Classification of Known and Unknown Study Items in a Memory Task Using Single-Trial Event-Related Potentials and Convolutional Neural Networks.

This study examines the feasibility of using event-related potentials (ERPs) obtained from electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings as biomarkers for long-term memory item classification. Previous studies have identified old/new effects in memory paradigms associated with explicit long-term memory and familiarity. Recent advancements in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have enabled the classification of ERP trials under different conditions and the identification of features related to neural processes at the single-trial level.

11-month-olds recognize the teacher-student relationship.

Understanding how preverbal infants perceive and differentiate the roles of teachers and students can provide profound insights into the early stages of human learning and cognition. We thus developed a paradigm based on the task order and the interactive position to determine if infants understand teacher-student relationships. Five experiments (N = 104), reveal that, after watching the teacher agent instruct the student agent from failure to success, 11-month-old infants looked at the teacher for a longer time when they watched a new naïve agent seek information in a new ambiguous scenario.

Future optimism group based on the chronological stress view is less likely to be severe procrastinators.

Previous studies have shown that procrastinators tend to disregard the future. However, the "time view" of procrastinators, including their impressions of the future, has not been sufficiently examined. Therefore, we introduced new indices, "chronological stress view" and "chronological well-being view," which treat impressions of the past, present, and future (= time view) as time-series data via stress and well-being, respectively.

Social robots as effective language tutors for children: empirical evidence from neuroscience.

The aim of the current study was to investigate children's brain responses to robot-assisted language learning. EEG brain signals were collected from 41 Japanese children who learned French vocabularies in two groups; half of the children learned new words from a social robot that narrated a story in French using animations on a computer screen (Robot group) and the other half watched the same animated story on the screen but only with a voiceover narration and without the robot (Display group). To examine brain activation during the learning phase, we extracted EEG functional connectivity (FC) which is defined as the rhythmic synchronization of signals recorded from different brain areas.

Mother-child inter-brain synchrony during a mutual visual search task: A study of feedback valence and role.

Parent and child have been shown to synchronize their behaviors and physiology during social interactions. This synchrony is an important marker of their relationship quality and subsequently the child's social and emotional development. Therefore, understanding the factors that influence parent-child synchrony is an important undertaking.

Infants' interoception is associated with eye contact in dyadic social interactions.

Interoception, that is, the perception of visceral stimuli, is the basis of socio-emotional development. However, no studies have demonstrated the relationship between the two in infants. This study aimed to elucidate the relationship between interoception and social behavior in infants and mothers.

Neural correlates of attentional orienting with neutral and fearful gaze cues in 12-month-olds.

Infants use information on gaze direction and facial expressions for social referencing when encountering various objects in their environment. However, it remains unclear how these social cues influence attentional orienting in infants. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we investigated the neural correlates of attentional orienting cued by an averted gaze with neutral and fearful expressions in 12-month-olds.

Synergistic effects of disgust and anger on amygdala activation while recalling memories of interpersonal stress: An fMRI study.

Occurrence of an unpleasant interpersonal event in daily life may cause an individual to experience unpleasant emotions and recall memories regarding it. These emotions, manifesting in daily social interactions, are often complex and mixed. In the laboratory, autobiographical recall is frequently used to induce emotions; however, it often involves recalling memories associated with a specific discrete emotion (e.

Third-party punishment by preverbal infants.

Third-party punishment of antisocial others is unique to humans and seems to be universal across cultures. However, its emergence in ontogeny remains unknown. We developed a participatory cognitive paradigm using gaze-contingency techniques, in which infants can use their gaze to affect agents displayed on a monitor.

Passive Brain-Computer Interfaces for Enhanced Human-Robot Interaction.

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have long been seen as control interfaces that translate changes in brain activity, produced either by means of a volitional modulation or in response to an external stimulation. However, recent trends in the BCI and neurofeedback research highlight passive monitoring of a user's brain activity in order to estimate cognitive load, attention level, perceived errors and emotions. Extraction of such higher order information from brain signals is seen as a gateway for facilitation of interaction between humans and intelligent systems.

Manifesto for new directions in developmental science.

Although developmental science has always been evolving, these times of fast-paced and profound social and scientific changes easily lead to disorienting fragmentation rather than coherent scientific advances. What directions should developmental science pursue to meaningfully address real-world problems that impact human development throughout the lifespan? What conceptual or policy shifts are needed to steer the field in these directions? The present manifesto is proposed by a group of scholars from various disciplines and perspectives within developmental science to spark conversations and action plans in response to these questions. After highlighting four critical content domains that merit concentrated and often urgent research efforts, two issues regarding "how" we do developmental science and "what for" are outlined.

Timing of phase-amplitude coupling is essential for neuronal and functional maturation of audiovisual integration in adolescents.

Objective: The ability to integrate audiovisual information matures late in adolescents, but its neuronal mechanism is still unknown. Recent studies showed that phase-amplitude coupling (PAC) of neuronal oscillations, which is defined as the modulation of high-frequency amplitude by low-frequency phase, is associated with audiovisual integration in adults. Thus, we investigated how PAC develops in adolescents and whether it is related to the functional maturation of audiovisual integration.

