10/12/2024


Analyses revealed that participants initiating forward gait after recalling a fearful experience in which the fearful stimulus was congruent to the movement direction expedited RTs, greater displacement and velocity of anticipatory postural responses, and greater step length and velocity. Results provide support for the theoretical position that motivational orientations to approach and avoid are contextualized based on affective congruency, which includes the spatial orientation of real or imagined emotional stimuli. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).Working memory is defined by many as the system that allows us to simultaneously store information over brief time periods while engaging in other information processing activities. In a previous study (Rhodes, Jaroslawska et al. (2019) Journal of Experimental Psychology General, 148, 1204-1227.) we found that retention of serially presented letters was disrupted by the introduction of an arithmetic processing task during a 10 second delay period. Importantly, the magnitude of this dual task disruption increased with age from 18 to 81. The demands of each task were adjusted prior to dual task so that age differences did not reflect baseline differences in single task performance. Motivated by these findings, theories of working memory, and additional analyses of processing reaction times from this previous experiment, we report two experiments, using the same tasks and adjustment procedure, attempting to modulate the magnitude of age differences in dual task effects via manipulations focused on time for encoding to-be-remembered material. Providing a delay prior to processing activities, to facilitate switching between the two tasks, did not modulate age differences. Neither did separating the to-be-remembered material temporally, to allow for the creation of more distinct representations. These findings provide two replications of our initial finding and suggest that age differences in working memory dual tasking are not due to limitations in the speed of encoding. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).Masculinity contest culture (MCC) encourages fierce competition and race for status at all costs. https://www.selleckchem.com/products/8-bromo-camp.html Across three experiments (Ntotal = 554), we investigated how MCC affects discretionary performance at work (i.e., organizational citizenship behaviors; OCBs). Compared to an alternative culture (i.e., feminine nurturing culture; FNC), participants in the MCC condition reported lower levels of OCBs toward the organization and its members. Further results showed that MCC diminished individuals' intentions to engage in discretionary performance through reduced organizational identification. We did not find a moderating effect of gender, suggesting that MCC thwarts discretionary performance and organizational identification for both women and men. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).Katz and Ferretti's, (Discourse Processes, 2003, 36, 19) pioneering paper was the first to address and systematically examine the role of marking (literally speaking, in a manner of speaking, proverbially speaking) during online processing of proverbs (see also Schwint et al., 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society Proceedings, 2006, 768). For Katz and colleagues, such markers function as introductory formulae, signaling to the addressee the intended interpretation of an incoming proverb. Inspired by their work, this paper explores the effects of marking, showing that some markers (literally, in the full sense of the word, double entendre, really) rather than disambiguating an ambiguous utterance, can allow for ambiguation (e.g., S/he is radiant, in the full sense of the word uttered in reference to a smiling person wearing sparkling clothes). Two offline questionnaire studies and one online reading task experiment, all conducted in Hebrew, test the Low-Salience Marking Hypothesis (Givoni, Low-salience marking, 2011; Givoni, Marking multiple meanings, 2020; Givoni, Journal of Pragmatics, 2013, 48, 29). Accordingly, such marking boosts low-salience meanings ("glittery", here the literal meaning) which are less-frequent, less-familiar, less-prototypical, and less-conventionalized (The Graded Salience Hypothesis, see Giora, Cognitive Linguistics, 1997, 8, 183; Giora, On our mind Salience, context and figurative language, Oxford University Press, 2003; Givoni & Giora, Handbuch Pragmatik, J.B. Metzler, 2018). Marked utterances were embedded in contexts, strongly supportive of the salient meaning of the ambiguities ("happy", here the figurative meaning). Results support the Low-Salience Marking Hypothesis. link2 They show preference for low-salience meanings as well as faster reading times of such meanings following low-salience marking relative to control conditions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).In 2005, the Moser group identified a new type of cell in the entorhinal cortex (ERC) the grid cell (Hafting, Nature, 436, 2005, pp. 801-806). A landmark series of studies from these investigators showed that grid cells support spatial navigation by encoding position, direction as well as distance information, and they subsequently found grid cells in pre- and para-subiculum areas adjacent to the ERC (Boccara, Nature Neuroscience, 13, 2010, pp. 987-994). Fast forward to 2010, when some clever investigators developed fMRI analysis methods to document grid-like responses in the human ERC (Doeller, Nature, 463, 2010, pp. 657-661). What was not at all expected was the co-identification of grid-like fMRI responses outside of the ERC, in