The Time Course of Information Processing During Eye Direction Perception.

Gaze directed at the observer (direct gaze) is a highly salient social signal. Despite the existence of a preferential orientation toward direct gaze, none of the studies carried out so far seem to have explicitly studied the time course of information processing during gaze direction judgment. In an eye direction judgment task, participants were presented with a sketch of a face.

Is it really on your hand? Spontaneous sensations are not peripheral sensations - Evidence from able-bodied individuals and a phantom limb syndrome patient.

Among other bodily signals, the perception of sensations arising spontaneously on the skin with no external triggers contributes to body awareness. The topic of spontaneous sensations (SPS) being quite recent in the literature, there is still a debate whether this phenomenon is elicited by peripheral cutaneous units' activity underlying tactile perception or originates directly from central mechanisms. In a first experiment, we figured that, if SPS depended on peripheral afferents, their perception on the glabrous hand should relate to the hand tactile sensitivity.

Normative Data for a Neuropsychological Test Battery in the French Aging Population: 20-Year Follow-Up From the "PROgnostic OF Cardiovascular and Cerebrovascular Events" Study.

Objective: The study aimed to present relevant norms for the evaluation of pathological aging in the French population over a 20-year period, utilizing the "PROgnostic OF cardiovascular and cerebrovascular events" test and questionnaire.

Methods: Three neuropsychological evaluations were administered over 20 years with 929 participants at the first cognitive evaluation (62-69 years old), 631 at the second (71-78 years old), and 293 at the third (81-88 years old). The tests and questionnaires were administered in the following order: McNair's Cognitive Complaints Questionnaire, Depression Questionnaire of Pichot, Mini Mental State Examination, Free and Cued Selective Reminding test, Benton Visual Retention Test, Digit-Symbol Substitution Test of the WAIS-III, Trail Making Test, Stroop Test, Verbal Fluency, and the Similarities subtest of the WAIS-III.

A new scale for the screening of childhood early psychotic symptoms.

This study aimed to develop a new scale, the Early Psychotic Symptoms screening scale (EPSy), to assess the prodromes of psychotic symptoms in children aged 4 to 13 years. Two versions were proposed: one to assess the child's current behavior and one to assess the child's behavior when he/she was 2 years old. The second aim of this study was to investigate the presence of these symptoms at the age of 2 years and their evolution up to the child's current age.

Cues to body-related distortions and hallucinations? Spontaneous sensations correlate with EEG oscillatory activity recorded at rest in the somatosensory cortices.

Body awareness may arise in the total absence of sensory input, as suggested by the spontaneous occurrence of normal and pathological (i.e., hallucinatory) bodily sensations.

Interoception and social cognition in chronic low back pain: a common inference disturbance? An exploratory study.

Lower interoceptive abilities are a characteristic of chronic pain conditions. Social support plays an important role in chronic low back pain (cLBP) but social cognitive skills have rarely been investigated. This study aimed to characterize interoceptive and social cognitive abilities in cLBP and to study the relationship between both domains that have been brought closer together by brain predictive coding models.

Eye Direction Detection and Perception as Premises of a Social Brain: A Narrative Review of Behavioral and Neural Data.

The eyes and the gaze are important stimuli for social interaction in humans. Impaired recognition of facial identity, facial emotions, and inference of the intentions of others may result from difficulties in extracting information relevant to the eye region, mainly the direction of gaze. Therefore, a review of these data is of interest.

Visuospatial working memory abilities and spontaneous sensations perception.

Body awareness arises when attending to and maintaining awareness of visuospatial body representations. By the same token, focussing on representations transfers them to working memory. Body awareness and working memory seemingly rely on similar processes and recruit common parietal areas involved in perception.

Positive and negative urgency as a single coherent construct: Evidence from a large-scale network analysis in clinical and non-clinical samples.

Aims: Negative and positive urgency are emotion-related impulsivity traits that are thought to be transdiagnostic factors in psychopathology. However, it has recently been claimed that these two traits are closely related to each other and that considering them separately might have limited conceptual and methodological value. The present study aimed to examine whether positive and negative urgency constructs constitute separate impulsivity traits.

Feeling Oneself Requires Embodiment: Insights From the Relationship Between Own-Body Transformations, Schizotypal Personality Traits, and Spontaneous Bodily Sensations.

Subtle bodily sensations such as itching or fluttering that occur in the absence of any external trigger (i.e., spontaneous sensations, or SPS) may serve to locate the spatial boundaries of the body.

To the self and beyond: Arousal and functional connectivity of the temporo-parietal junction contributes to spontaneous sensations perception.

The temporoparietal junction (TPJ), along with the anterior insula (AI) and the extrastriate body area (EBA), play a major part in embodiment and self-awareness. However, these connections also appear to be frequently engaged in arousal and attentional processing of external events. Considering that these networks may focus attention both toward and away from the self, we set to investigate how they contribute to the perception of spontaneous sensations (SPS), a common phenomenon related to self-awareness and mediated by both interoceptive and attentional processes.

Complexity of interruptions: Evidence supporting a non-interruption-based theory.

Interruptions are known to be pervasive and harmful for concentration. It is also known that many factors can influence their effect, such as the complexity of the interrupting task. Less, however, is known about the processes underlying the resumption of the primary task, especially if the interrupting task is complex.

Attention in schizophrenia: Impaired inhibitory control, faulty attentional resources, or both?

While the literature regarding the existence of difficulties in inhibition in schizophrenia is relatively consistent, it is not clear whether these difficulties reflect any specific deficit in an inhibitory control process or whether they are the result of deficits in the systems that regulate inhibitory control, such as attentional resources. This also raises the issue of attentional resources in schizophrenia, which offers a somewhat puzzling and sometimes contradictory picture. In this study, these issues were investigated by means of a paradigm in which the need for inhibitory control and the need for correct allocation of attentional resources varied parametrically.

