Stages Of Cognitive Processing Research Articles

Alpha desynchronization during the filtering initiation phase reflects active processing of distractors

The ability to select task-relevant information and filter out task-irrelevant information is critical to our success in daily goal-directed behavior. Researchers call this ability filtering efficiency and divide it into three cognitive processing stages: detection of distractors, initiation of filtering, and unnecessary storage. Although researchers have conducted more studies on ERP components related to filtration efficiency, there are few studies related to neural oscillations. Alpha oscillation activity is related to the active processing of information and the suppression of distractors. In the current EEG study, we used the change detection task with distracted items to examine whether alpha activity during filtering initiation reflects reactive suppression of distractors by manipulating memory load levels and the presence or absence of distractors. Results showed that, the presence of the distractors caused an increase in the degree of desynchronization of the alpha oscillations, and in the subsequent time, the alpha activity level returned to a level consistent with the absence of interference conditions. Phase synchronization between frontal and posterior brain regions in the upper alpha oscillations found no effects associated with distractors. Based on these results, we believed that the alpha activity during the filtering initiation phase reflected the active processing of distractors, but this may also be due to lower perceptual load of the target items. In addition, we observed a dominance effect of the right hemisphere in both time-frequency results and connectivity results. We speculate that this effect is related to the activation of the right ventral frontoparietal network.

Cognitive deficits and enhancements in youth from adverse conditions: An integrative assessment using Drift Diffusion Modeling in the ABCD study.

Childhood adversity can lead to cognitive deficits or enhancements, depending on many factors. Though progress has been made, two challenges prevent us from integrating and better understanding these patterns. First, studies commonly use and interpret raw performance differences, such as response times, which conflate different stages of cognitive processing. Second, most studies either isolate or aggregate abilities, obscuring the degree to which individual differences reflect task-general (shared) or task-specific (unique) processes. We addressed these challenges using Drift Diffusion Modeling (DDM) and structural equation modeling (SEM). Leveraging a large, representative sample of 9-10 year-olds from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, we examined how two forms of adversity-material deprivation and household threat-were associated with performance on tasks measuring processing speed, inhibition, attention shifting, and mental rotation. Using DDM, we decomposed performance on each task into three distinct stages of processing: speed of information uptake, response caution, and stimulus encoding/response execution. Using SEM, we isolated task-general and task-specific variances in each processing stage and estimated their associations with the two forms of adversity. Youth with more exposure to household threat (but not material deprivation) showed slower task-general processing speed, but showed intact task-specific abilities. In addition, youth with more exposure to household threat tended to respond more cautiously in general. These findings suggest that traditional assessments might overestimate the extent to which childhood adversity reduces specific abilities. By combining DDM and SEM approaches, we can develop a more nuanced understanding of how adversity affects different aspects of youth's cognitive performance. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT: To understand how childhood adversity shapes cognitive abilities, the field needs analytical approaches that can jointly document and explain patterns of lowered and enhanced performance. Using Drift Diffusion Modeling and Structural Equation Modeling, we analyzed associations between adversity and processing speed, inhibition, attention shifting, and mental rotation. Household threat, but not material deprivation, was mostly associated with slower task-general processing speed and more response caution. In contrast, task-specific abilities were largely intact. Researchers might overestimate the impact of childhood adversity on specific abilities and underestimate the impact on general processing speed and response caution using traditional measures.

Prefrontal event-related potential markers in association with mild cognitive impairment.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is among the leading contributors of dementia globally with approximately 60-70% of its cases. Current research is focused on the mild cognitive impairment (MCI), which is associated with cognitive decline but does not disrupt routine activities. Event-related potential (ERP) research is essential in screening patients with MCI. Low-density channel electroencephalography (EEG) is frequently used due to its convenience, portability, and affordability, making it suitable for resource-constrained environments. Despite extensive research on neural biomarkers for cognitive impairment, there is a considerable gap in understanding the effects on early stages of cognitive processes, particularly when combining physiological and cognitive markers using portable devices. The present study aimed to examine cognitive shortfalls and behavioral changes in patients with MCI using prefrontal selective attention ERP recorded from a prefrontal two-channel EEG device. We assessed cognitive decline using the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) and the Seoul Neuropsychological Screening Battery (SNSB). We administered auditory selective attention tasks to 598 elderly participants, including those with MCI (160) and cognitively normal (CN) individuals (407). We conducted statistical analyses such as independent t-tests, Pearson's correlations, and univariate and multiple logistic regression analyses to assess group differences and associations between neuropsychological tests, ERP measures, behavioral measures, and MCI prevalence. Our findings revealed that patients with MCI demonstrated slower information-processing abilities, and exhibited poorer task execution, characterized by reduced accuracy, increased errors, and higher variability in response time, compared to CN adults. Multiple logistic regression analyses confirmed the association between some ERP and behavioral measures with MCI prevalence, independent of demographic and neuropsychological factors. A relationship was observed between neuropsychological scores, ERP, and behavioral measures. The slower information processing abilities, and poor task execution in the MCI group compared to the CN individuals suggests flawed neurological changes and reduced attentional maintenance during cognitive processing, respectively. Hence, the utilization of portable EEG devices to capture prefrontal selective attention ERPs, in combination with behavioral assessments, holds promise for the identification of mild cognitive deficits and neural alterations in individuals with MCI. This approach could potentially augment the traditional neuropsychological tests during clinical screening for MCI.

