Levels Of Information Processing Research Articles

Processing of Emotional Facial Expressions (EFE) in Paediatric Anxiety: Are Child Faces More Noteworthy than Adult Faces?

Anxiety is characterized by an increased attention toward threatening information. Anxious adults displayed such attentional biases in tasks involving both implicit and explicit evaluation of Emotional Facial Expressions (EFE). This study investigated whether anxiety can disturb these two levels of information processing in children processing emotional faces. Second, we also intended to examine whether anxious children exhibit comparable responses to adult and child EFE, as children are particularly confronted to peers’ faces in their daily life. To this aims, a sample of children with high levels of anxiety on SCARED and STAI-C scales were compared to healthy children ranging in age from 6 to 9 years. They performed a forcedchoice paradigm, consisting in judging the age (adult/child), the gender (male/ female) and the emotion (anger/happiness) of faces presented one by one on a screen. For each condition, correct answers rates (CA) and Reaction Time (RT) were examined for anxious and non-anxious groups. Results showed that children performed generally more accurately for judging emotion as compared to age or gender. However, this effect was moderated by the face’s categories, as all children answered with higher accuracy to adult faces in the gender condition, and to children faces in the age condition, meaning they identify more accurately their peers but the sexual characters are more distinguishable on adult faces. All participants were more efficient to identify anger than happiness, but healthy children answered faster to adult angry faces in all conditions, while anxious children did not show this effect and processed more accurately anger on children faces as compared to adult ones. These results suggest that anxious children paid more attention to their peers’ disapproval, while non-anxious children focused rather on adults’ disapprobation. Further research might examine the role of the social standing and need of social approval in paediatric anxiety.

Resilience at Information Processing Level in Older Adults: Maintained Attention for Happy Faces when Positive Mood is Low.

Even though ageing is associated with declining cognitive capabilities, research has demonstrated an age-related improvement in affective well-being. This improvement can be related to increased resilience, developing as changes in emotion regulation at information-processing level. During negative mood, emotion regulation becomes a priority as demonstrated by an increased preference for positive over negative information in older adults. However, the effect of a positive mood on older adult's attentional preferences has not been established yet. To investigate this, 37 older adults were randomly assigned to a relaxation or a control condition (music). Mood state was assessed before and after the manipulation. Attentional bias was measured by an exogenous cueing task, in which the location of the target was correctly or incorrectly cued by happy, sad or neutral facial pictures. Both groups showed a decrease in negative mood (p < .001, 95% CI [2.73, 5.97], d = .82) without changes in positive mood. The relaxation group showed a significantly bigger increase in feeling relaxed (p = .017, η2 p = .15). No significant group differences were found for attentional bias. However, over the whole group, less positive mood after the manipulation was associated with more maintained attention for positive information (r = -.49, p < .01). These results indicate that older adults deploy emotion regulation strategies in attention during low positive mood. Flexible attentional processing of emotional information might serve as a resilience factor to maintain well-being during later stages of life.

Alterations in visual cortical activation and connectivity with prefrontal cortex during working memory updating in major depressive disorder.

The present study examined the impacts of major depressive disorder (MDD) on visual and prefrontal cortical activity as well as their connectivity during visual working memory updating and related them to the core clinical features of the disorder. Impairment in working memory updating is typically associated with the retention of irrelevant negative information which can lead to persistent depressive mood and abnormal affect. However, performance deficits have been observed in MDD on tasks involving little or no demand on emotion processing, suggesting dysfunctions may also occur at the more basic level of information processing. Yet, it is unclear how various regions in the visual working memory circuit contribute to behavioral changes in MDD. We acquired functional magnetic resonance imaging data from 18 unmedicated participants with MDD and 21 age-matched healthy controls (CTL) while they performed a visual delayed recognition task with neutral faces and scenes as task stimuli. Selective working memory updating was manipulated by inserting a cue in the delay period to indicate which one or both of the two memorized stimuli (a face and a scene) would remain relevant for the recognition test. Our results revealed several key findings. Relative to the CTL group, the MDD group showed weaker postcue activations in visual association areas during selective maintenance of face and scene working memory. Across the MDD subjects, greater rumination and depressive symptoms were associated with more persistent activation and connectivity related to no-longer-relevant task information. Classification of postcue spatial activation patterns of the scene-related areas was also less consistent in the MDD subjects compared to the healthy controls. Such abnormalities appeared to result from a lack of updating effects in postcue functional connectivity between prefrontal and scene-related areas in the MDD group. In sum, disrupted working memory updating in MDD was revealed by alterations in activity patterns of the visual association areas, their connectivity with the prefrontal cortex, and their relationship with core clinical characteristics. These results highlight the role of information updating deficits in the cognitive control and symptomatology of depression.

