Publications by authors named "Alejandro Ezquerro Nassar"

Article Synopsis
  • The study explores how COVID-19-related concerns and anxiety impact people's mind-wandering and dreaming, specifically looking at the emotional quality of these experiences.
  • Researchers used daily logs over two weeks from 172 individuals to track connections between daily worries and the affect experienced during mind-wandering and dreaming.
  • Results showed that poor sleep quality led to more negative feelings in dreams, while consistent COVID-19 worry was linked to increased negative affect in both waking daydreams and nighttime dreams.
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Mental imagery is the process through which we retrieve and recombine information from our memory to elicit the subjective impression of "seeing with the mind's eye". In the social domain, we imagine other individuals while recalling our encounters with them or modelling alternative social interactions in future. Many studies using imaging and neurophysiological techniques have shown several similarities in brain activity between visual imagery and visual perception, and have identified frontoparietal, occipital and temporal neural components of visual imagery.

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Humans' remarkable capacity to flexibly adapt their behavior based on rapid situational changes is termed cognitive control. Intuitively, cognitive control is thought to be affected by the state of alertness; for example, when drowsy, we feel less capable of adequately implementing effortful cognitive tasks. Although scientific investigations have focused on the effects of sleep deprivation and circadian time, little is known about how natural daily fluctuations in alertness in the regular awake state affect cognitive control.

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A major problem in psychology and physiology experiments is drowsiness: around a third of participants show decreased wakefulness despite being instructed to stay alert. In some non-visual experiments participants keep their eyes closed throughout the task, thus promoting the occurrence of such periods of varying alertness. These wakefulness changes contribute to systematic noise in data and measures of interest.

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