Temporal Locus Research Articles

Lifestyle Model in Regions with Extreme Environmental and Climate Conditions

The article introduces an analysis of human psychology in extreme conditions. On the one hand, scientific interest to extremology, i.e., the effect of extreme factors on people, is growing. On the other side, this analysis revealed a lack of empirical data on cognitive dynamics before, during, and after an extreme situation, as well as after spending a long time in extreme environmental and climate conditions. The research objective was to study the lifestyle of people (n = 66) who live in regions with extreme environmental and climate conditions. The theoretical analysis and the empirical data made it possible to construct a lifestyle model. Its structure consisted of core, peripheral, and background semantic layers. The core structure included balanced temporal continuum, practical activity, personal activity, and basic lifestyle. The temporal locus became disrupted if the core lifestyle structures were out of balance. Fatalism and fixation on the past led to negative reassessment of one’s life, which could be compensated by activating one’s inner resources and endowing semantic layers with a positive context.

Temporal dynamics of form and meaning in morphologically complex word processing: An ERP study on Korean inflected verbs

The word stem is distinguished as the core component in verb inflections that envelopes essential semantic and syntactic properties, playing a central role in word processing. In the present study, in order to find the role of form and meaning during the visual recognition of morphologically complex words, the effect of the stem length of inflected Korean verbs was examined in an event-related potential (ERP) lexical decision experiment. Additionally, a potential modulation of whole-word frequency in morphological effect was investigated in order to locate the temporal locus of sublexical (i.e., morphological) and lexico-semantic processing. Behavioral results showed that lexical decision times were faster for targets with shorter stem length compared to targets with identical word length but longer stem length. A significant interaction between the whole-word frequency and stem length was also found, in which stem length effect was not significant in words with high frequency. The ERP data revealed corollary results; the frequency effect emerged as early as N100, followed by significant modulations of N250, N400, and P600 components. The stem length effect was demonstrated in latency ranges N250, N400, and N400. In the N400 component, the interaction of two factors was revealed in which stem length effect shown only in the medium- and low-word frequency levels, but not in the high-frequency level. Taken together, the present data provide evidence for simultaneous activation of morphological and lexico-semantic information in early visual word processing after scanning the whole-form of a word. The results are discussed in terms of the current models of morphologically complex word processing.

The time course of holistic processing is similar for face and non-face Gestalt stimuli.

There is evidence that holistic processing of faces and other stimuli rich in Gestalt perceptual grouping cues recruit overlapping mechanisms at early processing stages, but not at later stages where faces and objects of expertise likely overlap. This has led to suggestions of dual pathways supporting holistic processing; an early stimulus-based pathway (supporting processing of stimuli rich in perceptual grouping cues) and an experience-based pathway (supporting processing of object of expertise), with both pathways supporting face processing. Holistic processing markers are present when upright faces are presented for as little as 50-ms. If the overlap between holistic processing of faces and stimuli rich in grouping cues occurs early in processing, markers of holistic processing for these Gestalt stimuli should be present as early as those for faces. In Experiment 1, we investigate the time-course of the emergence of holistic processing markers for face and non-face Gestalt stimuli. The emergence of these markers for faces and the Gestalt stimuli was strikingly similar; both emerged with masked presentations as little as 50-ms. In Experiment 2, where the stimulus presentation was not masked, thus the presentation duration, but not the post-presentation perceptual processing, was constrained, patterns of holistic processing for these stimuli still did not diverge. These findings are consistent with an early, and possibly extended, temporal locus for the overlap in the holistic processing of faces and non-face stimuli rich in grouping cues.

Electrophysiological dynamics of visuocortical processing in hoarding disorder.

Individuals with hoarding disorder (HD) typically perform worse than peers on neuropsychological tasks involving visual perception. Functional neuroimaging shows diffusely increased activity in the visual cortex, consistent with inefficient visual processing in HD. The temporal locus of these inefficiencies in HD is unknown. This study examined the temporal unfolding of visual event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to help better define the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying visual dysfunction in HD. Thirty-three individuals with HD and 35 healthy controls (HC) were assessed using a 64-channel EEG during a modified flanker task. Permutation-controlled analyses were conducted to detect group differences in visual evoked ERPs on a millisecond-to-millisecond basis. Bayesian ANCOVAs and linear regressions that included hoarding and age were conducted to identify the best-fit model for the identified VEPs, compared to a null model that included depression and anxiety severity. Three temporal regions (175ms, 270ms, and 440ms), showed differences in amplitude between HD and HC and were consistent with ERP components N1, P1/N2, and a late negative slow wave (LNSW), respectively. After controlling for depression and anxiety, HD demonstrated an enhanced ERP amplitude at N1 and an attenuated amplitude in LNSW compared to HC but did not show differences at P1/N2. For the N1 and LNSW, there was also a primary effect of the interaction between hoarding and age. This study indicates that altered visuocortical reactivity in HD first occurs at the level of visuocortical processing after 170ms, indicating alterations of middle and later, but not early, processing in occipitotemporal visual cortex.

