Anticipation of sexually arousing visual event leads to overestimation of elapsed time.

Subjective estimates of duration are affected by emotional expectations about the future. For example, temporal intervals preceding a threatening event such as an electric shock are estimated as longer than intervals preceding a non-threatening event. However, it has not been unequivocally shown that such temporal overestimation occurs also when anticipating a similarly arousing but appealing event.

Cross-Subject EEG Feedback for Implicit Image Generation.

Generative models are powerful tools for producing novel information by learning from example data. However, the current approaches require explicit manual input to steer generative models to match human goals. Furthermore, how these models would integrate implicit, diverse feedback and goals of multiple users remains largely unexplored.

The P3 indexes the distance between perceived and target image.

Visual recognition requires inferring the similarity between a perceived object and a mental target. However, a measure of similarity is difficult to determine when it comes to complex stimuli such as faces. Indeed, people may notice someone "looks like" a familiar face, but find it hard to describe on the basis of what features such a comparison is based.

Visible skin disease symptoms of another person reduce automatic imitation of their hand movements.

Imitation is an important mechanism for social interaction and learning, and humans tend to imitate others automatically. While imitating others is often useful, it can backfire when imitation is incongruent with one's goals. For example, in forced-choice reaction time tasks, this tendency results in a reliable slowing of reactions if the observed and self-initiated actions are incompatible (compatibility effect).

Time to imagine moving: Simulated motor activity affects time perception.

Sensing the passage of time is important for countless daily tasks, yet time perception is easily influenced by perception, cognition, and emotion. Mechanistic accounts of time perception have traditionally regarded time perception as part of central cognition. Since proprioception, action execution, and sensorimotor contingencies also affect time perception, perception-action integration theories suggest motor processes are central to the experience of the passage of time.

Anticipation of aversive visual stimuli lengthens perceived temporal duration.

Subjective estimates of elapsed time are sensitive to the fluctuations in an emotional state. While it is well known that dangerous and threatening situations, such as electric shocks or loud noises, are perceived as lasting longer than safe events, it remains unclear whether anticipating a threatening event speeds up or slows down subjective time and what defines the direction of the distortion. We examined whether the anticipation of uncertain visual aversive events resulted in either underestimation or overestimation of perceived duration.

Space, time and number: common coding mechanisms and interactions between domains.

Space, time and number are key dimensions that underlie how we perceive, identify and act within the environment. They are interconnected in our behaviour and brain. In this study, we examined interdependencies between these dimensions.

Neuroadaptive modelling for generating images matching perceptual categories.

Brain-computer interfaces enable active communication and execution of a pre-defined set of commands, such as typing a letter or moving a cursor. However, they have thus far not been able to infer more complex intentions or adapt more complex output based on brain signals. Here, we present neuroadaptive generative modelling, which uses a participant's brain signals as feedback to adapt a boundless generative model and generate new information matching the participant's intentions.

Information gain modulates brain activity evoked by reading.

The human brain processes language to optimise efficient communication. Studies have shown extensive evidence that the brain's response to language is affected both by lower-level features, such as word-length and frequency, and syntactic and semantic violations within sentences. However, our understanding on cognitive processes at discourse level remains limited: How does the relationship between words and the wider topic one is reading about affect language processing? We propose an information theoretic model to explain cognitive resourcing.

No evidence of calorie-related modulation of N2 in food-related Go/No-Go training: A preregistered ERP study.

Go/No-Go tasks, which require participants to inhibit automatic responses to images of palatable foods, have shown diagnostic value in quantifying food-related impulses. Moreover, they have shown potential for training to control impulsive eating. To test the hypothesis that training modulates early neural markers of response inhibition, the current study investigated how the N2 event-related brain potential to high- and low-calorie food images changes along Go-/No-Go training and how the N2 is related to later eating behavior.

I'll make you an offer you can refuse: How socially sensitive is the MFN?

Medial frontal negativity (MFN) is an event-related potential thought to originate in the anterior cingulate cortex. It is evoked by outcomes being worse than expected, such as when presented with unfair economic proposals during the Ultimatum Game (UG). This could mean the MFN indexes a social-emotional response, as commonly suggested in accounts that relate it to a violation of a social norm of fairness.

The semiotics of the message and the messenger: How nonverbal communication affects fairness perception.

Nonverbal communication determines much of how we perceive explicit, verbal messages. Facial expressions and social touch, for example, influence affinity and conformity. To understand the interaction between nonverbal and verbal information, we studied how the psychophysiological time-course of semiotics-the decoding of the meaning of a message-is altered by interpersonal touch and facial expressions.

Motor Timing and Covariation with Time Perception: Investigating the Role of Handedness.

Time is a fundamental dimension of our behavior and enables us to guide our actions and to experience time such as predicting collisions or listening to music. In this study, we investigate the regulation and covariation of motor timing and time perception functions in left- and right-handers who are characterized by distinct brain processing mechanisms for cognitive-motor control. To this purpose, we use a combination of tasks that assess the timed responses during movements and the perception of time intervals.

