The Orienting Response in Healthy Aging: Novelty P3 Indicates No General Decline but Reduced Efficacy for Fast Stimulation Rates.

Automatic orienting to unexpected changes in the environment is a pre-requisite for adaptive behavior. One prominent mechanism of automatic attentional control is the Orienting Response (OR). Despite the fundamental significance of the OR in everyday life, only little is known about how the OR is affected by healthy aging.

Memory detection using fMRI - does the encoding context matter?

Recent research revealed that the presentation of crime related details during the Concealed Information Test (CIT) reliably activates a network of bilateral inferior frontal, right medial frontal and right temporal-parietal brain regions. However, the ecological validity of these findings as well as the influence of the encoding context are still unclear. To tackle these questions, three different groups of subjects participated in the current study.

Effects of emotional context on memory for details: the role of attention.

It was repeatedly demonstrated that a negative emotional context enhances memory for central details while impairing memory for peripheral information. This trade-off effect is assumed to result from attentional processes: a negative context seems to narrow attention to central information at the expense of more peripheral details, thus causing the differential effects in memory. However, this explanation has rarely been tested and previous findings were partly inconclusive.

Depersonalization disorder: disconnection of cognitive evaluation from autonomic responses to emotional stimuli.

Background: Patients with depersonalization disorder (DPD) typically complain about emotional detachment. Previous studies found reduced autonomic responsiveness to emotional stimuli for DPD patients as compared to patients with anxiety disorders. We aimed to investigate autonomic responsiveness to emotional auditory stimuli of DPD patients as compared to patient controls.

Emotional arousal modulates the encoding of crime-related details and corresponding physiological responses in the Concealed Information Test.

Previous studies demonstrated that concealed crime-related memories can be validly identified using the Concealed Information Test (CIT). However, its field applicability is still debated, and it is specifically unknown how emotional arousal during a crime would influence CIT results. In the current study, emotional arousal during a mock crime and the time delay between mock crime and CIT examination were manipulated.