Neuroscience Methods Research Articles

Impact of the seductive allure effect and trappings of science on perceptions of paranormal and pseudoscientific research

ABSTRACT Despite concerns proponents of the paranormal misuse scientific concepts to justify their claims, few studies have assessed the influence of these misuses. Here we examined the role of the “seductive allure effect,” which often shows neuroscience-related content to exert greater influence than content from other scientific fields, by assessing whether it would impact how people respond to brief summaries of paranormal research. We also examined whether any trappings of science would elicit a similar effect. We found content depicting neuroscientific methods elicited greater perceptions of paranormal research as scientific and greater belief compared to content depicting traditional spiritualist practices. Summaries of psychological or pseudoscientific research procedures with the trappings of science, however, did not demonstrate any significant influence on paranormal belief or perceptions of paranormal research. These results show the seductive allure effect can impact how paranormal research is perceived and can influence belief.

Neuromarketing Insights Enhanced by Artificial Intelligence

The intersection of neuromarketing and artificial intelligence is examined in this research, along with the significant implications for transforming marketing tactics. By using neuroscience methods to identify subconscious reactions to marketing stimuli, neuromarketing sheds light on consumer behaviour. The integration of AI enhances neuromarketing research by effectively analysing neurodata and detecting significant patterns. When combined, they allow for marketing initiatives that are emotionally compelling, targeted, and personalised. However, ethical issues pertaining to bias in AI algorithms, customer privacy, and societal ramifications need to be taken into account. Businesses must adopt this multidisciplinary strategy if they want to stay ahead in the increasingly competitive market. This study advocates for responsible and ethical use in marketing practices while highlighting the transformational potential of utilising AI technologies with neuroscience findings.

Inaugural Review Prize 2023: The exercise hyperpnoea dilemma: A 21st-century perspective.

During mild or moderate exercise, alveolar ventilation increases in direct proportion to metabolic rate, regulating arterial CO2 pressure near resting levels. Mechanisms giving rise to the hyperpnoea of exercise are unsettled despite over a century of investigation. In the past three decades, neuroscience has advanced tremendously, raising optimism that the 'exercise hyperpnoea dilemma' can finally be solved. In this review, new perspectives are offered in the hope of stimulating original ideas based on modern neuroscience methods and current understanding. We first describe the ventilatory control system and the challenge exercise places upon blood-gas regulation. We highlight relevant system properties, including feedforward, feedback and adaptive (i.e., plasticity) control of breathing. We then elaborate a seldom explored hypothesis that the exercise ventilatory response continuously adapts (learns and relearns) throughout life and ponder if the memory 'engram' encoding the feedforward exercise ventilatory stimulus could reside within the cerebellum. Our hypotheses are based on accumulating evidence supporting the cerebellum's role in motor learning and the numerous direct and indirect projections from deep cerebellar nuclei to brainstem respiratory neurons. We propose that cerebellar learning may be obligatory for the accurate and adjustable exercise hyperpnoea capable of tracking changes in life conditions/experiences, and that learning arises from specific cerebellar microcircuits that can be interrogated using powerful techniques such as optogenetics and chemogenetics. Although this review is speculative, we consider it essential to reframe our perspective if we are to solve the till-now intractable exercise hyperpnoea dilemma.

The Influence of Design and Arousal on Impulse Purchase in Mobile Travel Applications

Since consumers’ impulse buying intentions can be easily completed via mobile platforms, impulse buying of travel products has become more common. Hence, this study aimed to understand how mobile tourism applications affect travelers’ impulse purchase behaviors. Utilizing the S-O-R framework and distinguishing environmental stimuli and consumer behaviors, this study proposed a conceptual model and hypotheses to investigate the relationship between usability, information effectiveness, emotional arousal, and impulsive purchase intentions in the context of mobile applications. Based on 63 responses, the experiment applied neuroscience methods and found that information effectiveness positively affected impulsive purchase intentions, while usability and emotional arousal did not have significant effects. Hence, results offer practical insights into the development of travel applications and extend the S-O-R framework with the inclusion of emotional arousal.