Age-related hearing loss associated with differences in the neural correlates of feature binding in visual working memory

The underlying neural mechanisms underpinning the association between age-related hearing loss (ARHL) and dementia remain unclear. A limitation has been the lack of functional neuroimaging studies in ARHL cohorts to help clarify this relationship. In the present study, we investigated the neural correlates of feature binding in visual working memory with ARHL (controls = 14, mild HL = 21, and moderate or greater HL = 23). Participants completed a visual change detection task assessing feature binding while their neural activity was synchronously recorded via high-density electroencephalography. There was no difference in accuracy scores for ARHL groups compared to controls. There was increased electrophysiological activity in those with ARHL, particularly in components indexing the earlier stages of visual cognitive processing. This activity was more pronounced with more severe ARHL and was associated with maintained feature binding. Source space (sLORETA) analyses indicated greater activity in networks modulated by frontoparietal and temporal regions. Our results demonstrate there may be increased involvement of neurocognitive control networks to maintain lower-order neurocognitive processing disrupted by ARHL.

Well-being is associated with cortical thickness network topology of human brain

BackgroundLiving a happy and meaningful life is an eternal topic in positive psychology, which is crucial for individuals’ physical and mental health as well as social functioning. Well-being can be subdivided into pleasure attainment related hedonic well-being or emotional well-being, and self-actualization related eudaimonic well-being or psychological well-being plus social well-being. Previous studies have mostly focused on human brain morphological and functional mechanisms underlying different dimensions of well-being, but no study explored brain network mechanisms of well-being, especially in terms of topological properties of human brain morphological similarity network.MethodsTherefore, in the study, we collected 65 datasets including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and well-being data, and constructed human brain morphological network based on morphological distribution similarity of cortical thickness to explore the correlations between topological properties including network efficiency and centrality and different dimensions of well-being.ResultsWe found emotional well-being was negatively correlated with betweenness centrality in the visual network but positively correlated with eigenvector centrality in the precentral sulcus, while the total score of well-being was positively correlated with local efficiency in the posterior cingulate cortex of cortical thickness network.ConclusionsOur findings demonstrated that different dimensions of well-being corresponded to different cortical hierarchies: hedonic well-being was involved in more preliminary cognitive processing stages including perceptual and attentional information processing, while hedonic and eudaimonic well-being might share common morphological similarity network mechanisms in the subsequent advanced cognitive processing stages.

Attentional biases to faces with direct versus averted gaze in children without and with autism spectrum disorder: A dot-probe paradigm

Previous research utilized a variety of paradigms to demonstrate attentional biases to faces with direct versus averted gaze in typical development (TD) and no such bias in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, little is known about whether the biases can be observed during automatic processing stages in TD and whether the lack of such bias in ASD is due to passive neglect or active avoidance of direct gaze. Therefore, we employed a dot-probe paradigm and manipulated stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) to measure response times to probes replacing faces with direct gaze compared to faces with averted gaze in children without and with ASD. There was no evidence of attentional bias in either group when stimuli were presented during the automatic processing stage (200 ms SOA). However, during the controlled processing stage (1000 ms SOA), an attentional bias to faces with direct versus averted gaze was found in control children but not in those with ASD. The results indicate that the facilitation of direct gaze on facial attention occurs during controlled rather than automatic processing stages in TD individuals. In contrast, children with ASD respond indiscriminately to direct and averted gaze during both stages of cognitive processing, supporting the gaze indifference hypothesis. For TD children but not for children with ASD, direct gaze is an adaptively informative or socially salient signal.