The development of ideas about the organization of the speech system

This work represents an insight into a problem of studying one of the higher mental functions of humans - speech, its primary role in the development of man as a biosocial being. Various concepts of speech and the problem of the dominance of cerebral hemispheres in language function are analyzed. It touched upon the ontogenesis of hemispheric asymmetry. The problem of 'codominance' of right and left hemispheres depending on the nature of the task solving by the subject and the functional level of information processing is discussed. The authors highlight that the problem has an interdisciplinary nature, it is marked at the junction of neurophysiology, neuropsychology, neurology and defectology.

Spontaneous eyeblinks during breaking continuous flash suppression are associated with increased detection times.

An eyeblink has a clear effect on low-level information processing because it temporarily occludes all visual information. Recent evidence suggests that eyeblinks can also modulate higher level processes (e.g., attentional resources), and vice versa. Despite these putative effects on different levels of information processing, eyeblinks are typically neglected in vision and in consciousness research. The main aim of this study was to investigate the timing and the effect of eyeblinks in an increasingly popular paradigm in consciousness research, namely breaking continuous flash suppression (b-CFS). Results show that participants generally refrain from blinking during a trial, that is, when they need to detect a suppressed stimulus. However, when they do blink during a trial, we observed a sharp increase in suppression time. This suggests that one needs to control for blinking when comparing detection times between conditions that could elicit phasic changes in blinking.

Autistic traits in the general population do not correlate with a preference for associative information

BackgroundAssociations and regularities in our environment can foster expectations and thereby help create a perceptually predictable world (e.g., a knife next to a plate predicts with high certainty a fork on the other side). Based on several observations, it has been suggested that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have an above average tendency to prefer well-organized information or structured environments. Surprisingly, however, this tendency has not yet been tested under controlled experimental conditions. MethodA recent study suggested that neurotypical adults prefer associative information, regardless of their semantic content. Therefore, in this study, we examined the relation of this preference bias to the scores of 123 neurotypical adults on questionnaires that measure autistic traits, known to co-vary with typical autism spectrum characteristics. Participants were presented with different configurations of meaningless abstract shapes. Some shapes were always presented in the exact same fixed configuration, and other shapes were always presented in different random configurations. In an unannounced subsequent evaluation task, participants were required to indicate which shapes they preferred. ResultsWe replicate the observation that people exhibit a general preference for shapes that were presented in fixed configurations. However, there were no correlations between autistic traits and this general preference. ConclusionsOur findings suggest the preference for associative information in ASD might be less general than first thought, or restricted to more complex (social) situations or other levels of information processing. We outline specific guidelines for future systematic investigations into the hypothesized increased preference for associative information in ASD.

White-Matter Structural Connectivity Underlying Human Laughter-Related Traits Processing.

Most research into the neural mechanisms of humor has not explicitly focused on the association between emotion and humor on the brain white matter networks mediating this connection. However, this connection is especially salient in gelotophobia (the fear of being laughed at), which is regarded as the presentation of humorlessness, and two related traits, gelotophilia (the enjoyment of being laughed at) and katagelasticism (the enjoyment of laughing at others). Here, we explored whether the topological properties of white matter networks can account for the individual differences in the laughter-related traits of 31 healthy adults. We observed a significant negative correlation between gelotophobia scores and the clustering coefficient, local efficiency and global efficiency, but a positive association between gelotophobia scores and path length in the brain's white matter network. Moreover, the current study revealed that with increasing individual fear of being laughed at, the linking efficiencies in superior frontal gyrus, anterior cingulate cortex, parahippocampal gyrus, and middle temporal gyrus decreased. However, there were no significant correlations between either gelotophilia or katagelasticism scores or the topological properties of the brain white matter network. These findings suggest that the fear of being laughed at is directly related to the level of local and global information processing of the brain network, which might provide new insights into the neural mechanisms of the humor information processing.

