Context effects in reproduction and perception of song tempo.

Studies of tempo perception suggest that exposure to a distribution of predominantly faster or slower versions of a song can shift one's memory for the original tempo toward the contextual tempos. Three experiments were conducted to examine whether similar assimilation effects would occur when participants are asked to reproduce the tempo of a song from memory. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants listened to a tempo-altered version of a pop song prior to tapping out the original tempo from memory on each trial.

The role of emotion arousal in the retrieval practice effect.

Many studies have shown that practicing retrieval produces better memory retention compared to restudy. Though previous literature has provided valuable insights about the retrieval practice effect, it is still unclear how emotion arousal influences the retrieval practice effect, and whether the effect would be manifested in recollection or familiarity processes. To answer these questions, in the current study, negative and neutral words were used as stimuli and participants were asked to perform a recognition test or restudy the words after initial study.

The effect of conceptual priming on subsequent familiarity: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence.

Previous studies on the neural mechanisms of how priming influences subsequent recognition memory have mainly focused on repetition priming, whereas the neural mechanisms of how conceptual priming affects subsequent recognition memory is still not clear. The present study investigated the electrophysiological correlates of how conceptual priming influences subsequent recognition memory. The behavioral results showed that conceptual priming only affected subsequent familiarity.

Electrophysiological correlates of masked repetition and conceptual priming for visual objects.

Background: Previous studies have investigated the time course of visual object processing using event-related potential (ERP) and the masked repetition priming paradigm. However, it is unclear how the ERP correlates associated with masked repetition priming differentiate from masked conceptual priming of visual objects.

Method: The present study used semantically related picture pairs of visual objects to compare the ERPs associated with masked repetition and conceptual priming of visual objects.

From alternation to repetition: Spatial attention biases contribute to sequential effects in a choice reaction-time task.

Observers often take longer to respond to a visual target when it appears at a recently stimulated location than when it appears at a new location in the visual field. This behavioral impairment - known as inhibition of return (IOR) - is mirrored by a reduction of an event-related potential (ERP) component called the N2pc that has been associated with attentional selection. Together, these findings indicate that the mechanism underlying IOR operates to bias covert attention against re-visiting the most recently attended location.

Distinct neural mechanisms underlying conceptual knowledge of manner and instrument verbs.

Studies on the organization of conceptual knowledge have examined categories of concrete nouns extensively. Less is known about the neural basis of verb categories suggested by linguistic theories. We used functional MRI to examine the differences between manner verbs, which encode information about the manner of an action, versus instrument verbs, which encode information about an object as part of their meaning.

Dissociating action and abstract verb comprehension post-stroke.

The neural bases of action and abstract concept representations remain a topic of debate. While several lines of research provide evidence for grounding of action-related conceptual content into sensory-motor systems, results of traditional lesion-deficit studies have been somewhat inconsistent. Further, few studies have directly compared the neural substrates of action and relatively abstract verb comprehension post-stroke.

The Mental Healthcare Act 2017 of India: A challenge and an opportunity.

The Mental Healthcare Act 2017 replaced the Mental Health Act 1987, subsequent to India's ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2007. The Mental Healthcare Act (MHCA) 2017 upholds patient autonomy, dignity, rights and choices during mental healthcare and thus marks a bold step in India's mental health legislation. This new Law marks a major shift in the way mental healthcare is delivered, as it aims to protect and promote the rights of people during the delivery of mental healthcare.

Fronto-temporoparietal connectivity and self-awareness in 18-month-olds: A resting state fNIRS study.

How and when a concept of the 'self' emerges has been the topic of much interest in developmental psychology. Self-awareness has been proposed to emerge at around 18 months, when toddlers start to show evidence of physical self-recognition. However, to what extent physical self-recognition is a valid indicator of being able to think about oneself, is debated.

The brain basis of audiovisual affective processing: Evidence from a coordinate-based activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis.

Our brains can integrate emotional signals from visual and auditory modalities, which is important for our daily social interactions and survival. Although behavioral effects of facilitation or interference of visual and auditory affective signals have been widely demonstrated, the underlying neural substrates remain unclear. We identified brain activation related to audiovisual affective processing at a whole-brain level in healthy adults with a quantitative coordinate-based meta-analysis, combining data from 306 participants across 18 neuroimaging studies.

Rightward directional bias in art produced by cultures without a written language.

In this study, we coded art painted on rocks located in southern Africa, which was painted with a mixture of ochre, blood, and clay by the San, a Neolithic culture with no written language. These images depict a mixture of humans and animals in a variety of contexts, including (but not limited to) hunts and dances. We calculated a laterality index for the collected available art from each region, finding that although there was variability across regions in the direction of the laterality scores, most regions contained a majority of figures facing rightward.

Multisensory Integration Is Modulated by Auditory Sound Frequency and Visual Spatial Frequency.