Survival processing occupies the central bottleneck of cognitive processing: A psychological refractory period analysis

Words judged for relevance in a survival situation are remembered better than words judged for relevance in a nonsurvival context. This survival processing effect has been explained by selective tuning of human memory during evolution to process and retain information specifically relevant for survival. According to the richness-of-encoding hypothesis the survival processing effect arises from a domain-general mechanism—namely, a particularly rich and distinct form of encoding. This form of information processing is effortful and requires limited cognitive capacities. In our experiment, we used the well-established psychological refractory period framework in conjunction with the effect propagation logic to assess the role of central cognitive resources for the survival processing effect. Our data demonstrate that the survival memory advantage indeed relies on the capacity-limited central stage of cognitive processing. Thus, rating words in the context of a survival scenario involves central processing resources to a greater amount than rating words in a nonsurvival control condition. We discuss implications for theories of the survival processing effect.

Negative bias in early and late cognitive processing of coronary heart disease patients with depressive symptoms: an EPR study

BackgroundThe purpose of this research was to explore the underlying mechanisms of cognitive impairments in patients with coronary heart disease (CHD) who exhibit depressive symptoms. This was accomplished by recording Event-related potentials (ERPs) during the emotional Stroop task, with a specific focus on the temporal dynamics of attentional bias towards various emotional words.MethodsWe selected 17 CHD patients with depressive symptoms and 23 CHD patients without depression using a convenience sampling method from the Affiliated Hospital of Weifang Medical University. Each participant completed an emotional Stroop color-word task, and ERPs were recorded during the task to examine cognitive processing.ResultsCHD patients with depressive symptoms exhibited generally smaller amplitudes of N1, N2, P3 and longer latency of P3 compared to CHD patients without depression. Specifically, the N1 amplitude of negative words was smaller and the P3 amplitude of negative words was larger in the CHD with depressive group compared to the CHD group. Furthermore, within the group of CHD patients with depressive symptoms, negative words elicited a smaller N1 amplitude and larger P3 amplitude compared to positive and neutral words.ConclusionsCHD patients with depressive symptoms demonstrate decreased attentional resources, leading to cognitive impairments. Notably, significant attentional bias occurs during both early and later stages of cognitive processing. This bias is primarily characterized by an enhanced automatic processing of negative information at the early stage and difficulty disengaging from such information at the later stage. These findings contribute to the existing literature on the cognitive neural mechanisms underlying depression in CHD patients.

Cognitive processing stages in mental rotation – How can cognitive modelling inform HsMM-EEG models?

The aspiration for insight into human cognitive processing has traditionally driven research in cognitive science. With methods such as the Hidden semi-Markov Model-Electroencephalography (HsMM-EEG) method, new approaches have been developed that help to understand the temporal structure of cognition by identifying temporally discrete processing stages. However, it remains challenging to assign concrete functional contributions by specific processing stages to the overall cognitive process. In this paper, we address this challenge by linking HsMM-EEG3 with cognitive modelling, with the aim of further validating the HsMM-EEG3 method and demonstrating the potential of cognitive models to facilitate functional interpretation of processing stages. For this purpose, we applied HsMM-EEG3 to data from a mental rotation task and developed an ACT-R cognitive model that is able to closely replicate human performance in this task. Applying HsMM-EEG3 to the mental rotation experiment data revealed a strong likelihood for 6 distinct stages of cognitive processing during trials, with an additional stage for non-rotated conditions. The cognitive model predicted intra-trial mental activity patterns that project well onto the processing stages, while explaining the additional stage as a marker of non-spatial shortcut use. Thereby, this combined methodology provided substantially more information than either method by itself and suggests conclusions for cognitive processing in general.

Recognition and evaluation of mental workload in different stages of perceptual and cognitive information processing using a multimodal approach

This study explores the effects of different perceptual and cognitive information processing stages on mental workload by assessing multimodal indicators of mental workload such as the NASA-TLX, task performance, ERPs and eye movements. Repeated measures ANOVA of the data showed that among ERP indicators, P1, N1 and N2 amplitudes were sensitive to perceptual load (P-load), P3 amplitude was sensitive to P-load only in the prefrontal region during high cognitive load (C-load) states, and P3 amplitude in the occipital and parietal regions was sensitive to C-load. Among the eye movement indicators, blink frequency was sensitive to P-load in all C-load states, but to C-load in only low P-load states; pupil diameter and blink duration were sensitive to both P-load and C-load. Based on the above indicators, the k-nearest neighbours (KNN) algorithm was used to propose a classification method for the four different mental workload states with an accuracy of 97.89%. Practitioner summary: Based on the results of this study, it is possible to implement the monitoring of mental workload states and optimise brain task allocation in operations involving high mental workload, such as human-computer interaction.

