Session Detail

This study examines the effects of scrambling either a subject or object associated with ‘floating’ numeral classifiers (FNCs) in Korean by using the event-related potentials (ERP) paradigm. The experimental materials consisted of 360 sets of 6 items, which vary in terms of three factors such as (i) the grammatical role ((S)ubject vs. (O)bject) that FNCs associate with, (ii) the type of Case/particle marker on FNCs (Case-less vs. (N)om/(A)cc Case-marked vs. (F)ocus-particle-marked), and (iii) the application/non-application of subject or object scrambling, as schematically represented below. i) S-related Case-less FNC: [park-in dog-Nom bread-Acc 2-FNC ate] I heard. ii) S-related N-marked FNC: [park-in dog-Nom bread-Acc 2-FNC-Nom ate] I heard. iii) S-related F-marked FNC: [park-in dog-Nom bread-Acc 2-FNC-Foc ate] I heard. iv) O-related Case-less FNC: [park-in bread-Acc dog-Nom 3-FNC ate] I heard. v) O-related A-marked FNC: [park-in bread-Acc dog-Nom 3-FNC-Acc ate] I heard. vi) O-related F-marked FNC: [park-in bread-Acc dog-Nom 3-FNC-Foc ate] I heard. Using the materials, we investigated the following three questions. First, is there a difference between effects of in-situ and scrambling options on FNCs? Second, is there a contrast between the in-situ and scrambled objects? Third, is there a distinction between the subjects in object-scrambling and object-in-situ sentences? We found that, first, the Caseless FNCs in sentences involving subject or object scrambling elicited P600 in comparison to the corresponding ones in sentences without such scrambling, whereas the Case-marked FNCs in the former case were ERP-wise not significantly different from the corresponding ones in the latter case. By contrast, the F(ocus-particle)-marked FNCs in sentences involving scrambling elicited P600 for subject or N400 for object in comparison to the corresponding ones in sentences without scrambling. We attribute the P600 effects here to a second-pass, revised integration process that now attempts to correctly link the Case-less/F-marked FNC to the relatively more ‘distant’ scrambled subject or object associated with it. Second, the scrambled objects induced reduced N400 effects relative to the in-situ ones. This result is unexpected, given that the canonical word order in Korean is SOV, predicting that scrambled objects will incur more processing loads. But one crucial feature of Korean is that this language allows pro drop or null subject argument for subjects. Thus, the object-initial sentences were not perceived by the Korean users as marked/exceptional in terms of word order. Third, the subjects after the scrambled objects were not differentiated from the ones before them in terms of ERP responses. Note that the former involve object scrambling, while the latter do not. Since the subjects do not involve scrambling in either type of sentences, no difference between them is an expected result. Overall, we take all the three results above to render neuroelectrophysiological evidence that our mind actively detects scrambling or permutation of word order in the course of sentence-processing FNC-associated scrambled subjects or objects.

 

Hierarchical processing – the ability to establish embedded representations, with elements at superordinate levels persisting while elements at subordinate levels are processed – is a key concept in various domains such as language, music, action and mathematics (Jeon, 2014). Notably, processing mathematical hierarchy is marked by an expertise-dependent functional modulation: While experts recruit a set of core regions, non-experts rely on broader activation around left frontal and parietal areas (Jeon & Friederici, 2016). These differences are related to more controlled, effortful processing in non-experts compared to automated, less demanding processing in experts (Neubauer & Fink, 2009). However, little is known about structural correlates of automatic mathematical processing. The current study seeks to explore how varying degrees of automaticity in processing hierarchical arithmetic expressions are reflected in connectivity profiles of relevant areas. We performed probabilistic tractography (Behrens, 2007) from regions commonly activated in both groups when processing hierarchical compared to linear algebraic structures: left Insula, left precentral gyrus (lPCG), left superior parietal lobule and bilateral medial pre-motor cortex (rMPC,lMPC; Jeon & Friederici, 2016). Our study adds empirical evidence from the viewpoint of structural connectivity, suggesting that connections to thalamic areas support more demanding processing. Individuals relying on more automatic processing showed higher connectivity of lPCG to temporal brain areas via left arcuate fasciculus and superior longitudinal fasciculus (AF/SLF). These structures are associated with hierarchal processing in language (Friederici, Bahlmann, Heim, Schubotz & Anwander, 2006), a highly automatic process in adult language users (Schneider & Chein, 2003). Therefore, we suggest a critical role of the left AF/SLF for hierarchical processing - specifically at high degrees of automaticity - be it in language or mathematics.

 

This study aimed to describe the social intelligence in neuropsychological context. Neuropsychology associated with the brain physiology and human behavior. The complexity of brain physiology modulates the high varieties of human behavior in society. The diversity of behavior in society led a social appraisal. This study help us to be aware in distinctive behavior that perceived by society. Using systematic review, we found that the physiology of brain leads intelligence in social context. Social intelligence need to be learned in social penetration. Impairment in social life means that there’s an abnormality in the physiology of brain. Brain plasticity is a key term to increase the ability in social skills. Nowadays, psychological intervention needs to stimulate the plasticity of brain development certainly in social impairment disability. Gaining the social intelligence means gaining the social acceptance.

 

Human brain is a connectome. More and more research focused on the relationship between brain network and creativity. Creativity is a multiple concept, with various measurements we can see its corresponding cognitive processes, and therefore, different creative problems shall connect with its own brain network structures. Present study aims to discriminate the relationship between connectome with divergent thinking insight problem solving using topological properties of white matter. By method of graph theoretical analysis for 66 adult, we compares efficiency of white-matter connectivity network for divergent thinking performance and insight problem performance. Results show that efficiency of information transmission between brain regions is significant to creativity tasks. In particular, divergent thinking only requires several brain regions cooperation to develop novel ideas, insight problem solving involves with cooperation of more brain regions to restructuring representation of problem and break the impasse. Global efficiency of white-matter connectivity network has total different influence mechanism for divergent and convergent thinking process. Present study is first to support the dual-process theory of creativity with structural brain images perspective.

