Goal-relevant situations facilitate memory of neutral faces

The hippocampus dissociates present from past and future goals

Our brain adeptly navigates goals across time frames, distinguishing between urgent needs and those of the past or future. The hippocampus is a region known for supporting mental time travel and organizing information along its longitudinal axis, transitioning from detailed posterior representations to generalized anterior ones. This study investigates the role of the hippocampus in distinguishing goals over time: whether the hippocampus encodes time regardless of detail or abstraction, and whether the hippocampus preferentially activates its anterior region for temporally distant goals (past and future) and its posterior region for immediate goals. We use a space-themed experiment with 7T functional MRI on 31 participants to examine how the hippocampus encodes the temporal distance of goals. During a simulated Mars mission, we find that the hippocampus tracks goals solely by temporal proximity. We show that past and future goals activate the left anterior hippocampus, while current goals engage the left posterior hippocampus. This suggests that the hippocampus maps goals using timestamps, extending its long axis system to include temporal goal organization.

The relationship between environmentally induced emotion and memory for a naturalistic virtual experience

Emotional stimuli (e.g. words, images) are often remembered better than neutral stimuli. However, little is known about how memory is affected by an environmentally induced emotional state (without any overtly emotional occurrences) - the focus of this study. Participants were randomly assigned to discovery (n = 305) and replication (n = 306) subsamples and viewed a desktop virtual environment before rating their emotions and completing objective (i.e. item, temporal-order, duration) and subjective (e.g. vividness, sensory detail, coherence) memory measures. In both samples, a Partial Least Squares Correlation analysis showed that an emotional state characterised by high negative emotion (i.e. threat, fear, anxiety) and arousal was reliably associated with better memory in both objective (i.e. item) and subjective (i.e. vividness and sensory detail) domains. No reliable associations were observed for any temporal memory measures (objective or subjective). Thus, an environmentally induced state of negative emotion corresponds with enhanced memory for indices of episodic memory pertaining to "what" happened, but not necessarily "when" it happened.

Real and Deepfake Face Recognition: An EEG Study on Cognitive and Emotive Implications

The human brain's role in face processing (FP) and decision making for social interactions depends on recognizing faces accurately. However, the prevalence of deepfakes, AI-generated images, poses challenges in discerning real from synthetic identities. This study investigated healthy individuals' cognitive and emotional engagement in a visual discrimination task involving real and deepfake human faces expressing positive, negative, or neutral emotions. Electroencephalographic (EEG) data were collected from 23 healthy participants using a 21-channel dry-EEG headset; power spectrum and event-related potential (ERP) analyses were performed. Results revealed statistically significant activations in specific brain areas depending on the authenticity and emotional content of the stimuli. Power spectrum analysis highlighted a right-hemisphere predominance in theta, alpha, high-beta, and gamma bands for real faces, while deepfakes mainly affected the frontal and occipital areas in the delta band. ERP analysis hinted at the possibility of discriminating between real and synthetic faces, as N250 (200-300 ms after stimulus onset) peak latency decreased when observing real faces in the right frontal (LF) and left temporo-occipital (LTO) areas, but also within emotions, as P100 (90-140 ms) peak amplitude was found higher in the right temporo-occipital (RTO) area for happy faces with respect to neutral and sad ones.

Hippocampal timestamp for goals

Our brain must manage multiple goals that differ in their temporal proximity. Some goals require immediate attention, while others have already been accomplished, or will be relevant later in time. Here, we examined how the hippocampus represents the temporal distance to different goals using a novel space-themed paradigm during 7T functional MRI (n=31). The hippocampus has an established role in mental time travel and a system in place to stratify information along its longitudinal axis on the basis of representational granularity. Previous work has documented a functional transformation from fine-grained, detail rich representations in the posterior hippocampus to coarse, gist-like representations in the anterior hippocampus. We tested whether the hippocampus uses this long axis system to dissociate goals based upon their temporal distance from the present. We hypothesized that the hippocampus would distinguish goals relevant for ones' current needs from those that are removed in time along the long axis, with temporally removed past and future goals eliciting increasingly anterior activation. We sent participants on a mission to Mars where they had to track goals that differed in when they needed to be accomplished. We observed a long-axis dissociation, where temporally removed past and future goals activated the left anterior hippocampus and current goals activated the left posterior hippocampus. Altogether, this study demonstrates that the timestamp attached to a goal is a key driver in where the goal is represented in the hippocampus. This work extends the scope of the hippocampus' long axis system to the goal-mapping domain.

