Atmospheric and Surface Processes, and Feedback Mechanisms Determining Arctic Amplification: A Review of First Results and Prospects of the (AC)3 Project

Mechanisms behind the phenomenon of Arctic amplification are widely discussed. To contribute to this debate, the (AC)3 project has been established in 2016. It comprises modeling and data analysis efforts as well as observational elements. The project has assembled a wealth of ground-based, airborne, ship-borne, and satellite data of physical, chemical, and meteorological properties of the Arctic atmosphere, cryosphere, and upper ocean that are available for the Arctic climate research community. Short-term changes and indications of long-term trends in Arctic climate parameters have been detected using existing and new data

Perception of emotion in psychiatric disorders: On the possible role of task, dynamics, and multimodality

Experimental evidence suggests an impairment in emotion perception in numerous psychiatric disorders. The results to date are primarily based on research using static displays of emotional facial expressions. However, our natural environment is dynamic and multimodal, comprising input from various communication channels such as facial expressions, emotional prosody, and emotional semantics, to name but a few. Thus, one critical open question is whether alterations in emotion perception in psychiatric populations are confirmed when testing patients in dynamic and multimodal naturalistic settings. Furthermore, the impact task demands may exert on results also needs to be reconsidered. Focusing on schizophrenia and depression, we review evidence on how emotions are perceived from faces and voices in these disorders and examine how experimental task demands, stimulus dynamics, and modality may affect study results

Neuroimaging results suggest the role of prediction in cross-domain priming.

The repetition of a stimulus leads to shorter reaction times as well as to the reduction of neural activity. Previous encounters with closely related stimuli (primes) also lead to faster and often to more accurate processing of subsequent stimuli (targets). For instance, if the prime is a name, and the target is a face, the recognition of a persons' face is facilitated by prior presentation of his/her name. A possible explanation for this phenomenon is that the prime allows predicting the occurrence of the target. To the best of our knowledge, so far, no study tested the neural correlates of such cross-domain priming with fMRI. To fill this gap, here we used names of famous persons as primes, and congruent or incongruent faces as targets. We found that congruent primes not only reduced RT, but also lowered the BOLD signal in bilateral fusiform (FFA) and occipital (OFA) face areas. This suggests that semantic information affects not only behavioral performance, but also neural responses in relatively early processing stages of the occipito-temporal cortex. We interpret our results in the framework of predictive coding theories