 

It has been shown that cognitive tasks (such as memory, perception, and inhibitory control) that involve processes biased toward one hemisphere in younger adults tend to engage both hemispheres in healthy older adults. However, whether the additional activities from the other hemisphere index processes similar in nature or help compensate for the overall cognitive decline is still not well understood. In view of that, the present study used well-characterized event-related brain potential components—N400 and P600, to investigate age-related differences during syntactic processing, one of the best-known examples of functional lateralization. Twenty-eight younger and 32 older adults participated; all were healthy, right-handed, and without familial sinistrality background. Participants viewed two-word phrases presented word by word on a screen, with the target words presented laterally to either visual field (VF), matching or mismatching the syntactic category expectancy created by a preceding central cue (e.g., Grammatical: liǎng-dòng fáng-zi “two houses”; jí-shí bang-máng “to immediately help”. Ungrammatical: jí-shí fáng-zi “immediately house”; liǎng-dòng bang-máng “to two help”). Participants judged the grammaticality of the phrases with button-press responses. Our findings replicated prior research in showing that, relative to grammatical targets, ungrammatical targets elicited a reliable P600 grammaticality effect only with right VF (left-hemisphere-biased) presentation for younger adults. However, for older adults, reliable P600 grammaticality effects were found with both VF presentations. Both younger and older adults showed additional bilateral N400 grammatical effects. In addition, regardless of VF presentations, older adults were significantly less accurate than younger adults, revealing a reliable negative linear relation between older adults’ age and their accuracy. Our findings thus add to the literature showing hemispheric asymmetry reduction in older adults. Furthermore, the additional right hemisphere activity in older adults during syntactic category processing reflects qualitatively similar processes subserved by the left hemisphere; however, provides no evidence for successful compensation.

 

Although structural analysis in syntactic processing is predominantly subserved in the left hemisphere (LH) in healthy young adults, prior studies have shown that the right hemisphere (RH) is capable of initiating processes similar in nature. The degree to which these structural processes are left-lateralized has been shown to be sensitive to several factors, including the family history of left-handedness (familial sinistrality; FS). In keeping with imaging findings showing less structural asymmetry in the brain in individuals with FS background (FS+), it has been shown this population also tends to show less lateralized syntactic processing. These prior studies were conducted exclusively using Indo-European languages. As processing of different languages may involve non-identical lateralization patterns, the present study aims to provide cross-linguistic validations using Chinese. 25 FS+ and 28 FS- young adults were tested; all were right-handed. Participants viewed two-word phrases presented word by word on a screen, with the target words presented laterally to either visual field (VF), matching or mismatching the syntactic category expectancy created by a preceding central cue (e.g., Grammatical: liǎng-dòng fang-zi “two houses”; jí-shí bang-máng “immediately help”. Ungrammatical: jí-shí fang-zi “immediately house”; liǎng-dòng bang-máng “two help”). Participants judged the grammaticality of the phrases by pressing response buttons. Consistent with past findings, we found a reliable P600 effect (600-1100 ms) modulated by both VF or FS background—with reliable effects from only RVF (left-hemisphere biased) presentation for FS- participants but from both VF presentations for FS+ participants. Also consistent with past findings, we found the N400 grammaticality effect (300-600 ms) not modulated by either VF or FS background. These results thus provide cross-linguistic validations for the role of familial sinistrality on functional lateralization in the brain and additional support for the capability of the RH to perform qualitatively similar syntactic processes as does the LH.

 

Syntax is one of the most unique aspects of human language abilities and has been shown to be associated with two white-matter tracts in the brain—the superior longitudinal fasciculus (SLF) and the uncinate fasciculus (UF). Previous studies used functional measures that had limited ability to tease apart different aspects of syntactic processing. In view of this, we used two well-characterized event-related potential (ERP) components—P600 and N400, to investigate different subtypes of syntactic processing (structural analysis vs. lexical-semantic restrictions, respectively). There were 16 right-handed young adults without familial sinistrality participated in this study. We recorded participants’ ERPs while they viewed two-word phrases presented word by word on a screen, with the target word presented laterally to either visual field (VF), matching or mismatching the syntactic category expectancy created by a preceding central cue. Participants judged phrasal grammaticality with button-press responses. Consistent with prior research, participants elicited an N400 grammaticality effect with both VF presentations, but a P600 grammaticality effect with right VF (left-hemisphere-biased) presentation only. Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) data were collected from the same participants, and fractional anisotropy (FA) value computed for syntax-related tracts (left and right SLF1, 2, and 3, and UF) and corpus callosum (CC). Correlational analyses revealed that larger overall magnitude of the RVF/LH grammaticality effect (summing over the N400 and P600 time windows) was associated with higher FA in the anterior part of the CC (CC_genu) and left SLF1. Critically, the above associations with SLF integrity were driven by individual variations in N400 responses, such that participants with higher left SLF1&2 FA values showed larger N400 responses. Our findings extend the current literature by showing that the SLF is also sensitive to more lexical-semantic associated aspects of syntactic information processing.