Rhesus infant nervous temperament predicts peri-adolescent central amygdala metabolism & behavioral inhibition measured by a machine-learning approach.

Anxiety disorders affect millions of people worldwide and impair health, happiness, and productivity on a massive scale. Developmental research points to a connection between early-life behavioral inhibition and the eventual development of these disorders. Our group has previously shown that measures of behavioral inhibition in young rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) predict anxiety-like behavior later in life. In recent years, clinical and basic researchers have implicated the central extended amygdala (EAc)-a neuroanatomical concept that includes the central nucleus of the amygdala (Ce) and the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BST)-as a key neural substrate for the expression of anxious and inhibited behavior. An improved understanding of how early-life behavioral inhibition relates to an increased lifetime risk of anxiety disorders-and how this relationship is mediated by alterations in the EAc-could lead to improved treatments and preventive strategies. In this study, we explored the relationships between infant behavioral inhibition and peri-adolescent defensive behavior and brain metabolism in 18 female rhesus monkeys. We coupled a mildly threatening behavioral assay with concurrent multimodal neuroimaging, and related those findings to various measures of infant temperament. To score the behavioral assay, we developed and validated UC-Freeze, a semi-automated machine-learning (ML) tool that uses unsupervised clustering to quantify freezing. Consistent with previous work, we found that heightened Ce metabolism predicted elevated defensive behavior (i.e., more freezing) in the presence of an unfamiliar human intruder. Although we found no link between infant-inhibited temperament and peri-adolescent EAc metabolism or defensive behavior, we did identify infant nervous temperament as a significant predictor of peri-adolescent defensive behavior. Our findings suggest a connection between infant nervous temperament and the eventual development of anxiety and depressive disorders. Moreover, our approach highlights the potential for ML tools to augment existing behavioral neuroscience methods.

The impact of out-of-home care on brain development: a brief review of the neuroscientific evidence informing our understanding of children's attachment outcomes.

Researchers interested in the effects of early experiences of caregiving adversity have employed neuroscientific methods to illuminate whether and how such environmental input impacts on brain development, and whether and how such impacts underpin poor socioemotional outcomes in this population. Evidence is compelling in documenting negative effects on the individual's neurodevelopment following exposure to adverse or disadvantaged environments such as institutionalization or maltreatment. Neuroimaging research focused specifically on attachment-relevant processing of socioemotional stimuli and attachment outcomes among children looked-after is scarcer, but largely consistent. This review begins by summarizing the key general brain structural and functional alterations associated with caregiving deprivation. Then, neuroscientific evidence that is more directly relevant for understanding these children's attachment outcomes, both by employing social stimuli and by correlating children's neural markers with their attachment profiles, is reviewed. Brief interpretations of findings are suggested, and key limitations and gaps in the literature identified.

Brain Morphometry is an Advanced Method of Neuroimaging Mapping in Children

The use of magnetic resonance imaging in morphometry, as quantitative assessment of brain parameters (thickness, surface area, volume), allows to detect changes in many neuropsichiatric conditions that were previously considered intact. This article provides data on neuroimaging brain morphometry and effective use of this method in neurosciences.

The convergence of naturalistic paradigms and cognitive neuroscience methods to investigate memory and its development

Studies that involve lab-based stimuli (e.g., words, pictures) are fundamental in the memory literature. At the same time, there is growing acknowledgment that memory processes assessed in the lab may not be analogous to how memory operates in the real world. Naturalistic paradigms can bridge this gap and over the decades a growing proportion of memory research has involved more naturalistic events. However, there is significant variation in the types of naturalistic studies used to study memory and its development, each with various advantages and limitations. Further, there are notable gaps in how often different types of naturalistic approaches have been combined with cognitive neuroscience methods (e.g., fMRI, EEG) to elucidate the neural processes and substrates involved in memory encoding and retrieval in the real world. Here we summarize and discuss what we identify as progressively more naturalistic methodologies used in the memory literature (movie, virtual reality, staged-events inside and outside of the lab, photo-taking, and naturally occurring event studies). Our goal is to describe each approach’s benefits (e.g., naturalistic quality, feasibility), limitations (e.g., viability of neuroimaging method for event encoding versus event retrieval), and discuss possible future directions with each approach. We focus on child studies, when available, but also highlight past adult studies. Although there is a growing body of child memory research, naturalistic approaches combined with cognitive neuroscience methodologies in this domain remain sparse. Overall, this viewpoint article reviews how we can study memory through the lens of developmental cognitive neuroscience, while utilizing naturalistic and real-world events.