What do error patterns in processing facial expressions, social interaction scenes and vocal prosody tell us about the way social cognition works in children with 22q11.2DS?

Impairments in social cognition have been frequently described in 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (22q11.2DS) and are thought to be a hallmark of difficulties in social interactions.

Pain and Distraction According to Sensory Modalities: Current Findings and Future Directions.

Background: This review discusses the findings in the literature on pain and distraction tasks according to their sensory modality. Distraction tasks have been shown to reduce (experimentally induced) acute pain and chronic pain. This can be influenced by nature and by the sensory modalities used in the distraction tasks.

Response Inhibition as a Function of Movement Complexity and Movement Type Selection.

This study aims to determine whether response inhibition shows the same degree of effectiveness for two sources of motor complexity: (1) Movement complexity, which is measured through two actions with different motor requirements (simple lifting action vs. complex reaching action), and (2) Movement type selection, which is measured in movements performed separately (no active-movement type selection) vs. selectively (active-movement type selection).

First-order Affective Theory of Mind in Persons with Alzheimer's Disease and in Healthy Older Adults.

"Theory of Mind" (ToM) is the capacity to deduce other persons' cognitive and emotional states. Studies investigating affective ToM in healthy older adults and in persons with Alzheimer's disease have reported contradictory results, although evidence indicates that advanced age (Ruffman, Henry, Livingstone, & Phillips, 2008) and Alzheimer's disease (Elferink, van Tilborg, & Kessels, 2015) do not affect the ability to identify or infer different emotions to the same extent. To evaluate affective ToM abilities in these populations, we asked 63 individuals (17 with Alzheimer's disease) to infer the emotional states of characters presented without facial details in emotional situations.

How to detect the invisible? Investigating the role of the extrageniculate pathways in the salience-based progression of attention using moving S-cone items.

Visual attention progresses from the most to the least salient item until a target is found. We explored whether and how the extrageniculate pathways participate in this progression when salience is built on motion signals. Because there is a disynaptic extrageniculate pathway that conveys motion signals to the cortex and because recent studies suggest that motion-related attentional effects rely not on motion per se but on motion-energy (i.

Pain and emotion as predictive factors of interoception in fibromyalgia.

Introduction: This study investigated interoception in fibromyalgia (FM), a disorder characterized by chronic pain accompanied by mood deregulation. Based on observations on the relationship between somatosensory processing and pain in FM and considering the affective symptoms of this disorder, we tested in FM three dimensions of interoception: interoceptive accuracy (IA), interoceptive awareness (IAW) and interoceptive sensibility (IS).

Materials And Methods: Twenty-one female FM patients (M = 50.

Failures Due to Interruptions or Distractions: A Review and a New Framework.

Interruptions of ongoing activities have spread since the development of and global increase in technology use and the general speeding in pace we all experience every day. Their negative effects are well known: decline in performance and emotional distress. However, the literature still needs to shed light on the exact cognitive mechanisms involved in the way users decide to reply to an interruption, on the effects of interruptions of different durations, and on factors influencing reactivation of task schemata and goals at resumption.

Resting heart rate: A physiological predicator of lie detection ability.

This study explored a psychophysiological measure, Resting Heart Rate (RHR), as a predicator of the ability to detect lies. RHR was recorded for 1min and followed by a deception detection task in which participants were required to judge 24 videos of people describing a real-life event (50% truthful, 50% deceptive). Multiple regression analyses showed that, among other individual characteristics, only RHR predicted the ability to distinguish truth from lies.

Pain dilates time perception.

We have all experienced that time seems stretched during unpleasant situations. While there is evidence of subjective time overestimation when perceiving external unpleasant stimuli, no study has measured the dilation of time when individuals experience an unpleasant situation in their own body. Here we measured the time dilation induced by a painful homeostatic deviance using temporal bisection task.

Thoughts and sensations, twin galaxies of the inner space: The propensity to mind-wander relates to spontaneous sensations arising on the hands.

Sensations and thoughts have been described as potentially related to self-awareness. We therefore asked whether sensations that arise in the absence of external triggers, i.e.

Attention and Executive Disorders in Neurofibromatosis 1: Comparison Between NF1 With ADHD Symptomatology (NF1 + ADHD) and ADHD Per Se.

To compare children with Neurofibromatosis type 1 and associated ADHD symptomatology (NF1 + ADHD) with children having received a diagnosis of ADHD without NF1. The idea was that performance differences in tasks of attention between these two groups would be attributable not to the ADHD symptomatology, but to NF1 alone. One group of children with NF1 + ADHD ( = 32), one group of children with ADHD ( = 31), and one group of healthy controls ( = 40) participated in a set of computerized tasks assessing intensive, selective, and executive aspects of attention.

Exploring visual attention functions of the human extrageniculate pathways through behavioral cues.

Over the past few decades, evidence has accumulated showing that, at subcortical levels, visual attention depends partly on the extrageniculate neural pathways, that is, those pathways that bypass the lateral geniculate nucleus and circumvent the primary visual cortex. Working in concert with neuroscience, experimental psychology has contributed considerably to the understanding of the role these pathways play through the use of 3 behavioral cues: nasal-temporal asymmetries, responses to S-cone stimuli, and responses to perceptually suppressed stimuli. In this article, after presenting the extrageniculate pathways and the role of each of the component structures in visual attention, we review findings from studies that have used these behavioral cues, as well as what they tell us about the role of the extrageniculate pathways in visual attention.