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Determining how emotional experience influences attention is a long standing goal of cognitive psychologists. Emotion is often broken down into two main dimensions, arousal and valence. While many theories focus more on the influence of one dimension than the other, the systematic investigation of the independent influences of the two dimensions of emotion on attention has been slow. In order to examine the relevance of both aspects of emotion, and their interplay on attention simultaneously, in the current experiment we induced low (satisfaction) and high (happiness) arousal positive emotions and low (sadness) and high (anger) arousal negative emotions in subjects before having them complete an inattentional blindness (IB) test. In line with theories that focus on the role of valence, we found that negative emotions led to more IB than positive emotions, and that arousal did not influence attention. Implications of the results for the theoretical contributions of the dimensions of emotion to visual attention are discussed.

Forward predictions are crucial in motor action (e.g., catching a ball, or being tickled) but may also apply to sensory or cognitive processes (e.g., listening to distorted speech or to a foreign accent). According to the "internal forward model," the cerebellum generates predictions about somatosensory consequences of movements. These predictions simulate motor processes and prepare respective cortical areas for anticipated sensory input. Currently, there is very little evidence that a cerebellar forward model also applies to other sensory domains. In the current study, we address this question by examining the role of the cerebellum when auditory stimuli are anticipated as a consequence of a motor act. We applied an N100 suppression paradigm and compared the ERP in response to self-initiated with the ERP response to externally produced sounds. We hypothesized that sensory consequences of self-initiated sounds are precisely predicted and should lead to an N100 suppression compared with externally produced sounds. Moreover, if the cerebellum is involved in the generation of a motor-to-auditory forward model, patients with focal cerebellar lesions should not display an N100 suppression effect. Compared with healthy controls, patients showed a largely attenuated N100 suppression effect. The current results suggest that the cerebellum forms not only motor-to-somatosensory predictions but also motor-to-auditory predictions. This extends the cerebellar forward model to other sensory domains such as audition.

Different reference frames are used in daily life in order to structure the environment. The two-choice Simon task setting has been used to investigate how task-irrelevant spatial information influences human cognitive control. In recent studies, a Go/NoGo Simon task setting was used in order to divide the Simon task between a pair of participants. Yet, not only a human co-actor, but also even an attention-grabbing object can provide sufficient reference in order to reintroduce a Simon effect (SE) indicating cognitive conflict in Go/NoGo task settings. Interestingly, the SE could only occur when a reference point outside of the stimulus setup was available. The current studies exploited the dependency between different spatial reference frames (egocentric and allocentric) offered by the stimulus setup itself and the task setup (individual vs. joint Go/NoGot task setting). Two studies (Experiments 1 and 2) were carried out along with a human co-actor. Experiment 3 used an attention-grabbing object instead. The egocentric and allocentric SEs triggered by different features of the stimulus setup (global vs. local) were modulated by the task setup. When interacting with a human co-actor, an egocentric SE was found for global features of the stimulus setup (i.e., stimulus position on the screen). In contrast, an allocentric SE was yielded in the individual task setup illustrating the relevance of more local features of the stimulus setup (i.e., the manikin's ball position). Results point toward salience shifts between different spatial reference frames depending on the nature of the task setup. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two experiments studied the impact of irrelevant background faces on Go responses to imperative signals superimposed on them. Two major results were obtained. The first concerns a response time advantage of one's own face and a related advantage of familiar over unfamiliar faces. When the imperative signal was superimposed on the responding agent's own face, or the face of a sibling or friend, Go responses were faster as compared to unfamiliar faces. The second concerns the impact of social context. A slight increase of the own-face advantage was observed when the task was performed together with a co-actor. Importantly, this increase was only observed for unfamiliar, not familiar co-actors. The implications of these results are discussed in a framework for stimulus-based response selection which relies on two factors, face familiarity and face/agent compatibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hyperscanning: Most neuroimaging studies of human social cognition have focused on brain activity of single subjects. More recently, “two-person neuroimaging” has been introduced, with simultaneous recordings of brain signals from two subjects involved in social interaction. These simultaneous “hyperscanning” recordings have already been carried out with a spectrum of neuroimaging modalities, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Dual MEG Setup: We have recently developed a setup for simultaneous magnetoencephalographic (MEG) recordings of two subjects that communicate in real time over an audio link between two