Research on the Aesthetic Value of Piano Playing Art Based on Multiple Intelligences Theory

Abstract In this study, a new exploration of a classic problem in the field of music aesthetics was carried out through the research methods of cognitive neuroscience and the brain mechanism of the formation of artistic aesthetic value in piano performance based on the theory of multiple intelligences was analyzed. In terms of EEG signal preprocessing, an EEG signal preprocessing method based on baseline average was proposed. In terms of EEG feature extraction, a decision-level feature fusion method is proposed, which uses SVM as the base classifier to extract time-domain, frequency-domain and nonlinear features, respectively, train the base classifier, and integrate the output of multiple basic classifiers through decision fusion. A feature fusion method based on music and ERP was also proposed to predict the response of subjects after listening to a piano performance. Based on DS evidence theory, emotion recognition and classification were carried out using EEG and music features from the perspective of decision-making level fusion. The results showed that piano performance mainly activated the left inferior frontal gyrus, right precentral gyrus, left auxiliary motor area, right superior parietal gyrus, cerebellar Crus1 area, right lingual gyrus and left inferior occipital gyrus, with peak t values of 4.67, 4.8, 5.76, 5.16, 7.02, 7.12 and 8.3, respectively. The activation of auxiliary motor areas, cerebellum, inferior frontal gyrus and other areas indicates that the artistic beauty felt by listening to piano performance can enhance people’s creativity, and the activation of the right superior occipital gyrus can enhance people’s imagination.

Application of neuroscience methods to the comparison of the link between brain and endocranium in Ursidae

Application of neuroscience methods to the comparison of the link between brain and endocranium in Ursidae

Chronological Review on the Implementation of EEG in the Public Realm Assessment

From 1900 to the present, numerous studies have been conducted in the public realm to assess its diverse characteristics. As time has progressed advancements in technology have led to the development of neuroscientific methods which can assess spatial characteristics, human perception, decision-making, and human spatial cognition. Electroencephalogram (EEG), Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), Crowd Sensing, Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Agent-based model (ABM) are a few prominent examples and some of these methods have proven to be more efficient in producing precise, relevant and bigger data. This paper focuses on and highlights the use of Electroencephalogram (EEG) in the public realm. It is a pragmatic tool that can be used for the subconscious assessment of users which is an advantage over traditional methodologies. This paper reviews and brings together various studies held in the public realm to learn how EEG can be implemented for evaluation and to find a possible breakthrough for future research.

Neuromarketing: Evaluating Consumer Emotions and Preferences to Improve Business Marketing Management

The invention of neuroscience has benefited medical practitioners and businesses in improving their management and leadership. Neuromarketing, a field that combines neuroscience and marketing, helps businesses understand consumer behaviour and how they respond to advertising stimuli. This study aims to investigate the consumer purchase intention and preferences to improve the marketing management of the brand, based on neuroscientific tools such as emotional arousal using Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) sensors, eye-tracking, and emotion analysis through facial expressions classification. The stimuli for the experiment are two advertisement videos from the Macau tea brand “Guanding Teahouse” followed by a survey. The experiment was conducted on 40 participants. 76.2% of participants that chose the same product in the first survey responded with the same choice of products in the second survey. The GSR peaks in video ad 1 measured a total of 60. On the other hand, video ad 2 counted a total of 55 GSR peaks. The emotions in ad1 and ad2 have similar responses, with an attention percentage of 76%. The results showed that ad1 has a higher engagement time of 11.1% and ad2 has 9.6%, but only 19 of the respondent’s conducted engagement in video ad1, and 31 showed engagement in video ad2. The results demonstrated that although ad 1 has higher engagement rates, the respondents are more attracted to video ad 2. Therefore, ad2 has better marketing power than ad 1. Overall, this study bridges the gap of no previous research on measuring tea brand advertisements with the neuroscientific method. The results provide valuable insights for marketers to develop better advertisements and marketing campaigns and understand consumer preferences by personalising and targeting advertisements based on consumers' emotional responses and behaviour of consumers' purchase intentions. Future research could explore advertisements targeting different demographics.