 

After imagination of hand movements a short lasting EEG activity in beta band is usually reported as part of the event related synchronization mechanism (i.e. ERS). We tried to investigate how training and prolonged usage affect beta rebound phenomenon of a Motor Imagery (i.e. MI) based Brain Computer Interface (i.e. BCI). Participants were eleven male students in age range 22-27, all right-handed. At the beginning we recorded untrained MI subjects than, after two weeks of training we acquired data from same subjects. In our study we used BCIGEM a videogame that embodies BCI paradigms. We used a videogame because MI literature suggests that a rich visual representation of the feedback signals may enhance the learning progress in BCI tasks. In addition a videogame with appealing graphics stimulates participant attention and increases motivation. We measured beta rebound ERS at a peak around 22.95Hz during left motor imagery and at 21.48Hz for right motor imagery. These values are compatible with literature that reports peaks at 23.5±2.5 Hz for left MI and 22.7±0.7 Hz for right MI. Statistical tests returned a significant p values for untrained-trained difference of ERS beta peaks in left t(13)= 5.7051, p<0.05 and right t(13)= 8.2305, p<0.05. In same trained subjects we also checked the effect of one and half hour continuous BCI usage. In trained subjects we interpreted this time-on-task effect as a correlate of mental fatigue. Difference between initial session and session recorded at the end of BCI in trained subjects was significant on beta rebound frequencies for left t(13)= 3.0475, p<0.05 and right t(13)= 4.8955, p<0.05. According to our findings Beta rebound ERS seems a frequency band able to characterize neurophysiological correlates of learning and mental fatigue.

 

Deficits in emotion recognition and decision making are two of the signature symptoms in schizophrenia. Studies have shown that patients are less accurate in recognizing faces with negative emotions than with positive ones, especially for the fearful and angry expressions. On the other hand, the updated reward prediction error (RPE) – a discrepancy between the predicted and actual action outcomes – is thought to be encoded by dopaminergic neurons, and the dysregulation of dopamine systems in schizophrenia has been suggested to alter the appraisal of stimuli, leading to the abnormalities in reinforcement learning and decision making. These two deficits, however, have seldom been incorporated together into clinical study. Accordingly, this study aims to investigate the impact of emotional experience on decision making in schizophrenia. Specifically, building on our previously established paradigm, we took three basic facial expressions – neutral, anger, and happiness – as the affective primes inserted into a probabilistic gambling task, and examine their impact on choice behavior. In addition to conventional behavioral statistics, a reinforcement learning model was adopted to fit the participants’ trial-by-trial choice data to assess their latent process involved in the task. Moreover, EEG recordings were implemented throughout the experiment to obtain the activities related to facial perception, affective arousal, and RPE signaling. For healthy controls, both anger and happiness facial primes elicited higher level of affective arousal than the neutral ones, and led to elevated RPE signaling, rendering the participants to update expected values more frequently and make more exploratory choices. Conversely, in schizophrenic patients, the baseline of RPE signaling was contingent to their symptom severity, and, importantly, only the happiness facial prime yielded significant modulatory effect on choice behavior due to patients’ less-accurate recognition to negative emotions. Findings of this study shall contribute to our understanding of the mechanism underlying affect-elicited decision making in schizophrenia.

 

In visual search, usually a salient object attracts attention. For instance, if a target was on a bar with unique orientation (i.e., salient capture), response is faster than if the target was in a homogenous background. However, our previous studies found that if the target was on a salient collinear object, overlapping takes longer than non-overlapping (ie., collinear masking). Recent studies suggested that aging decreases perceptual grouping ability on good continuity. The goal of this study is to explore the effect of aging on salient capture and collinear masking effects in our specific search display. A total of 28 participants, including 16 young adults (mean age 23.8) and 12 old adults (mean age 74.1), joined in this study. To enlarge search display and to reduce task difficulty for old participants, we magnified the search display by 1.5 times and reduced number of elements from 21 x 27 to 9 x 9 bars. Additionally, the possible locations for distractor and target are reduced from 7 to 3. Participants were required to discriminate the orientation of a target (a slat black bar). The results showed that with 9-bars collinear distractor, both age groups showed significant slower responses in overlapping (old 1190 ms, young 562 ms) than non-overlapping conditions (old 910 ms, young 530 ms). When the trials were with 1 horizontal bar, only old adults showed significantly faster response in overlapping (919 ms) than non-overlapping conditions (990 ms). We argue that the lack of salient capture effect for young adults might be due to less saliency in a sparse display. The preserved collinear masking effect for both age groups suggested that aging did not influence the ability of perceptual grouping on collinearity.

 

Transforming novel faces into familiar ones requires overcoming variations in expression and pose, among others. Our previous studies have shown that multiple exposures coupled with sufficient variation in either expression or pose can lead to robust recognition and significant generalization (Shyi & He, 2011; Shyi & Lin, 2014; Cheng & Shyi, 2014). During normal social interactions, variations in both expression and pose unfold dynamically over time. However, the nature of dynamic changes between them is not the same. Variations in expression typically entail combinatory changes of facial muscles for expressing different emotions, and those in pose typically entail rigid head rotation along biologically constrained trajectories. This consideration suggests that while both embody dynamic alterations, there might be non-shared aspects in their underlying brain mechanism. Here we examined the extent to which brain mechanisms that are shared and non-shared between processing of expression and pose. Participants performed a one-back task judging whether the identity of the currently viewed face was the same as the immediately preceding one. They made the judgment while viewing sequences of animation portraying variation in expression or in pose. Structural and functional images of brain regions selective for face processing were acquired using a GE MR-750 3T scanner. The results showed brain activations for viewing faces underwent expression and pose transformation were greater than that for viewing scrambled controls. Moreover, no significant difference between expression and pose processing in activation for areas subsumed the core (FFA, OFA, pSTS) and extended system (MT/V5) of face processing. However, a difference in activation in a brain region along the dorsal route suggests that it was more selective for processing pose than for processing expression. Together, these findings underscore the shared and non-shared mechanisms for processing of dynamic transformation that may play important roles in transforming novel faces into familiar ones.

