Qiongwen Cao, Michael S Cohen, Akram Bakkour, Yuan Chang Leong, Jean Decety
{"title":"Moral conviction interacts with metacognitive ability in modulating neural activity during sociopolitical decision-making.","authors":"Qiongwen Cao, Michael S Cohen, Akram Bakkour, Yuan Chang Leong, Jean Decety","doi":"10.3758/s13415-024-01243-3","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13415-024-01243-3","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The extent to which a belief is rooted in one's sense of morality has significant societal implications. While moral conviction can inspire positive collective action, it can also prompt dogmatism, intolerance, and societal divisions. Research in social psychology has documented the functional characteristics of moral conviction and shows that poor metacognition exacerbates its negative outcomes. However, the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying moral conviction, their relationship with metacognition, and how moral conviction is integrated into the valuation and decision-making process remain unclear. This study investigated these neurocognitive processes during decision-making on sociopolitical issues varying in moral conviction. Participants (N = 44) underwent fMRI scanning while deciding, on each trial, which of two groups of political protesters they supported more. As predicted, stronger moral conviction was associated with faster decision times. Hemodynamic responses in the anterior insula (aINS), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and lateral prefrontal cortex (lPFC) were elevated during decisions with higher moral conviction, supporting the emotional and cognitive dimensions of moral conviction. Functional connectivity between lPFC and vmPFC was greater on trials higher in moral conviction, elucidating mechanisms through which moral conviction is incorporated into valuation. Average support for the two displayed groups of protesters was positively associated with brain activity in regions involved in valuation, particularly vmPFC and amygdala. Metacognitive sensitivity, the ability to discriminate one's correct from incorrect judgments, measured in a perceptual task, negatively correlated with parametric effects of moral conviction in the brain, providing new evidence that metacognition modulates responses to morally convicted issues.</p>","PeriodicalId":50672,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience","volume":" ","pages":"291-310"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142866146","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 two sides of Phobos: Gray and white matter abnormalities in phobic individuals.","authors":"Alessandro Grecucci, Alessandro Scarano, Ascensión Fumero, Francisco Rivero, Rosario J Marrero, Teresa Olivares, Yolanda Álvarez-Pérez, Wenceslao Peñate","doi":"10.3758/s13415-024-01258-w","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13415-024-01258-w","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Small animal phobia (SAP) is a subtype of specific phobia characterized by an intense and irrational fear of small animals, which has been underexplored in the neuroscientific literature. Previous studies often faced limitations, such as small sample sizes, focusing on only one neuroimaging modality, and reliance on univariate analyses, which produced inconsistent findings. This study was designed to overcome these issues by using for the first time advanced multivariate machine-learning techniques to identify the neural mechanisms underlying SAP. Specifically, we relied on the multimodal Canonical Correlation Analysis approach combined with Independent Component Analysis (ICA) to decompose the structural magnetic resonance images from 122 participants into covarying gray and white matter networks. Stepwise logistic regression and boosted decision trees were then used to extract a predictive model of SAP. Our results indicate that four covarying gray and white matter networks, IC19, IC14, IC21, and IC13, were critical in classifying SAP individuals from control subjects. These networks included brain regions, such as the Middle Temporal Gyrus, Precuneus, Insula, and Anterior Cingulate Cortex-all known for their roles in emotional regulation, cognitive control, and sensory processing. To test the generalizability of our results, we additionally ran a supervised machine-learning model (boosted decision trees), which achieved an 83.3% classification accuracy, with AUC of 0.9, indicating good predictive power. These findings provide new insights into the neurobiological underpinnings of SAP and suggest potential biomarkers for diagnosing and treating this condition. The study offers a more nuanced understanding of SAP, with implications for future research and clinical applications in anxiety disorders.</p>","PeriodicalId":50672,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience","volume":" ","pages":"550-569"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2025-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142928721","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}
Tammy T Tran, Kevin P Madore, Kaitlyn E Tobin, Sophia H Block, Vyash Puliyadi, Shaw C Hsu, Alison R Preston, Arnold Bakker, Anthony D Wagner
{"title":"Age-Related differences in the relationship between sustained attention and associative memory and Memory-Guided inference.","authors":"Tammy T Tran, Kevin P Madore, Kaitlyn E Tobin, Sophia H Block, Vyash Puliyadi, Shaw C Hsu, Alison R Preston, Arnold Bakker, Anthony D Wagner","doi":"10.3758/s13415-025-01292-2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-025-01292-2","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Episodic memory enables the encoding and retrieval of novel associations, as well as the bridging across learned associations to draw novel inferences. A fundamental goal of memory science is to understand the factors that give rise to individual and age-related differences in memory-dependent cognition. Variability in episodic memory could arise, in part, from both individual differences in sustained attention and diminished attention in aging. We first report that, relative to young adults (N = 23; M = 20.0 years), older adults (N = 26, M = 68.7 years) demonstrated lower associative memory and memory-guided associative inference performance and that this age-related reduction in associative inference occurs even when controlling for associative memory performance. Next, we confirm these age-related memory differences by using a high-powered, online replication study (young adults: N = 143, M = 26.2 years; older adults N = 133, M = 67.7 years), further demonstrating that age-related differences in memory do not reflect group differences in sustained attention (as assayed by the gradual-onset continuous performance task; gradCPT). Finally, we report that individual differences in sustained attention explain between-person variability in associative memory and inference performance in the present, online young adult sample, but not in the older adult sample. These findings extend understanding of the links between attention and memory in young adults, demonstrating that differences in sustained attention was related to differences in memory-guided inference. By contrast, our data suggest that the present age-related differences in memory-dependent behavior and the memory differences between older adults are due to attention-independent mechanisms.</p>","PeriodicalId":50672,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143744354","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}