Models of neuromodulation for computational psychiatry.

Psychiatry faces fundamental challenges: based on a syndrome-based nosology, it presently lacks clinical tests to infer on disease processes that cause symptoms of individual patients and must resort to trial-and-error treatment strategies. These challenges have fueled the recent emergence of a novel field-computational psychiatry-that strives for mathematical models of disease processes at physiological and computational (information processing) levels. This review is motivated by one particular goal of computational psychiatry: the development of 'computational assays' that can be applied to behavioral or neuroimaging data from individual patients and support differential diagnosis and guiding patient-specific treatment. Because the majority of available pharmacotherapeutic approaches in psychiatry target neuromodulatory transmitters, models that infer (patho)physiological and (patho)computational actions of different neuromodulatory transmitters are of central interest for computational psychiatry. This article reviews the (many) outstanding questions on the computational roles of neuromodulators (dopamine, acetylcholine, serotonin, and noradrenaline), outlines available evidence, and discusses promises and pitfalls in translating these findings to clinical applications. WIREs Cogn Sci 2017, 8:e1420. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1420 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

The Multilevel Modality-Switch Effect: What Happens When We See the Bees Buzzing and Hear the Diamonds Glistening.

Previous studies demonstrated that the sequential verification of different sensory modality properties for concepts (e.g., BLENDER-loud; BANANA-yellow) brings about a processing cost, known as the modality-switch effect. We report an experiment designed to assess the influence of the mode of presentation (i.e., visual, aural) of stimuli on the modality-switch effect in a property verification and lexical decision priming paradigm. Participants were required to perform a property verification or a lexical decision task on a target sentence (e.g., "a BEE buzzes", "a DIAMOND glistens") presented either visually or aurally after having been presented with a prime sentence (e.g., "the LIGHT is flickering", "the SOUND is echoing") that could either share both, one or none of the target's mode of presentation and content modality. Results show that the mode of presentation of stimuli affects the conceptual modality-switch effect. Furthermore, the depth of processing required by the task modulates the complex interplay of perceptual and semantic information. We conclude that the MSE is a task-related, multilevel effect which can occur on two different levels of information processing (i.e., perceptual and semantic).

Just Swap Out of Negative Vibes? Rumination and Inhibition Deficits in Major Depressive Disorder: Data from Event-Related Potentials Studies.

Major depression is a serious disorder of impaired emotion regulation. Emotion hyperactivity leads to excessive negative ruminations that daily hijack the patient’s mental life, impacting their mood. Evidence from past researches suggest that depressive patients present several cognitive impairments in attention and working memory, leading to a more acute selective attention for negative stimuli and a greater accessibility of negative memories. Recently, is has been proposed that impaired inhibitory functioning with regard to emotional information processing might be one of the mechanisms of ruminations linking memory, attention and depression. It seems that inhibition deficit is present at both the input level (i.e., the ability to reduce the interference from emotional distracters) and the higher level (i.e., the ability to direct the attention away from emotional material that has already been processed) of emotional information processing. Event-related potentials (ERP) have widely been used to study inhibition in adults suffering from various psychopathological states. In particular, depressive disorder has been linked to ERPs modulations, at early as well as at latter stages of the information-processing stream, when processing affective material. For instance, deficits in inhibiting negative information have been indexed by changes in the parameters (amplitudes and latencies) of early P2, P1 and N1 components while other ERP studies have shown an ability to differentiate depressed patients from normal controls based upon response inhibition difficulties in go-nogo tasks, indexed by later NoGo P3 differences. In this review, we will focus on results of ERP studies investigating inhibition and its interaction with emotional related cue processing in depressive populations. Implications for future research and theoretical perspectives will be discussed within the framework of current models of depressive disorder, based upon the hypothesis that negative ruminations are at the center of depression processes.