 

Introduction Face recognition is one lasting and intriguing topic in visual neuroscience, and its most associated brain area, the “Fusiform Face Area” (aka. FFA), has been shown to be responsive more to upright than inverted faces, a “neuronal inversion effect (NIE)”. Brants et al., (2011) suggested that the significant NIE in FFA, both before and after Greeble training, was an indication of participants treating Greebles “face-like” throughout the training. Upon close examination, we found that the different training protocol (Gauthier et al., 1997, Vision Res., 37(12), pp. 1673-82; vs. Gauthier et al., 1998, ibid., 38/15, pp. 2401-28), and the 1000ms vs. 500ms RT difference (in verification task), may confound the disparate fMRI results between Gauthier et al., (1999) and Brants et al., (2001). Methods In order to investigate the effect of training protocol, in the current study we trained 16 (currently 12) Greeble experts, 8 (/6) in each training protocol, with either Gauthier97 or Gauthier98 paradigm, in between the NIE and localizer tasks. In addition, the extant literature (11 papers) with the similar FFA-NIE reports have also been extracted for meta-analysis as comparison. Results The basic training performance (session-wise accuracy and RTs) mimicked both Gauthier97 and Brants01, suggesting successful replications. Intriguingly, in both Gauthier97 and 98 training regimes, the average of participant’s NIE@FFAbefore and NIE@FFApost were both insignificant (for both faces and Greebles), in sharp contrast to results in both Gauthier99 and Brants01. To put our fMRI results in larger perspective, the meta analyses across 11 studies with similar NIE@FFA also suggested that NIE (a) may not be a consistent index for face-related processing in the FFA; (b) its small aggregate p came from few studies with very small p-values; and (c) overall, the aggregate effect sizes across studies was also insignificant (Cohen's d= 0.596; effect-size r= 0.285). These results would be more implicative given the inevitable significance-selection biases (or the file-drawer problem). Conclusions With our successful behavioral replication of Greeble training, we found that the specific training paradigm did not matter in NIE@FFA, as in both Gauthier97 and 98, effects were both insignificant both before and after training. After comparing with the meta-analysis results, we conclude that NIE may not be a good index of face-related processing in FFA. In light of the rising concerns about the replicability in cognitive neurosciences (e.g., Szucs and Ioannidis, 2016, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/071530), the present study helps empirically in such endeavor.

 

Schizophrenia is a psychiatric disorder accompanied by hallucinations and delusions, which is characterized by a decrease in mismatch negativity (MMN) response against a deviant sound stimulus during continuous tone stimulation. We used source localization technique of duration deviant MMN responses and investigated difference in cortical representation of the unconscious auditory-memory processes in 79 schizophrenia patients and 88 healthy volunteers. All data were collected with a 32-channel electroencephalograph system in National Taiwan University Hospital. Channel-based ERP analysis confirmed a statistically significant decrease in MMN peak amplitude in the patient group. Regional brain activity for MMN was determined by Multiple Sparse Priors method and statistical test was performed on the obtained source distribution of MMN. A 1-sample t-test (FWE corrected, p < 0.05) within each group showed that the number of common-activated voxels within the auditory-related regions such as superior temporal area (BA 22) and primary auditory cortex (BA 41) was smaller only in the left hemisphere of the patient group. In addition, the patient group showed a significantly augmented cortical activity over the control group in the auditory-related vicinal regions of the left hemisphere, such as the middle temporal area (BA 21) and the temporal pole area (BA 38). These results suggest that the cortical regions responding to auditory memory-processing have a wide individual variety in patients especially in the left hemisphere. The auditory processing in these distributed and asymmetric cortical areas might cause decrease in MMN amplitude in patients.

 

There have been intense debates on whether the capacity of visual working memory (VWM) is limited by a small set of discrete slots with high precision, or by a pool of resources that can be flexibly distributed to various items. Previous studies on the issue were mostly based on behavioral modeling, and precision of VWM was measured by the response distribution over a continuous physical scale. However, underlying electrophysiological mechanisms to the behavioral parameters remained unclear. In this study, a delayed color-estimation task (Bays, Catalao, and Husain, 2009; Zhang and Luck, 2008) was applied along with electroencephalogram (EEG) recording. Four parameters were estimated according to performance on the task: precision, the probability of correctly remembering items (pT), the probability of random guessing (pU), and the probability of mismatching a non-target color (pNT). Since conventional EEG analysis methods were constrained by nonlinear and nonstationary assumptions, a new approach combining Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT; Huang et al., 1998) and ensemble empirical-mode decomposition (EEMD) was applied for EEG data analysis (e.g. Chang et al., 2016). Taking the target-only condition as baseline, results showed the following: (i) As the number of to-be-remembered items increased, there were decreased alpha- and theta-band activity during memory retention stage, and decreased alpha- but increased theta-band activity during memory retrieval stage across the whole brain. (ii) pT was positively correlated with alpha-band activity throughout the retention and retrieval stages across the brain. (iii) pU was negatively correlated with alpha-band activity during retention and retrieval stages, whereas pNT was negatively correlated to theta-band activity only in the retrieval period. These patterns of results were consistent with previous studies in the negative correlation between alpha oscillation and memory load, and the positive correlation between theta oscillation and successful memory retrieval (e.g. Chen and Caplan, 2016). We will also discuss these results in the framework of event related potentials such as: N2PC, SPCN for their corresponding cognitive processes measured with the task.

