Working memory is a fundamental component of human cognition, essential for performing complex tasks that require holding and manipulating information. Visuospatial working memory (VSWM) enables the temporary retention of visual and spatial information, with its neural correlates, such as contralateral delay activity (CDA, a component of event-related potentials), providing insights into memory load dynamics. This study aimed to investigate how sequentially presented items are maintained and integrated into VSWM. Twenty-three participants performed a task where three visual items were presented sequentially, followed by a retro-cue and a test array, while accuracy and CDA were measured. Behavioral results showed significant differences in accuracy across item positions, with the third item yielding the lowest accuracy. Electrophysiological findings revealed that CDA amplitude was more negative for the second item, suggesting greater cognitive resources were allocated to it compared to the first and third items. Correlations between working memory capacity, task performance, and CDA amplitudes suggest that individuals with higher working memory capacity can better adapt resource distribution to handle sequential information processing, particularly under conditions of increased cognitive load. These results suggest that VSWM management involves dynamic, nonuniform allocation of cognitive resources influenced by the serial position of items. These insights expand our understanding of how VSWM processes sequential inputs and may inform future studies on optimizing cognitive strategies for tasks involving complex visual and spatial information.

Environmental sound processing in primary progressive aphasia: behavioral deficits and their neural correlates.

Depression and obesity represent major public health challenges, and their comorbidity suggests underlying shared mechanisms. A comprehensive understanding of the common cognitive-behavioral and neurobiological pathways, particularly those involving reward processing, is essential for developing effective clinical and public health interventions. This systematic review synthesizes evidence regarding the overlap of behavioral and neural substrates or correlates of reward processing and manifestations in depression and obesity. The findings indicate that comorbid depression and obesity are associated with reward-related behaviors, as well as functional and structural alterations in key reward-processing regions, such as the hippocampus, amygdala, and anterior cingulate cortex. These alterations correlate with increased severity of depressive symptoms and abnormal reward-related behaviors. Insulin resistance and dysregulation of serotonin pathways constitute significant mediators that exacerbate reward dysfunction in affected individuals. Additionally, early-life stress and genetic predispositions significantly shape both the structure and function of the brain's reward circuitry. This review highlights that the comorbidity of obesity and depression can be explained through complex behavioral and neural mechanisms, particularly those involving reward processing pathways. Further longitudinal and intervention studies are warranted to clarify causal relationships and underlying mechanisms.

Early childhood neural reward-related reactivity concurrently and prospectively associates with depressive symptom severity.

The mind's eyes: Distinct neural correlates of spatial and object imagery.

Altered brain activity and connectivity in adolescent obsessive-compulsive disorder and their correlations with perceived parental rearing patterns: A resting-state fMRI study.

Neural correlates of retrieval practice with feedback in foreign vocabulary learning: An fNIRS study.

Attentional engagement strengthens joint agency: Evidence from intra-brain, inter-brain, and behavioural signals via EEG hyperscanning.

The neural correlates of pausing behaviours in L2 writing

Neural correlates of rumination in psychiatric disorders: A systematic review of fMRI evidence.

Neural correlates of recognition memory obtained after encoding under conventional laboratory, virtual, and real-life conditions reveal modality-specific mnemonic processing.

Relationship between regional homogeneity changes and cognitive dysfunction in patients with first-episode drug-naïve bipolar II disorder in the depressive phase.

