A case of prosopagnosia with some preserved covert remembrance of familiar faces

This paper presents the detailed analysis of a case of prosopagnosia in a 54-year-old male farmer following bioccipital vascular disease. In-depth clinical investigations confirmed the diagnosis of prosopagnosia and revealed the absence of any associated defect, except for a slight aspecific disturbance of the short-term memory. Further study of this case indicated that the trouble was not concerned with the class of complex visual stimuli, was not even concerned with facial expressions or unknown faces, was not a perceptual defect, but was related mainly to the operation of individualization. The memory hypothesis was thus retained and supported. Moreover, exploration of the difficulty indicated that the deficiency was limited to defective access to conscious information concerning faces and information associated with these faces (name, context, etc.), effectively stored in memory.     

On Being Exposed to Superior Others: Consequences of Self-Threatening Upward Social Comparisons

Being inferior to someone else can be hurtful. But what exactly happens when we found ourselves in such situations? We first address why and when upward comparison can be self-threatening and later review the effects of such threatening social comparison. We argue that two main kinds of disturbances can ensue: affective disturbances and attentional disturbances. Second, three ways to deal with self-threatening social comparison are reviewed: proactive regulation, defensive regulation, and regulation by avoidance. For each of these disturbances and regulation modes, we review empirical findings and later discuss the impact of upward comparison on performance. We conclude by going back to the very need behind the need for a positive evaluation.     

Emotional priming of pop-out in visual search

When searching for a discrepant target along a simple dimension such as color or shape, repetition of the target feature substantially speeds search, an effect known as feature priming of pop-out (V. Maljkovic and K. Nakayama, 1994). The authors present the first report of emotional priming of pop-out. Participants had to detect the face displaying a discrepant expression of emotion in an array of four face photographs. On each trial, the target when present was either a neutral face among emotional faces (angry in Experiment 1 or happy in Experiment 2), or an emotional face among neutral faces. Target detection was faster when the target displayed the same emotion on successive trials. This effect occurred for angry and for happy faces, not for neutral faces. It was completely abolished when faces were inverted instead of upright, suggesting that emotional categories rather than physical feature properties drive emotional priming of pop-out. The implications of the present findings for theoretical accounts of intertrial priming and for the face-in-the-crowd phenomenon are discussed.     

Contributions of expected sensory and affective action effects to action selection and performance: Evidence from forced- and free-choice tasks

Whereas ideomotor approaches to action control emphasize the importance of sensory action effects for action selection, motivational approaches emphasize the role of affective action effects. We used a game-like experimental setup to directly compare the roles of sensory and affective action effects in selecting and performing reaching actions in forced- and free-choice tasks. The two kinds of action effects did not interact. Action selection and execution in the forced-choice task were strongly impacted by the spatial compatibility between actions and the expected sensory action effects, whereas the free-choice task was hardly affected. In contrast, action execution, but not selection, in both tasks was strongly impacted by the spatial compatibility between actions and highly valued action effects. This pattern suggests that sensory and affective action effects serve different purposes: The former seem to dominate rule-based action selection, whereas the latter might serve to reduce any remaining action uncertainty.     

Coping with a changing soundscape: avoidance,adjustments and adaptations

Since the industrial age, background anthropogenic noise has become a pervasive feature of many habitable environments. This relatively recent environmental feature can be particularly challenging for organisms that use acoustic forms of communication due to its propensity for masking and decreasing the potential acoustic space of signals. Furthermore, anthropogenic noise may affect biological processes including animal interactions, physiological and behavioural responses to stimuli and cognitive development. However, animals’ cognitive abilities may enable them to cope with high levels of anthropogenic noise through learning, the employment of acoustic and behavioural flexibility as well as the use of multi-modal sensory systems. We are only just beginning to understand how neural structures, endocrine systems and behaviour are mechanistically linked in these scenarios, providing us with information we can use to mitigate deleterious effects of pervasive noise on wildlife, along with highlighting the remarkable adaptability of animals to an increasingly anthropogenic world. In this review, I will focus mainly on birds, due to the amount of literature on the topic, and survey recent advancements made in two main spheres: (1) how anthropogenic noise affects cognitive processes and (2) how cognition enables animals to cope with increasingly noisy environments. I will be highlighting current gaps in our knowledge, such as how noise might impact behavioural traits such as predation, as well as how noise causes physical damage to neurotransmitters and affects stress levels, in order to direct future studies on this topic.     

Pre‐frontal‐insular‐cerebellar modifications correlate with disgust feeling blunting after subthalamic stimulation: A positron emission tomography study in Parkinson's disease

Subthalamic nucleus (STN) deep brain stimulation (DBS) has recently advanced our understanding of the major role played by this basal ganglion in human emotion. Research indicates that STN DBS can induce modifications in all components of emotion, and neuroimaging studies have shown that the metabolic modifications correlated with these emotional disturbances following surgery are both task‐ and sensory input‐dependent. Nevertheless, to date, these modifications have not been confirmed for all emotional components, notably subjective emotional experience, or feelings. To identify the neural network underlying the modification of feelings following STN DBS, we assessed 16 patients with Parkinson's disease before and after surgery, using both subjective assessments of emotional experience and ¹⁸[F]fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (¹⁸FDG‐PET). The patients viewed six film excerpts intended to elicit happy, angry, fearful, sad, disgusted, and neutral feelings, and they self‐rated the intensity of these feelings. After DBS, there was a significant reduction in the intensity of the disgust feeling. Correlations were observed between decreased disgust experience and cerebral glucose metabolism (FDG uptake) in the bilateral pre‐frontal cortices (orbitofrontal, dorsolateral, and inferior frontal gyri), bilateral insula, and right cerebellum. We suggest that the STN contributes to the synchronization process underlying the emergence of feelings.