 

Previous fMRI studies have identified mid-fusiform gyrus as a key region in the functional network of perceptual expertise. In one recent study, cortical thickness (CT) of car experts' Fusiform Face Area (aka FFA) were correlated with their face and object (car) performance [McGugin, et al. (2016) JoCN 28, pp. 282-294]. To both extend this finding from car experts to experts of other domain, and also expand the CT and cortical volume (via volumetric brain morphology, or VBM), in study1 we reanalyzed our previously acquired birder T1-weighted Siemens 1.5T MRI data (N=27 Caucasians, 17 bird experts, and 10 novices), with both audiovisual and visual dprimes as their expertise measure. The results showed that significant correlations were found in both voxel density and CT between both audio and visual d', especially in bilateral fusiform gyrus, dorsal anterior and posterior cingulate gyrus, hippocampus, parahippocamous, etc. After partialling out the age confound, controlling for the high correlation between expertise and age, these results still hold. In study2, we corroborated the similar results with the 1.5T Philips T1-weighted MRI data (N=20, 10 local birders, with only visual dprimes) acquired in Taiwan. Lastly, the joint analyses combining both America and Taiwan data (N=47) showed that the left fusiform gyrus remained highly correlated, further strengthening the role of FG in expertise. Despite of slight disparities, the brain regions are overall highly similar across VBM- and CT-expertise correlations, not only extending the previous CT-expertise in car to bird experts, but also expanding the CT-expertise to VBM-expertise correlations, deepening the interconnection between experience and brain structure.

 

In recent years, the study of cortical thickness and volume in various age groups and typical/atypical populations has become an important aspect of developmental and clinical neuroscience, offering insights, assessment, and recommendations about brain plasticity. While the numbers of these publications are ever-growing, the reports with both thickness and volume analyses are scarce. Therefore in this study, we sought to establish their relationship in a well-controlled musician vs. non-musicians (N=16 in each group, age-matched 20-25 yrs, with musicians having > 10 hours of regular practices per week and passing both the visual note memory task and >.80 accuracy criterion of auditory consonant/dissonant tests, whereas non-musicians were without any training and performing both tasks at chance level). Their T1 MRI data were acquired and analyzed by BrainVoyager QX (for thickness) and SPM-CAT12 (for volume), and their group-wise differences were assessed both qualitatively and quantitatively. Our findings indicated that the brain areas related to professional musical training showed significant thickening and size increases in musician than non-musician group, including frontal, parietal, and temproral lobes, which conform to the conclusions drawn in earlier and similar studies. The most intriguing part is that while the qualitative method yielded decent (~70%) comparable results between cortical thickness and brain volume findings, the quantitative overlap index of similarity fared as low as .5%! Lastly, we offer some speculations about the reasons behind these disparate and less-addressed results, and await more cross-software and cross-preprocessing comparisons for further insights.

 

Mood and anxiety disorders have been reported to associate with chronic pain. Our recent fMRI study suggests that women with primary dysmenorrhea (PDM) develop functional reorganization with a network shift from affective processing of salience to the cognitive modulation of pain. Here, we aimed to further investigate whether early emotional processing is modulated by long-term menstrual pain, both in the presence and absence of menstrual pain in PDM. We recruited 72 right-handed PDM subjects (PDMs) and 76 age-matched otherwise healthy women (CONs) during menstruation phase (MENS; Day 1-3) and periovulatory phase (POV; Day 12-14). Psychological inventories and pain experience were collected. Neutral, happy, sad, and angry voices stimuli were used to collect event-related MEG data. Source analysis using the beamforming method within theta activity (4-8 Hz) was performed for estimating cortical responses at 80-150 ms after stimulus onset. Brain emotional response indexes (BERIs) were calculated as the percentage change of theta activity of each emotion to that of neutral prosody. Statistical analyses with repeated measures models including factors of group, phase, emotion, and their interactions were performed. PDMs reported lower quality of life, higher anxiety, personal emotional adjustment problems, and pain catastrophizing than CONs. During MENS, comparing to CONs, PDMs showed increased BERIs to sad prosody at brain regions of the left parahippocampal, fusiform, hippocampus, amygdala, and middle and superior temporal pole and to angry prosody at brain regions of the bilateral cuneus and precuneus, and decreased BERIs to angry prosody at the left STG and right IFG. In contrast, during POV, comparing to CONs, PDMs only showed significant decreased BERIs both to sad prosody at the right OFC and ACC and to angry prosody at the right precentral, postcentral, SMA, IFG, and dlPFC. To conclude, our findings suggest that personal experience with long-term menstrual pain would shape the function and connectivity within networks in central processing of emotional perception and could eventually impact women’s long-term health.

 

Increase of theta oscillation has been reported in patients with severe and chronic neurogenic pain, which is localized in the cortical pain matrix. Most of these studies focus on brain state under painful condition. Our recent studies indicate dysfunctions of neural networks in women with primary dysmenorrhea (PDM) even under non-painful state. Here we further examined the effect of cyclic menstrual pain experience on theta activity across the menstrual cycle. Forty-one PDM women and 41 healthy female controls (CON), a subset of the participants from our previous PDM studies, were included. The magnetoencephalographic (MEG) signals with 3-5 minutes of eye-open resting state were recorded using a 306-channel MEG system (Vectorview, Elekta-Neuromag) during their 1st-3rd (menstrual phase, MENS) and 12th-16th day (periovulatory phase, POV). All subjects were assessed with a standardized clinical evaluation protocol including gynecological examination and psychological assessments. The source image of theta oscillatory activity for each individual was estimated using the beamforming approach. Whole-brain voxel-wise two-sample t-tests were performed for group comparison (p<0.01 uncorrected; cluster size k>50 voxels) of each phase. Further statistical analyses, including spearman’s correlation and regression, were conducted between psychological/pain experience assessments. Our results showed that PDM exhibited increased theta oscillation in the left pre/post-central gyri (primary sensorimotor cortex) during the POV phase compared with those during the MENS phase (p=0.001), where the activity of this region was correlated with the state anxiety only in the MENS phase (p=0.015) but not in the POV phase (p=0.816). The results also showed the increased theta activity at the left middle cingulate cortex (MCC) of PDM, compared with CONs, during the MENS phase. The regression results demonstrated that in PDM group the MCC theta activity at the POV phase was a possible predictive factor for self-reported pain rating index (p=0.038). These findings suggest that theta activity of sensorimotor and MCC may play a role of adaptation in pain processing through the menstrual cycle. These should contribute to a better understanding of interplay between brain regions of affective-cognitive functions affected by long-term menstrual pain experience in PDM.

