The influence of lexical word properties on selective attention to emotional words: Support for the attentional tuning of valent word forms.

Using event-related potentials, it was found that selective attention to valence facilitates early affective discrimination of words with task-relevant valence and inhibits affective processing of words with task-irrelevant valence. This attention-based modulation of affective processing presumably relies on prior associative learning linking visual word forms with their affects. To investigate this hypothesis, we employed a valence-detection task and manipulated lexical (length, frequency) and affective (arousal) word features.

Cortical oscillations and event-related brain potentials during the preparation and execution of deceptive behavior.

Deception often occurs in response to a preceding cue (e.g., a precarious question) alerting us about the need to subsequently lie.

Of ugly gains and happy losses: An event-related potential study of interactions of the intrinsic and acquired valence of emotional pictures.

During the last decades, event-related potential research on the processing of intrinsic and acquired valence has made great progress, but the two dimensions rarely varied simultaneously. Only that way, however, can we investigate whether the acquisition of extrinsic valence varies with intrinsic valence and whether intrinsic and acquired valence share the same brain mechanisms. Forty-five participants performed associative learning of gains and losses, using pictures varying on intrinsic valence (positive, negative) and outcome (90 % gain, 50 %/50 %, 90 % loss).

The influence of selective attention to specific emotions on the processing of faces as revealed by event-related brain potentials.

Event-related potential studies using affective words have indicated that selective attention to valence can increase affective discrimination at early perceptual stages. This effect most likely relies on neural associations between perceptual features of a stimulus and its affective value. Similar to words, emotional expressions in human faces are linked to specific visual elements.

Dollars do not determine detection: Monetary value associated with unexpected objects does not affect the likelihood of inattentional blindness.

Conscious perception often fails when an object appears unexpectedly and our attention is focused elsewhere (inattentional blindness). Although various factors have been identified that modulate the likelihood of this failure of awareness, it is not clear whether the monetary reward value associated with an object can affect whether or not this object is detected under conditions of inattention. We hypothesised that unexpectedly appearing objects that contain a feature linked to high value, as established via reward learning in a previous task, would subsequently be detected more frequently than objects containing a feature linked to low value.

The posterior semantic asymmetry (PSA): specific to written not auditory semantic word processing.

The present study replicates the finding of a posterior semantic asymmetry (PSA; Koppehele-Gossel et al., Brain Lang 157-158:35-43, 2016), a lateralized event-related potential (ERP) suggested to reflect semantic activation from visually presented single words. This ERP negativity, derived from the subtraction of right-side from left-side scalp activity, again peaked around 300 ms at temporoparietal electrodes and was more pronounced in a semantic task, compared to both a silent naming task and a passive viewing task.

The posterior semantic asymmetry (PSA): An early brain electrical signature of semantic activation from written words.

This study replicates and extends the findings of Koppehele-Gossel, Schnuerch, and Gibbons (2016) of a posterior semantic asymmetry (PSA) in event-related brain potentials (ERPs), which closely tracks the time course and degree of semantic activation from single visual words. This negativity peaked 300 ms after word onset, was derived by subtracting right- from left-side activity, and was larger in a semantic task compared to two non-semantic control tasks. The validity of the PSA in reflecting the effort to activate word meaning was again attested by a negative correlation between the meaning-specific PSA increase and verbal intelligence, even after controlling for nonverbal intelligence.

What's past is past: Neither perceptual preactivation nor prior motivational relevance decrease subsequent inattentional blindness.

Inattentional blindness-the phenomenon that clearly visible, yet currently unexpected objects go unnoticed when our attention is focused elsewhere-is an ecologically valid failure of awareness. It is currently subject to debate whether previous events and experiences determine whether or not inattentional blindness occurs. Using a simple two-phase paradigm in the present study, we found that the likelihood of missing an unexpected object due to inattention did not change when its defining characteristic (its color) was perceptually preactivated (Experiment 1; N = 188).

Detection of deception: Event-related potential markers of attention and cognitive control during intentional false responses.

Successful deception requires the coordination of multiple mental processes, such as attention, conflict monitoring, and the regulation of emotion. We employed a simple classification task, assessing ERPs to further investigate the attentional and cognitive control components of (instructed) deception. In Experiment 1, 20 participants repeatedly categorized visually presented names of five animals and five plants.

Affective priming and cognitive load: Event-related potentials suggest an interplay of implicit affect misattribution and strategic inhibition.

Prior research suggests that the affective priming effect denoting prime-congruent evaluative judgments about neutral targets preceded by affective primes increases when the primes are processed less deeply. This has been taken as evidence for greater affect misattribution. However, no study so far has combined an experimental manipulation of the depth of prime processing with the benefits of ERPs.

Motivated malleability: Frontal cortical asymmetry predicts the susceptibility to social influence.

Humans, just as many other animals, regulate their behavior in terms of approaching stimuli associated with pleasure and avoiding stimuli linked to harm. A person's current and chronic motivational direction - that is, approach versus avoidance orientation - is reliably reflected in the asymmetry of frontal cortical low-frequency oscillations. Using resting electroencephalography (EEG), we show that frontal asymmetry is predictive of the tendency to yield to social influence: Stronger right- than left-side frontolateral activation during a resting-state session prior to the experiment was robustly associated with a stronger inclination to adopt a peer group's judgments during perceptual decision-making (Study 1).

A brain electrical signature of left-lateralized semantic activation from single words.

