Differential impact of emotional task relevance on three indices of prioritised processing for fearful and angry facial expressions

It is commonly assumed that threatening expressions are perceptually prioritised, possessing the ability to automatically capture and hold attention. Recent evidence suggests that this prioritisation depends on the task relevance of emotion in the case of attention holding and for fearful expressions. Using a hybrid attentional blink (AB) and repetition blindness (RB) paradigm we investigated whether task relevance also impacts on prioritisation through attention capture and perceptual salience, and if these effects generalise to angry expressions. Participants judged either the emotion (relevant condition) or gender (irrelevant condition) of two target facial stimuli (fearful, angry or neutral) imbedded in a stream of distractors. Attention holding and capturing was operationalised as modulation of AB deficits by first target (T1) and second target (T2) expression. Perceptual salience was operationalised as RB modulation. When emotion was task-relevant (Experiment 1; N?=?29) fearful expressions captured and held attention, and were more perceptually salient than neutral expressions. Angry expressions captured attention, but were less perceptually salient and capable of holding attention than fearful and neutral expressions. When emotion was task-irrelevant (Experiment 2; N?=?30), only fearful attention capture and perceptual salience effects remained significant. Our findings highlight the importance for threat-prioritisation research to heed both the type of threat and prioritisation investigated.     

Heterogeneity of Neuropsychological Impairment in HIV Infection: Contributions from Mild Cognitive Impairment

Despite longstanding acknowledgement of the heterogeneity of HIV-associated neurocognitive disorders (HAND), existing HAND diagnostic methods classify according to the degree of impairment, without regard to the pattern of neuropsychological strengths and weaknesses. Research in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) has demonstrated that classifying individuals into subtypes by both their level and pattern of impairment, using either conventional or statistical methods, has etiologic and prognostic utility. Methods for characterizing the heterogeneity of MCI provide a framework that can be applied to other disorders and may be useful in clarifying some of the current challenges in the study of HAND. A small number of studies have applied these methods to examine the heterogeneity of neurocognitive function among individuals with HIV. Most have supported the existence of multiple subtypes of neurocognitive impairment, with some evidence for distinct clinicodemographic features of these subtypes, but a number of gaps exist. Following a review of diagnostic methods and challenges in the study of HAND, we summarize the literature regarding conventional and empirical subtypes of MCI and HAND and identify directions for future research regarding neurocognitive heterogeneity in HIV infection.     

Implicit and explicit false belief development in preschool children

The ability to represent the mental states of other agents is referred to as Theory of Mind (ToM). A developmental breakthrough in ToM consists of understanding that others can have false beliefs about the world. Recently, infants younger than 2 years of age have been shown to pass novel implicit false belief tasks. However, the processes underlying these tasks and their relation to later‐developing explicit false belief understanding, as well as to other cognitive abilities, are not yet understood. Here, we study a battery of implicit and explicit false belief tasks in 3‐ and 4‐year‐old children, relating their performance to linguistic abilities and executive functions. The present data show a significant developmental change from failing explicit false belief tasks at 3 years of age to passing them at the age of 4, while both age groups pass implicit false belief tasks. This differential developmental trajectory is reflected by the finding that explicit and implicit false belief tasks do not correlate. Further, we demonstrate that explicit false belief tasks correlate with syntactic and executive functions, whereas implicit false belief tasks do not. The study thus indicates that the processes underlying implicit false belief tasks are different from later‐developing explicit false belief understanding. Moreover, our results speak for a critical role of syntactic and executive functions for passing standard explicit false belief tasks in contrast to implicit tasks.     

Contextual utility affects the perceived quality of explanations

Are explanations of different kinds (formal, mechanistic, teleological) judged differently depending on their contextual utility, defined as the extent to which they support the kinds of inferences required for a given task? We report three studies demonstrating that the perceived “goodness” of an explanation depends on the evaluator’s current task: Explanations receive a relative boost when they support task-relevant inferences, even when all three explanation types are warranted. For example, mechanistic explanations receive higher ratings when participants anticipate making further inferences on the basis of proximate causes than when they anticipate making further inferences on the basis of category membership or functions. These findings shed light on the functions of explanation and support pragmatic and pluralist approaches to explanation.     