About the Need for a More Adequate Way to Get an Understanding of the Experiencing of Aesthetic Items.

We live in times when neuroscientific methods have become standard methods that many researchers can easily use. While this offers excellent opportunities to understand brain activities linked with aesthetic processing, we face the problem of using sophisticated techniques without a proper and valid theoretical foundation of aesthetics. A further problem arises from sophisticated methods often demanding strict constraints in presenting and experiencing aesthetic stimuli. However, when experiencing aesthetic items, contextual factors matter, e.g., social and situational affordances are essential in triggering a true and deep "Kunsterlebnis" (Experience of Art). Additionally, in Art, it is often not the artwork as an object that matters but the close relationship with and the processing of the artwork. However, art is only one facet of the whole aesthetic domain, beside, e.g., design, architecture, everyday aesthetics, dance, literature, music, and opera. In the present paper, I propose a dynamic and holistic aesthetic perspective that includes the respective context, situation, cognitive and affective traits and state of the beholder, ongoing processes of understanding, Zeitgeist, and other cultural factors, which can be applied to different aesthetic domains. When ignoring such temporal and dynamic factors, we will not understand the qualia of aesthetic processing. These considerations might help researchers in the field of aesthetics to better understand the experiencing of aesthetic items of all kinds-if we ignore these factors, we are missing the essence of experiencing aesthetic items, especially artworks. We aim to sensitize and inform readers about these ideas to inspire a deeper understanding of experiencing aesthetic items and the advancement of a theoretical framework addressing the experiencing of aesthetics from different domains.

Children and overtourism: a cognitive neuroscience experiment to reflect on exposure and behavioural consequences

As tourism research has paid limited attention to children, this study investigates children’s reactions to tourism development, focusing on their unique viewpoints on the World Heritage Site of Dubrovnik, Croatia. It employed cognitive neuroscience methods with 397 participants, revealing that, despite their preference for sustainable tourism scenarios, children exhibit a notable fixation on images emblematic of overtourism and associated challenges, particularly overcrowding. When exposed to sustainable tourism photographs, there was an observable increase in physiological arousal, albeit not as pronounced as when confronted with an overtourism scenario. Intriguingly, regardless of the scenario, children predominantly expressed neutral emotions. Within the sustainable tourism context, gender differences manifest as girls exhibiting lower levels of place attachment. Furthermore, inner-city residents exhibit diminished levels of nature connectedness, and emotions are indirectly linked to nature connectedness, place attachment, or pro-environmental behaviour. Conversely, in the unsustainable scenario, older children and inner-city residents exhibited a heightened sense of neutrality towards overtourism-related concerns, whereas those outside the inner city displayed a stronger affinity for nature connectedness. Positive emotions were negatively associated with nature connectedness and pro-environmental behaviour but positively associated with place attachment. Accordingly, this study advocates a more inclusive and sustainable future through children’s empowerment in tourism development.

Tissue optical clearing methods for microscopy: A review of their application in neuroscience

Recent advances in microscopy have enabled cellular-resolution imaging of thick tissue samples or even whole organs. The natural opacity of organs and tissues acts as a barrier to light penetration and must be removed to visualise structures of interest on a three-dimensional scale. Tissue optical clearing methods achieve sample transparency while also preserving fluorescently labelled epitopes. This innovative approach to sample preparation effectively enhances traditional histological sections and, with the aid of light sheet microscopy, enables optical sectioning and three-dimensional reconstruction of entire organs, even whole brains. Light sheet microscopy of optically cleared brain samples is a valuable method in neuroscience that is used in neuro-oncology, traumatic brain injury, ischemic brain injury, and neurodegenerative disease research.In this review, we describe tissue optical clearing methods used to achieve optical transparency in brain samples. This quickly developing field has a significant potential for producing cutting-edge uses in neuroscience research.

