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Trends in Cognitive Sciences Feb 2010Dreams are a remarkable experiment in psychology and neuroscience, conducted every night in every sleeping person. They show that the human brain, disconnected from the... (Review)
Review
Dreams are a remarkable experiment in psychology and neuroscience, conducted every night in every sleeping person. They show that the human brain, disconnected from the environment, can generate an entire world of conscious experiences by itself. Content analysis and developmental studies have promoted understanding of dream phenomenology. In parallel, brain lesion studies, functional imaging and neurophysiology have advanced current knowledge of the neural basis of dreaming. It is now possible to start integrating these two strands of research to address fundamental questions that dreams pose for cognitive neuroscience: how conscious experiences in sleep relate to underlying brain activity; why the dreamer is largely disconnected from the environment; and whether dreaming is more closely related to mental imagery or to perception.
Topics: Brain; Consciousness; Dreams; Emotions; Environment; Humans; Imagination; Neurophysiology; Perception; Psychophysiology
PubMed: 20079677
DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2009.12.001 -
Proceedings of the National Academy of... Jan 2014Emotions are often felt in the body, and somatosensory feedback has been proposed to trigger conscious emotional experiences. Here we reveal maps of bodily sensations...
Emotions are often felt in the body, and somatosensory feedback has been proposed to trigger conscious emotional experiences. Here we reveal maps of bodily sensations associated with different emotions using a unique topographical self-report method. In five experiments, participants (n = 701) were shown two silhouettes of bodies alongside emotional words, stories, movies, or facial expressions. They were asked to color the bodily regions whose activity they felt increasing or decreasing while viewing each stimulus. Different emotions were consistently associated with statistically separable bodily sensation maps across experiments. These maps were concordant across West European and East Asian samples. Statistical classifiers distinguished emotion-specific activation maps accurately, confirming independence of topographies across emotions. We propose that emotions are represented in the somatosensory system as culturally universal categorical somatotopic maps. Perception of these emotion-triggered bodily changes may play a key role in generating consciously felt emotions.
Topics: Adult; Emotions; Female; Finland; Humans; Male; Psychophysiology; Self Report; Sensation
PubMed: 24379370
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1321664111 -
Annual Review of Psychology 2008The past 10 years have brought near-revolutionary changes in psychological theories about short-term memory, with similarly great advances in the neurosciences. Here, we... (Review)
Review
The past 10 years have brought near-revolutionary changes in psychological theories about short-term memory, with similarly great advances in the neurosciences. Here, we critically examine the major psychological theories (the "mind") of short-term memory and how they relate to evidence about underlying brain mechanisms. We focus on three features that must be addressed by any satisfactory theory of short-term memory. First, we examine the evidence for the architecture of short-term memory, with special attention to questions of capacity and how--or whether--short-term memory can be separated from long-term memory. Second, we ask how the components of that architecture enact processes of encoding, maintenance, and retrieval. Third, we describe the debate over the reason about forgetting from short-term memory, whether interference or decay is the cause. We close with a conceptual model tracing the representation of a single item through a short-term memory task, describing the biological mechanisms that might support psychological processes on a moment-by-moment basis as an item is encoded, maintained over a delay with some forgetting, and ultimately retrieved.
Topics: Attention; Brain; Cognition; Humans; Memory, Short-Term; Neural Pathways; Psychological Theory; Psychophysiology; Retention, Psychology; Time Factors
PubMed: 17854286
DOI: 10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093615 -
Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Jun 2021The use of heart rate variability (HRV) in research has been greatly popularized over the past decades due to the ease and affordability of HRV collection, coupled with... (Review)
Review
The use of heart rate variability (HRV) in research has been greatly popularized over the past decades due to the ease and affordability of HRV collection, coupled with its clinical relevance and significant relationships with psychophysiological constructs and psychopathological disorders. Despite the wide use of electrocardiograms (ECG) in research and advancements in sensor technology, the analytical approach and steps applied to obtain HRV measures can be seen as complex. Thus, this poses a challenge to users who may not have the adequate background knowledge to obtain the HRV indices reliably. To maximize the impact of HRV-related research and its reproducibility, parallel advances in users' understanding of the indices and the standardization of analysis pipelines in its utility will be crucial. This paper addresses this gap and aims to provide an overview of the most up-to-date and commonly used HRV indices, as well as common research areas in which these indices have proven to be very useful, particularly in psychology. In addition, we also provide a step-by-step guide on how to perform HRV analysis using an integrative neurophysiological toolkit, NeuroKit2.
