stimulation over dorsomedial prefrontal cortex causally affects metacognitive bias but not mentalising.","authors":"Rebekka S Mattes, Alexander Soutschek","doi":"10.3758/s13415-025-01277-1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-025-01277-1","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Despite the importance of metacognition for everyday decision-making, its neural substrates are far from understood. Recent neuroimaging studies linked metacognitive processes to dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), a region known to be involved in monitoring task difficulty. dmPFC is also thought to be involved in mentalising, consistent with theoretical accounts of metacognition as a self-directed subform of mentalising. However, it is unclear whether, and if so how, dmPFC causally affects metacognitive judgements, and whether this can be explained by a more general role of dmPFC for mentalising. To test this, participants performed two tasks targeting metacognition in perceptual decisions and mentalising whilst undergoing excitatory anodal versus sham dmPFC tDCS. dmPFC tDCS significantly decreased subjective confidence reports while leaving first-level performance in accuracy and reaction times unaffected, suggesting a causal contribution of dmPFC to representing metacognitive bias. Furthermore, we found no effect of dmPFC tDCS on neither metacognitive sensitivity and efficiency nor on mentalising, providing no evidence for an overlap between perceptual metacognition and mentalising in the dmPFC. Together, our findings highlight the dmPFC's causal role in metacognition by representing subjective confidence during evaluations of cognitive performance.</p>","PeriodicalId":50672,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2025-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143517053","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Approach-avoidance conflict recruits lateral frontoparietal and cinguloinsular networks in a predator-prey game setting.","authors":"Yuqian Ni, Robert F Potter, Thomas W James","doi":"10.3758/s13415-025-01278-0","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-025-01278-0","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Objects associated with both reward and threat produce approach-avoidance conflict (AAC). Although our day-to-day encounters with AAC objects are dynamic and interactive, the cognitive neuroscience literature on AAC is largely based on experiments that use static stimuli. Here, we used a dynamic, interactive, video-game environment to test neural substrates implicated in processing AAC in a more ecologically valid setting. While undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), subjects (N = 31) played a predator-prey video game, guiding an avatar through a maze containing six types of aversive or appetitive agents. Of the six agent types, two were \"non-AAC\" and either always healed or always harmed the player's avatar on contact. The other four were \"AAC,\" healing or harming the avatar probabilistically. Results revealed that imminence (inverse of distance) between a player's avatar and an environmental agent was a strong predictor of activation in three brain networks: the cinguloinsular (CI), dorsal frontoparietal (DFP), and occipitotemporal (OT). Additionally, two distinct temporal patterns of heightened activation with AAC agents emerged in two networks: the CI network responded with a transient spike of activation at trial onsets, followed by rapid decay, whereas the lateral frontoparietal (LFP) network showed sustained activation across the whole trial. We conclude that, in an interactive, dynamic setting, the roles of the CI and LFP networks appear to be complimentary, with the CI involved in distinguishing between AAC and non-AAC agents when they first appeared and the LFP involved in maintaining a behavioral mode related to the level of AAC.</p>","PeriodicalId":50672,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2025-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143517049","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Maximilian Reger, Oleg Vrabie, Gregor Volberg, Angelika Lingnau
{"title":"Actions at a glance: The time course of action, object, and scene recognition in a free recall paradigm.","authors":"Maximilian Reger, Oleg Vrabie, Gregor Volberg, Angelika Lingnau","doi":"10.3758/s13415-025-01272-6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-025-01272-6","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Being able to quickly recognize other people's actions lies at the heart of our ability to efficiently interact with our environment. Action recognition has been suggested to rely on the analysis and integration of information from different perceptual subsystems, e.g., for the processing of objects and scenes. However, stimulus presentation times that are required to extract information about actions, objects, and scenes to our knowledge have not yet been directly compared. To address this gap in the literature, we compared the recognition thresholds for actions, objects, and scenes. First, 30 participants were presented with grayscale images depicting different actions at variable presentation times (33-500 ms) and