Natural disaster induced cognitive disruption: impacts on action slips

Previous research has indicated an increase in stress levels and cognitive intrusions after natural disasters. These previous studies have not, however, assessed the impact disaster induced cognitive disruption has on human performance. In the present report, we investigated the impact of the 7.1 magnitude 2010 Christchurch, New Zealand earthquake on self-reported earthquake-induced cognitive disruption and its relationship to performance on the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART). Participants who self-reported greater cognitive disruption induced by the earthquake also had higher levels of errors of commission during SART (r = .80, p < .001). This was even the case when controlling for earthquake-induced anxiety, depression, participant sex, and self-reported sleep amount. Post-disaster assessments need to include the impact of the events directly on cognitive self-regulation and conscious thoughts, in addition to more clinical constructs, such as anxiety and depression.     

Underestimation of prior remembering and susceptibility to false memories: two sides of the same coin?

In two studies, we explored whether susceptibility to false memories and the underestimation of prior memories (i.e., forgot-it-all-along effect) tap overlapping memory phenomena. Study 1 investigated this issue by administering the Deese/Roediger–McDermott task (DRM) and the forgot-it-all-along (FIA) task to an undergraduate sample (N = 110). It was furthermore explored how performances on these tasks correlate with clinically relevant traits such as fantasy proneness, dissociative experiences, and cognitive efficiency. Results show that FIA and DRM performances are relatively independent from each other, suggesting that these measures empirically apparently refer to separate dimensions. However, they do not seem to define different profiles in terms of dissociation, fantasy proneness, and cognitive efficiency. Study 2 replicated the finding of relative independence between false memory propensity (as measured with the DRM task) and the underestimation of prior memories (as measured with an autobiographical memory dating task) in people with a history of childhood sexual abuse (N = 35).     

Ursolic acid attenuates lipopolysaccharide-induced cognitive deficits in mouse brain through suppressing p38/NF-κB mediated inflammatory pathways

Evidence indicates that systemic administration of lipopolysaccharide (LPS) induces brain inflammation, ultimately resulting in cognitive deficits. Ursolic acid (UA), a plant-derived pentacyclic triterpenoid, is well known to possess multiple biological functions, including antioxidant, anti-tumor and anti-inflammatory activities. In the present study, we assessed the protective effect of UA against the LPS-induced cognitive deficits in mice. We found that UA significantly improved cognitive deficits of LPS-treated mice in open field, step-through passive avoidance and Morris water maze tasks. One potential mechanism of this action was attributed to the decreased production of pro-inflammatory markers including COX-2, iNOS, TNF-α, IL-1β, IL-2 and IL-6 in LPS-treated mouse brain. Mechanistically, UA markedly inhibited LPS-induced IκBα phosphorylation and degradation, NF-κB p65 nuclear translocation and p38 activation in mouse brain, but did not affect the activation of TLR4, MyD88, ERK, JNK and Akt. Taken together, these results suggest that UA may be useful for mitigating inflammation-associated brain disorders by inhibiting pro-inflammatory factors production, at least in part, through blocking the p38/NF-κB signaling pathways.     

流畅体验、内/外动机、数学焦虑及数学成绩的路径分析

目的：研究旨在考察数学学习中的流畅体验,探讨流畅体验、内/外动机、数学焦虑及数学成绩的关系。方法：招募296名高中生,在数学月考后完成自编考试流畅体验量表、学习动机量表、数学焦虑量表。结果：路径分析表明,存在四条显著路径,即内部动机→流畅状态→数学成绩;数学焦虑→流畅状态→数学成绩;外部动机→流畅状态→数学成绩;外部动机→数学成绩。结论：只有通过考试过程中的流畅体验,内部动机和数学焦虑才能影响考试成绩。     

Suicide bombings and the self

The failure to locate a unifying psychological profile of suicide bombers should prompt moves to a more extended and interdisciplinary front, availing itself of insights from disciplines such as sociology, philosophy and history of ideas, as well as from psychology. This paper aims in that direction by exploring ‘traditional’ versus ‘western liberal’ conceptions of the self, with special emphasis on their possible pathologies; and by integrating those pathologies with insights from Durkheimian suicidology. It is hypothesised that suicide bombers in the West are typically callow, malleable young men targeted by terror merchants, and that their suicide missions are, first and foremost, acts of deluded self-enhancement, which need to be understood against the backdrop of the western liberal conception of the self. Finally, some implications for moral education are suggested.     