On the Hierarchical Structure of the Original Posner Task

In 1967, a task for analysis of the depth of processing in simple classification was published (Posner & Mitchell, 1967, p. 392). This task has become known as the Posner task for long-term memory retrieval of information. In the original experiment, pairs of items (letters, nonsense forms, digits) were presented to the participants who were supposed to respond as fast as possible by indicating either or different. In completing the trials of this task the participants had to perform according to different rules that constituted three experimental conditions. (1) Under the instruction they had to check whether the two items presented on a screen showed physical identity (e.g., A A). (2) The instruction required the participants to compare the two items with respect to their semantic meaning. More precisely, either the same name (e.g., a A) or different names (e.g., a B) applied to both items. (3) Finally, there was the rule instruction that utilized the possibility to classify letters as vowels or consonants, i.e., the participants had to decide whether both items belonged to the same group. The depth-of-processing idea guiding Posner and Mitchell's work suggested that there are different levels of information processing. While the first level demanded mere processing of feature information in the sense of the instruction, the second level necessitated access to stored information, as is demanded by the instruction. Finally, the rule instruction additionally required the recovery of rules and their application.To a considerable extent, Posner and Mitchell's (1967) depth-of-processing idea is in line with another, even more influential notion in cognitive research, namely Craik and Lockhard's levels-of-processing model that was first published in 1972. According to this model, the accessibility of information stored in memory is considered a function of the depth of mental processing when storing information in memory. 'Deep' mental processing produces memory traces that are more elaborated, longer lasting, and stronger than those formed by 'shallow' mental processing. Furthermore, deep and shallow mental processing are proposed to represent two anchor points of a continuum. Hence, deep processing involves the identification and elaboration of semantic contents, linking contents and learnt items, and creating links for embedding new information in an already available web of information. In contrast, shallow processing is restricted to establishing links between one or a few obvious and easily accessible features of a learnt item and corresponding conceptual information in the web. As a consequence, information stored by deep mental processing can be accessed and retrieved in many ways, whereas only one or very few routes to access information exist for information stored by shallow processing. Finally, there are consequences with regard to the long-term availability of learnt items stored in long-term memory: the more links lead to a learnt item, the smaller the probability of losing access to this item in the long run.In the years following the publication of the Posner task (Posner, Boies, Eichelmann, & Taylor, 1969; Posner & Mitchell, 1967), the research interest concentrated on the physical and name identity conditions whereas the rule-identity condition was neglected. It was Hunt (1978) who especially highlighted the importance of the qualitative difference between the mental processes underlying performance elicited by the physical- and name-identity instructions. According to Hunt, the physical-identity instruction stimulates processes that are mechanistic and occur unconsciously. These processes are to be seen as a kind of background activity that occurs in combination with other kinds of cognitive processes. In contrast, the name-identity instruction is assumed to be associated with memory processes that conduct a search in the web of information also referred to as knowledge base or long-term memory. …

Online masquerade detection resistant to mimicry

Masquerade attackers are internal intruders acting through impersonating legitimate users of the victim system. Most of the proposals for their detection suggested recognition methods based on the comparison of use models of the protected environment. However recent studies have shown their vulnerability against adversarial attacks based on imitating the behavior of legitimate users. In order to contribute to their identification, this article introduces a novel detection method robust against evasion strategies based on mimicry. The proposal described two levels of information processing: analysis and verification. At the analysis stage, local alignment algorithms are implemented. In this way it is possible to score the similarity between action sequences performed by users, bearing in mind their regions of greatest resemblance. On the other hand, a novel validation scheme based on the statistical non-parametric U-test is implemented. Through this it is possible to refine the labeling of sequences to avoid making hasty decisions when their nature is not sufficiently clear. In order to strengthen their effectiveness against mimicry attacks, the analysis of the monitored sequences is performed in concurrency. This involves partitioning long sequences with two purposes: making subsequences of small intrusions more visible and analyzing new sequences when suspicious situations occur, such as the execution of never before seen commands or the discovery of potentially harmful activities. The proposal has been evaluated from the functional standard SEA and mimicry attacks. Promising experimental results have been shown, demonstrating great precision against conventional masqueraders (TPR=98.3%, FPR=0.77%) and a success rate of 80.2% when identifying mimicry attacks, hence outperforming the best contributions of bibliography.

