Dynamic Measures of Anxiety-Related Threat Bias: Links to Stress Reactivity.

Exaggerated attention to threatening information, or the threat bias, has been implicated in the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders. Recent research has highlighted methodological limitations in threat bias measures, such as temporal insensitivity, leading to the development of novel metrics that capture change and variability in threat bias over time. These metrics, however, have rarely been examined in non-clinical samples.

Neurocognitive assessment of emotional context sensitivity.

Sensitivity to emotional context is an emerging construct for characterizing adaptive or maladaptive emotion regulation, but few measurement approaches exist. The current study combined behavioral and neurocognitive measures to assess context sensitivity in relation to self-report measures of adaptive emotional flexibility and well-being. Sixty-six adults completed an emotional go/no-go task using happy, fearful, and neutral faces as go and no-go cues, while EEG was recorded to generate event-related potentials (ERPs) reflecting attentional selection and discrimination (N170) and cognitive control (N2).

Hick-Hyman Law is Mediated by the Cognitive Control Network in the Brain.

The Hick-Hyman law describes a linear increase in reaction time (RT) as a function of the information entropy of response selection, which is computed as the binary logarithm of the number of response alternatives. While numerous behavioral studies have provided evidence for the Hick-Hyman law, its neural underpinnings have rarely been examined and are still unclear. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging study, by utilizing a choice reaction time task to manipulate the entropy of response selection, we examined brain activity mediating the input and the output, as well as the connectivity between corresponding regions in human participants.

Repeated recall and PKMζ maintain fear memories in juvenile rats.

We examined the neural substrates of fear memory formation and maintenance when repeated recall was used to prevent forgetting in young animals. In contrast to adult rats, juveniles failed to show contextual fear responses at 4 d post-fear conditioning. Reconsolidation sessions 3 and 6 d after conditioning restored contextual fear responses in juveniles 7 d after initial training.

The Capacity of Cognitive Control Estimated from a Perceptual Decision Making Task.

Cognitive control refers to the processes that permit selection and prioritization of information processing in different cognitive domains to reach the capacity-limited conscious mind. Although previous studies have suggested that the capacity of cognitive control itself is limited, a direct quantification of this capacity has not been attempted. In this behavioral study, we manipulated the information rate of cognitive control by parametrically varying both the uncertainty of stimul measured as information entropy and the exposure time of the stimuli.

Neuroanatomical Alterations in High-Functioning Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a pervasive neurodevelopmental condition, affecting cognition and behavior throughout the life span. With recent advances in neuroimaging techniques and analytical approaches, a considerable effort has been directed toward identifying the neuroanatomical underpinnings of ASD. While gray-matter abnormalities have been found throughout cortical, subcortical, and cerebellar regions of affected individuals, there is currently little consistency across findings, partly due to small sample-sizes and great heterogeneity among participants in previous studies.

For whom the bell tolls: Neurocognitive individual differences in the acute stress-reduction effects of an attention bias modification game for anxiety.

The efficacy of attention bias modification training (ABMT) for anxiety is debated, in part because individual differences in task engagement and pre-training threat bias impact training efficacy. In the present study, an engaging, gamified ABMT mobile application, or "app," was utilized in 42 (21 females) trait-anxious adults. EEG was recorded during pre- and post-training threat bias assessment to generate scalp-recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) reflecting neurocognitive responses to threat.