Topics: Electrocardiography; Heart Rate; Psychophysiology; Reproducibility of Results
PubMed: 34207927
DOI: 10.3390/s21123998 -
Behavior Research Methods Feb 2018The usage of psychological networks that conceptualize behavior as a complex interplay of psychological and other components has gained increasing popularity in various...
The usage of psychological networks that conceptualize behavior as a complex interplay of psychological and other components has gained increasing popularity in various research fields. While prior publications have tackled the topics of estimating and interpreting such networks, little work has been conducted to check how accurate (i.e., prone to sampling variation) networks are estimated, and how stable (i.e., interpretation remains similar with less observations) inferences from the network structure (such as centrality indices) are. In this tutorial paper, we aim to introduce the reader to this field and tackle the problem of accuracy under sampling variation. We first introduce the current state-of-the-art of network estimation. Second, we provide a rationale why researchers should investigate the accuracy of psychological networks. Third, we describe how bootstrap routines can be used to (A) assess the accuracy of estimated network connections, (B) investigate the stability of centrality indices, and (C) test whether network connections and centrality estimates for different variables differ from each other. We introduce two novel statistical methods: for (B) the correlation stability coefficient, and for (C) the bootstrapped difference test for edge-weights and centrality indices. We conducted and present simulation studies to assess the performance of both methods. Finally, we developed the free R-package bootnet that allows for estimating psychological networks in a generalized framework in addition to the proposed bootstrap methods. We showcase bootnet in a tutorial, accompanied by R syntax, in which we analyze a dataset of 359 women with posttraumatic stress disorder available online.
Topics: Dimensional Measurement Accuracy; Female; Humans; Neural Networks, Computer; Psychophysiology; Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic
PubMed: 28342071
DOI: 10.3758/s13428-017-0862-1 -
Zhurnal Voprosy Neirokhirurgii Imeni N.... 2016Awake craniotomy is a neurosurgical intervention aimed at identifying and preserving the eloquent functional brain areas during resection of tumors located near the... (Review)
Review
Awake craniotomy is a neurosurgical intervention aimed at identifying and preserving the eloquent functional brain areas during resection of tumors located near the cortical and subcortical language centers. This article provides a review of the modern literature devoted to the issue. The anatomical rationale and data of preoperative functional neuroimaging, intraoperative electrophysiological monitoring, and neuropsychological tests as well as the strategy of active surgical intervention are presented. Awake craniotomy is a rapidly developing technique aimed at both preserving speech and motor functions and improving our knowledge in the field of speech psychophysiology.
Topics: Craniotomy; Humans; Wakefulness
PubMed: 27186613
DOI: 10.17116/neiro2016801107-116 -
Trends in Neurosciences Dec 2019The marriage of cognitive neurophysiology and mathematical psychology to understand decision-making has been exceptionally productive. This interdisciplinary area is... (Review)
Review
The marriage of cognitive neurophysiology and mathematical psychology to understand decision-making has been exceptionally productive. This interdisciplinary area is based on the proposition that particular neurons or circuits instantiate the accumulation of evidence specified by mathematical models of sequential sampling and stochastic accumulation. This linking proposition has earned widespread endorsement. Here, a brief survey of the history of the proposition precedes a review of multiple conundrums and paradoxes concerning the accuracy, precision, and transparency of that linking proposition. Correctly establishing how abstract models of decision-making are instantiated by particular neural circuits would represent a remarkable accomplishment in mapping mind to brain. Failing would reveal challenging limits for cognitive neuroscience. This is such a vigorous area of research because so much is at stake.