Understanding how brain activation relates to the content of our thoughts under stress is essential for linking cognitive processes to neural mechanisms. The Think Aloud Paradigm (TAP) offers a unique, real-time method to capture verbalized cognition, enabling researchers to assess the qualitative nature of ruminative thinking. In this study, the TAP was administered prior to and following the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) to investigate whether verbalized ruminative thought content is associated with prefrontal hypoactivation during stress. Participants' transcripts were rated on four scales: (1) rehashing bad performance, (2) speculating about negative consequences, (3) focus on negative affect, and (4) reflection. Dichotomized change scores were used as group-level predictors of neural activation. Results showed that rehashing bad performance and speculating about negative consequences were significantly associated with differential activation patterns in the bilateral Inferior Frontal Gyrus (IFG) and left Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex (DLPFC). Interestingly, this association shows opposing patterns for each hemisphere: Specifically, participants who less frequently engage in rehashing bad performance and speculating about negative consequences show increased recruitment of the left IFG and left DLPFC under stress, whereas those who do show prefrontal hypoactivation. Participants who rehashed their poor performance further showed decreased activation in the right IFG over time, while those who did not showed no significant changes in the right IFG. These findings suggest that ruminative thought content, as captured through TAP, is associated with reduced prefrontal engagement during stress. Future research should investigate this relationship in clinical populations to evaluate its potential for diagnostic or intervention purposes.

Left hippocampal subiculum-hypothalamus hyperconnectivity as a neural correlate of stress vulnerability.

Neural correlates of interactions between adaptive learning and hierarchical reasoning in repeated strategic games

Abstract Learning from experience is theorised to be driven by reward prediction error (RPE) signals that reflect updates to our expectations of reward. Despite numerous studies on the neural correlates of RPEs, the question of how large-scale networks (LSNs) in the brain reconfigure in response to an RPE learning signal remains open. Here we examine how functional networks change in response to RPEs depending on the context. In our study participants performed a probabilistic reversal learning task whilst we acquired fMRI data in two experimental settings: reward-seeking and punishment-avoiding. Participants' behavior was best explained by models with different learning rates for positive and negative RPEs. Furthermore, no evidence was found for context-dependent learning rates. Using behaviorally fitted RPE models, we performed a whole-brain network analysis. This analysis revealed classical reward structures, where striatal reward networks emerge as modules when the community structure is examined at a finer resolution, and a ventromedial prefrontal network emerges at a coarser resolution. Using the same behavioral model, we found that, compared to negative RPEs, positive RPEs increased within-network integration and decreased between-network integration. This indicates that there are distinctly different neural processes for positive and negative RPEs.

We conducted coordinate-based anisotropy effect size signed differential mapping (AES-SDM) meta-analyses to identify task-general and domain-specific (working memory, reward, and emotion processing) activation abnormalities in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD). We systematically searched the PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, ScienceDirect, and China National Knowledge Infrastructure databases for functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies that compared patients with MDD with healthy controls (HCs) up to December 3, 2024. Differences in brain activity were evaluated using AES-SDM software across all task types, including emotion-processing, working memory, and reward-processing domains, to compare MDD patients with HCs. Forty-six studies (11 on working memory, 12 on reward processing, and 23 on emotion processing) involving 1,558 patients with MDD and 1,468 HCs were included. Across all task types, patients with MDD showed greater activation in the left lenticular nucleus/putamen, right rolandic operculum, left anterior cingulate/paracingulate gyri, and right inferior frontal gyrus. In the emotion-processing domains, MDD was associated with hyperactivation in the right amygdala and left striatum. No clusters survived the primary corrected threshold in the working memory or reward-processing domains. Jackknife analyses supported the robustness of the main clusters, and Egger's test did not indicate significant publication bias (all p > 0.05). Meta-regression did not reveal significant effects of age or illness duration on the results. This meta-analysis demonstrated task-general hyperactivation across salience/control-related regions in patients with MDD and domain-specific hyperactivation in the amygdala-striatal circuitry during emotion processing. The absence of corrected findings in working memory and reward processing highlights the need for more standardized paradigms and larger datasets to clarify domain-specific abnormalities. Not applicable.