Temporal locus of phonological information processing during Korean visual word recognition: ERP evidence of the irregular words

Temporal locus of phonological information processing during Korean visual word recognition: ERP evidence of the irregular words

The unnoticed interictal disphoric disorder

IntroductionPsychiatric morbidity in refractory epilepsy is frequent and has a negative influence on quality of life. Treatment-refractory epileptic patients are at higher risk of developing psychiatric disturbances. The interictal dysphoric disorder (IDD) has been described as a pleomorphic pattern of symptoms claimed to be typical of patients with epilepsy. It is characterized by 3/8 symptoms: depressive mood, anergia, pain, insomnia, fear, anxiety, irritability, and euphoric mood.ObjectivesTo provide evidence that psychiatric morbidity is high in refractory epilepsy and to describe associations to IDD.AimsThe present study aims to show that there are typical psychiatric conditions in epilepsy that can be unnoticed.MethodsWe cross-sectional analyzed the psychopathologic outcomes of patients with refractory epilepsy. The assessments methods included SCID for DSM-IV and clinical interview for epileptic specific psychiatric conditions.ResultsThe sample consists of 153 patients, with a mean age of 37. A total of 42.5% were males. One or more Axis I diagnoses was seen in 38% of the patients. The most common condition was IDD (27.1%), followed by affective and anxiety disorders (22 and 15.3% respectively). Considering patients with IDD, we found differences in locus (P = 0.001) (present in 34.3% of non-stablished locus, 8.6% of extra-temporal locus and 57.1% of temporal locus) but not with hemisphere, sex, type of crises, treatment. We neither found correlation with age, number of crisis or number of treatments.ConclusionsPsychiatric comorbidities as IDD do not appear in the DSM-IV but are prevalent and could be related with temporal locus.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

L’Écriture de l’abandon: esthétique carmélitaine de l’œuvre romanesque de Georges Bernanos. Par Philippe Richard

Like his intellectual precursor Charles Péguy, Georges Bernanos is one of those major French authors now almost entirely unread by English-speaking academics. It is a tremendous shame, especially when there is so much still to be said about him, as Philippe Richard’s recent book amply demonstrates. Richard’s work deserves a place alongside that of Monique Gosselin, William Bush, and even Michel Estève for the magisterial and comprehensive way in which it synthesizes previous scholarship on Bernanos’s fictional writing and elevates it with a new hypothesis repeatedly and thoroughly tested. Acknowledging previous studies of Bernanos’s fascination with sanctity, anguish, and existential crisis, Richard plunges into the sources of Carmelite spirituality that offer again and again illumination about Bernanos’s narrative structures and even his expressive armoury. Here, Bernanos’s literary exploration of le vide and le néant, seemingly anticipated by Mallarmé and others, is shown to correlate strongly with, if not actually to be rooted in, what Carmelite spirituality describes as the dark nights of the senses and the soul. Throughout the book, Richard traces the intertextual pathways between biblical passages, commentaries thereon from John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, and Thérèse de Lisieux, and countless pages from Bernanos’s fictional œuvre. Richard impresses with his total command of the primary sources, and his scholarly awareness of the markers others have put down in the critical sand. In several fulsome appendices, he provides us with some of his analytical findings in detail, pinpointing where Bernanos uses Carmelite concepts such as l’abandon and la douceur, and their various cognates. On a deeper level, Richard runs counter to some Bernanos critics who are simply determined to nail the latter’s colours to the mast of modernity. According to the hypothesis of Bernanos the Carmelite, the experience of le vide or le néant is not an end in itself, a seedbed for mere literary creativity, nor even sincerely anguished expressivism, but part of a well-known Carmelite journey from the arid love of self to the fruitful love of God. From this starting point, Richard identifies in Bernanos’s writing an aesthetic of prayer, leading to a range of theologically inspired stylistics, all finding their fulfilment in the narrative implications of the night of Holy Saturday. In this last perspective, the night in Bernanos is not only the dark night of the senses and the soul: it is primordially the dark night of the separation of the Father and the Son that precedes the Resurrection. Here readers will detect the influence of Hans Urs von Balthasar for whom Samedi saint was the temporal locus for a dramatique divine (Mysterium Paschale (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970)). In other words, Richard’s interpretation shows Bernanos to be fully in line with so much of the Catholic literary revival of the Belle Époque, whose collective project was to render divine agency imaginable once more. In his conclusion Richard evokes the possibility of extending his analysis regarding the musical threads in Bernanos’s imagination. It is to be hoped this next work will not be long in coming.

