Dynamic changes in electrical brain activity during passive learning of foreign speech sound discrimination.

Previous brain research on phonetic learning of foreign speech sounds has focused on learning outcomes, mostly neglecting the dynamical neural changes during learning. In the present study, Finnish-speaking participants listened passively to a repeated presentation of vowel /a/ with infrequent changes in Mandarin tone for 2 h per day for 4 consecutive days while their brain activity was recorded using electroencephalography. While our previous study has reported the brain activity changes from test recordings conducted before and after the sound exposure, we here analyzed the data recorded during the exposure.

Dimension-based retro-cue benefit in working memory does not require unfocused dimension removal.

Introduction: Within the maintenance phase of visual working memory (VWM), previous researchers presented retro-cues orienting to a probed dimension across all multidimension stimuli and found a robust dimension-based retro-cue benefit (RCB): VWM performance for cued dimension was better than no/neutral-cue baseline. This improvement is often attributed to the prioritization of information related to the focused dimension and the removal of information related to the unfocused dimension from VWM. However, it remains unclear whether the removal of the uncued dimension is necessary to observe this dimension-based RCB.

Comparison of working memory performance in athletes and non-athletes: a meta-analysis of behavioural studies.

The relationship between sports expertise and working memory (WM) has garnered increasing attention in experimental research. However, no meta-analysis has compared WM performance between athletes and non-athletes. This study addresses this gap by comparing WM performance between these groups and investigating potential moderators.

Intensity dependence of auditory evoked potentials distinguish participants with unmedicated depression from non-depressed controls.

Depression is a heterogeneous syndrome that impacts an individual's emotional, social, cognitive and bodily functioning. Depression is associated with biases in emotional processing, but alterations in basic sensory processing have received less attention in depression research. Here, we measured event-related potentials (ERPs) in response to changes in the intensity of auditory stimuli and the location of somatosensory stimuli in participants with depression and in non-depressed control participants.

Magnetoencephalography reveals impaired sensory gating and change detection in older adults in the somatosensory system.

Brain electrophysiological responses can provide information about age-related decline in sensory-cognitive functions with high temporal accuracy. Studies have revealed impairments in early sensory gating and pre-attentive change detection mechanisms in older adults, but no magnetoencephalographic (MEG) studies have been undertaken into both non-attentive and attentive somatosensory functions and their relationship to ageing. Magnetoencephalography was utilized to record cortical somatosensory brain responses in young (20-28 yrs), middle-aged (46-56 yrs), and older adults (64-78 yrs) under active and passive somatosensory oddball conditions.

Altered temporoparietal junction activity during reflected self-evaluation in sub-clinical depression.

Negative self-schema is a core symptom of depression. According to social psychological theories, two types of self-evaluations play important roles in forming the negative self-view: direct self-evaluation (that is, evaluating the self directly through one's first-person perspective introspection) and reflected self-evaluation (which requires theory of mind (ToM) ability, and is evaluating the self through reflecting on a third person's perspective). Although many previous studies have investigated the processing of the direct self-evaluation in depression, few have extended research on the reflected self-evaluation.

The effect of sad mood on early sensory event-related potentials to task-irrelevant faces.

It has been shown that the perceiver's mood affects the perception of emotional faces, but it is not known how mood affects preattentive brain responses to emotional facial expressions. To examine the question, we experimentally induced sad and neutral mood in healthy adults before presenting them with task-irrelevant pictures of faces while an electroencephalography was recorded. Sad, happy, and neutral faces were presented to the participants in an ignore oddball condition.

Pain modulates early sensory brain responses to task-irrelevant emotional faces.

Background: Pain can have a significant impact on an individual's life, as it has both cognitive and affective consequences. However, our understanding of how pain affects social cognition is limited. Previous studies have shown that pain, as an alarm stimulus, can disrupt cognitive processing when focal attention is required, but whether pain also affects task-irrelevant perceptual processing remains unclear.

Alterations in working memory maintenance of fearful face distractors in depressed participants: An ERP study.

Task-irrelevant threatening faces (e.g., fearful) are difficult to filter from visual working memory (VWM), but the difficulty in filtering non-threatening negative faces (e.

Impact of observational and direct learning on fear conditioning generalization in humans.

Humans gain knowledge about threats not only from their own experiences but also from observing others' behavior. A neutral stimulus is associated with a threat stimulus for several times and the neutral stimulus will evoke fear responses, which is known as fear conditioning. When encountering a new event that is similar to one previously associated with a threat, one may feel afraid and produce fear responses.

Encoding specificity instead of online integration of real-world spatial regularities for objects in working memory.

Most objects show high degrees of spatial regularity (e.g. beach umbrellas appear above, not under, beach chairs).

Auditory event-related potentials in separating patients with depressive disorders and non-depressed controls: A narrative review.

This narrative review brings together the findings regarding the differences in the auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) between patients with depressive disorder and non-depressed control subjects. These studies' results can inform us of the possible alterations in sensory-cognitive processing in depressive disorders and the potential of using these ERPs in clinical applications. Auditory P3, mismatch negativity (MMN) and loudness dependence of auditory evoked potentials (LDAEP) were the subjects of the investigation.

