Recent enough to matter: Perceived temporal proximity, anxiety, and COVID-19 vaccine intent.

Effects of noradrenergic blockade on emotional working memory and its neural underpinnings: A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial.

Cognitive processes and neurophysiological mechanisms of time processing in Parkinson's disease: A narrative review.

Clinical intuition and its measurement in nursing research: An integrative review.

Childhood material hardship, including insecurity in housing, utilities, food, and medical care, is a critical factor influencing cognitive functioning and mental health outcomes. However, past research on material hardship is limited by cross-sectional data and reliance on conventional behavioral measures of cognitive functioning that suffer from poor reliability and lack of specificity. To address these gaps, this study used a well-validated computational model of cognition to examine individuals' drift rate, which is hypothesized to be driven by the efficiency of evidence accumulation (EEA) for decision-relevant information, a key process that supports higher-order cognitive functioning. Here, we examined how material hardship during childhood was associated with adolescent drift rate, and whether drift rate was linked with attention difficulties. 187 adolescents recruited from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study were included in the analyses. Adolescents exposed to greater material hardship showed lower drift rate, suggesting less effective processing. Growth curve modeling revealed that initial exposure to material hardship, but not changes across childhood, was associated with drift rate in adolescence. Lower drift rate was also associated with concurrent attentional problems and served as a significant indirect pathway linking material hardship to adolescent attention. This is the first longitudinal study that examined the associations among childhood material hardship exposure, adolescent drift rate, and attentional difficulties. Our results suggest that challenges to essential living conditions in childhood may impact cognitive processes underlying goal-directed behavior in adolescents. These findings highlight the application of computational models to reveal specific cognitive processes impacted by adversity. SUMMARY: Existing research on material hardship and cognitive functioning is limited by reliance on cross-sectional task-based performance, resulting in inconsistent findings. We applied the diffusion-decision model to decompose trial-wise performance into underlying cognitive processes, including drift rate, a key evidence accumulation process underlying goal-directed behavior. Greater cumulative childhood material hardship, beyond exposure to other adversity, is associated with lower drift rate, which is linked with greater attentional problems in adolescents. Findings were specific to drift rate, not average response time or accuracy, emphasizing the value of computational methods in capturing cognitive changes associated with material hardship.

Neural dynamics during moral persuasion process: An EEG hyperscanning study.

Visual simulation-a process that allows us to create complex internal models of the world-is essential for the completion of daily tasks, such as our morning commute. We can mentally track our progress along the route and make adjustments on the fly, all internally. Previous work has shown that complex visual simulations are supported by visuomotor regions across humans and nonhuman primates, but relatively little is known of the cognitive processes involved. We hypothesized that neural areas involved in sequential monitoring (i.e., keeping track of the state or step in an ordered series) are selectively active during visual simulation. A monotonic increase (ramping) in lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) activity has been previously shown to be necessary for executing nonmotor sequences. Therefore, to test the hypothesis, we examined LPFC activity in humans and a macaque monkey using fMRI while they performed a visual simulation task, "Planko." We found LPFC ramping across species that was specific to the visual simulation condition. These findings suggest that visual simulation tasks are supported by sequence monitoring regions across species, providing a foundation for understanding this complex and universal cognitive process.

Phytochemical profiling and molecular interactions of Parishins a and C as potent AChE inhibitors from red Gastrodia elata.

This review examines the possible association between orofacial pain and dementia by synthesizing current findings from clinical, observational, and mechanistic studies. Although chronic pain has been increasingly recognized as a factor linked to cognitive decline, the specific role of orofacial pain, including conditions such as temporomandibular disorders, trigeminal neuralgia, burning mouth syndrome, and primary headaches, remains underexplored. Given the distinct neuroanatomy of the trigeminal system and its close connection to emotional and cognitive processing, orofacial pain may involve unique mechanisms relevant to neurodegeneration. Studies suggesting possible links between orofacial pain conditions and cognitive impairment were identified, highlighting mechanisms such as neuroinflammation, locus coeruleus dysfunction, and central sensitization. Modifiable cofactors, including poor oral health and sleep disturbances, which may influence both pain and dementia risk and are particularly relevant in dental and orofacial clinical practice, were also examined. Pain assessment and management strategies for individuals with dementia were reviewed as well, with emphasis on the need for validated tools and interdisciplinary care models that incorporate dental and orofacial pain specialists. Given the heterogeneous and limited nature of existing studies, this review does not make causal claims but instead conceptually maps the current landscape, identifies critical gaps in the literature, and outlines implications for research and practice. Dentists and orofacial pain providers may be uniquely positioned to recognize pain-related risk factors in cognitively vulnerable patients and implement preventive or therapeutic strategies. Future longitudinal studies and mechanistic investigations are needed to clarify the direction and clinical significance of the orofacial pain-dementia relationship.

Gaining insights into elementary school students' experiences of soft skills at school.

