Beyond emotional similarity: The role of situation-specific motives.

It is well established that people often express emotions that are similar to those of other group members. However, people do not always express emotions that are similar to other group members, and the factors that determine when similarity occurs are not yet clear. In the current project, we examined whether certain situations activate specific emotional motives that influence the tendency to show emotional similarity.

Co-activated yet disconnected-Neural correlates of eye closures when trying to stay awake.

Spontaneous eye-closures that herald sleep onset become more frequent when we are sleep deprived. Although these are typically associated with decreased responsiveness to external stimuli, it is less clear what occurs in the brain at these transitions to drowsiness and light sleep. To investigate this, task-free fMRI of sleep-deprived participants was acquired.

Increased Automaticity and Altered Temporal Preparation Following Sleep Deprivation.

Study Objectives: Temporal expectation enables us to focus limited processing resources, thereby optimizing perceptual and motor processing for critical upcoming events. We investigated the effects of total sleep deprivation (TSD) on temporal expectation by evaluating the foreperiod and sequential effects during a psychomotor vigilance task (PVT). We also examined how these two measures were modulated by vulnerability to TSD.

Sleep deprivation reduces the rate of rapid picture processing.

Object recognition becomes impaired at faster presentation rates and here we show the neuroanatomical foci of where this might be exacerbated by sleep deprivation (SD). Twenty healthy human participants were asked to detect a target house in serially presented house pictures that appeared at 1-15images/s. Temporal response profiles relating fMRI signal magnitude to presentation frequency were derived from task-responsive regions.

Functional imaging correlates of impaired distractor suppression following sleep deprivation.

Sleep deprivation (SD) has been shown to affect selective attention but it is not known how two of its component processes: target enhancement and distractor suppression, are affected. To investigate, young volunteers either attended to houses or were obliged to ignore them (when attending to faces) while viewing superimposed face-house pictures. MR signal enhancement and suppression in the parahippocampal place area (PPA) were determined relative to a passive viewing control condition.

Reduced visual processing capacity in sleep deprived persons.

Multiple experiments have found sleep deprivation to lower task-related parietal and extrastriate visual activation, suggesting a reduction of visual processing capacity in this state. The perceptual load theory of attention (Lavie, 1995) predicts that our capacity to process unattended distractors will be reduced by increasing perceptual difficulty of task-relevant stimuli. Here, we evaluated the effects of sleep deprivation and perceptual load on visual processing capacity by measuring neural repetition-suppression to unattended scenes while healthy volunteers attended to faces embedded in face-scene pictures.