Is knowledge emotion? The subjective emotional responses to wines depend on level of self-reported expertise and sensitivity to key information about the wine

Many factors influence emotional responses evoked by wines. Here we assessed how self-reported wine expertise, tasting condition (blind vs. informed) as well as sensitivity to key information about wines (e.g., reputation, price, grape variety) impact the subjective affective responses they evoked. We measured subjective affective responses of high and low in self-reported wine expertise consumers to 8 different wines in a blind tasting and in a tasting when information about the wines was known. After their first tasting session, we asked participants the extent to which they considered specific information when they intended to purchase wine (e.g., reputation, etc.). The more wine consumers high in self-reported expertise paid attention to the wine's reputation, the less they used feelings when tasting wines. In contrast, the more the wine tasters low in self-reported expertise paid attention to the wine's reputation, the more feelings they reported. Moreover, when considering positive and negative feelings separately, it appears that the more participants paid attention to the label, the lower the number of positive terms they tended to mention. Additionally, wine tasters low in self-reported expertise were more inclined to report positive feelings towards the wines in the informed condition and if they were sensitive to wine's reputation. In contrast, wine tasters high in self-reported expertise were less inclined to report positive feelings towards the wines in the informed condition and if they were sensitive to wine's reputation. These results hint at the importance of considering psychological theories of emotion while studying wine-elicited emotions, in particular appraisal theories of emotion.

Comment: Collective Epistemic Emotions and Individualized Learning: A Relational Account

This comment considers some potential implications of both the appraisal approaches and the framework proposed by Mascolo in regard to a mechanism that is particularly important for development: learning. More specifically, I discuss Mascolo’s account of emotion with respect to how appraisal processes can be considered relational, automatic, social, as well as the drivers of learning amplification.

How does the peak-end rule smell? Tracing hedonic experience with odours

The peak-end rule predicts that retrospective evaluations of affective events heavily depend on their most intense and last moment and imply duration neglect. It was originally proposed for negative experiences such as painful medical procedures. It is unclear, however, to what degree it also applies to positive experiences. Previously, rigorous comparisons between the two domains were limited due to the use of qualitatively different stimuli. Hence, it is not clear if the peak-end rule holds for short positive and negative experiences alike. To address these questions in a genuinely emotional domain, we conducted two experiments (n = 48 each) in which we used odours as stimuli. Participants repeatedly evaluated continuous odour sequences delivered into their noses via an olfactometer. The sequences differed in valence (positive vs. negative), length (36 vs. 72 s), and trajectory (increasing, decreasing, U-shaped, and inverse U-shaped). Results provide evidence for the peak-end rule for both positive and negative experiences alike. Results further show an overweighting of intense negative experiences for sequences that contain both pleasant and unpleasant episodes but provide little evidence for an effect of the trajectory manipulation.

Effects of hunger on emotional arousal responses and attention/memory biases

In this study, we examined how emotional arousal interacts with hunger states and the processing of food stimuli. In general, arousal enhances the processing of high-priority information at the expense of lower priority information (Mather & Sutherland, 2011). Because food has been a biologically relevant stimulus in primates throughout evolution, detecting it in the environment and remembering its location has high priority. In our study, inducing arousal enhanced attention to subsequent food stimuli. In addition, we manipulated whether participants were hungry or sated to examine how hunger states would influence emotional processing. Previous research reveals that being hungry is associated with increases in norepinephrine, a key neurotransmitter involved in the arousal response. We found that, when sated, participants showed greater pupil dilation to emotional than neutral stimuli. In contrast, when hungry, pupil dilation responses were as strong to neutral as to emotional stimuli. Thus, when hungry, participants were less effective at differentiating the intensity of arousal responses to emotional versus neutral stimuli because of high arousal responses to neutral stimuli. Memory for food stimuli was enhanced compared with memory for nonfood stimuli for all participants but especially for hungry participants. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).