Special Subsection Afterword: ESP Research and Cognitive Neuroscience: Possibly Incompatible - But Methodologically Complementary

This commentary considers the fields of extrasensory perception (ESP) research and cognitive neuroscience, discussing points of conflict and domains where they may be complementary. ESP research challenges the assumption in cognitive neuroscience that the mind is the product of known physical processes in the brain. Cognitive neuroscience methods and tools applied to ESP research could benefit and bridge the gap between the two fields. Firstly, concurrently studying subjective experiences and neural activity during ESP tasks would allow us to better characterize subjective states typically associated with ESP. Secondly, similarities between mind-wandering and free-response ESP experimental designs allow us to speculate on the potential implication of the default-mode network during the percipient’s experience. Finally, tools developed in computational neurolinguistics and natural language processing may become valuable to automatize judging procedures in free-response ESP paradigms such as remote viewing. Despite potentially incompatible assumptions about the mind and the brain, ESP research can gain new insights from cognitive neuroscience methods and approaches and can contribute in its own way to the study of human subjective experiences and cognition.

A virtual reality paradigm with dynamic scene stimuli for use in memory research.

Episodic memory may essentially be memory for one's place within a temporally unfolding scene from a first-person perspective. Given this, pervasively used static stimuli may only capture one small part of episodic memory. A promising approach for advancing the study of episodic memory is immersing participants within varying scenes from a first-person perspective. We present a pool of distinct scene stimuli for use in virtual environments and a paradigm that is implementable across varying levels of immersion on multiple virtual reality (VR) platforms and adaptable to studying various aspects of scene and episodic memory. In our task, participants are placed within a series of virtual environments from a first-person perspective and guided through a virtual tour of scenes during a study phase and a test phase. In the test phase, some scenes share a spatial layout with studied scenes; others are completely novel. In three experiments with varying degrees of immersion, we measure scene recall, scene familiarity-detection during recall failure, the subjective experience of déjà vu, the ability to predict the next turn on a tour, the subjective sense of being able to predict the next turn on a tour, and the factors that influence memory search and the inclination to generate candidate recollective information. The level of first-person immersion mattered to multiple facets of episodic memory. The paradigm presents a useful means of advancing mechanistic understanding of how memory operates in realistic dynamic scene environments, including in combination with cognitive neuroscience methods such as functional magnetic resonance imaging and electrophysiology.

Neuroanatomy of Entrepreneurship and Bibliometric Analysis of Studies with Vosviewer