Higher hypnotic suggestibility is associated with the lower EEG signal variability in theta, alpha, and beta frequency bands.

Variation of information in the firing rate of neural population, as reflected in different frequency bands of electroencephalographic (EEG) time series, provides direct evidence for change in neural responses of the brain to hypnotic suggestibility. However, realization of an effective biomarker for spiking behaviour of neural population proves to be an elusive subject matter with its impact evident in highly contrasting results in the literature. In this article, we took an information-theoretic stance on analysis of the EEG time series of the brain activity during hypnotic suggestions, thereby capturing the variability in pattern of brain neural activity in terms of its information content.

Association between Behavioral Ambidexterity and Brain Health.

Appropriately handling and switching exploration of novel knowledge and exploitation of existing knowledge is a fundamental element of genuine innovation in society. Moreover, a mounting number of studies have suggested that such "ambidexterity" is associated not only with organizational performance but also with the human brain. Among these reports, however, there have not been any definitive MRI-based parameters that objectively and easily evaluate such ambidexterity.

Emotion-related cerebral blood flow changes in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex: An NIRS study.

The current study examined whether cerebral blood flow (CBF) changes in the anterior ventral medial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) represent responses to emotional stimuli instead of cognitive control of emotion during distraction tasks, as suggested by our previous near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) study. The functional distinction of MPFC regions is occasionally difficult due to their multiple functions. Here, we addressed some remaining concerns from our previous distraction studies, and employed the distraction paradigm, in which negative or neutral images are presented as emotional stimuli; a rest period is included in one condition and working memory (distraction) tasks in the other.

Does watching Han Solo or C-3PO similarly influence our language processing?

Several studies have demonstrated that perceiving an action influences the subsequent processing of action verbs. However, which characteristics of the perceived action are truly determinant to enable this influence is still unknown. The current study investigated the role of the agent executing an action in this action-language relationship.

Rapid saccadic response with fearful gaze cue.

It has been shown that an averted gaze with emotional expression guides our attention toward a gazed-at location, and the effect of a gaze with fearful expression has been well-investigated. However, the findings are not consistent, and most studies used the manual response measure. Recent studies suggest that examining eye movements is more suitable to capture the early stage of the effect of threat-related stimuli on attentional process.

Subtle temporal delays of mothers' responses affect imitation learning in children: Mother-child interaction study.

The relationship between temporal contiguity of mothers' teaching behaviors and children's imitation learning was investigated. Participants (2-year-old children) observed their mothers' demonstration of using novel toys over a double television system under live and delayed conditions. The dyads normally interacted in the live condition, whereas they interacted with a 1-s time delay inserted between the children's actions and mothers' responses in the delayed condition.

Parental presence with encouragement alters feedback processing in preschoolers: An ERP study.

External feedback plays an important role in adapting to the environment; however, feedback processing in preschoolers has not been fully understood. The present event-related brain potential (ERP) study sought to understand the influence of parental presence with encouragement on feedback processing by focusing on reward positivity (RewP: mean amplitude between 200-350 ms). Five-year-old children ( = 21) completed an animal search task both alone (the alone condition) and with a parent who offered words of encouragement (the with a parent condition).

Distraction decreases prefrontal oxygenation: A NIRS study.

When near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is used to measure emotion-related cerebral blood flow (CBF) changes in the prefrontal cortex regions, the functional distinction of CBF changes is often difficult because NIRS is unable to measure neural activity in deeper brain regions that play major roles in emotional processing. The CBF changes could represent cognitive control of emotion and emotional responses to emotional materials. Supposing that emotion-related CBF changes in the prefrontal cortex regions during distraction are emotional responses, we examined whether oxygenated hemoglobin (oxyHb) decreases.

Neural oscillations in the temporal pole for a temporally congruent audio-visual speech detection task.

Though recent studies have elucidated the earliest mechanisms of processing in multisensory integration, our understanding of how multisensory integration of more sustained and complicated stimuli is implemented in higher-level association cortices is lacking. In this study, we used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to determine how neural oscillations alter local and global connectivity during multisensory integration processing. We acquired MEG data from 15 healthy volunteers performing an audio-visual speech matching task.

Causal Dynamics of Scalp Electroencephalography Oscillation During the Rubber Hand Illusion.

Rubber hand illusion (RHI) is an important phenomenon for the investigation of body ownership and self/other distinction. The illusion is promoted by the spatial and temporal contingencies of visual inputs near a fake hand and physical touches to the real hand. The neural basis of this phenomenon is not fully understood.

Infant discrimination of humanoid robots.

Recently, extremely humanlike robots called "androids" have been developed, some of which are already being used in the field of entertainment. In the context of psychological studies, androids are expected to be used in the future as fully controllable human stimuli to investigate human nature. In this study, we used an android to examine infant discrimination ability between human beings and non-human agents.

Building a responsive teacher: how temporal contingency of gaze interaction influences word learning with virtual tutors.

Animated pedagogical agents are lifelike virtual characters designed to augment learning. A review of developmental psychology literature led to the hypothesis that the temporal contingency of such agents would promote human learning. We developed a Pedagogical Agent with Gaze Interaction (PAGI), an experimental animated pedagogical agent that engages in gaze interaction with students.