C-Tactile (CT) targeted affective touch plays a central role in social cognition and emotional development. In autism, atypical sensory processing, particularly in response to tactile stimulation, has frequently been reported. Autistic individuals have been shown to exhibit altered perception and reduced hedonic evaluation of affective touch, as well as increased defensive responses. Despite these differences in direct touch, the perception of vicarious social touch or its connection to social and emotional constructs remains poorly explored. Vicarious touch is theoretically relevant because it recruits social-cognitive and affective mechanisms beyond primary somatosensory processing; however, most prior studies have focused on neural correlates in neurotypical adults, with limited behavioral investigation and scarce evidence in autistic populations. The present study evaluated how autistic and non-autistic adolescents and young adults perceive vicarious social touch. Participants observed videos depicting touch delivered at three different speeds (static, CT-optimal, and fast) and across five skin locations (back, upper arm, ventral forearm, dorsal forearm, and palm). Participants provided subjective ratings of how pleasant they believed the touch was for the person in the video (numeric rating scale (NRS) Other/pleasantness) and how much they would like to be touched in the same way (NRS Self/willingness). We also examined associations with empathy and touch-related attitudes. Results showed no group differences in the pleasantness and willingness ratings. However, a significant three-way interaction between speed, skin location, and group emerged for the NRS Self. Across both groups, ratings indicated that speed and skin location modulated ratings, with CT-optimal stroking and touch in the back rated as most pleasant. For NRS Self, male participants reported higher pleasantness than females, across groups. Pleasantness and willingness ratings were positively correlated with attitudes toward touch from friends and family and toward self-care, but not with other touch-related attitudes or empathy scores, across groups. Finally, autistic individuals reported significantly lower empathy and less positive touch-related experiences than non-autistic participants. Overall, these findings suggest that global vicarious touch perception may be relatively preserved in autistic adolescents and young adults, while individual differences in empathy and touch-related experiences may contribute to broader variability in social touch processing.

Motivational decision-making is most adaptive when exploitation of known rewards is effectively balanced against exploration of uncertain alternatives. Trait anxiety influences this balance across individuals, yet less is known about the dynamic effects of acute anxiety on behaviour. This study combined a decision-making task, the multi-armed bandit Maggie's Farm task, with fMRI and computational modelling to examine how experimentally induced anxiety modulates exploration strategies (random, value-free exploration versus directed, novelty-seeking exploration) and their neural correlates. Forty-seven healthy participants (24 female; 23 male) completed the task under alternating conditions of safety and anxiety induced by unpredictable electric shocks. Exploratory behaviour was promoted through different task decision horizons and modelled using parameters capturing random value-free exploration (ε) and novelty seeking (η). Acute anxiety impaired performance and decision consistency, selectively increasing random, value-free exploration without affecting novelty-driven exploration. Reaction times decreased, indicating faster, less deliberative responding. Neuroimaging revealed that horizon manipulations recruited circumscribed frontoparietal regions. Value and policy signals were dissociable, with ventromedial prefrontal cortex encoding expected value and superior parietal lobule mediating exploratory control. Critically, acute anxiety increased activation in right superior parietal lobule and frontopolar cortex specifically during random, value-free exploration, independently of value processing. Together with the behavioural findings, this pattern identifies a neural signature of anxiety-related decision noise. In conclusion, acute anxiety increases random, value-independent exploration, promoting less goal-directed, more stochastic behaviour. These findings link anxiety-induced decision noise to frontoparietal activation and identify random exploration as a computational marker of dysregulated anxiety-related decision-making.Significance statement Understanding how anxiety alters decision-making is crucial because anxious states are common and often impair flexible behaviour. Exploration is a key component of adaptive decisions, yet different forms of exploration serve different functions. Using experimental anxiety induction, computational modelling, and fMRI, we show that acute anxiety does not increase all exploratory behaviour uniformly. Instead, it selectively boosts random, value-free exploration, choices driven by noise rather than information seeking, while leaving goal-directed, novelty-driven exploration unchanged. This shift reflects altered engagement of frontoparietal brain regions involved in control and uncertainty processing. These findings highlight a specific computational pathway through which acute anxiety disrupts decision-making, offering mechanistic insight relevant to both basic neuroscience and anxiety-related disorders.

Metabolomic signatures of SSRI exposure during neural differentiation and correlation of lysophosphatidylcholines with early symptoms of neurodevelopmental disorders.