Decreased intersubject synchrony in dynamic valence ratings of sad movie contents in dysphoric individuals.

Emotional reactions to movies are typically similar between people. However, depressive symptoms decrease synchrony in brain responses. Less is known about the effect of depressive symptoms on intersubject synchrony in conscious stimulus-related processing.

Attentional bias towards interpersonal aggression in depression - an eye movement study.

Depressed individuals exhibit an attentional bias towards mood-congruent stimuli, yet evidence for biased processing of threat-related information in human interaction remains scarce. Here, we tested whether an attentional bias towards interpersonally aggressive pictures over interpersonally neutral pictures could be observed to a greater extent in depressed participants than in control participants. Eye movements were recorded while the participants freely viewed visually matched interpersonally aggressive and neutral pictures, which were presented in pairs.

Magnetoencephalography Responses to Unpredictable and Predictable Rare Somatosensory Stimuli in Healthy Adult Humans.

Mismatch brain responses to unpredicted rare stimuli are suggested to be a neural indicator of prediction error, but this has rarely been studied in the somatosensory modality. Here, we investigated how the brain responds to unpredictable and predictable rare events. Magnetoencephalography responses were measured in adults frequently presented with somatosensory stimuli (FRE) that were occasionally replaced by two consecutively presented rare stimuli [unpredictable rare stimulus (UR) and predictable rare stimulus (PR); = 0.

Individual differences in working memory capacity are unrelated to the magnitudes of retrocue benefits.

Previous studies have associated visual working memory (VWM) capacity with the use of internal attention. Retrocues, which direct internal attention to a particular object or feature dimension, can improve VWM performance (i.e.

Neural generators of the frequency-following response elicited to stimuli of low and high frequency: A magnetoencephalographic (MEG) study.

The frequency-following response (FFR) to periodic complex sounds has gained recent interest in auditory cognitive neuroscience as it captures with great fidelity the tracking accuracy of the periodic sound features in the ascending auditory system. Seminal studies suggested the FFR as a correlate of subcortical sound encoding, yet recent studies aiming to locate its sources challenged this assumption, demonstrating that FFR receives some contribution from the auditory cortex. Based on frequency-specific phase-locking capabilities along the auditory hierarchy, we hypothesized that FFRs to higher frequencies would receive less cortical contribution than those to lower frequencies, hence supporting a major subcortical involvement for these high frequency sounds.

Brain responses of dysphoric and control participants during a self-esteem implicit association test.

Previous studies have reported lowered implicit self-esteem at the behavioral level among depressed individuals. However, brain responses related to the lowered implicit self-esteem have not been investigated in people with depression. Here, event-related potentials were measured in 28 dysphoric participants (individuals with elevated amounts of depressive symptoms) and 30 control participants during performance of an implicit association task (IAT) suggested to reflect implicit self-esteem.

Electrical brain activity and facial electromyography responses to irony in dysphoric and non-dysphoric participants.

We studied irony comprehension and emotional reactions to irony in dysphoric and control participants. Electroencephalography (EEG) and facial electromyography (EMG) were measured when spoken conversations were presented with pictures that provided either congruent (non-ironic) or incongruent (ironic) contexts. In a separate session, participants evaluated the congruency and valence of the stimuli.

Discovering dynamic task-modulated functional networks with specific spectral modes using MEG.

Efficient neuronal communication between brain regions through oscillatory synchronization at certain frequencies is necessary for cognition. Such synchronized networks are transient and dynamic, established on the timescale of milliseconds in order to support ongoing cognitive operations. However, few studies characterizing dynamic electrophysiological brain networks have simultaneously accounted for temporal non-stationarity, spectral structure, and spatial properties.

Event-Related Potentials to Changes in Sound Intensity Demonstrate Alterations in Brain Function Related to Depression and Aging.

Measures of the brain's automatic electrophysiological responses to sounds represent a potential tool for identifying age- and depression-related neural markers. However, these markers have rarely been studied related to aging and depression within one study. Here, we investigated auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) in the brain that may show different alterations related to aging and depression.

Event-related potentials to task-irrelevant sad faces as a state marker of depression.

Negative bias in face processing has been demonstrated in depression, but there are no longitudinal investigations of negative bias in symptom reduction. We recorded event-related potentials (P1 and N170) to task-irrelevant facial expressions in depressed participants who were later provided with a psychological intervention and in never depressed control participants. Follow-up measurements were conducted for the depressed group two and 39 months later.

Deviance detection in sound frequency in simple and complex sounds in urethane-anesthetized rats.

Mismatch negativity (MMN), which is an electrophysiological response demonstrated in humans and animals, reflects memory-based deviance detection in a series of sounds. However, only a few studies on rodents have used control conditions that were sufficient in eliminating confounding factors that could also explain differential responses to deviant sounds. Furthermore, it is unclear if change detection occurs similarly for sinusoidal and complex sounds.