Temporal Locus of the Influence of Phonological Information during Korean Visual Word Recognition : Event-Related Potential Evidences of Homophone

Temporal Locus of the Influence of Phonological Information during Korean Visual Word Recognition : Event-Related Potential Evidences of Homophone

Object individuation and compensation in healthy aging

Theories on neural compensation suggest that aged participants overactivate the brain areas involved in a task to compensate for the age-related decline. In this electrophysiological study, we investigated the temporal locus of neural overactivation in aging during multiple target processing. We measured performance and three event-related brain potential responses (N1, N2pc, and contralateral delay activity) in young and old adults, while they enumerated a variable number (1–4) of targets presented in an easy (distractor absent) or difficult (distractor present) condition. The main results indicated that although N2pc (∼200 ms) increased in amplitude in the distractor-present condition in the young group, no modulation occurred for the old group. Old participants were associated with larger N2pc amplitudes than young participants in the distractor-absent condition, where both groups had comparable levels of accuracy. These effects were not present for N1 and contralateral delay activity. Overall, the data suggest that in enumeration, aging is associated with compensatory effects that rely on the selection mechanism responsible for target individuation.

Time Time Time

If you were a neoclassical economist, the most dominant strategy to maximize your life would be to know or control you point of death and spend your last penny the minute before exodus, according to the standard neoclassical rules. However, if you are human and heterodox economist, you realize, the world does not function this way. If it were efficient to know your point of death, evolution would have found a biological way to program a conscientious knowledge of the point of death in human. It is the miracle of life that our last day remains unknown and this unknown point of cessation creates opportunity to care beyond one’s own life span. Life is not a zero-sum game discounted from your point of death, but also the length of time having lived, so the past, shapes our discounting. The following paper argues that general discounting theory is always forward looking but never considers how your past experiences, call it learning, as well as the length of your life passed, may stretch the focus of discounting. Adopting a theory that explains discounting beyond one’s prospective time of death and integrating the notion of past time of being stretching the focus of social care may help explaining why young people, who have a rather narrow past time horizon, are more prone to engage in myopic behavior (e.g., take drugs, save less), whereas older people whose discounting may draw on a long history of past experiences, tend to engage in discounting beyond their prospective natural existence and embrace long-term social care (e.g., for climate stability, charity for future generations). Overall, finding the miracle of life in an unknown point of death is a novel heterodox strategy to explain discounting behavior in a real-world relevant way. Pointing at the necessity to include one’s own history and experience into standard neoclassical economic discounting theory, spearheads heterodox economics by opening a detected black box of forward-looking discounting behavioral economics’ decision making fallibility predicaments. Shedding light on the importance of integrating backward looking aspects in discounting and the temporal locus determining a diversified range of experiences setting the stage for future social care beyond one’s own existence will grant opportunities to imbue intergenerational equity in mankind.

Neural markers for immediate performance accuracy in a Stroop color-word matching task: an event-related potentials analysis.

The present study examined the neural markers measured in event-related potentials (ERPs) for immediate performance accuracy during a cognitive task with less conflict, i.e., a Stroop color-word matching task, in which participants were required to judge the congruency of two feature dimensions of a stimulus. In an effort to make ERP components more specific to distinct underlying neural substrates, recorded EEG signals were firstly dissolved into multiple independent components (ICs) using independent component analysis (ICA). Thereafter, individual ICs with prominent sensory- or cognitive-related ERP components were selected to separately reconstruct scalp EEG signals at representative channels, from which ERP waveforms were built, respectively. Statistical comparisons on amplitudes of stimulus-locked ERP components, i.e., prefrontal P2 and N2, parietal P3, bilateral occipital P1 and N1, revealed significant reduced P3 amplitude in error trials than in correct trials. In addition, significant evident ERN was also observed in error trials but not in correct trials. Considering the temporal locus of semantic conflict in the present task, we concluded that reduced P3 amplitude in error trials reflect impaired resolving process of semantic conflict, which further lead to a performance error in the Stroop color-word matching task.

Semantic size of abstract concepts: it gets emotional when you can't see it.