Five-month-old infants know humans are solid, like inanimate objects

Infants know that humans are exempt from some of the principles that govern the motion of inanimate objects: for instance, humans can be caused to move without being struck. In the current study, we report that infants nevertheless do apply some of the same principles to both humans and objects, where appropriate. Five-month-old infants expect humans, like all material objects, to be solid.     

Effectiveness of an empirically supported treatment for social phobia in the field

This study examined the effectiveness of individual exposure combined with cognitive restructuring for social phobia in a clinical setting as well as the influence of sample restriction criteria on the effect size. Participants were 217 unselected patients with a primary diagnosis of social phobia who were treated by 57 therapists in four outpatient clinics of the Christoph-Dornier-Foundation of Clinical Psychology in Germany. Results 6 weeks after the end of therapy showed highly significant reductions in social phobic fears and avoidance as well as in general anxiety and symptoms of depression. However, patients who dropped out during therapy reported a significantly higher degree of depression. Results did not differ between the four outpatient clinics and are comparable with the average effect-sizes reported by meta-analytic studies of controlled efficacy research, using selected patients. Also, restricting the sample according to the selection criteria often applied in research settings did not result in higher effect sizes for the applied outcome measures. We conclude that individual cognitive behavioural therapy for social phobia can be transported from research settings to the field of mental health.     

The fate of cognition in very old age: six-year longitudinal findings in the Berlin Aging Study (BASE)

The authors report full-information longitudinal age gradients in 4 intellectual abilities on the basis of 6-year longitudinal changes in 132 individuals (mean age at T1 = 78.27, age range = 70-100) from the Berlin Aging Study. Relative to the cross-sectional parent sample (N = 516, mean age at T1 = 84.92 years), this sample was positively selected because of differential mortality and experimental attrition. Perceptual speed, memory, and fluency declined with age. In contrast, knowledge remained stable up to age 90, with evidence for decline thereafter. Age gradients were more negative in old old (n = 66, mean age at T1 = 83.04) than in old (n = 66, mean age at T1 = 73.77) participants. Rates of decline did not differ reliably between men and women or between participants with high versus low life-history status. They conclude that intellectual development after age 70 varies by distance to death, age, and intellectual ability domain.     

Opioid modulation of Fos protein expression and olfactory circuitry plays a pivotal role in what neonates remember

Paradoxically, fear conditioning (odor-0.5 mA shock) yields a learned odor preference in the neonate, presumably due to a unique learning and memory circuit that does not include apparent amygdala participation. Post-training opioid antagonism with naltrexone (NTX) blocks consolidation of this odor preference and instead yields memory of a learned odor aversion. Here we characterize the neural circuitry underlying this switch during memory consolidation. Experiment 1 assessed post-training opioid modulation of Fos protein expression within olfactory circuitry (olfactory bulb, piriform cortex, amygdala). Odor-shock conditioning with no post-training treatment (odor preference) induced significant changes in Fos protein expression in the granule cell layer of the olfactory bulb and anterior piriform cortex. Post-training opioid receptor antagonism (odor aversion) prevented the learning-induced changes in the anterior piriform cortex and also induced significant changes in Fos protein expression in the central nucleus of the amygdala. Experiment 2 assessed intra-amygdala opioid modulation of neonate memory consolidation. Post-training infusion of NTX within the amygdala permitted consolidation of an odor aversion, while vehicle-infused pups continued to demonstrate an odor preference. Overall, results demonstrate that opioids modulate memory consolidation in the neonate via modulating Fos protein expression in olfactory circuitry. Furthermore, these results suggest that opioids are instrumental in suppressing neonate fear behavior via modulating the amygdala.     

Assessing heterogeneity in meta-analysis: Q statistic or I2 index?

In meta-analysis, the usual way of assessing whether a set of single studies is homogeneous is by means of the Q test. However, the Q test only informs meta-analysts about the presence versus the absence of heterogeneity, but it does not report on the extent of such heterogeneity. Recently, the I(2) index has been proposed to quantify the degree of heterogeneity in a meta-analysis. In this article, the performances of the Q test and the confidence interval around the I(2) index are compared by means of a Monte Carlo simulation. The results show the utility of the I(2) index as a complement to the Q test, although it has the same problems of power with a small number of studies.