 

Retrieval orientation refers to the cognitive operations that bias the processing of retrieval cues for a specific retrieval target. This study examined whether different retrieval orientations are adopted for neutral items encoded in neutral and emotional contexts. In three study-test cycles, participants were first presented with pictures of neutral objects embedded in emotionally neutral, negatively valenced, and positive valenced background scenes, respectively. They then made old/new judgments to the objects without the background scenes. The ERPs associated with the correct rejections were examined. We found two sets of retrieval orientation effects, one related to arousal and the other related to valence over the frontal scalp region. These retrieval orientation effects reveal the modulation of emotional context on the subsequent retrieval.

 

The current study serves as an initial stage to build a system in which machines and the human brain interact reciprocally to harness the computation power of the brain for online direction of machine movements. We adopted motor imaginary based BCI to predict the intended side of an “imagined” hand movement in response to visual cues. During the training phase, we presented 120 visual cues that were randomly interleaved to indicate left and right hand movements in each trial. Each visual cue was displayed for 4000-ms, followed by a 1500-ms fixation cue and a 4000-ms resting period. The participant was required to constantly imagine hand movement throughout the 4000-ms display of visual cue. To build a machine learning architecture in automatic detection of implicitly intended movements, we implemented Common Spatial Pattern (CSP) for EEG spectral feature extraction and linear discriminant analysis for MI classification. While the EEG signals were collected from 32 channels, we managed to reduce the number of channels in the data processing to four while still maintaining high accuracy at an average of 85% for five different participants for training session data using 5–fold cross validation process. In addition, we tested our BCI system with a second data set recorded from a participant using synchronous BCI protocol streaming off line to the system, which showed a 92% high accuracy classification. We will discuss how this EEG data acquisition and analytic framework can be applied to integrate external environment information with the processing of native sensory modality (i.e., sensory addition), and thus serves as a close loop information sharing system that may assists the machine to carry out appropriate actions in the environment at either conscious or subconscious level.

 

Emotion has been widely investigated throughout various task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI); however, vocal emotional processing and its underlying neural mechanism are less examined. In this study, we assessed the brain network topology using resting-state and task-based fMRI and performed automatic emotion recognition using fusion of audio and fMRI. The vocal emotion stimuli were generated from the USC IEMOCAP database (Busso et al., 2008). The stimuli were rated with 3 levels of arousal (high, middle and low) and valence (positive, neutral, and negative). Two fMRI experiments were conducted: 1) Arousal experiment: includes 3 task conditions of high, middle, low arousal and a resting-state condition 2) Valence experiment: includes 3 task conditions of positive, neutral, and negative valence, and resting-state condition. A total of 18 subjects participated in each experiment. fMRI data was preprocessed using DPARSF toolbox (Yan et al., 2010). We calculated nodal network metrics including degree and PageRank centrality. Functional connectivity (Pearson correlation) between 90 AAL regions were calculated. Further lobe-dependent convolutional neural network and acoustic features were extracted as input to support vector machine. Degree and PageRank centrality showed significant differences between resting-state and each arousal-task conditions in both left and right superior temporal gyri. Significant correlation of degree and PageRank centrality was found between resting-state and valence-task conditions in left amygdala. The resting-state functional connectivity was correlated with all task-evoked functional connectivity. Lastly, multimodal fusion of fMRI and audio information provided significant improvement in recognition accuracies. Reference: Busso, C., Bulut, M., Lee, C. C., Kazemzadeh, A., Mower, E., Kim, S., ... & Narayanan, S. S. (2008). IEMOCAP: Interactive emotional dyadic motion capture database. Language resources and evaluation, 42(4), 335. Yan, C., & Zang, Y. (2010). DPARSF: a MATLAB toolbox for" pipeline" data analysis of resting-state fMRI. Frontiers in systems neuroscience, 4, 13.

 

A target word presented in the peripheral visual field can become unrecognizable due to visual crowding caused by the surrounded flankers, a phenomenon usually occurs in reading. Despite unrecognizable, nevertheless, our previous study showed a robust semantic priming effect from a crowded prime to the subsequently presented target word (Yeh, He, & Cavanagh, 2012, Psychological Science). Here we explore the neural correlates of such semantic priming effect by measuring the BOLD signals with fMRI. Three prime-target relationships were manipulated when both prime and target were Chinese characters: high-related, low-related, unrelated, and a non-word pair was served as perceptual control. Participants judged whether the prime and the target was semantically related if they were words, or whether the prime and the target were identical if they were non-words. The prime was presented at 5ﾟeccentricity on top of the fixation sign, and the target word was either shown alone or crowded by four flankers. Results showed that all word pairs when presented alone and thus recognizable had greater activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and left middle temporal gyrus (MTG), contrast to the non-word pairs. Under visual crowding, however, higher activation of the left IFG was found for either the high-related or low-related word pairs as compared to the non-word pairs. Semantic retrieval process based on the activation of left IFG is thus observed for both crowed and isolated words, while additional representations of verbal semantic information based on MTG activation is obtained only when semantically related words were recognizable. Unrecognizable words under visual crowding may have rendered the semantic representation too weak to be detectable since the sign to semantic retrieval is evident.