provided written descriptions of each image. Next, ten naïve raters evaluated these descriptions with respect to the presence and accuracy of information related to actions, objects, scenes, and sensory information. Comparing thresholds across presentation times, we found that recognizing actions required shorter presentation times (from 60 ms onwards) than objects (68 ms) and scenes (84 ms). More specific actions required presentation times of approximately 100 ms. Moreover, thresholds were modulated by action category, with the lowest thresholds for locomotion and the highest thresholds for food-related actions. Together, our data suggest that perceptual evidence for actions, objects, and scenes is gathered in parallel when these are presented in the same scene but accumulates faster for actions that reflect static body posture recognition than for objects and scenes.</p>","PeriodicalId":50672,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2025-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143516419","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"N200 and late components reveal text-emoji congruency effect in affective theory of mind.","authors":"Yi Zhong, Haiyu Zhong, Qiong Chen, Xiuling Liang, Feng Xiao, Fei Xin, Qingfei Chen","doi":"10.3758/s13415-025-01270-8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-025-01270-8","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Emojis are thought to be important for online communication, affecting not only our emotional state, but also our ability to infer the sender's emotional state, i.e., the affective theory of mind (aToM). However, it is unclear the role of text-emoji valence congruency in aToM judgements. Participants were presented with positive, negative, or neutral instant messages followed by positive or negative emoji and were required to infer the sender's emotional state as making valence and arousal ratings. Participants rated that senders felt more positive when they displayed positive emojis as opposed to negative emojis, and the senders were more aroused when valence between emoji and sentence was congruent. Event-related potentials were time-locked to emojis and analyzed by robust mass-univariate statistics, finding larger N200 for positive emojis relative to negative emojis in the negative sentence but not in the positive and neutral sentences, possibly reflecting conflict detection. Furthermore, the N400 effect was found between emotional and neutral sentences, but not between congruent and incongruent conditions, which may reflect a rapid bypassing of deeper semantic analysis. Critically, larger later positivity and negativity (600-900 ms) were found for incongruent combinations relative to congruent combinations in emotional sentences, which was more pronounced for positive sentence, reflecting the cognitive efforts needed for reevaluating the emotional meaning of emotional state attribution under incongruent combinations. These results suggest that emoji valence exerts different effects on positive and negative aToM judgments, and affective processing of sentence-emoji combinations precedes semantic processing, highlighting the importance of emojis in aToM.</p>","PeriodicalId":50672,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2025-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143517057","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Annika Stump, Torsten Wüstenberg, Jeffrey N Rouder, Andreas Voss
{"title":"The face of illusory truth: Repetition of information elicits affective facial reactions predicting judgments of truth.","authors":"Annika Stump, Torsten Wüstenberg, Jeffrey N Rouder, Andreas Voss","doi":"10.3758/s13415-025-01266-4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-025-01266-4","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>People tend to judge repeated information as more likely true compared with new information. A key explanation for this phenomenon, called the illusory truth effect, is that repeated information can be processed more fluently, causing it to appear more familiar and trustworthy. To consider the function of time in investigating its underlying cognitive and affective mechanisms, our design comprised two retention intervals. Seventy-five participants rated the truth of new and repeated statements 10 min, as well as 1 week after first exposure while spontaneous facial expressions were assessed via electromyography. Our data demonstrate that repetition results not only in an increased probability of judging information as true (illusory truth effect) but also in specific facial reactions indicating increased positive affect, reduced mental effort, and increased familiarity (i.e., relaxations of musculus corrugator supercilii and frontalis) during the evaluation of information. The results moreover highlight the relevance of time: both the repetition-induced truth effect as well as EMG activities, indicating increased positive affect and reduced mental effort, decrease significantly after a longer interval.</p>","PeriodicalId":50672,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2025-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143517064","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}