Psychophysiology

Choline and folate are critical nutrients for fetal brain development, but the timing of their influence during gestation has not been previously characterized. At different periods during gestation, choline stimulation of α7-nicotinic receptors facilitates conversion of γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) receptors from excitatory to inhibitory and recruitment of GluR1-R2 receptors for faster excitatory responses to glutamate. The outcome of the fetal development of inhibition and excitation was assessed in 159 newborns by P50 cerebral auditory-evoked responses...

Research using psychophysiological methods holds great promise for refining clinical assessment, identifying risk factors, and informing treatment. Unfortunately, unique methodological features of existing approaches limit inclusive research participation and, consequently, generalizability. This brief overview and commentary provides a snapshot of the current state of representation in clinical psychophysiology, with a focus on the forms and consequences of ongoing exclusion of Black participants. We illustrate issues of inequity and exclusion that are unique to clinical psychophysiology, considering intersections among social constructions of Blackness and biased design of current technology used to measure electroencephalography, skin conductance, and other signals...

Seeing a face in motion can help subsequent face recognition. Several explanations have been proposed for this 'motion advantage', but other factors that might play a role have received less attention. For example, facial movement might enhance recognition by attracting attention to the internal facial features thereby facilitating identification. However, there is no direct evidence that motion increases attention to regions of the face that facilitate identification (i.e., internal features) compared to static faces...

Several studies have shown that parafoveal processing is essential in reading development. In this study, we explore the effect of transposing and substituting inner and outer letters in a flanker lexical decision task administered to 78 children and 65 adults. The results show a significant interaction between the Group factor and the Flanker factor, suggesting differences in the effects of flankers for children and adults. In the case of adults, transposed and substituted letters generated benefit of the same magnitude in comparison to the unrelated condition, but of lesser magnitude than the Identity condition...

Visual symmetry activates a network of regions in the extrastriate cortex and generates an event-related potential (ERP) called the sustained posterior negativity (SPN). Previous work has found that the SPN is robust to experimental manipulations of task, spatial attention, and memory load. In the current study, we investigated whether the SPN is also robust to alcohol-induced changes in mental state. A pilot experiment (N = 13) found that alcohol unexpectedly increased SPN amplitude. We followed this unexpected result with two new experiments on separate groups, using an alcohol challenge paradigm...

During adolescence, emotion regulation and reactivity are still developing and are in many ways qualitatively different from adulthood. However, the neurobiological processes underpinning these differences remain poorly understood, including the role of maturing neurotransmitter systems. We combined magnetic resonance spectroscopy in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and self-reported emotion regulation and reactivity in a sample of typically developed adolescents (n = 37; 13-16 years) and adults (n = 39; 30-40 years), and found that adolescents had higher levels of glutamate to total creatine (tCr) ratio in the dACC than adults...

Most studies of adolescent and adult behavior involved one age group of each, whereas the dynamic changes in brain development suggest that there may be behavioral flux in adolescence. In two studies, we investigated developmental changes in social reward motivation in female and male Long-Evans rats from prepuberty to early adulthood in a social operant conditioning task. Given the earlier onset of puberty in females than in males, we predicted the course of social reward development would differ between the sexes...

Prenatal drug exposure is a public health problem, which results in profound behavioral problems during childhood and adolescence, mainly represented by an increase in the risk of cocaine abuse at an early age. In rodents, prenatal and postnatal cocaine exposure enhanced locomotor activity and cocaine- or nicotine-induced locomotor sensitization. Various authors consider that the adverse emotional states (anxiety and depression) that occur during cocaine withdrawal are the main factors that precipitate, relapse, and increase chronic cocaine abuse, which could increase the risk of relapse of cocaine abuse...

Efficiently selecting task-relevant objects during visual search depends on foreknowledge of their defining characteristics, which are represented within attentional templates. These templates bias attentional processing toward template-matching sensory signals and are assumed to become anticipatorily activated prior to search display onset. However, a direct neural signal for such preparatory template activation processes has so far remained elusive. Here, we introduce a new high-definition rapid serial probe presentation paradigm (RSPP-HD), which facilitates high temporal resolution tracking of target template activation processes in real time via monitoring of the N2pc component...

Expression is the main method for judging the emotional state and psychological condition of the human body, and the prediction of changes in facial expressions can effectively determine the mental health of a person, thus avoiding serious psychological or psychiatric disorders due to early negligence. From a computer vision perspective, most researchers have focused on studying facial expression analysis, and in some cases, body posture is also considered. However their performance is more limited under unconstrained natural conditions, which requires more information to be used in human emotion analysis...