Altered beta band spatial-temporal interactions during negative emotional processing in major depressive disorder: An MEG study

BackgroundThe mood-concordance bias is a key feature of major depressive disorder (MDD), but the spatiotemporal neural activity associated with emotional processing in MDD remains unclear. Understanding the dysregulated connectivity patterns during emotional processing and their relationship with clinical symptoms could provide insights into MDD neuropathology. MethodsWe enrolled 108 MDD patients and 64 healthy controls (HCs) who performed an emotion recognition task during magnetoencephalography recording. Network-based statistics (NBS) was used to analyze whole-brain functional connectivity (FC) across different frequency ranges during distinct temporal periods. The relationship between the aberrant FC and affective symptoms was explored. ResultsMDD patients exhibited decreased FC strength in the beta band (13–30 Hz) compared to HCs. During the early stage of emotional processing (0-100 ms), reduced FC was observed between the left parahippocampal gyrus and the left cuneus. In the late stage (250-400 ms), aberrant FC was primarily found in the cortex-limbic-striatum systems. Moreover, the FC strength between the right fusiform gyrus and left thalamus, and between the left calcarine fissure and left inferior temporal gyrus were negatively associated with Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HAMD) scores. LimitationsMedication information was not involved. ConclusionMDD patients exhibited abnormal temporal-spatial neural interactions in the beta band, ranging from early sensory to later cognitive processing stages. These aberrant interactions involve the cortex-limbic-striatum circuit. Notably, aberrant FC in may serve as a potential biomarker for assessing depression severity.

The auditory stimulus reduced the visual inhibition of return: Evidence from psychophysiological interaction analysis.

Visual inhibition of return (IOR) is a mechanism for preventing attention from returning to previously examined spatial locations. Previous studies have found that auditory stimuli presented simultaneously with a visual target can reduce or even eliminate the visual IOR. However, the mechanism responsible for decreased visual IOR accompanied by auditory stimuli is unclear. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we aimed to investigate how auditory stimuli reduce visual IOR. Behaviorally, we found that the visual IOR accompanying auditory stimuli was significant but smaller than the visual IOR. Neurally, only in the validly cued trials, the superior temporal gyrus showed increased neural coupling with the intraparietal sulcus, presupplementary motor area, and some other areas in audiovisual conditions compared with visual conditions. These results suggest that the reduction in visual IOR by the simultaneous auditory stimuli may be due to a dual mechanism: rescuing the suppressed visual salience and facilitating response initiation. Our results support crossmodal interactions can occur across multiple neural levels and cognitive processing stages. This study provides a new perspective for understanding attention-orienting networks and response initiation based on crossmodal information.

Cortical Tracking of Continuous Speech Under Bimodal Divided Attention.

Speech processing often occurs amid competing inputs from other modalities, for example, listening to the radio while driving. We examined the extent to which dividing attention between auditory and visual modalities (bimodal divided attention) impacts neural processing of natural continuous speech from acoustic to linguistic levels of representation. We recorded electroencephalographic (EEG) responses when human participants performed a challenging primary visual task, imposing low or high cognitive load while listening to audiobook stories as a secondary task. The two dual-task conditions were contrasted with an auditory single-task condition in which participants attended to stories while ignoring visual stimuli. Behaviorally, the high load dual-task condition was associated with lower speech comprehension accuracy relative to the other two conditions. We fitted multivariate temporal response function encoding models to predict EEG responses from acoustic and linguistic speech features at different representation levels, including auditory spectrograms and information-theoretic models of sublexical-, word-form-, and sentence-level representations. Neural tracking of most acoustic and linguistic features remained unchanged with increasing dual-task load, despite unambiguous behavioral and neural evidence of the high load dual-task condition being more demanding. Compared to the auditory single-task condition, dual-task conditions selectively reduced neural tracking of only some acoustic and linguistic features, mainly at latencies >200 ms, while earlier latencies were surprisingly unaffected. These findings indicate that behavioral effects of bimodal divided attention on continuous speech processing occur not because of impaired early sensory representations but likely at later cognitive processing stages. Crossmodal attention-related mechanisms may not be uniform across different speech processing levels.