Lesion and imaging studies consistently indicate a left-lateralization of semantic language processing in human temporo-parietal cortex. Surprisingly, electrocortical measures, which allow a direct assessment of brain activity and the tracking of cognitive functions with millisecond precision, have not yet been used to capture this hemispheric lateralization, at least with respect to posterior portions of this effect. Using event-related potentials, we employed a simple single-word reading paradigm to compare neural activity during three tasks requiring different degrees of semantic processing.

The winner takes it all: Event-related brain potentials reveal enhanced motivated attention toward athletes' nonverbal signals of leading.

Observers of sports can reliably estimate who is leading or trailing based on nonverbal cues. Most likely, this is due to an adaptive mechanism of detecting motivationally relevant signals such as high status, superiority, and dominance. We reasoned that the relevance of leading athletes should lead to a sustained attentional prioritization.

Multiple neural signatures of social proof and deviance during the observation of other people's preferences.

Detecting one's agreement with or deviation from other people, a key principle of social cognition, relies on neurocognitive mechanisms involved in reward processing, mismatch detection, and attentional orienting. Previous studies have focused on explicit depictions of the (in)congruency of individual and group judgments. Here, we report data from a novel experimental paradigm in which participants first rated a set of images and were later simply confronted with other individuals' ostensible preferences.

Not quite so blind: Semantic processing despite inattentional blindness.

We often fail to detect clearly visible, yet unexpected objects when our attention is otherwise engaged, a phenomenon widely known as inattentional blindness. The potentially devastating consequences and the mediators of such failures of awareness have been studied extensively. Surprisingly, however, hardly anything is known about whether and how we process the objects that go unnoticed during inattentional blindness.

From Positivity to Negativity Bias: Ambiguity Affects the Neurophysiological Signatures of Feedback Processing.

Previous studies on the neurophysiological underpinnings of feedback processing almost exclusively used low-ambiguity feedback, which does not fully address the diversity of situations in everyday life. We therefore used a pseudo trial-and-error learning task to investigate ERPs of low- versus high-ambiguity feedback. Twenty-eight participants tried to deduce the rule governing visual feedback to their button presses in response to visual stimuli.

Social proof in the human brain: Electrophysiological signatures of agreement and disagreement with the majority.

Perceiving one's deviance from the majority usually instigates conformal adjustments of one's own behavior to that of the group. Using ERPs, we investigated the mechanisms by which agreeing and disagreeing with the majority are differentially represented in the human brain and affect subsequent cognitive processing. Replicating previous findings obtained in a slightly different paradigm, we found that learning about one's disagreement with the majority, as compared to learning about one's agreement with the majority, elicited a mediofrontal feedback negativity.

Assessing and correcting for regression toward the mean in deviance-induced social conformity.

Our understanding of the mechanisms underlying social conformity has recently advanced due to the employment of neuroscience methodology and novel experimental approaches. Most prominently, several studies have demonstrated the role of neural reinforcement-learning processes in conformal adjustments using a specifically designed and frequently replicated paradigm. Only very recently, the validity of the critical behavioral effect in this very paradigm was seriously questioned, as it invites the unwanted contribution of regression toward the mean.

Some See It, Some Don't: Exploring the Relation between Inattentional Blindness and Personality Factors.

Human awareness is highly limited, which is vividly demonstrated by the phenomenon that unexpected objects go unnoticed when attention is focused elsewhere (inattentional blindness). Typically, some people fail to notice unexpected objects while others detect them instantaneously. Whether this pattern reflects stable individual differences is unclear to date.

Weak encoding of faces predicts socially influenced judgments of facial attractiveness.

Conforming to the majority can be seen as a heuristic type of judgment, as it allows the individual to easily choose the most accurate or most socially acceptable type of behavior. People who process the currently to-be-judged items in a superficial, heuristic way should tend to conform to group judgment more than people processing these items in a systematic and elaborate way. We investigated this hypothesis using electroencephalography (EEG), analyzing whether the strength of neural encoding of faces was related to the tendency to adopt a group's evaluative judgments regarding these faces.

Does semantic preactivation reduce inattentional blindness?

We are susceptible to failures of awareness if a stimulus occurs unexpectedly and our attention is focused elsewhere. Such inattentional blindness is modulated by various parameters, including stimulus attributes, the observer's cognitive resources, and the observer's attentional set regarding the primary task. In three behavioral experiments with a total of 360 participants, we investigated whether mere semantic preactivation of the color of an unexpected object can reduce inattentional blindness.

Neural sensitivity to social deviance predicts attentive processing of peer-group judgment.

The detection of one's deviance from social norms is an essential mechanism of individual adjustment to group behavior and, thus, for the perpetuation of norms within groups. It has been suggested that error signals in mediofrontal cortex provide the neural basis of such deviance detection, which contributes to later adjustment to the norm. In the present study, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to demonstrate that, across participants, the strength of mediofrontal brain correlates of the detection of deviance from a peer group's norms was negatively related to attentive processing of the same group's judgments in a later task.

Challenging perceptual tasks require more attention: the influence of task difficulty on the N1 effect of temporal orienting.

Both filter and resource models of attention suggest an influence of task difficulty on the size of early attention effects. As for temporal orienting, the idea that early effects are modulated by task difficulty has not been tested directly, so far. To fill this empirical gap, the present study used an auditory temporal-orienting task, in which two differently pitched pure tones served as targets.

Independent effects of temporal expectation and stimulus intensity in audition.

Temporal orienting--that is, selective attention to instants in time--has been shown to modulate performance in terms of faster responses in a variety of paradigms. Electrophysiological recordings have shown that temporal orienting modulates neural processing at early, probably perceptual, and late, probably decision- or response-related, stages. Recently, it was shown that the effect of temporal orienting on early auditory brain potentials is independent of the effect of the physical sound feature intensity.