Size is an important visuo-spatial characteristic of the physical world. In language processing, previous research has demonstrated a processing advantage for words denoting semantically “big” (e.g., jungle) versus “small” (e.g., needle) concrete objects. We investigated whether semantic size plays a role in the recognition of words expressing abstract concepts (e.g., truth). Semantically “big” and “small” concrete and abstract words were presented in a lexical decision task. Responses to “big” words, regardless of their concreteness, were faster than those to “small” words. Critically, we explored the relationship between semantic size and affective characteristics of words as well as their influence on lexical access. Although a word’s semantic size was correlated with its emotional arousal, the temporal locus of arousal effects may depend on the level of concreteness. That is, arousal seemed to have an earlier (lexical) effect on abstract words, but a later (post-lexical) effect on concrete words. Our findings provide novel insights into the semantic representations of size in abstract concepts and highlight that affective attributes of words may not always index lexical access.

Visual perspective and the characteristics of mind wandering

When the mind wanders away from the here-and-now toward imaginary events, it typically does so from one of two visual vantage points—a first-person perspective (i.e., the world is seen as it is in everyday life) or a third-person perspective (i.e., the world is seen from the viewpoint of an outside observer). While extant evidence has detailed consequences that ensue from the utilization of these distinct points of view, less is known about their more basic properties. Here, we investigated the prevalence, demographics and qualities associated with the visual perspective that people spontaneously adopt when the mind wanders. The results from a cross-cultural survey (N = 400) revealed that almost half of the participants (46%) typically utilize a third-person perspective when mind wandering. Further, culture and gender were shown to impact the distribution of first- and third-person imagers. Specifically, a first-person perspective was more common among participants from Western nations and females, while participants from Eastern cultures resonated more strongly with a third-person perspective. Moreover, these factors were also shown to impact qualities (e.g., temporal locus, vividness) of mental imagery. Taken together, the current findings elucidate the prevalence of first- and third-person visual perspectives and detail individual differences that influence the qualia of mind wandering.

Semantic Conflict Processing in the Color-Word Stroop and the Emotional Stroop

With the aim of establishing the temporal locus of the semantic conflict in color-word Stroop and emotional Stroop phenomena, we analyzed the Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) elicited by nonwords, incongruent and congruent color words, colored words with positive and negative emotional valence, and colored words with neutral valence. The incongruent, positive, negative, and neutral stimuli produced interference in the behavioral response to the color of the stimuli. The P150/N170 amplitude was sensitive to the semantic equivalence of both dimensions of the congruent color words. The P3b amplitude was smaller in response to incongruent color words and to positive, negative, and neutral colored words than in response to the congruent color words and colored nonwords. There were no differences in the ERPs induced in response to colored words with positive, negative, and neutral valence. Therefore, the P3b amplitude was sensitive to interference from the semantic content of the incongruent, positive, negative, and neutral words in the color-response task, independently of the emotional content of the colored words. In addition, the P3b amplitude was smaller in response to colored words with positive, negative, and neutral valence than in response to the incongruent color words. Overall, these data indicate that the temporal locus of the semantic conflict generated by the incongruent color words (in the color-word Stroop task) and by colored words with positive, negative, and neutral valence (in the emotional Stroop task) appears to occur in the range 300–450 ms post-stimulus.

Emotion words affect eye fixations during reading.

Emotion words are generally characterized as possessing high arousal and extreme valence and have typically been investigated in paradigms in which they are presented and measured as single words. This study examined whether a word's emotional qualities influenced the time spent viewing that word in the context of normal reading. Eye movements were monitored as participants read sentences containing an emotionally positive (e.g., lucky), negative (e.g., angry), or neutral (e.g., plain) word. Target word frequency (high or low) was additionally varied to help determine the temporal locus of emotion effects, with interactive results suggesting an early lexical locus of emotion processing. In general, measures of target fixation time demonstrated significant effects of emotion and frequency as well as an interaction. The interaction arose from differential effects with negative words that were dependent on word frequency. Fixation times on emotion words (positive or negative) were consistently faster than those on neutral words with one exception-high-frequency negative words were read no faster than their neutral counterparts. These effects emerged in the earliest eye movement measures, namely, first and single fixation duration, suggesting that emotionality, as defined by arousal and valence, modulates lexical processing. Possible mechanisms involved in processing emotion words are discussed, including automatic vigilance and desensitization, both of which imply a key role for word frequency. Finally, it is important that early lexical effects of emotion processing can be established within the ecologically valid context of fluent reading.