Variance After-Effects Distort Risk Perception in Humans

In many contexts, decision-making requires an accurate representation of outcome variance-otherwise known as "risk" in economics. Conventional economic theory assumes this representation to be perfect, thereby focusing on risk preferences rather than risk perception per se [1-3] (but see [4]). However, humans often misrepresent their physical environment. Perhaps the most striking of such misrepresentations are the many well-known sensory after-effects, which most commonly involve visual properties, such as color, contrast, size, and motion. For example, viewing downward motion of a waterfall induces the anomalous biased experience of upward motion during subsequent viewing of static rocks to the side [5]. Given that after-effects are pervasive, occurring across a wide range of time horizons [6] and stimulus dimensions (including properties such as face perception [7, 8], gender [9], and numerosity [10]), and that some evidence exists that neurons show adaptation to variance in the sole visual feature of motion [11], we were interested in assessing whether after-effects distort variance perception in humans. We found that perceived variance is decreased after prolonged exposure to high variance and increased after exposure to low variance within a number of different visual representations of variance. We demonstrate these after-effects occur across very different visual representations of variance, suggesting that these effects are not sensory, but operate at a high (cognitive) level of information processing. These results suggest, therefore, that variance constitutes an independent cognitive property and that prolonged exposure to extreme variance distorts risk perception-a fundamental challenge for economic theory and practice.

Social Information Processing and Reactive and Proactive Aggression among Children with ADHD

&lt;p&gt;This study examined the social information processing qualities among children with reactive and proactive aggression among children with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD). It enrolled a total of 112 Saudi school children (62 boys, 50 girls; mean age = 9.26 years, SD = 1.98) of which 51 were diagnosed with ADHD and 61 typically developing peers. Data on children’s social informational processing and type of aggression displayed were gathered and analyzed for group differences by diagnosis and gender within diagnosis. Findings suggest gaps in social information processing and elevated aggression levels among children with ADHD compared to typical others. Male children with ADHD to present mostly with proactive aggression and self-serving information processing. Female ADHD were characterized by reactive aggression and selective information processing. Implicit socialization processes might explain the differences in social information processing and type of aggression among male and female students with Arabic culture background.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

Structural realist account of the self

In this paper, inspired by the late twentieth century developments in philosophy of science (ontic structural realism), I propose an ontological scheme to accommodate the scientifically-informed anti-substantivalist views of the self. I call the position structural realist theory of the self (SRS for short). More specifically, I argue that SRS provides a middle ground for bringing a metaphysical reconciliation between the two recurring, and apparently competing forms of such anti-substantivalist views, i.e., eliminativism and pluralism. The notion of the structural self, as the underpinning pattern that is the subject of the ontological commitments in SRS, is not as cumbersome as the orthodox substantivalist notion, and yet accounts for the relation of the different aspects and elements of the self by integrating them structurally into a central unifying pattern of selfhood. I use the experimental studies of Northoff et al. (Neuroimage 31:440–457, 2006) about the processing of the self-related stimuli in the cortical midline structure of the brain, to argue that the underlying pattern of the selfhood could be sought at the level of information processing (in the sense of generic computation). I also add a programmatic suggestion about how the different situated, experiential and extended aspects of the selfhood could be structurally incorporated into this underlying pattern.

Development of a Field-Deployable Psychomotor Vigilance Test to Monitor Helicopter Pilot Performance.

Flying a helicopter is a complex psychomotor skill. Fatigue is a serious threat to operational safety, particularly for sustained helicopter operations involving high levels of cognitive information processing and sustained time on task. As part of ongoing research into this issue, the object of this study was to develop a field-deployable helicopter-specific psychomotor vigilance test (PVT) for the purpose of daily performance monitoring of pilots. The PVT consists of a laptop computer, a hand-operated joystick, and a set of rudder pedals. Screen-based compensatory tracking task software includes a tracking ball (operated by the joystick) which moves randomly in all directions, and a second tracking ball which moves horizontally (operated by the rudder pedals). The 5-min test requires the pilot to keep both tracking balls centered. This helicopter-specific PVT's portability and integrated data acquisition and storage system enables daily field monitoring of the performance of individual helicopter pilots. The inclusion of a simultaneous foot-operated tracking task ensures divided attention for helicopter pilots as the movement of both tracking balls requires simultaneous inputs. This PVT is quick, economical, easy to use, and specific to the operational flying task. It can be used for performance monitoring purposes, and as a general research tool for investigating the psychomotor demands of helicopter operations. While reliability and validity testing is warranted, data acquired from this test could help further our understanding of the effect of various factors (such as fatigue) on helicopter pilot performance, with the potential of contributing to helicopter operational safety.