Topics: Animals; Brain; Decision Making; Humans; Mind-Body Relations, Metaphysical; Models, Neurological; Models, Psychological; Neurons; Psychophysiology; Reaction Time
PubMed: 31704180
DOI: 10.1016/j.tins.2019.10.001 -
Psychophysiology Jun 2017This research examined human defensive reactivity when exposure to an aversive event could be escaped but not entirely avoided. Prolonged visual cues indicated whether...
This research examined human defensive reactivity when exposure to an aversive event could be escaped but not entirely avoided. Prolonged visual cues indicated whether exposure to an upcoming aversive (i.e., disgusting) picture could be terminated after onset (escaped) or not, or that a neutral go signal would appear. Acoustically elicited startle reflexes were measured during each cue interval, as were cardiac and skin conductance activity. Early in the cuing interval, startle reflexes were potentiated during both escape and inescapable exposure trials, compared to the simple motor context. Later in the interval, reflexes remained potentiated for both escapable and inescapable trials, with potentiation further enhanced when aversive exposure could not be escaped compared to when exposure could be escaped. Heart rate deceleration in the cuing interval indicated increased vigilance when preparing any (escape or neutral) action, whereas skin conductance responding indicated enhanced sympathetic action mobilization particularly in an escape context. These data suggest that startle reflexes engaged in an escape context reflect both motor-related response inhibition and aversive potentiation, and they indicate that defensive motivation is engaged whenever aversive exposure is guaranteed, regardless of whether it can be escaped or not.
Topics: Adolescent; Arousal; Autonomic Nervous System; Blood Pressure; Emotions; Escape Reaction; Fear; Female; Galvanic Skin Response; Heart Rate; Humans; Male; Reflex, Startle; Young Adult
PubMed: 28218794
DOI: 10.1111/psyp.12842 -
Behavior Research Methods Apr 2022Eye-tracking and recording of physiological signals are increasingly used in research within cognitive science and human-computer interaction. For example, gaze position...
Eye-tracking and recording of physiological signals are increasingly used in research within cognitive science and human-computer interaction. For example, gaze position and measures of autonomic arousal, including pupil dilation, skin conductance (SC), and heart rate (HR), provide an indicator of cognitive and physiological processes. The growing popularity of these techniques is partially driven by the emergence of low-cost recording equipment and the proliferation of open-source software for data collection and analysis of such signals. However, the use of new technology requires investigation of its reliability and validation with respect to real-world usage and against established technologies. Accordingly, in two experiments (total N = 69), we assessed the Gazepoint GP3-HD eye-tracker and Gazepoint Biometrics (GPB) system from Gazepoint. We show that the accuracy, precision, and robustness of the eye-tracker are comparable to competing systems. While fixation and saccade events can be reliably extracted, the study of saccade kinematics is affected by the low sampling rate. The GP3-HD is also able to capture psychological effects on pupil dilation in addition to the well-defined pupillary light reflex. Finally, moderate-to-strong correlations between physiological recordings and derived metrics of SC and HR between the GPB and the well-established BIOPAC MP160 support its validity. However, low amplitude of the SC signal obtained from the GPB may reduce sensitivity when separating phasic and tonic components. Similarly, data loss in pulse monitoring may pose difficulties for certain HR variability analyses.
Topics: Eye Movements; Eye-Tracking Technology; Humans; Psychophysiology; Reproducibility of Results; Saccades
PubMed: 34405387
DOI: 10.3758/s13428-021-01654-x -
Neuropsychopharmacology : Official... Feb 2018
Topics: China; History, 20th Century; History, 21st Century; Humans; Psychophysiology; United States; Visual Perception
PubMed: 29326432
DOI: 10.1038/npp.2017.271