Manipulating Bodily Presence Affects Cross-Modal Spatial Attention: A Virtual-Reality-Based ERP Study.

Earlier studies have revealed cross-modal visuo-tactile interactions in endogenous spatial attention. The current research used event-related potentials (ERPs) and virtual reality (VR) to identify how the visual cues of the perceiver's body affect visuo-tactile interaction in endogenous spatial attention and at what point in time the effect takes place. A bimodal oddball task with lateralized tactile and visual stimuli was presented in two VR conditions, one with and one without visible hands, and one VR-free control with hands in view.

Effects of touch on emotional face processing: A study of event-related potentials, facial EMG and cardiac activity.

Being touched is known to affect emotion, and even a casual touch can elicit positive feelings and affinity. Psychophysiological studies have recently shown that tactile primes affect visual evoked potentials to emotional stimuli, suggesting altered affective stimulus processing. As, however, these studies approached emotion from a purely unidimensional perspective, it remains unclear whether touch biases emotional evaluation or a more general feature such as salience.

Feeling Touched: Emotional Modulation of Somatosensory Potentials to Interpersonal Touch.

Although the previous studies have shown that an emotional context may alter touch processing, it is not clear how visual contextual information modulates the sensory signals, and at what levels does this modulation take place. Therefore, we investigated how a toucher's emotional expressions (anger, happiness, fear, and sadness) modulate touchee's somatosensory-evoked potentials (SEPs) in different temporal ranges. Participants were presented with tactile stimulation appearing to originate from expressive characters in virtual reality.

Natural brain-information interfaces: Recommending information by relevance inferred from human brain signals.

Finding relevant information from large document collections such as the World Wide Web is a common task in our daily lives. Estimation of a user's interest or search intention is necessary to recommend and retrieve relevant information from these collections. We introduce a brain-information interface used for recommending information by relevance inferred directly from brain signals.

Not My Problem: Vicarious Conflict Adaptation with Human and Virtual Co-actors.

The Simon effect refers to an incompatibility between stimulus and response locations resulting in a conflict situation and, consequently, slower responses. Like other conflict effects, it is commonly reduced after repetitions, suggesting an executive control ability, which flexibly rewires cognitive processing and adapts to conflict. Interestingly, conflict is not necessarily individually defined: the Social Simon effect refers to a scenario where two people who share a task show a conflict effect where a single person does not.

The self in conflict: actors and agency in the mediated sequential Simon task.

Executive control refers to the ability to withstand interference in order to achieve task goals. The effect of conflict adaptation describes that after experiencing interference, subsequent conflict effects are weaker. However, changes in the source of conflict have been found to disrupt conflict adaptation.

The developing cognitive substrate of sequential action control in 9- to 12-month-olds: evidence for concurrent activation models.

Nine-month-olds start to perform sequential actions. Yet, it remains largely unknown how they acquire and control such actions. We studied infants' sequential-action control by employing a novel gaze-contingent eye tracking paradigm.

The meaning of the virtual Midas touch: an ERP study in economic decision making.

The Midas touch refers to the altruistic effects of a brief touch. Though these effects have often been replicated, they remain poorly understood. We investigate the psychophysiology of the effect using remotely transmitted, precisely timed, tactile messages in an economic decision-making game called Ultimatum.

Sequential modulations of the Simon effect depend on episodic retrieval.

Sequential modulations of conflict effects, like the reduction of the Simon effect after incompatible trials, have been taken to reflect the operation of a proactive control mechanism commonly called conflict monitoring. However, such modulations are often contaminated by episodic effects like priming and stimulus-response feature integration. It has previously been observed that if the episodic representation of a conflicting trial is altered by rotating the stimulus framing 180(∘) around its axis, the subsequent "conflict adaptation" pattern is eliminated.

Keep your opponents close: social context affects EEG and fEMG linkage in a turn-based computer game.

In daily life, we often copy the gestures and expressions of those we communicate with, but recent evidence shows that such mimicry has a physiological counterpart: interaction elicits linkage, which is a concordance between the biological signals of those involved. To find out how the type of social interaction affects linkage, pairs of participants played a turn-based computer game in which the level of competition was systematically varied between cooperation and competition. Linkage in the beta and gamma frequency bands was observed in the EEG, especially when the participants played directly against each other.

From outcome prediction to action selection: developmental change in the role of action-effect bindings.

Ideomotor theory considers bidirectional action-effect associations to be the fundamental building blocks for intentional action. The present study employed a novel pupillometric and oculomotor paradigm to study developmental changes in the role of action-effects in the acquisition of voluntary action. Our findings suggest that both 7- and 12-month-olds (and adults) can use acquired action-effect bindings to predict action outcomes but only 12-month-olds (and adults) showed evidence for employing action-effects to select actions.