Models of visual categorization

Visual categorization refers to our ability to organize objects and visual scenes into discrete categories. It is an essential skill as it allows us to distinguish friend from foe or edible versus poisonous food. Understanding how the visual system categorizes objects and scenes is a challenge because it requires bridging the gap between different levels of understanding-from the level of neural circuits and neural networks to the level of information processing and, ultimately, behavior. Computational models have become powerful tools for integrating knowledge across these levels of analysis. We review recent progress in our understanding of the computational mechanisms underlying visual categorization and discuss some of the remaining challenges.

ID 13 – Motor cortex connectivity in cervical dystonia: An fMRI study

Objective To better understand motor cortex position in dystonia pathophysiology by its connectivity in normal population and cervical dystonia patients. Methods Functional magnetic resonance imaging has been performed in 25 healthy controls and 25 patients (all right-handed) in a motor timing task requiring simple movement of right hand – key press – to intercept a moving target. Left side premotor cortex was used as the seed for the psychophysiologic interaction model, based on the area showing decreased activity in dystonia patients compared to the healthy controls. Results Decreased connectivity to bilateral parietal cortex (mainly area 7) was found in cervical dystonia patients in comparison to the healthy controls. This difference is suggestive of lower associative information exchange in the disease, possibly leading to the lower behavioral performance in the task. Conclusions Our results point to possible impairment of communication between premotor cortex and parietal associative areas in cervical dystonia patients. This notion is well in accord with the newly emerging dystonia definition as a multiple node network pathology involving basal ganglia, cerebellum and specific cortical areas. Key message Our findings support the role of a complex pathways pathway disruption, even of multiple cortical information processing levels, in dystonia pathophysiology.

The Architecture of Mind as a Network of Networks of Natural Computational Processes

In discussions regarding models of cognition, the very mention of “computationalism” often incites reactions against the insufficiency of the Turing machine model, its abstractness, determinism, the lack of naturalist foundations, triviality and the absence of clarity. None of those objections, however, concerns models based on natural computation or computing nature, where the model of computation is broader than symbol manipulation or conventional models of computation. Computing nature consists of physical structures that form layered computational architecture, with computation processes ranging from quantum to chemical, biological/cognitive and social-level computation. It is argued that, on the lower levels of information processing in the brain, finite automata or Turing machines may still be adequate models, while, on the higher levels of whole-brain information processing, natural computing models are necessary. A layered computational architecture of the mind based on the intrinsic computing of physical systems avoids objections against early versions of computationalism in the form of abstract symbols manipulation.

Work content influences on cognitive task load, emotional state and performance during a simulated 520-days' Mars mission

In high-risk domains such as human space flight, cognitive performances can be negatively affected by emotional responses to events and conditions in their working environment (e.g., isolation and health incidents). The COgnitive Performance and Error (COPE) model distinguishes effects of work content on cognitive task load and emotional state, and their effect on the professional's performance. This paper examines the relationships between these variables for a simulated Mars-mission. Six volunteers (well-educated and -motivated men) were isolated for 520 days in a simulated spacecraft in which they had to execute a (virtual) mission to Mars. As part of this mission, every other week, several computer tasks were performed. These tasks consisted of a negotiation game, a chat-based learning activity and an entertainment game. Before and after these tasks, and after post-task questionnaires, the participants rated their emotional state consisting of arousal, valence and dominance, and their cognitive task load consisting of level of information processing, time occupied and task-set switches. Results revealed significant differences between cognitive task load and emotional state levels when work content varied. Significant regression models were also found that could explain variation in task performance. These findings contribute to the validation of the COPE model and suggest that differences in appraisals for tasks may bring about different emotional states and task performances.