Entrepreneurship has been at the focus of many scientists doing research in the field of social sciences. Studies have focused on entrepreneurial intention, entrepreneurial disposition and entrepreneurial behavior. Generally, empirical methods have been used in studies, but the neurophysiological, neuropsychological and psychoneuroendocrinological reasons behind the individual's entrepreneurship have been neglected. In short, genetic factors, hormones, behavioral genetic factors related to the individual's being an entrepreneur were not taken into account in the studies. However, with the use and development of neuroscience methods, tools and approaches in different fields, the opportunities offered by neuroscience in research on entrepreneurship in the field of Social Sciences have recently begun to be utilized. This has facilitated the neuroanatomical examination of entrepreneurial individuals. Entrepreneurship research focuses on the individual's family, environmental, social and educational interactions. In order for entrepreneurship to be understood in a multidimensional way, it is necessary to consider human behavior in terms of genetic transfers, hormones, behavioral genetics and the interactions of these factors with each other. For this reason, studies on the concepts of "entrepreneurship and neuroscience", "entrepreneurship and genetics", "entrepreneurship and biology" and "neuroentrepreneurship" gain importance. The aim of this study is to provide information about the neuroscience methods, tools and approaches used in entrepreneurship research, to make a detailed bibliometric analysis of the researches, to identify the trends and gaps related to the mentioned concepts and to bring them to the attention of researchers and to make suggestions about what should be done in future studies. Since a better understanding of entrepreneurial thought, intention and behavior will contribute to the development of entrepreneurship, mapping the studies in the literature in terms of the neuroanatomy of entrepreneurship and analyzing them within the scope of quantitative data makes the study unique. The study consists of five parts. In the first part of the study, studies carried out for a better understanding of entrepreneurship in terms of neurophysiology, hormones and genetics are given by making use of neuroscience methods, tools and approaches in the literature. In the second part, neuroscience tools, methods and approaches used in entrepreneurship research are explained. In the third part, the method of the research and in the fourth part, the bibliometric analysis findings are given. In the last part, the discussion and conclusion, the deficiencies identified in the field and recommendations for future studies are made. As the analysis unit, bibliometric data of different types of papers scanned in the Web of Science (WoS) database and published between 2006 and 2023 was taken as a basis. As a result of the research, 379 publications related to the words "entrepreneurship" and "neuroscience" were identified and the most studied 260 of them were neuroscience, neurology, 53 business economics and 47 mathematical computational biology. 346 publications on "entrepreneurship" and "genetics" have been identified and the most studied 146 of them are genetic inheritance, 44 are biochemistry, molecular biology and 35 are business economics. 183 publications on “entrepreneurship” and “biology” were found, 58 of which were studied the most, multidisciplinary sciences, 55 related to genetic inheritance and 44 of them related to business. Within the scope of the study, only 9 publications related to "neuroentrepreneurship", which are directly related to entrepreneurship and neuroscience, were identified in the Web of Science (WoS) database. In the last part, discussion and conclusion, what needs to be done in entrepreneurship research and suggestions are presented.

Neurophysiological mechanisms of cognition in the developing brain: Insights from intracranial EEG studies

The quest to understand how the development of the brain supports the development of complex cognitive functions is fueled by advances in cognitive neuroscience methods. Intracranial EEG (iEEG) recorded directly from the developing human brain provides unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution for mapping the neurophysiological mechanisms supporting cognitive development. In this paper, we focus on episodic memory, the ability to remember detailed information about past experiences, which improves from childhood into adulthood. We review memory effects based on broadband spectral power and emphasize the importance of isolating narrowband oscillations from broadband activity to determine mechanisms of neural coordination within and between brain regions. We then review evidence of developmental variability in neural oscillations and present emerging evidence linking the development of neural oscillations to the development of memory. We conclude by proposing that the development of oscillations increases the precision of neural coordination and may be an essential factor underlying memory development. More broadly, we demonstrate how recording neural activity directly from the developing brain holds immense potential to advance our understanding of cognitive development.

Research trends in chemogenetics for neuroscience in recent 14 years: A bibliometric study in CiteSpace.

Chemogenetics has been widely adopted in Neuroscience. Neuroscience has become a hot research topic for scientists. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore the current status and trends in the global application of chemogenetics in neuroscience over the last 14 years via CiteSpace. Publications related to chemogenetics in neuroscience were retrieved from the Science Citation Index-Extended Web of Science from 2008 to 2021. We used CiteSpace to analyze publications, citations, cited journals, countries, institutions, authors, cited authors, cited references, and keywords. A total of 947 records were retrieved from 2008 to 2021 on February 21, 2022. The number and rate of publications and citations increased significantly. Journal of Neuroscience was the most cited journal, and BRAIN RES BULL ranked first in the centrality of cited journals. The United States of America (USA) had the highest number of publications among the countries. Takashi Minamoto was the most prolific author and Armbruster BN ranked the first among authors cited. The first article in the frequency ranking of the references cited was published by Roth BL. The keyword of "nucleus accumben (NAc)" had the highest frequency. The top 3 keywords with the strongest citation bursts include "transgenic mice," "cancer," and "blood-brain barrier." The period 2008 to 2021 has seen a marked increase in research on chemogenetics in neuroscience. The application of chemogenetics is indispensable for research in the field of neuroscience. This bibliometrics study provides the current situation and trend in chemogenetic methods in neuroscience in recent 14 years, which may help researchers to identify the hot topics and frontiers for future studies in this field.