A Novel, Expert-Endorsed, Neurocognitive Digital Assessment Tool for Addictive Disorders: Development and Validation Study.

Background: Many people with harmful addictive behaviors may not meet formal diagnostic thresholds for a disorder. A dimensional approach, by contrast, including clinical and community samples, is potentially key to early detection, prevention, and intervention. Importantly, while neurocognitive dysfunction underpins addictive behaviors, established assessment tools for neurocognitive assessment are lengthy and unengaging, difficult to administer at scale, and not suited to clinical or community needs.

General and specific graphic health warning labels reduce willingness to consume sugar-sweetened beverages.

Sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) consumption is associated with obesity and other severe negative health consequences. The present study examined the effectiveness of two types of health warning labels (HWLs) in modulating dietary choices for SSBs: specific HWLs, presenting health consequences associated with consuming SSBs, and general HWLs, presenting health consequences of an unhealthy diet and obesity. While electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded, 63 participants completed a computer-based task in which they were first randomly allocated to view either SBB-specific, general, or non-warning control HWLs.

Neural patterns during anticipation predict emotion regulation success for reappraisal.

The ability to exert control over emotions, termed emotion regulation (ER), is vital for everyday functioning. ER success may be influenced by processes relating to the anticipation (prior to active regulation) and implementation (during active regulation) of ER strategy use. We investigated whether brain activity patterns recorded using electroencephalography (EEG) during the first second of anticipation and implementation of two ER strategies-distraction and reappraisal-were related to regulation success.

The neural encoding of information prediction errors during non-instrumental information seeking.

In a dynamic world, accurate beliefs about the environment are vital for survival, and individuals should therefore regularly seek out new information with which to update their beliefs. This aspect of behaviour is not well captured by standard theories of decision making, and the neural mechanisms of information seeking remain unclear. One recent theory posits that valuation of information results from representation of informative stimuli within canonical neural reward-processing circuits, even if that information lacks instrumental use.

Intrinsic Valuation of Information in Decision Making under Uncertainty.

In a dynamic world, an accurate model of the environment is vital for survival, and agents ought regularly to seek out new information with which to update their world models. This aspect of behaviour is not captured well by classical theories of decision making, and the cognitive mechanisms of information seeking are poorly understood. In particular, it is not known whether information is valued only for its instrumental use, or whether humans also assign it a non-instrumental intrinsic value.