geographically separated MEG laboratories. Here we present an extended version of the setup, where we have added a video connection and replaced the telephone-landline-based link with an Internet connection. Our setup enabled transmission of video and audio streams between the sites with a one-way communication latency of about 130 ms. Our software that allows reproducing the setup is publicly available. Validation: We demonstrate that the audiovisual Internet-based link can mediate real-time interaction between two subjects who try to mirror each others’ hand movements that they can see via the video link. All the nine pairs were able to synchronize their behavior. In addition to the video, we captured the subjects’ movements with accelerometers attached to their index fingers; we determined from these signals that the average synchronization accuracy was 215 ms. In one subject pair we demonstrate inter-subject coherence patterns of the MEG signals that peak over the sensorimotor areas contralateral to the hand used in the task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The N1 auditory ERP and its magnetic counterpart (N1[m]) are suppressed when elicited by self-induced sounds. Because the N1(m) is a correlate of auditory event detection, this N1 suppression effect is generally interpreted as a reflection of the workings of an internal forward model: The forward model captures the contingency (causal relationship) between the action and the sound, and this is used to cancel the predictable sensory reafference when the action is initiated. In this study, we demonstrated in three experiments using a novel coincidence paradigm that actual contingency between actions and sounds is not a necessary condition for N1 suppression. Participants performed time interval production tasks: They pressed a key to set the boundaries of time intervals. Concurrently, but independently of keypresses, a sequence of pure tones with random onset-to-onset intervals was presented. Tones coinciding with keypresses elicited suppressed N1(m) and P2(m), suggesting that action-stimulus contiguity (temporal proximity) is sufficient to suppress sensory processing related to the detection of auditory events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous studies have shown that the N1 event-related potential (ERP) response is attenuated when it is elicited by self-initiated sounds. This N1 suppression effect is generally interpreted to reflect an internal prediction mechanism, which enables the discrimination of the sensory consequences of our own actions and those of others. The blocked design used in the forerunner studies (i.e., self- and externally initiated sounds presented in different blocks) seriously limits the relevance of these findings, because the N1 effect can simply be explained by contextual task differences. In the present study, self- and externally initiated sounds were mixed within blocks. N1 suppression was found, and its magnitude was even larger than that observed in a traditional blocked condition. This result supports the involvement of an internal prediction mechanism in the discrimination of the sensory consequences of one's own actions and those of others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is a widely used measure of implicit attitudes. Despite its application in various fields, the malleability of the IAT by different methodological factors has been shown frequently. In this article, we focus on two factors that potentially influence the IAT effect, but which have received either inconsistent or no support so far: the IAT version (i.e., picture-word IAT vs. word IAT) and the position of the attribute labels on the screen (i.e., the positive or negative label on the left side). In two experiments, we used the original flower-insect IAT to systematically analyse the effects of the position of attribute labels (i.e., the assignment of the positive or the negative attribute label to the left screen position) and the block order of compatible (e.g., flower and positive) and incompatible blocks (e.g., flower and negative) as between-subjects factors. Reliable IAT effects were observed for the picture-word IAT and the word IAT when calculating the IAT effect as a difference in the response times as well as when computing the recommended D Score as IAT outcome. Smaller IAT effects occurred in the picture-word IAT than in the word IAT, supporting existing literature. In addition, an effect of the position of the attribute labels on the screen was found in both experiments, resulting in larger IAT effects when the negative attribute label was positioned on the left. This effect also appeared when calculating the D Score. The study highlights the importance of methodical factors for the IAT outcome., Competing Interests: Declaration of conflicting interestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Social interactions fill our everyday life and put strong demands on our brain function. However, the possibilities for studying the brain basis of social interaction are still technically limited, and even modern brain imaging studies of social cognition typically monitor just one participant at a time. We present here a method to connect and synchronize two faraway neuromagnetometers. With this method, two participants at two separate sites can interact with each other through a stable real-time audio connection with minimal delay and jitter. The magnetoencephalographic (MEG) and audio recordings of both laboratories are accurately synchronized for joint offline analysis. The concept can be extended to connecting multiple MEG devices around the world. As a proof of concept of the MEG-to-MEG link, we report the results of time-sensitive recordings of cortical evoked responses to sounds delivered at laboratories separated by 5 km.