 

The study used morphed faces to investigate the perceptual advantage of between-categorical compared with within-categorical facial expressions. Twenty-nine participants including 12 males and 12 females (aged from 19-24) were recruited from southern Taiwan. Three sets of male happy and fearful expressions were selected from the natural facial expressions of the Taiwanese standard emotional stimuli database. We then morphed the two kinds of emotions of each set into one hundred equal scaling combined facial expressions. Results found the peak amplitudes(PAs) of N170 of second faces were higher than those of the first faces on PO8. The analysis on Fz, Cz and Pz found that the intensity at Pz were higher than those of Cz and Fz. It was also found that the Same(S) and Within(W) pairs were higher than Between(B) pairs. The mean amplitudes(MAs) of P3 at Pz, Cz, and Fz were also found that Pz were higher than those of Cz and Fz and the second faces higher than the first faces. The Same pairs were higher than the Within pairs, the Between pairs were higher than the Within pairs. These findings suggested that the parietal activation were higher in processing categorical information on faces. The differences among the types of categories across components might suggest different processes that related to emotional perceptual categorization.

 

The oddball P300 wave is widely used to access stroke patients’ cognitive functions. According to the context updating theory, the P300 component indexes brain activities underlying revision of the mental representation induced by incoming stimuli. It involves an attention-driven comparison process evaluates the representation of the previous event in working memory. Delayed latencies have been reported for various cerebrovascular diseases, such as the unilateral thalamic stroke. Here, we aim to investigate the memory updating effects in patients with putamen stroke by eliciting auditory and visual P300. Patients with putamen and thalamic stroke were recruited as two patient groups. Young and Age-matched healthy participants were included as two control groups. All patients accepted full clinical examination and MRI scan. Cognitive functions were evaluated for all participants by using the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE). Compared to age-matched controls, we found delayed auditory P300 component in both groups of patients with putamen or thalamic stroke. It suggests the impairment of the auditory attention or memory updating in patients with stroke at various location and different lesion type. Our study illustrates the important role of subcortical structures subserved in context updating.

 

Resource-based approach is the broad interdisciplinary trend in psychology and neuroscience that stresses the necessity of search for resources. The first essay within the resources paradigm devoted specially to psychology of music was proposed by N.Almayev (2000). The lack of resources is experienced as tension while their sufficient level as relieve. Idea that musical experience is the result of tensions and subsequent relieves which stems from Kurth (1947) is consonant with the proposed approach. This way any quantitative change of sound’s characteristics may be interpreted in the terms of resources. Proposed theoretical and experimental paradigm was fulfilled in the following studies: 1) Subjective localization of acoustic stimuli in a human body. This study helps to understand, why sound is so mandatory for search of psychic resources during perception. It occurs because every sound is estimated by an organism from the standpoint of its ability to produce this sound. 2) Investigation of tonality, search for the psychophysiological mechanisms of major and minor perception. Major and minor phenomena cannot be understood without the study of sound’s attenuation process. Four different types of attenuation is now under investigation: real, midi synthesized, with triangle form of attenuation, with rectangular one. 3) Interaction of tempo and intensity of the stimuli most of all affects the state of a brain. This makes pulsations the key stimuli for psychophysiological study of tension, relief and expectation. Affect of tempo escalation with 70 and 90 dB stimuli were studied with EEG methods. Acceleration of tempo with 90 dB signals leads to selective inhibition of brain activity in the frontal area (F3, FZ, F4), rise of delta and theta rhythms in it. Proposed framework permits to describe in the unified manner changes in subjective perception and psychophysiological data caused by the alterations of stimuli’s acoustic characteristics. Supported by RFBR №16-06-00487.

 

Grapheme-color synesthesia is a condition in which visual perception of letters induces simultaneous perception of a given color. Grapheme–color correspondences have been shown to be systematically associated with grapheme properties: impacts of visual shape similarity and ordinality (positions in a grapheme sequence) on hue distances of synesthetic colors, and the impact of frequency on luminance distances of synesthetic colors. However, contributions of these factors differ across individuals. The individual differences relate to which grapheme properties the individual is likely to process. Which grapheme properties a synesthete processes may be reflected by the type of subjective experiences the synesthete perceives. Some synesthetes termed “projectors,” perceived their associated colors visually in external space.” Others, termed “associators,” perceived their colors in internal space, characterizing them as existing “in my mind’s eye” or “in my head.” Differences in processing graphemes for perceiving synesthetic colors between projectors and associators depend on whether connections between graphemes and colors processing are a top–down or bottom–up pathway. Specifically, connections between graphemes and colors in projectors involves the letter shape area in the fusiform gyrus. In contrast, connections between graphemes and colors in associators involves the superior parietal lobe (Van Leeuwen, den Ouden, & Hagoort, 2011). The present study aimed at obtaining evidence for the following hypotheses: Because shape differences reflect a lower-level perceptual property of graphemes, projectors tend to show strong effects of shape difference on synesthetic colors. In contrast, because ordinality and familiarity reflect conceptual higher-level properties of graphemes, associators tend to show strong effects of ordinality and familiarity on synesthetic colors. We revealed that ordinality and familiarity factors were expressed more strongly among associators than among projectors. This finding suggests that grapheme–color associations are partly determined by the type of synesthetic experience.