Jana Isabelle Braunwarth, Nicola Kristina Ferdinand
{"title":"The impact of emotional feedback in learning easy and difficult tasks - an ERP study.","authors":"Jana Isabelle Braunwarth, Nicola Kristina Ferdinand","doi":"10.3758/s13415-025-01284-2","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13415-025-01284-2","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Learning from the emotional reaction of others is crucial in our everyday lives. We assumed that additional emotional information could be especially beneficial, when a task is difficult and the limits of working memory capacity are reached. For this reason, we examined whether a potential benefit of emotional feedback during reinforcement learning is dependent on working memory load. In addition to learning performance, we analysed the neural mechanisms of reinforcement learning by examining two event-related potentials (ERPs): feedback-related negativity (FRN) and P3b. Participants were divided into two difficulty groups (with n = 21 in the difficult and n = 22 in the easy group), performing a learning task with emotional or non-emotional feedback. Task difficulty was manipulated by varying the number of stimulus-response associations. Participants' showed learning in all conditions. Emotional feedback led to increased accuracy and decreased reaction times in both groups. However, this benefit occurred earlier in the easy condition. The detection of unexpected events, as reflected in the peak-to-peak FRN, as well as working memory updating, as reflected in the P3b, were enhanced after emotional in contrast to non-emotional feedback for both groups. In contrast, task difficulty had no effect on the detection of unexpected events but led to a P3b that was more evenly distributed over the scalp, which could indicate that additional frontal resources were recruited to perform the difficult task. Our results suggest that working memory load and emotional information independently influence feedback processing without interacting.</p>","PeriodicalId":50672,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143732785","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}
M Lojowska, J M Gerbracht, J B Engelmann, K Roelofs, M Mulckhuyse
{"title":"A transcranial magnetic stimulation study on the role of the right angular gyrus in orienting and reorienting of attention toward threat.","authors":"M Lojowska, J M Gerbracht, J B Engelmann, K Roelofs, M Mulckhuyse","doi":"10.3758/s13415-025-01275-3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-025-01275-3","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Reorientation of attention to threatening stimuli is a fundamental part of human cognition. Such interaction between cognitive and affective processes is often associated with faster response times. In the present study, the role of the right angular gyrus (AG) in reorienting to threat is examined. An exogenous spatial cueing paradigm was adopted with threatening and nonthreatening targets. Threat was induced by means of differential fear conditioning of the target. Single pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was applied to the right AG at different stimulus onset asynchronies (SOA) after target onset (range 30-300 ms). Transcranial magnetic stimulation was predicted to interfere at an earlier SOA with reorienting (during invalidly cued trials) to threatening targets. Even though an overall decrement in performance to targets contralateral to TMS stimulation was found, TMS to right AG did not specifically affect reorienting, neither to safe nor to threatening targets. We suggest that detection of biologically significant stimuli outside the focus of attention may depend more on the ventral frontoparietal rather than dorsal frontoparietal network of attention.</p>","PeriodicalId":50672,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143722509","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}
Eline S Kruithof, Eva M Drop, Daan Gerits, Jana Klaus, Dennis J L G Schutter
{"title":"Continuous theta burst stimulation to the medial posterior cerebellum impairs reversal learning in healthy volunteers.","authors":"Eline S Kruithof, Eva M Drop, Daan Gerits, Jana Klaus, Dennis J L G Schutter","doi":"10.3758/s13415-025-01273-5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-025-01273-5","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The role of the cerebellum in associative learning and context-updating implies involvement in learning reward-punishment contingencies. This study examined the direct contribution of the cerebellum to reward- and punishment-based reversal learning. A total of 111 healthy right-handed adult volunteers received continuous theta burst stimulation (cTBS) to either the medial posterior cerebellum (n = 37), right posterolateral cerebellum (n = 37), or right occipital lobe (n = 37) in this single-blind between-subjects study. A gambling task with two changing reward-punishment contingencies (reversals) was administered to assess reversal learning rate and the implementation of the optimal strategy as primary endpoints. As secondary endpoints, heart rate variability (HRV), state anxiety, state anger, trait aggression, and trait impulsivity were assessed to examine interactions with cerebellar cTBS on the implementation of the optimal strategy. Results showed that medial posterior cerebellar cTBS compared with right posterolateral cerebellar and right occipital lobe cTBS reduced learning rate after the first reversal and diminished the implementation of the optimal strategy after learning the second reversal. No interactions of cTBS with HRV, state anxiety, state anger, trait aggression, and trait impulsivity on the implementation of the optimal strategy were observed. Our findings provide evidence for involvement of the cerebellum in reward- and punishment-based reversal learning and behavioral adaptation.</p>","PeriodicalId":50672,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143722514","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}