particular, the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Here we provide a compact overview of the burgeoning literature on grid cells in both rodent and human species, while considering the intriguing question what are grid-like responses doing in the OFC and vmPFC? (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).Prepulse inhibition (PPI) refers to the modulation of the startle response by the presentation of a weaker stimulus prior to the onset of the startle stimulus. This response is consolidated along the maturation process of the mesocortical system, where the dopamine neurotransmitter plays an important role. In fact, it has been reported that agonist and antagonist dopaminergic drugs are able to change PPI expression. This study was aimed to analyze the relationship between the adult medial prefrontal cortex (mPfc) and dopaminergic involvement in PPI throughout the life span. Specifically, the present experiment analyzed the effect of the administration of dopaminergic agonist amphetamine on PPI in two different age periods in Wistar rats postnatal day (PND) 28 and PND 70. In this last period, we also explored the relationship between PPI response and amphetamine effects after mPfc lesion. The results showed that PPI was expressed in all groups and periods; however, amphetamine only modulated this effect during adulthood. We also found that the mPfc is essential to modulate PPI after amphetamine consumption. Besides, our results suggest a role for dopamine and mPfc as important modulators of PPI in adulthood. Nevertheless, this neurotransmitter could not be involved in the expression of PPI because the administration of a dopaminergic agonist was ineffective in PND-28 period. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).Decision neuroscience research has consistently implicated orbitofrontal and adjacent ventromedial prefrontal cortex in value-based decision-making. These areas are thought to reflect subjective value, a generic indicator of the personal motivational relevance of different options that allows them to be compared on a common scale. There are a number of unanswered questions arising from this model. We review findings from studies in patients with focal damage to the ventral frontal lobe that led us to reconsider how decision options are evaluated, applying perspectives from research on object recognition in the ventral visual stream. While decision-making is often approached from an abstract economic perspective in the lab, most of our everyday decisions, whether about food, goods, or people, are between directly perceived complex objects made up of multiple value-predictive attributes. It is not clear how multiple attributes are integrated to produce a global value estimate. We know the objects themselves are represented in the ventral visual stream at different levels of complexity, ranging from individual features to unique combinations of such features, but what about the values of those objects? Here, we suggest distinctions between configural and elemental evaluation echoing distinctions in visual processing. We discuss evidence that orbitofrontal-ventromedial prefrontal cortex is not required for all value-based decisions, but rather is specifically critical for recognizing value when it is predicted by configural relationships between attributes. We also consider how this perspective connects with emerging views of orbitofrontal cortex as an abstract cognitive map, and the debate on whether subjective value is a neurobiologically meaningful construct. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) plays a prominent role in signaling reward expectations. Two important features of rewards are their value (how good they are) and their specific identity (what they are). link3 Whereas research on OFC has traditionally focused on reward value, recent findings point toward a pivotal role of reward identity in understanding OFC signaling and its contribution to behavior. Here, we review work in rodents, nonhuman primates, and humans on how the OFC represents expectations about the identity of rewards, and how these signals contribute to outcome-guided behavior. Moreover, we summarize recent findings suggesting that specific reward expectations in OFC are learned and updated by means of identity errors in the dopaminergic midbrain. We conclude by discussing how OFC encoding of specific rewards complements recent proposals that this region represents a cognitive map of relevant task states, which forms the basis for model-based behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).Genetic variants in large conductance voltage and calcium sensitive potassium (BKCa) channels have associations with neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism spectrum disorder, fragile X syndrome, and intellectual disability. In the case of fragile X syndrome, early preclinical studies suggest that BKCa channels may be a promising treatment target for neurodevelopmental disorders. While BKCa channel dysfunction has been investigated within the context of fragile X syndrome, it is unknown whether interference with BKCa channel function is inductive for deficits in behavioral domains relevant to neurodevelopmental disorders. This represents a critical gap in our knowledge regarding the relationship between BKCa dysfunction and neurodevelopmental disorders. To explore this concept, we used the BKCa channel antagonist paxilline to evaluate the role of BKCa channel function in phenotypes of neurodevelopmental disorders. Here we used adult male C57BL/6J mice and a series of behavioral paradigms which assessed anxiety-like behavior, locomotor activity, social behavior, and repetitive self-grooming.