Mental disorders represent a major global health problem, with depression being one of the most prevalent and disabling conditions worldwide. Growing evidence suggests that the serotonergic system, particularly the 5-HT2A receptor, plays an important role in modulating mood and cognitive processes, constituting a key pharmacological target for several psychoactive compounds. In this study, we investigated the molecular interaction profile between the 5-HT2A receptor and four pharmacologically relevant ligands, serotonin (5-HT), psilocybin/psilocin (PSILO), lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), and lumateperone (LMTP). Interaction energies were evaluated using the molecular fragmentation with conjugated caps (MFCC) method combined with density functional theory (DFT) calculations. Crystallographic structures were used as initial models, and residue-level interaction energies were calculated to identify the amino acids that contribute most to ligand stabilization at the receptor binding site. The results reveal that the complexes exhibit total interaction energies ranging from -35.38 to -71.98 kcal mol-1 under dielectric conditions representative of the protein environment. Key residues such as Asp155, Phe339, Leu229, and Val366 were identified as the main contributors to ligand stabilization in the studied systems, highlighting their role as structural anchors within the orthosteric binding pocket. Energy decomposition further revealed distinct interaction patterns associated with different regions of the ligand. Therefore, this study provides a detailed energetic characterization of ligand recognition in the 5-HT2A receptor and offers details that may contribute to the rational design of new serotonergic agents with potential for therapeutic applications.

Curiosity, error correction, and confidence in younger and older adults.

Parental acceptance-rejection and brain network connectivity: A naturalistic neuroimaging study.

Executive functioning in young delinquents: A systematic literature review.

Children are adept statistical learners, capable of parsing streams of structured input into meaningful units, but the cognitive processes they engage during learning may differ from those of adults. To date, however, it is unclear how learners of different ages predict upcoming experience when navigating environments with complex structure, as well as how changes in predictive learning mechanisms influence structured knowledge acquisition. To address this question, we tested 106 children, adolescents, and adults, ages 8-22 years, on a predictive learning task, in which they experienced sequences of stimuli with a higher-order temporal structure. After an initial learning phase, participants' explicit knowledge of the relations between stimuli was probed via two additional task measures. We used a recently introduced computational model to characterize participants' response times during learning, and found that all participants relied on simple, recency-based prediction, anticipating that they would encounter stimuli they recently encountered in the past. With increasing age, however, participants demonstrated greater evidence of additionally relying on a more sophisticated learning mechanism, which captured a predictive representation of the conditional relations between stimuli. Though predictive learning changed with age, we found only weak evidence that these changes related to the acquisition of explicit knowledge of the environment. Our results suggest that the learning mechanisms through which people parse continuous streams of experience change with age, influencing their predictions about upcoming events. SUMMARY: Children, adolescents, and adults all learn to segment continuous streams of structured perceptual input, but they may do so via different learning processes. We examined how the learning mechanisms that enable people to predict upcoming experiences change and relate to structured knowledge acquisition across development. Computational modeling revealed that in a graph-learning task, younger participants relied on simple, recency-based prediction, while older participants tracked temporal relations between stimuli. The extent to which participants engaged in this sophisticated form of predictive learning only weakly related to their knowledge of the task's structure.

Happy faces, faster stops: The cognitive benefits of dance in emotional contexts.

Anxiety modulates the relationship between right inferior parietal lobule structure and problematic smartphone use: a test of the I-PACE model.

Rumination is a transdiagnostic process associated with psychopathology. While culture shapes cognitive and emotion processing, cultural influences on rumination remain unclear. Therefore, this systematic review aimed to examine cultural differences in the association between rumination and psychopathology. To address this aim, we conducted a literature search (May 2024), which identified 24 eligible studies. We conducted an exploratory meta-analysis examining whether cultural group moderated the association between rumination and psychopathology. First, we found cultural differences in the association between rumination and psychopathology under certain conditions. Second, we identified three culture-specific mechanisms that may shape the relationships between rumination and psychopathology: (1) social support was less eroded by rumination in Japanese versus German participants and correlated with weaker rumination-wellbeing associations; (2) self-doubt attributions mediated the association between rumination and depression symptoms in European Americans but not Asians; and (3) happiness levels moderated the relationship between rumination and depression symptoms in European Americans but not Asian Americans. Third, given the limited studies available, meta-analyses could only be conducted comparing Western and Asian samples for depression symptoms. This exploratory analysis highlighted cultural group did not significantly moderate the relationship between rumination and depression. Finally, the review highlighted the scarcity of sufficient studies to draw definitive conclusions about the role of culture in rumination and psychopathology and the need for research focusing on diverse cultural groups, clinical samples and disorder-specific measures of rumination. Advancing this research is crucial for informing the integration of culture into theories of rumination and enhancing cultural tailoring of interventions.

Beyond anxiety reduction: Psychological transformation and systemic contradictions in generative-AI-mediated language learning - A cultural-historical activity theory perspective.

Asthma's impact on brain function: an investigation of changes in functional connectivity and network topology.