 

Mental rotation (MR), a cognitive process of imagining an object rotating, has been considered as an important spatial ability. Previous studies suggest that MR is an embodied process modulated by hand movement. It is also known that males outperform females on MR tests. To better understand the embodied nature and gender differences in MR, the present study examined whether holding heavy bags in hands affected female and male MR performance. In the experiment, 40 right-handed participants (20 females and 20 males) performed a chronometric MR task while standing and holding bags in both hands. Half of the participants (10 females and 10 males) held light bags (0.22 kg × 2) and the other half (10 females and 10 males) held heavy bags (3.22 kg × 2). In each trial, two three-dimensional objects were presented on a display. One object was an identical or mirror-reversed version of the other, being rotated by 0°, 60°, 120°, or 180° in depth. The participants judged whether the two objects were identical or mirror-reversed by pressing a foot pedal. Results showed that females with heavy bags performed MR more accurately and quickly than females with light bags, although male performance was not affected by whether the bags were light or heavy. This gender difference in the heavy-bag effect could not be accounted for by individual differences in body weight. The pattern of the results is similar to a recent finding that concurrent approaching behavior (arm flexion) improves female (but not male) MR performance (Jansen, Kaltner, & Memmert, 2016). The heavy-bag effect could also be explained in terms of approaching behavior because holding heavy bags requires arm muscles to produce pulling forces, which are directed towards one’s own body. The present finding has implications for considering the gender difference in embodied processes during MR.

 

In the MRI experiment, generally uses the method of GLM analysis In addition to the use of GLM analysis, we tried to join searchlight for data analysis, and compared the results with the results of GLM analysis. The first set of data for the Fictive Motion：24 participants, Fictive Motion sentence (FMS, it is not real action, but we can imagine that the action, such as the road across the mountains) and Fictive Motion sentence counterpart (FMScp, as control the use of words such as FMS, such as road is between the mountains). Second sets of data for Texture：25 subjects, mainly Metaphorical sentence ( MS, it was originally used to describe real words, abstract words, such as Metaphorical sentence counterpart and tough life) (MScp, as control the use of words such as MS, the difference of the impermanence of life). Analysis of the two sets, using GLM analysis, found that some brain regions in the mission, there are indeed differences; then in the searchlight analysis, FMS and FMScp found in distinguishing or MS and MScp, some brain areas have obvious differences. Finally, the group analysis run T-test, up to 0.05 significant level, meaning that in the task, part of the brain to distinguish FMS and FMScp or MS and MScp has more than 50% accuracy.

 

The fusiform face area (FFA) has often been speculated as a brain region that is specialized for face perception and recognition. While it is generally believed that the FFA responds selectively more to facial stimuli than other objects, the expertise hypothesis proposes that the FFA may participate in the processing of any object class that is trained to be processed at the subordinate or individual level. Previous study (e.g., Brands et al., 2011, JOCN xx, pp. xxx-yyy) has shown and interpreted that, the Neuronal Inversion Effect, or higher activity in the upright than in the inverted face condition, observed both before- and after-expertise training in the FFA, as the evidence that subjects viewed Greebles as faces throughout. Next poster gives the FFA evidence of how two different training regimes (Gauthier et al., 1997, Vision Res., 37(12), pp. 1673-82; vs. Gauthier et al., 1998, ibid., 38/15, pp. 2401-28) yield different FFA responses, and in the current study we explore similar results with MVPA. The multi-voxel pattern analysis is used to distinguish the patterns of FFA activity between Greebles and other stimuli (“Faces” and “Objects”), and we demonstrate that activity patterns of localized FFA perform better at distinction of “Faces vs. Greebles” in before- than after-training does, and in “Greebles vs. Objects” better in after- than before-training does. In both case, the Gauthier 97 paradigm has shown more prominent distinction results than the Gauthier 98 paradigm. In addition, the searchlight information mapping is employed to identify other brain regions that can provide information concerning the neural representation of distinct object classes. Taken together, these results further downplay the conclusion made by Brants et al, (2011), and further strengthen the claim that different training paradigm had profound impact upon the acquired object of expertise representation.

 

Dual-process theories suggested that recognition memory is supported by two qualitatively different processes: recollection and familiarity. Recollection-based recognition is the recovery of contextual information about an encoded event. Familiarity-based recognition is a graded signal that supports judgments of prior occurrence. One of the frequently used method for examining the contributions of recollection- and familiarity-processes to recognition memory is the remember/know procedure. In a typical remember/know procedure, remember response is made when the specific contextual details are recollected; where know response is to be given when contextual information is absent but the item remains familiar. The present MEG study aim to investigate the neural substrates of recognition memory by using the modified remember/know combined with confidence rating procedure. Participants first study words with semantic judgments at encoding phase. During retrieval stage, participants give an old/new confidence rating response followed by a remember/know judgement. The MEG source data reveals distinct temporal and spatial scalp distributions of two processes, where familiarity related activity is observed in the left superior parietal region in the early time window; and recollection related activity is found in the tempoparietal region in the late time window. The current results suggest that recollection and familiarity make dissociable contributions to recognition memory.

 

Exercise is known to be beneficial for cognitive and anxiolytic effects. However, the neural mechanism of acute exercise on emotional processing remains to be determined. Here, using a placebo-controlled, within-subject, and crossover design, this fMRI study examined how a single bout of aerobic exercise modulates the amygdala reactivity in response to conscious and nonconscious (backward masked) perception of fearful and happy faces in healthy subjects, who varied in anxiety by the State-Trait Anxiety inventory (STAI-S). Results showed that running and walking sessions did not significantly differ the STAI-S scores. However, the amygdala reactivity exhibited an interaction of emotion by session in the nonconscious, but not conscious, condition. To nonconscious happy relative to fearful processing, amygdala reactivity was reduced after running but was increased after walking. Furthermore, after running relative to walking, the functional connectivity of the amygdala was increased with the orbitofrontal cortex and insula to nonconscious happiness, whereas was decreased with the parahippocampal gyrus and subgenual cingulate to nonconscious fear. The findings demonstrated that a single bout of aerobic exercise could modulate amygdala reactivity and functional connectivity in response to nonconscious, but not conscious, emotional processing. As evidenced by differential amygdala reactivity to perceived happiness and fear, it may shed light on the anxiolytic effect of acute exercise.