Amplifying Colossal Thermal Expansion of a Martensitic Molecular Crystal through Interlayer Shear-Induced Side-Chain Liberation.

Molecular crystals capable of colossal thermal expansion (TE) are fascinating owing to their substantial and continuous volume changes and reasonably linear responses to temperature. This makes them promising candidates for micromachine applications. Macroscopic motion is driven by subtle yet cooperative movements of molecules that respond to the thermal motions of dynamic functional units.

A discrete component in visual working memory encoding.

Working memory (WM) is a central cognitive bottleneck, which has primarily been attributed to its well-known storage limit. However, relatively little is known about the processing limit during the initial memory encoding stage, which may also constrain various cognitive processes. The present study introduces a novel method using dynamic stimulus presentation and hierarchical Bayesian modeling to quantitatively estimate visual WM encoding speed.

The dynamics of attentional guidance by working memory contents.

Working memory (WM) contents can guide attention toward matching sensory information in the environment, but there are mixed findings regarding whether only a single prioritized item or multiple items held in WM can guide attention. The present study examines the limit of WM-guided attention with a novel task procedure and mouse trajectory analysis. Specifically, we introduced a perceptual-matching task utilizing the continuous estimation procedure within the maintenance interval of a WM task for one or two colors.

Contributions of global and local processing on medical image perception.

Purpose: The influential holistic processing hypothesis attributes expertise in medical image perception to cognitive processing of global gist information. However, it has remained unclear whether or how experts use rapid global impression of images for their subsequent diagnostic decisions based on the focal sign of cancer. We hypothesized that continuous-global and discrete-local processes jointly attribute to radiological experts' detection of mammogram, with different weights and temporal dynamics.

Detrimental effects of effortful physical exertion on a working memory dual-task in older adults.

Action and cognition often interact in everyday life and are both sensitive to the effects of aging. The present study tested the effects of a physical action, effortful handgrip exertion, on working memory (WM) and inhibitory control in younger and older adults. Using a novel dual-task paradigm, participants engaged in a WM task with 0 or 5-distractors under concurrent physical exertion (5% vs.

Familiarity enhances mnemonic precision but impairs mnemonic accuracy in visual working memory.

Prior stimulus familiarity has a variety of effects on visual working memory representations and processes. However, it is still unclear how familiarity interacts with the veridical correspondence between mnemonic representation and external stimuli. Here, we examined the effect of familiarity on two aspects of mnemonic correspondence, precision and accuracy, in visual working memory.

Trial-by-trial mouse trajectory predicts variance in precision across working memory representations: A critical reanalysis of Hao et al. (2021).

Multiple representations in visual working memory (VWM) can vary in mnemonic precision. This inhomogeneity of VWM precision has received some support from recent studies with the whole-report procedure, in which all memory items are recalled in free or forced orders. Recently, Hao et al.

Visual search under physical effort is faster but more vulnerable to distractor interference.

Cognition and action are often intertwined in everyday life. It is thus pivotal to understand how cognitive processes operate with concurrent actions. The present study aims to assess how simple physical effort operationalized as isometric muscle contractions affects visual attention and inhibitory control.

Schizotypy is associated with reduced mnemonic precision in visual working memory.

Background: Working memory (WM) maintains a limited amount of information over a short period of time at the service of other ongoing mental activities. Deficits in this function are often observed in schizophrenia spectrum disorders. The present study examined whether self-report schizotypy was associated with the qualitative, quantitative, or both aspects of visual WM and whether these impairments could be accounted for by sensory memory deficits and/or depressed mood in a group of non-clinical, medication-naïve participants.

The aftermath of memory retrieval for recycling visual working memory representations.

We examined the aftermath of accessing and retrieving a subset of information stored in visual working memory (VWM)-namely, whether detection of a mismatch between memory and perception can impair the original memory of an item while triggering recognition-induced forgetting for the remaining, untested items. For this purpose, we devised a consecutive-change detection task wherein two successive testing probes were displayed after a single set of memory items. Across two experiments utilizing different memory-testing methods (whole vs.

Dissociating models of visual working memory by reaction-time distribution analysis.

There have been heated debates on whether visual working memory (VWM) represents information in discrete-slots or a reservoir of flexible-resources. However, one key aspect of the models has gone unnoticed, the speed of processing when stored information in memory is assessed for accuracy. The present study evaluated contrasting predictions from the two models regarding the change detection decision times spent on the assessment of stored information by estimating the ex-Gaussian parameters from change detection RT distributions across different set sizes (2, 4, 6, or 8).

You may look unhappy unless you smile: the distinctiveness of a smiling face against faces without an explicit smile.

An expressionless face is often perceived as rude whereas a smiling face is considered as hospitable. Repetitive exposure to such perceptions may have developed stereotype of categorizing an expressionless face as expressing negative emotion. To test this idea, we displayed a search array where the target was an expressionless face and the distractors were either smiling or frowning faces.