Screen time (ST) on digital devices has increased in recent decades due to digital development. Furthermore, constant engagement with digital devices alters sleep patterns, leading to nocturnal eating behaviour among users. These phenomena are therefore of great concern, as digital device addiction and night eating are associated with unhealthy food intake, increasing the metabolic syndrome (MetS) risks. The purpose of this review was to examine the evidence of the influence of ST and night eating behaviour (NEB) on dietary intake and its association with MetS based on previous literature...

There is an absence of mechanism-driven interventions equipped to reduce the large mental health disparities that exist for preadolescent youth living in poverty. Building a Strong Identity and Coping Skills (BaSICS) is a preventive intervention designed to target multiple aspects of poverty-related stress adaptation, including altered neuroendocrine function. The purpose of the current study was to examine whether pre-post shifts in preadolescent hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) activation could longitudinally predict internalizing outcomes and to determine whether BaSICS could buffer such HPA-related risk for psychopathology...

Whole-brain dynamic functional connectivity is a growing area in neuroimaging research, encompassing data-driven methods for investigating how large-scale brain networks dynamically reorganize during resting states. However, this approach has been rarely applied to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data acquired during task performance. In this study, we first combined the psychophysiological interactions (PPI) and sliding-window methods to analyze dynamic effective connectivity of fMRI data obtained from subjects performing the N-back task within the Human Connectome Project dataset...

The link between neuroticism and the various indicators of daily cortisol fluctuations is frequently noted to be inconsistent or lacking in strength. The current study aimed to investigate the predictive capacity of both self-assessment and external evaluations of neuroticism, along with their interaction, on multiple indices of diurnal cortisol variations. This research involved the assessment of neuroticism using self-report and external evaluations among 166 working individuals, coupled with the collection of saliva samples over two consecutive workdays...

Irrelevant speech impairs cognitive performance, especially in tasks requiring verbal short-term memory. Working on these tasks during irrelevant speech can also cause a physiological stress reaction. The aim of this study was to examine heart rate variability (HRV) as a non-invasive and easy-to-use stress measure in an irrelevant speech paradigm. Thirty participants performed cognitive tasks (n-back and serial recall) during two sound conditions: irrelevant speech (50 dB) and quiet (33 dB steady-state noise)...

Childhood poverty is related to deficits in multiple cognitive domains including adult language function. It is unknown if the brain basis of language is disrupted in adults with childhood poverty backgrounds, controlling for current functioning. Fifty-one adults (age 24) from an existing longitudinal study of childhood poverty, beginning at age 9, were examined on behavioral phonological awareness (LP) and completed an event-related fMRI speech/print processing LP task. Adults from childhood poverty backgrounds exhibited lower LP in adulthood...

Real-world categories often contain exceptions that disobey the perceptual regularities followed by other members. Prominent psychological and neurobiological theories indicate that exception learning relies on the flexible modulation of object representations, but the specific representational shifts key to learning remain poorly understood. Here, we leveraged behavioral and computational approaches to elucidate the representational dynamics during the acquisition of exceptions that violate established regularity knowledge...

This research aimed to investigate whether the mental space-time association of temporal concepts could be modulated by the availability of cognitive resources (in terms of working memory and inhibitory control capacities) and to explore whether access to this association could be an automatic process. To achieve this, two experiments were carried out. In Experiment 1, participants had to classify words with future and past meanings. The working memory load (high vs. low) was manipulated and the participants were grouped into quartiles according to their visuospatial working memory capacity (WMC)...

INTRODUCTION: Assistive technologies for learning are aimed at promoting academic skills, such as reading and mathematics. These technologies mainly embrace mobile and web apps addressed to children with learning difficulties. Nevertheless, most applications lack pedagogical foundation. Additionally, the task of selecting suitable technology for educational purposes becomes challenging. Hence, this protocol posits the psychophysiological assessment of an online method for learning (OML) named Smartick...

BACKGROUND: Mouthwashes play a pivotal role in oral care, and their efficacy has been explored extensively across various dimensions. As a contribution to the development of novel oral care products, this study aims to investigate the psychophysiological effects of aromatic mouthwashes during the resilience period from a short-term cognitive stressor utilizing biological signals and subjective evaluations. METHODS: A within-participant experimental design with 22 healthy females was conducted with four mouthwashes; peppermint (Mint), peppermint + bergamot (MB), peppermint + sweet orange (MO), and peppermint + lavender (ML), and water as the control (Ctl), after a 20-min calculation task...