Accurate integration of auditory and visual information is essential for our ability to communicate with others. Previous studies have shown that the temporal discrepancies over which audiovisual speech stimuli will be integrated into a coherent percept are much wider than those typically observed for simple stimuli like beeps and flashes of light. However, our sensitivity to the low-level features of simple stimuli is not constant.

Depression in caregivers of patients with breast cancer: A cross-sectional study from a cancer research center in South India.

Context: Existing literature suggests an alarming rate of depression in cancer caregivers, which is comparable to or even higher than in patients themselves. There are no studies on depression among caregivers of breast cancer from India.

Aims: The aim is to study the prevalence and determinants of depression in caregivers of breast cancer.

Capacity for mental healthcare decisions under the Mental Healthcare Act.

Mental Healthcare Act (MHCA), 2017 aims to protect and promote the rights of patients during mental health care. This Act promotes patient's autonomy and choice for those with ability to make decisions on mental health care, independent of the level of risks or complexities. Supported decision-making can vary from minimal or no support to complete support for decision-making.

Time-Course of Motor Involvement in Literal and Metaphoric Action Sentence Processing: A TMS Study.

There is evidence that the motor cortex is involved in reading sentences containing an action verb ("The spike was hammered into the ground") as well as metaphoric sentences ("The army was hammered in the battle"). Verbs such as 'hammered' may be homonyms, with separate meanings belonging to the literal action and metaphoric action, or they may be polysemous, with the metaphoric sense grounded in the literal sense. We investigated the time course of the effects of single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation to primary motor cortex on literal and metaphoric sentence comprehension.

Prevalence of child abuse in Kerala, India: An ICAST-CH based survey.

Background: Child abuse is a major concern in India with frequent reports of extreme maltreatment and fatalities. A dearth of robust and methodologically sound studies has resulted in ambiguity regarding the extent of child abuse in the general population.

Objectives: To estimate the one-year and lifelong prevalence of exposure to violence, physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, and neglect using a validated instrument-the International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect (ISPCAN) Child Abuse Screening Tool - Child, Home Version (ICAST-CH).

Development of brain functional connectivity and its relation to infant sustained attention in the first year of life.

The study of brain functional connectivity is crucial to understanding the neural mechanisms underlying the improved behavioral performance and amplified ERP responses observed during infant sustained attention. Previous investigations on the development of functional brain connectivity during infancy are primarily confined to the use of functional and structural MRI techniques. The current study examined the relation between infant sustained attention and brain functional connectivity and their development during infancy with high-density EEG recordings.

The multifaceted abstract brain.

concepts play a central role in human behaviour and constitute a critical component of the human conceptual system. Here, we investigate the neural basis of four types of abstract concepts, examining their similarities and differences through neuroimaging meta-analyses. We examine numerical and emotional concepts, and two higher-order abstract processes, morality judgements and theory of mind.

Electrophysiological evidence of an attentional bias in crossmodal inhibition of return.

Inhibition of return (IOR) refers to a delay in responding to targets when they appear at recently attended locations, relative to unattended locations. Within the visual modality, this attentional bias has been associated with a reduction in the N2pc event-related potential (ERP) component at previously attended locations. The present study examined whether a similar attentional bias was observed in crossmodal audio-visual IOR.

Cortical and Subcortical Coordination of Visual Spatial Attention Revealed by Simultaneous EEG-fMRI Recording.

Visual spatial attention has been studied in humans with both electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) individually. However, due to the intrinsic limitations of each of these methods used alone, our understanding of the systems-level mechanisms underlying attentional control remains limited. Here, we examined trial-to-trial covariations of concurrently recorded EEG and fMRI in a cued visual spatial attention task in humans, which allowed delineation of both the generators and modulators of the cue-triggered event-related oscillatory brain activity underlying attentional control function.

Prevalence of child abuse in school environment in Kerala, India: An ICAST-CI based survey.

Very few studies focus on childhood abuse in developing countries and only a small fraction of such studies explicitly deal with abuse in a school environment. The purpose of this study was to estimate the prevalence of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse in a school environment in a developing country. Abuse history was collected using the International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect (ISPCAN) Child Abuse Screening Tool - Children's Institutional Version (ICAST-CI).

Evidence for an attentional component of inhibition of return in visual search.

Inhibition of return (IOR) is typically described as an inhibitory bias against returning attention to a recently attended location as a means of promoting efficient visual search. Most studies examining IOR, however, either do not use visual search paradigms or do not effectively isolate attentional processes, making it difficult to conclusively link IOR to a bias in attention. Here, we recorded ERPs during a simple visual search task designed to isolate the attentional component of IOR to examine whether an inhibitory bias of attention is observed and, if so, how it influences visual search behavior.

Development of infant sustained attention and its relation to EEG oscillations: an EEG and cortical source analysis study.

The current study examined the relation between infant sustained attention and infant EEG oscillations. Fifty-nine infants were tested at 6 (N = 15), 8 (N = 17), 10 (N = 14), and 12 (N = 13) months. Three attention phases, stimulus orienting, sustained attention, and attention termination, were defined based on infants' heart rate changes.