Attention allocation to subliminally presented affective faces in high and low social anxiety.

Attention bias to affective stimuli, particularly threatening stimuli, has been well documented, with attention bias to affective faces often reported in populations with social anxiety (SA). However, inconsistencies exist in the literature regarding the direction of the bias, with some studies reporting a bias to attend toward social threat, and others reporting a bias to avoid social threat. This variability in the attention bias literature could be related to fluctuations in how attentional resources are allocated toward social stimuli over time.

Flashing a smile: Startle eyeblink modulation by masked affective faces.

Affective faces are important stimuli with relevance to healthy and abnormal social and affective information processing. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of brief presentations of affective faces on attention and emotional state across the time course of stimulus processing, as indexed by startle eyeblink response modulation. Healthy adults were presented with happy, neutral, and disgusted male and female faces that were backward masked by neutral faces.

Deception effects on standing center of pressure.

Accurate deception detection is a desirable goal with many applications including credibility assessment, security screening, counter-terrorism, and homeland security. However, many deception detection methodologies involve intrusive sensors or other limitations that preclude their use in a covert manner. Posturography may overcome these limitations by using minimally invasive force platform technology.

Classification of body movements based on posturographic data.

The human body, standing on two feet, produces a continuous sway pattern. Intended movements, sensory cues, emotional states, and illnesses can all lead to subtle changes in sway appearing as alterations in ground reaction forces and the body's center of pressure (COP). The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that carefully selected COP parameters and classification methods can differentiate among specific body movements while standing, providing new prospects in camera-free motion identification.

The time course of face processing: startle eyeblink response modulation by face gender and expression.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of both facial expression and face gender on startle eyeblink response patterns at varying lead intervals (300, 800, and 3500ms) indicative of attentional and emotional processes. We aimed to determine whether responses to affective faces map onto the Defense Cascade Model (Lang et al., 1997) to better understand the stages of processing during affective face viewing.

Functional neuroimaging of dressing-related skills.

Restoration of motor function following stroke involves reorganization of motor output through intact pathways, with compensatory brain activity likely variable by task. One class of motor tasks, those involved in self-care, is particularly important in stroke rehabilitation. Identifying the brain areas that are engaged in self-care and how they reorganize after stroke may enable development of more effective rehabilitation strategies.

Assessment of the attention impairment in absence epilepsy: comparison of visual and auditory P300.

We report an investigation of P300 measures of information processing in patients with generalized epilepsy of the absence type and those with complex partial epilepsy. Studies have demonstrated that absence patients perform more poorly than complex partial patients on behavioral tests of sustained attention (the Continuous Performance Test, or CPT). Duncan [Duncan, C.

Infrared reflectance as an alternative to EMG for measuring prepulse inhibition of startle eyeblink.

The "gold standard" measure of the human startle eyeblink response is the ocular electromyogram (EMG). However, EMG measurement is not always feasible, as with special populations or during functional neuroimaging. We evaluated an alternative, nonelectrical, noncontact measure that uses infrared (IR) light reflected from the eye.

An irrelevant light enhances auditory detection in humans: a psychophysical analysis of multisensory integration in stimulus detection.

Physiological and behavioral studies in animal models have revealed that information from the different senses can be used synergistically to enhance the detection of objects and events. Although a great deal of evidence exists which demonstrates the synergistic use of multisensory cues in human behavior and perception, there is conflicting evidence about whether such interactions can be used to aid in stimulus detection. To examine this issue, we had volunteers indicate the presence or absence of a brief, low-intensity sound that was either presented alone or paired with a simultaneous light in a one-interval signal detection task.