Minhee Yoo, Giwon Bahg, Brandon Turner, Ian Krajbich
{"title":"People display consistent recency and primacy effects in behavior and neural activity across perceptual and value-based judgments.","authors":"Minhee Yoo, Giwon Bahg, Brandon Turner, Ian Krajbich","doi":"10.3758/s13415-025-01285-1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-025-01285-1","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Retrospective judgments require decision-makers to gather information over time and integrate that information into a summary statistic like the average. Many retrospective judgments require putting equal weight on early and late information, in contrast to prospective judgments that involve predicting the future and so rely more on late information. We investigate how people weight information over time when continuously reporting the average stimulus strength in a sequence of displays. We investigate the consistency of these temporal profiles across perceptual and value-based tasks using both behavior and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. We found that people display remarkably consistent temporal weighting functions across choice domains, with a generally strong recency bias and modest primacy bias. The fMRI data revealed evidence-tracking activity in the cuneus in both tasks and in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in the value-based task. Finally, a network of cognitive control regions is more active for people who exhibit a stronger primacy vs. recency bias. Together, our behavioral findings indicate that people consistently overweight recency when evaluating past information, and the neural data suggest that overcoming this tendency may require cognitive control.</p>","PeriodicalId":50672,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143722516","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}
Ata B Karagoz, Erin K Moran, Deanna M Barch, Wouter Kool, Zachariah M Reagh
{"title":"Evidence for shallow cognitive maps in Schizophrenia.","authors":"Ata B Karagoz, Erin K Moran, Deanna M Barch, Wouter Kool, Zachariah M Reagh","doi":"10.3758/s13415-025-01283-3","DOIUrl":"10.3758/s13415-025-01283-3","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Individuals with schizophrenia can have marked deficits in goal-directed decision making. Prominent theories differ in whether schizophrenia (SZ) affects the ability to exert cognitive control or the motivation to exert control. An alternative explanation is that schizophrenia negatively impacts the formation of cognitive maps, the internal representations of the way the world is structured, necessary for the formation of effective action plans. That is, deficits in decision-making could arise when goal-directed control and motivation are intact but used to plan over ill-formed maps. We tested the hypothesis that individuals with SZ are impaired in constructing cognitive maps. We combine a behavioral representational similarity analysis technique with a sequential decision-making task. This enables us to examine how relationships between choice options change when individuals with SZ and healthy age-matched controls build a cognitive map of the task structure. Our results indicate that SZ affects how people represent the structure of the task, focusing more on simpler visual features and less on abstract, higher-order, planning-relevant features. At the same time, we find that individuals with SZ were able to display similar performance on this task compared with controls, emphasizing the need for a distinction between cognitive map formation and changes in goal-directed control in understanding cognitive deficits in schizophrenia.</p>","PeriodicalId":50672,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143671393","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}
Chiara Longo, Giulia Mattavelli, Alice Beati, Maria Pennacchio, Bryan Bertoldi, Maria Chiara Malaguti, Costanza Papagno
{"title":"Affective priming of body and facial expressions in Parkinson's disease.","authors":"Chiara Longo, Giulia Mattavelli, Alice Beati, Maria Pennacchio, Bryan Bertoldi, Maria Chiara Malaguti, Costanza Papagno","doi":"10.3758/s13415-025-01290-4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-025-01290-4","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) often experience impairments in emotion processing. Previous literature has highlighted deficits in facial expression recognition and body movement processing, including social signals. However, to date, the integration of facial and bodily expressions has been investigated in healthy populations, but not in individuals with PD. The present study assessed the reciprocal influence between facial and body emotion recognition by using subliminal priming paradigms in a sample of PD patients and in healthy controls (HC). Participants completed both a Face-Body and a Body-Face priming task, in which facial or body expressions subliminally primed the discrimination of body or face emotions, respectively. Recognition of face and body emotions was also assessed. The results revealed that the discrimination of fearful and happy body expressions was not modulated by the previous congruent, incongruent, or neutral face in PD patients, whereas a significant Face-Body priming effect was observed in HC. In contrast, body emotion did not significantly prime face expression discrimination in either group. These findings suggest an impairment in the automatic integration of emotional information from faces and bodies in PD, which may hinder the detection of mismatches between emotional information from different cues.</p>","PeriodicalId":50672,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143671389","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}
Kenneth W Carlson, Harry R Smolker, Louisa L Smith, Hannah R Snyder, Benjamin L Hankin, Marie T Banich
{"title":"Correction: Individual differences in intolerance of uncertainty is primarily linked to the structure of inferior frontal regions.","authors":"Kenneth W Carlson, Harry R Smolker, Louisa L Smith, Hannah R Snyder, Benjamin L Hankin, Marie T Banich","doi":"10.3758/s13415-025-01288-y","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-025-01288-y","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":50672,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143659310","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}