From green advertising to sustainable behavior: a systematic literature review through the lens of value-belief-norm framework

In the current ecological context, advertising and communication emerge as valuable tools for raising awareness and encouraging sustainable behavior. For this communication to be effective, it is necessary to understand the process through which a green message translates into sustainable decisions and how it interacts with individuals’ pro-environmental predispositions and intrinsic motivations. From this perspective, we conducted a systematic review of the literature linking two bodies of research related to the effectiveness of green advertising, on the one hand, and the determinants of pro-environmental behavior, on the other. The main contribution of this article is the development of a conceptual framework that is specific to green advertising. This framework combines the stages of cognitive processing of persuasive messages and the value-belief-norm theory of environmentalism, as well as other internal and external factors (e.g. personal capabilities, contextual factors, and affective variables). Based on our results, we identify gaps and opportunities for future research.

The influence of bilingual experience on executive function under emotional interference: Evidence from the N1 component.

The influence of bilingual education and experience on an individual's information-processing ability has recently been a hot issue in international studies. Previous studies have found that bilingual experience affects executive function, but the results remain controversial. Executive function refers to the conscious control of purposeful behavior. It is responsible for processing high-level action controls, including such sub-functions as inhibitory control, cognitive switching, and working memory updating. Emotion, as an essential factor in daily life, also has a complex interaction with executive function. This paper explores whether the bilingual cognitive advantage effect can continue in the more complex conditions of emotional interference. To investigate the specific electrophysiological characteristics of the participants at different stages of cognitive processing, we used a combination of the behavioral and ERP experiments in which the positive, neutral, and negative emotional stimuli were selected as emotional interference conditions and the emotional Simon paradigm, the cognitive switching of emotion paradigm, and the emotional N-back paradigm was adopted. The results show that the main effect of the N1 component amplitude is significant. Specifically, the amplitude of the N1 component in the proficient bilinguals is significantly smaller than that of the non-proficient bilinguals, while the main effects of other component groups are not significant, indicating that under the condition of emotional interference, the influence of bilingual experience on executive function only exists in the early attention stage and that the bilingual experience can improve the individual's attentional control and speed up attention processing in the early attention stage.

The relationship between autistic traits and empathy in adolescents: An ERP study

Based on the mind-blindness hypothesis, a large number of studies have shown that individuals with autism-spectrum disorder (ASD) and autistic traits have empathy deficits. However, the recent double empathy theory contradicts the mind-blindness hypothesis and suggests that individuals with ASD and autistic traits do not necessarily lack empathy. Thus, the presence of empathy deficits in individuals with ASD and autistic traits is still controversial. We recruited 56 adolescents (28 high autistic traits, 28 low autistic traits, 14–17 years old) in this study to explore the relationship between empathy and autistic traits. The study participants were required to undertake the pain empathy task, during which the electroencephalograph (EEG) activities were recorded. Our results show that empathy was negatively associated with autistic traits at the questionnaire, behavioral, and EEG levels. Our results also suggested that empathy deficits in adolescents with autistic traits may be manifested mainly in the late stages of cognitive control processing.

The Neural Correlates of the Recognition of Emotional Intensity Deficits in Major Depression: An ERP Study.

Deficits in facial emotional intensity recognition have been associated with social cognition in patients with major depression. The study examined multiple event-related potential (ERP) components in patients with major depression and investigated the relationships between ERPs, social cognition, and clinical features. Thirty-one patients met DSM-IV diagnosis of depression and 31 healthy participants completed the emotion intensity recognition task (EIRT), while ERPs were recorded. Data on ERP components (P100, N170, P200, and P300) were analyzed. The behavioral results showed that patients with major depression performed worse on EIRT, including all six categories of emotions (sadness, disgust, happiness, surprise, anger, and fear), compared to healthy participants. The ERP results showed that patients with major depression exhibited higher P100 amplitudes for sad and happy faces than healthy participants; P300 amplitudes induced by sad and surprise faces were also higher than in healthy participants, mainly in the central and temporal lobes. A positive correlation was found between sadness intensity scores and P100 amplitudes in patients with major depression. Patients with major depression are biased in their identification of facial expressions indicating emotional intensity. Specifically, they have emotional biases in the early and late stages of cognitive processing, mainly in the form of sensitivity to sad stimuli. It may lead to a persistent rumination of sadness that is detrimental to the remission of depression. Additionally, patients with major depression devote different amounts of cognitive resources for different intensities of sad faces during the preconscious stage of cognitive processing. The more intense their perception of sadness, the more cognitive resources they devote. Therefore, the assessment of the intensity of facial expressions is an important research topic, with clinical implications on social cognitive function in patients with major depression.

