Appropriately balancing potential risks versus rewards is important for affective decision-making in everyday life. Impaired affective decision-making on risk-taking tasks has been reported in individuals with dementia, but the neural correlates of such deficits, and whether they relate to neuropsychiatric symptoms, such as disinhibition and apathy, have not been directly...
A growing body of evidence has shown the key role of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) in aggressive behavior, along with the chance of modulating it by means of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). However, the functional interplay between the two cerebral hemispheres in the regulation of aggressive behavior is still unclear. To address this issue, we...
Characteristics of real-life objects, such as binocular depth, potentially yield visual processes going beyond what examinations of planar pictures as experimental cues can reveal. While virtual reality (VR) is used to approximate real-life features in experimental settings, this approach fundamentally hinges on whether the distinct modalities are processed in a similar way. To...
Learning from the emotional reaction of others is crucial in our everyday lives. We assumed that additional emotional information could be especially beneficial, when a task is difficult and the limits of working memory capacity are reached. For this reason, we examined whether a potential benefit of emotional feedback during reinforcement learning is dependent on working memory...
The role of the cerebellum in associative learning and context-updating implies involvement in learning reward-punishment contingencies. This study examined the direct contribution of the cerebellum to reward- and punishment-based reversal learning. A total of 111 healthy right-handed adult volunteers received continuous theta burst stimulation (cTBS) to either the medial...
Retrospective judgments require decision-makers to gather information over time and integrate that information into a summary statistic like the average. Many retrospective judgments require putting equal weight on early and late information, in contrast to prospective judgments that involve predicting the future and so rely more on late information. We investigate how people...
Reorientation of attention to threatening stimuli is a fundamental part of human cognition. Such interaction between cognitive and affective processes is often associated with faster response times. In the present study, the role of the right angular gyrus (AG) in reorienting to threat is examined. An exogenous spatial cueing paradigm was adopted with threatening and...
The core resting-state networks (RSNs) have been shown to be dysfunctional in individuals with internalizing disorders (IDs; e.g., anxiety, depression). Source-localised, closed-loop brain training of infraslow (≤ 0.1 Hz) EEG signals may have the potential to reduce symptoms associated with IDs and restore normal core RSN function. We conducted a pilot randomized, double-blind...
There is a need to identify neurobiological and psychosocial risk processes for postpartum depression (PPD). Previous research links low reward responsiveness with lower reported affiliation or bond to one’s infant and PPD symptoms, but the potential moderating role of reward processing in the relationship between bonding with infants and PPD has yet to be examined. The current...
Neural correlates of performance monitoring, specifically the error-related negativity (ERN), are not only sensitive to motivation, but also altered in mental disorders marked by high levels of impulsivity and compulsivity. We explored the relationship between the ERN and individual differences in impulsivity and compulsivity. A total of 221 participants were recruited along the...
Being able to quickly recognize other people’s actions lies at the heart of our ability to efficiently interact with our environment. Action recognition has been suggested to rely on the analysis and integration of information from different perceptual subsystems, e.g., for the processing of objects and scenes. However, stimulus presentation times that are required to extract...
Despite the importance of metacognition for everyday decision-making, its neural substrates are far from understood. Recent neuroimaging studies linked metacognitive processes to dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), a region known to be involved in monitoring task difficulty. dmPFC is also thought to be involved in mentalising, consistent with theoretical accounts of...
People tend to judge repeated information as more likely true compared with new information. A key explanation for this phenomenon, called the illusory truth effect, is that repeated information can be processed more fluently, causing it to appear more familiar and trustworthy. To consider the function of time in investigating its underlying cognitive and affective mechanisms...
Previous research has demonstrated that machine learning (ML) could not effectively decode passive observation of neutral versus pain photographs by using electroencephalogram (EEG) data. Consequently, the present study explored whether active viewing, i.e., requiring participant engagement in a task, of neutral and pain stimuli improves ML performance. Random forest (RF) models...
Eating is inherently social for humans. Yet, most neuroimaging studies of appetite and food-induced reward have focused on studying brain responses to food intake or viewing pictures of food alone. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure haemodynamic responses to “vicarious” feeding. The subjects (n = 97) viewed series of short videos representing...
The current study tested the hypothesis that lexical ambiguity, a common source of representational conflict during language comprehension, engages domain-general cognitive control processes that are reflected by theta-band oscillations in scalp-recorded electroencephalograms (EEG). In Experiment 1, we examined the neural signature elicited by lexically ambiguous compared to...
Anhedonia, i.e., the loss of pleasure or lack of reactivity to reward, is a core symptom of major psychiatric conditions. Altered reward processing in the striatum has been observed across mood and psychotic disorders, but whether anhedonia transdiagnostically contributes to these deficits remains unclear. We investigated associations between self-reported anhedonia and neural...
Increased intolerance of uncertainty (IU), or distress felt when encountering situations with unknown outcomes, occurs transdiagnostically across various forms of psychopathology and is targeted in therapeutic intervention. Increased intolerance of uncertainty shows overlap with symptoms of internalizing disorders, such as depression and anxiety, including negative affect and...
In a sequence, at least two aspects of information—the identity of items and their serial order—are maintained and supported by distinct working memory (WM) capacities. Verbal serial order WM is modulated by spatial processing, reflected in the Spatial Position Association of Response Codes (SPoARC) effect—the left-beginning, right-end positional association between space and...
Adolescence is a developmental period of relative volatility, where the individual experiences significant changes to their physical and social environment. The ability to adapt to the volatility of one’s surroundings is an important cognitive ability, particularly while foraging, a near-ubiquitous behaviour across the animal kingdom. As adolescents experience more volatility in...