Efeitos dos intervalos de tempo de apresentação de conhecimento de resultados (CR) na aquisição de habilidades motoras

O aspecto temporal do Conhecimento de Resultados (CR) é composto por três intervalos: pré-CR, pós-CR e o intervalo intertentativas. Um problema sobre este tópico é que a manipulação de um intervalo implica na alteração dos outros, o que sugere uma análise conjunta desses intervalos. O presente estudo investigou os efeitos dos intervalos de tempo de apresentação de CR na aquisição de habilidades motoras. Foi utilizada uma tarefa de posicionamento manual, que consistia em transportar três bolas de tênis entre seis recipientes em ordem e tempo alvo pré-estipulados. O instrumento continha uma plataforma com seis recipientes e uma central de controle ligada ao microcomputador. O estudo teve a fase de aquisição, com 30 tentativas com a sequência (4-2/5-3/6-1) e tempo alvo (3000 ms) definidos pelo experimentador. Dez minutos após o término da fase de aquisição foi aplicado o teste de transferência imediata e, após 24 horas, o teste de transferência atrasada. Ambos os testes tiveram de 15 tentativas de prática, de uma nova sequência de movimento (6-1/5-3/4-2) e tempo alvo (4000 ms), sem fornecimento de CR. Noventa universitários foram divididos em nove grupos (n = 10): três grupos com quatro segundos, três grupos com oito segundos e três grupos com 16 segundos de intervalo intertentativas, todos com intervalos pré e pós-CR distintos. Os resultados mostraram que menores intervalos intertentativas tiveram melhor desempenho nos testes. Isto sugere que o tempo para processamento de informação não deve ser longo, o que aumentaria a demanda de atenção e a exigência de memória.

The Dorsal Hippocampal Commissure: When Functionality Matters

The Dorsal Hippocampal Commissure: When Functionality Matters

Temporal regularity effects on pre-attentive and attentive processing of deviance

Temporal regularity allows predicting the temporal locus of future information thereby potentially facilitating cognitive processing. We applied event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate how temporal regularity impacts pre-attentive and attentive processing of deviance in the auditory modality. Participants listened to sequences of sinusoidal tones differing exclusively in pitch. The inter-stimulus interval (ISI) in these sequences was manipulated to convey either isochronous or random temporal structure. In the pre-attentive session, deviance processing was unaffected by the regularity manipulation as evidenced in three event-related-potentials (ERPs): mismatch negativity (MMN), P3a, and reorienting negativity (RON). In the attentive session, the P3b was smaller for deviant tones embedded in irregular temporal structure, while the N2b component remained unaffected. These findings confirm that temporal regularity can reinforce cognitive mechanisms associated with the attentive processing of deviance. Furthermore, they provide evidence for the dynamic allocation of attention in time and dissociable pre-attentive and attention-dependent temporal processing mechanisms.

Spatial serial conditioning maintained with minimal temporal contingency

Two experiments used a spatial serial conditioning paradigm to assess the effectiveness of spatially informative conditioned stimuli in eliciting tracking behavior in pigeons. The experimental paradigm consisted of the simultaneous presentation of 2 key lights (CS2 and CTRL), followed by another key light (CS1), followed by food (the unconditioned stimulus or US). CS2 and CTRL were presented in 2 of 3 possible locations, randomly assigned; CS1 was always presented in the same location as CS2. CS2 was designed to signal the spatial, but not the temporal locus of CS1; CS1 signaled the temporal locus of the US. In experiment 1, differential pecking on CS2 was observed even when CS2 was present throughout the interval between consecutive presentations of CS1, but only in a minority of pigeons; prevalence of differential pecking was enhanced when CS2 duration was halved. A control condition verified that pecking on CS2 was not due to temporal proximity between CS2 and US. Experiment 2 demonstrated the reversibility of spatial conditioning between CS2 and CTRL. Asymptotic performance never involved tracking CTRL more than CS2 for any of 16 pigeons. It is inferred that pigeons learned the spatial association between CS2 and CS1, and that temporal contingency facilitated its expression as tracking behavior.

The fading affect bias begins within 12 hours and persists for 3 months

Research has shown that the tendency for emotional affect to fade more over time for unpleasant events than for pleasant events, known as the Fading Affect Bias (FAB), increased across 3-month, 9-month and 4.5-year intervals. The current study attempted to determine the temporal locus of the FAB using the data set by Walker et al. as well as two additional data sets. All three data sets showed that the FAB was present after 1 day and persisted for 3 months, even though the affective fading for initially pleasant events slightly increased over time. Moreover, the third data set showed that the FAB was present for events occurring on the test day. Although the results challenge traditional conceptions of the FAB as a healthy coping mechanism that takes place across long periods, they fit well with the Broaden and Build Theory of positive emotions. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.