Neurocognitive Dynamics of Prosodic Salience over Semantics during Explicit and Implicit Processing of Basic Emotions in Spoken Words.

How language mediates emotional perception and experience is poorly understood. The present event-related potential (ERP) study examined the explicit and implicit processing of emotional speech to differentiate the relative influences of communication channel, emotion category and task type in the prosodic salience effect. Thirty participants (15 women) were presented with spoken words denoting happiness, sadness and neutrality in either the prosodic or semantic channel. They were asked to judge the emotional content (explicit task) and speakers' gender (implicit task) of the stimuli. Results indicated that emotional prosody (relative to semantics) triggered larger N100, P200 and N400 amplitudes with greater delta, theta and alpha inter-trial phase coherence (ITPC) and event-related spectral perturbation (ERSP) values in the corresponding early time windows, and continued to produce larger LPC amplitudes and faster responses during late stages of higher-order cognitive processing. The relative salience of prosodic and semantics was modulated by emotion and task, though such modulatory effects varied across different processing stages. The prosodic salience effect was reduced for sadness processing and in the implicit task during early auditory processing and decision-making but reduced for happiness processing in the explicit task during conscious emotion processing. Additionally, across-trial synchronization of delta, theta and alpha bands predicted the ERP components with higher ITPC and ERSP values significantly associated with stronger N100, P200, N400 and LPC enhancement. These findings reveal the neurocognitive dynamics of emotional speech processing with prosodic salience tied to stage-dependent emotion- and task-specific effects, which can reveal insights into understanding language and emotion processing from cross-linguistic/cultural and clinical perspectives.

How to look unique

No two snowflakes are alike — each one is unique, with its own distinct properties. But our visual experience often fails to reflect this: If we view an array of snowflakes, for example, it may be difficult to recognize the distinctness of each individual, even if they truly are unique at bottom. What, then, *does* make an object look unique — i.e., most different from its peers? Here, 5 experiments (N=336) explore a deep connection between visual complexity and the experience of uniqueness. We algorithmically generated random-looking shapes across varying complexity levels, based on their skeletal surprisal. In E1, subjects dragged-and-dropped the shapes to place similar objects near one another and dissimilar objects far from one another. Remarkably, both highly simple and highly complex shapes were placed closer to one another on average, whereas medially-complex shapes showed the greatest overall dispersion; in other words, sets of medially-complex objects were judged as having the most unique members. To explore the nature of this quadratic pattern, four follow-up experiments targeted different stages of cognitive processing. We found this same quadratic pattern in another conceptually-laden task (E2), in which subjects were shown a named object and decided which other objects would have the same name; we found that medially-complex objects were least likely to be given similar names, as compared to highly complex objects and highly simple objects. Intriguingly, however, this quadratic pattern did *not* appear in more rapid perceptual processes, including tests of discrimination (E3), change detection (E4), and visual search (E5) — which all showed linear relationships between complexity and performance. The findings suggest a role for complexity in visual uniqueness that evolves through the hierarchy of cognitive processing, whereby medially-complex objects are seen as the most unique objects in higher-level processes, whereas simple objects are most distinctive in lower-level processes.

How do extrinsic cues influence consumers' online hotel booking decisions? An event-related potential experiment.

Booking decision is a typical decision-making behavior in hospitality, while the neural processing of it is still unclear. To address this issue, with the help of event-related potential (ERP), this work uncovered the neural mechanism of the influence of two extrinsic cues, namely, brand familiarity (familiar vs. unfamiliar) and online reviews (positive vs. negative) on online hotel booking decisions. Behavioral results indicated that the booking rate under the condition of positive reviews was higher than that of negative reviews. In addition, the response time in the case of familiar brands was longer than that of unfamiliar brands. ERP results showed that the P200 amplitude of familiar brands was smaller than that of unfamiliar brands, while for the late positive potential amplitude, the opposite was the case. It is suggested that in the early stage of cognitive processing, unfamiliar brands evoke more automatic and unconscious attention while in the later stage, familiar brands attract more conscious attention. This study also found that the N400 amplitude of negative online reviews was larger than that of positive online reviews, indicating that negative stimuli can result in a larger emotional conflicts than that of positive stimuli. This study provides new insights into the neural mechanism of online booking decisions in the hospitality.