Self-construal priming modulates the scope of visual attention

Although it is well documented that cultures influence basic cognitive processes such as attention, the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. We tested the hypothesis that self-concepts that characterize people from different cultures mediate the variation of visual attention. After being primed with self-construals that emphasize the Eastern interdependent self or the Western independent self, Chinese participants were asked to discriminate a central target letter flanked by compatible or incompatible stimuli (Experiment 1) or global/local letters in a compound stimulus (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 showed that, while responses were slower to the incompatible than to the compatible stimuli, this flanker compatibility effect was increased by the interdependent relative to the independent self-construal priming. Experiment 2 showed that the interdependent-self priming resulted in faster responses to the global than to the local targets in compound letters whereas a reverse pattern was observed in the independent-self priming condition. The results provide evidence for dynamics of the scope of visual attention as a function of self-construal priming that switches self-concept toward the interdependent or independent styles in Chinese.     

Across-task long-term priming: Interaction of task readiness and automatic retrieval

When humans carry out actions in response to external stimulation, they acquire associations between the stimulus and the action it triggered. When the same stimulus is used in two different tasks, the retrieval of associations compiled in the competing task hampers current performance. Previous research suggests that this across-task priming depends on the task set for the preceding task remaining active across the switch of tasks and, thus, competing with the activations needed for the new task. We present two experiments investigating this notion. Participants switched between two semantic classification tasks. In Experiment 1, participants switched between short runs of the two tasks. Across-task priming was observed on switch and repeat trials. In Experiment 2, participants switched between longer runs of the two tasks. Across-task priming was markedly reduced on repeat trials. The data suggest that whether or not across-task priming affects behaviour after the switch trial depends, amongst others, on whether the task set necessary for the previous task spills into the repeat trials. The implications of these findings for mechanisms of cognitive and mnemonic control are discussed.     

The relationship between allocentric and egocentric frames of reference and categorical and coordinate spatial information processing

We report two experiments on the relationship between allocentric/egocentric frames of reference and categorical/coordinate spatial relations. Jager and Postma (2003) suggest two theoretical possibilities about their relationship: categorical judgements are better when combined with an allocentric reference frame and coordinate judgements with an egocentric reference frame (interaction hypothesis); allocentric/egocentric and categorical/coordinate form independent dimensions (independence hypothesis). Participants saw stimuli comprising two vertical bars (targets), one above and the other below a horizontal bar. They had to judge whether the targets appeared on the same side (categorical) or at the same distance (coordinate) with respect either to their body-midline (egocentric) or to the centre of the horizontal bar (allocentric). The results from Experiment 1 showed a facilitation in the allocentric and categorical conditions. In line with the independence hypothesis, no interaction effect emerged. To see whether the results were affected by the visual salience of the stimuli, in Experiment 2 the luminance of the horizontal bar was reduced. As a consequence, a significant interaction effect emerged indicating that categorical judgements were more accurate than coordinate ones, and especially so in the allocentric condition. Furthermore, egocentric judgements were as accurate as allocentric ones with a specific improvement when combined with coordinate spatial relations. The data from Experiment 2 showed that the visual salience of stimuli affected the relationship between allocentric/egocentric and categorical/coordinate dimensions. This suggests that the emergence of a selective interaction between the two dimensions may be modulated by the characteristics of the task.     

Losing control in front of a fearful face: The effect of emotional information on cognitive control

How is our cognitive control system modulated by emotional information, especially fearful stimuli? An intuitive hypothesis is that fearful stimuli would enhance cognitive control so that people could switch from the ongoing task to emergent events more quickly to secure themselves. To test this hypothesis, we investigated the influence of emotional information on the shift function of cognitive control by using the task-cueing procedure, in which face images were presented as cues. With the gender of faces indicating which task to do, we manipulated the emotional valence of faces (neutral vs. fearful), finding that the switch costs were larger in the trials containing fearful cues than in the trials containing neutral cues (Experiment 1). This effect was not caused by enlarging task-set interference (Experiment 2), nor by slowing down cue encoding (Experiment 3). Contrary to the intuitive hypothesis, our results suggested that the endogenous task-set reconfiguration process was impaired when fearful faces were presented. We speculated that the benefit of decreasing cognitive flexibility in face of fearful stimuli is to speed up response in a dangerous environment, and this accelerating response is achieved by suppressing the goal-directed system to permit the fast, automatic stimulus-driven system to govern behaviours.     

Eye gaze cannot be ignored (but neither can arrows)

Recent studies have shown that switch costs (i.e., slower responding on task-alternation trials than on task-repetition trials) are not observed when on the preceding trial a no-go signal instructed the participant to withhold the response to the target stimulus. This finding suggests that neither task set is inhibited on no-go trials, and that the origin of switch costs is located in the application of the task set to the target stimulus. However, these studies also showed that responding after a no-go trial is substantially slower than after a go trial. This suggests that both task sets are inhibited on no-go trials and that switch costs originate from the preparation of a task set. In two experiments we created conditions that revealed an absence of switch costs in conjunction with relatively fast responding after no-go trials. Together these findings confirm that switch costs originate from the application of the task set.