Biol Psychiatry Cogn Neurosci Neuroimaging
October 2024
Making early and good predictions is a critical feature of decision making in domains such as investing and predicting the spread of diseases. Past literature indicates that people use recent and longer-term trends to extrapolate future outcomes. Nonetheless, less is known about what differentiates the strategies people use to make better predictions than others.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrevious work highlighted a critical role for top-down goals in shifting memory organization, namely, through studying the downstream influences of event segmentation and task switching on free recall. Here, we extend these frameworks into the realm of motivation, by comparing how threat motivation influences memory organization by capturing free recall dynamics. In Study 1, we manipulated individuals' motivation to successfully encode information by the threat of exposure to aversive sounds for forgetting.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIncubation of craving is a phenomenon describing the intensification of craving for a reward over extended periods of abstinence from reinforcement. Animal models use instrumental markers of craving to reward cues to examine incubation, while human paradigms rely on subjective self-reports. Here, we characterize an animal-inspired, novel human paradigm that showed strong positive relationships between self-reports and instrumental markers of craving for favored palatable foods.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImportance: Research on resilience after trauma has often focused on individual-level factors (eg, ability to cope with adversity) and overlooked influential neighborhood-level factors that may help mitigate the development of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Objective: To investigate whether an interaction between residential greenspace and self-reported individual resources was associated with a resilient PTSD trajectory (ie, low/no symptoms) and to test if the association between greenspace and PTSD trajectory was mediated by neural reactivity to reward.
Design, Setting, And Participants: As part of a longitudinal cohort study, trauma survivors were recruited from emergency departments across the US.
Memories are not only stored for personal recall, but also to communicate knowledge to others in service of adaptive decision-making. Prior research shows that goals to share information can change which content is communicated in memory as well as the linguistic style embedded in this communication. Yet, little is known as to how communication-related alterations in memory narration drive differences of value processing in listeners.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecent work has identified a critical role for the hippocampus in reward-sensitive behaviors, including motivated memory, reinforcement learning, and decision-making. Animal histology and human functional neuroimaging have shown that brain regions involved in reward processing and motivation are more interconnected with the ventral/anterior hippocampus. However, direct evidence examining gradients of structural connectivity between reward regions and the hippocampus in humans is lacking.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDespite the salient experience of encoding threatening events, these memories are prone to distortions and often non-veridical from encoding to recall. Further, threat has been shown to preferentially disrupt the binding of event details and enhance goal-relevant information. While extensive work has characterised distinctive features of emotional memory, research has not fully explored the influence threat has on temporal memory, a process putatively supported by the binding of event details into a temporal context.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study examines the association between brain dynamic functional network connectivity (dFNC) and current/future posttraumatic stress (PTS) symptom severity, and the impact of sex on this relationship. By analyzing 275 participants' dFNC data obtained ~2 weeks after trauma exposure, we noted that brain dynamics of an inter-network brain state link negatively with current (r=-0.179, = 0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
March 2024
The memory benefit that arises from distributing learning over time rather than in consecutive sessions is one of the most robust effects in cognitive psychology. While prior work has mainly focused on repeated exposures to the same information, in the real world, mnemonic content is dynamic, with some pieces of information staying stable while others vary. Thus, open questions remain about the efficacy of the spacing effect in the face of variability in the mnemonic content.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis article describes the rationale, aims, and methodology of the Accelerating Medicines Partnership® Schizophrenia (AMP® SCZ). This is the largest international collaboration to date that will develop algorithms to predict trajectories and outcomes of individuals at clinical high risk (CHR) for psychosis and to advance the development and use of novel pharmacological interventions for CHR individuals. We present a description of the participating research networks and the data processing analysis and coordination center, their processes for data harmonization across 43 sites from 13 participating countries (recruitment across North America, Australia, Europe, Asia, and South America), data flow and quality assessment processes, data analyses, and the transfer of data to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Data Archive (NDA) for use by the research community.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMemory is a reconstructive process that can result in events being recalled as more positive or negative than they actually were. While positive recall biases may contribute to well-being, negative recall biases may promote internalizing symptoms, such as social anxiety. Adolescence is characterized by increased salience of peers and peak incidence of social anxiety.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNearly 50 years of research has focused on faces as a special visual category, especially during development. Yet it remains unclear how spatial patterns of neural similarity of faces and places relate to how information processing supports subsequent recognition of items from these categories. The current study uses representational similarity analysis and functional imaging data from 9- and 10-year-old youth during an emotional n-back task from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development Study 3.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMost prior research characterizes information-seeking behaviors as serving utilitarian purposes, such as whether the obtained information can help solve practical problems. However, information-seeking behaviors are sensitive to different contexts (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFChanges in context influence the way we form and structure memories. Yet, little is known about how qualitatively different types of context switches shape memory organization. The current experiments characterize how different features of context change influence the structure and organization of free recall.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSystems consolidation theories posit that consolidation occurs primarily through a coordinated communication between hippocampus and neocortex [Moscovitch, M., & Gilboa, A. Systems consolidation, transformation and reorganization: Multiple trace theory, trace transformation theory and their competitors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe ongoing stream of sensory experience is so complex and ever-changing that we tend to parse this experience at "event boundaries," which structures and strengthens memory. Memory processes undergo profound change across early childhood. Whether young children also divide their ongoing processing along event boundaries, and if those boundaries relate to memory, could provide important insight into the development of memory systems.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFChildhood trauma is a known risk factor for trauma and stress-related disorders in adulthood. However, limited research has investigated the impact of childhood trauma on brain structure linked to later posttraumatic dysfunction. We investigated the effect of childhood trauma on white matter microstructure after recent trauma and its relationship with future posttraumatic dysfunction among trauma-exposed adult participants (n = 202) recruited from emergency departments as part of the AURORA Study.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBoth external motivational incentives (e.g., monetary reward) and internal motivational incentives (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe perception of agency can influence memory when individuals feel their decisions exert control over their environment. While perceived agency has been shown to increase memory for items, most real-life situations are much more complex. Here, we examined how an individual's agency to influence the outcome of a situation affects their ability to learn associations between items that occur prior to and after a decision is made.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAs individuals navigate the world, they are bound to have emotionally intense experiences. These events not only influence momentary physiological and affective responses, but may also have a powerful impact on one's memory for their emotional experience. In this research, we used the naturalistic context of a haunted house to examine how physiological arousal is associated with metacognitive emotional memory (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA large body of research illustrates the prioritization of goal-relevant information in memory; however, it is unclear how reward-related memories are organized. Using a rewarded free recall paradigm, we investigated how reward motivation structures the organization of memory around temporal and higher-order contexts. To better understand these processes, we simulated our findings using a reward-modulated variant of the Context Maintenance and Retrieval Model (CMR; Polyn et al.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMotivation is a powerful driver of learning and memory. Functional MRI studies show that interactions among the dopaminergic midbrain substantia nigra/ventral tegmental area (SN/VTA), hippocampus, and nucleus accumbens (NAc) are critical for motivated memory encoding. However, it is not known whether these effects are transient and purely functional, or whether individual differences in the structure of this circuit underlie motivated memory encoding.
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