How Emotion Strengthens the Recollective Experience: A Time-Dependent Hippocampal Process

Emotion significantly strengthens the subjective recollective experience even when objective accuracy of the memory is not improved. Here, we examine if this modulation is related to the effect of emotion on hippocampal-dependent memory consolidation. Two critical predictions follow from this hypothesis. First, since consolidation is assumed to take time, the enhancement in the recollective experience for emotional compared to neutral memories should become more apparent following a delay. Second, if the emotion advantage is critically dependent on the hippocampus, then the effects should be reduced in amnesic patients with hippocampal damage. To test these predictions we examined the recollective experience for emotional and neutral photos at two retention intervals (Experiment 1), and in amnesics and controls (Experiment 2). Emotional memories were associated with an enhancement in the recollective experience that was greatest after a delay, whereas familiarity was not influenced by emotion. In amnesics with hippocampal damage the emotion effect on recollective experience was reduced. Surprisingly, however, these patients still showed a general memory advantage for emotional compared to neutral items, but this effect was manifest primarily as a facilitation of familiarity. The results support the consolidation hypothesis of recollective experience, but suggest that the effects of emotion on episodic memory are not exclusively hippocampally mediated. Rather, emotion may enhance recognition by facilitating familiarity when recollection is impaired due to hippocampal damage

Dissociable Modulation of Overt Visual Attention in Valence and Arousal Revealed by Topology of Scan Path

Emotional stimuli have evolutionary significance for the survival of organisms; therefore, they are attention-grabbing and are processed preferentially. The neural underpinnings of two principle emotional dimensions in affective space, valence (degree of pleasantness) and arousal (intensity of evoked emotion), have been shown to be dissociable in the olfactory, gustatory and memory systems. However, the separable roles of valence and arousal in scene perception are poorly understood. In this study, we asked how these two emotional dimensions modulate overt visual attention. Twenty-two healthy volunteers freely viewed images from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) that were graded for affective levels of valence and arousal (high, medium, and low). Subjects' heads were immobilized and eye movements were recorded by camera to track overt shifts of visual attention. Algebraic graph-based approaches were introduced to model scan paths as weighted undirected path graphs, generating global topology metrics that characterize the algebraic connectivity of scan paths. Our data suggest that human subjects show different scanning patterns to stimuli with different affective ratings. Valence salient stimuli (with neutral arousal) elicited faster and larger shifts of attention, while arousal salient stimuli (with neutral valence) elicited local scanning, dense attention allocation and deep processing. Furthermore, our model revealed that the modulatory effect of valence was linearly related to the valence level, whereas the relation between the modulatory effect and the level of arousal was nonlinear. Hence, visual attention seems to be modulated by mechanisms that are separate for valence and arousal

Meta-KANSEI modeling with Valence-Arousal fMRI dataset of brain

Background: Traditional KANSEI methodology is an important tool in the field of psychology to comprehend the concepts and meanings; it mainly focusses on semantic differential methods. Valence-Arousal is regarded as a reflection of the KANSEI adjectives, which is the core concept in the theory of effective dimensions for brain recognition. From previous studies, it has been found that brain fMRI datasets can contain significant information related to Valence and Arousal. Methods: In this current work, a Valence-Arousal based meta-KANSEI modeling method is proposed to improve the traditional KANSEI presentation. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) was used to acquire the response dataset of Valence-Arousal of the brain in the amygdala and orbital frontal cortex respectively. In order to validate the feasibility of the proposed modeling method, the dataset was processed under dimension reduction by using Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) based segmentation and Mean Shift (MS) clustering. Furthermore, Affective Norm English Words (ANEW) by IAPS (International Affective Picture System) were used for comparison and analysis. The data sets from fMRI and ANEW under four KANSEI adjectives of angry, happy, sad and pleasant were processed by the Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) algorithm. Finally, a defined distance based on similarity computing was adopted for these two data sets. Results: The results illustrate that the proposed model is feasible and has better stability per the normal distribution plotting of the distance. The effectiveness of the experimental methods proposed in the current work was higher than in the literature. Conclusions: mean shift can be used to cluster and central points based meta-KANSEI model combining with the advantages of a variety of existing intelligent processing methods are expected to shift the KANSEI Engineering (KE) research into the medical imaging field

Is it reliable to assess visual attention of drivers affected by Parkinson's disease from the backseat?—a simulator study

BACKGROUND: Current methods of determining licence retainment or cancellation is through on-road driving tests. Previous research has shown that occupational therapists frequently assess drivers' visual attention while sitting in the back seat on the opposite side of the driver. Since the eyes of the driver are not always visible, assessment by eye contact becomes problematic. Such procedural drawbacks may challenge validity and reliability of the visual attention assessments. In terms of correctly classified attention, the aim of the study was to establish the accuracy and the inter-rater reliability of driving assessments of visual attention from the back seat. Furthermore, by establishing eye contact between the assessor and the driver through an additional mirror on the wind screen, the present study aimed to establish how much such an intervention would enhance the accuracy of the visual attention assessment. METHODS: Two drivers with Parkinson's disease (PD) and six control drivers drove a fixed route in a driving simulator while wearing a head mounted eye tracker. The eye tracker data showed where the foveal visual attention actually was directed. These data were time stamped and compared with the simultaneous manual scoring of the visual attention of the drivers. In four of the drivers, one with Parkinson's disease, a mirror on the windscreen was set up to arrange for eye contact between the driver and the assessor. Inter-rater reliability was performed with one of the Parkinson drivers driving, but without the mirror. RESULTS: Without mirror, the overall accuracy was 56% when assessing the three control drivers and with mirror 83%. However, for the PD driver without mirror the accuracy was 94%, whereas for the PD driver with a mirror the accuracy was 90%. With respect to the inter-rater reliability, a 73% agreement was found. CONCLUSION: If the final outcome of a driving assessment is dependent on the subcategory of a protocol assessing visual attention, we suggest the use of an additional mirror to establish eye contact between the assessor and the driver. The clinicians' observations on-road should not be a standalone assessment in driving assessments. Instead, eye trackers should be employed for further analyses and correlation in cases where there is doubt about a driver's attention

Affective Guide with Attitude

The Affective Guide System is a mobile context-aware and spatial-aware system, offering the user with an affective multimodal interaction interface. The system takes advantage of the current mobile and wireless technologies. It includes an ‘affective guide with attitude’ that links its memories and visitor’s interest to the spatial location so that stories are relevant to what can be immediately seen. This paper presents a review of related work, the system in detail, challenges and the future work to be carried out

A influência das emoções nas falsas memórias: uma revisão crítica

Neste artigo revisamos estudos relativos à influencia das emoções no funcionamento da memória e, em específico, na produção de falsas memórias. As falsas memórias são um tipo de distorção mnemônica que consistem na recuperação de eventos que nunca ocorreram. As emoções são descritas através das dimensões de valência e alerta. Numerosos estudos têm sugerido que a valência e o alerta beneficiam a memória através de distintos processos cognitivos e mecanismos neurais. Já as pesquisas sobre a influência das emoções na produção de falsas memórias são bastante incipientes, e divergem quanto aos seus resultados. O foco principal será a discussão metodológica de pesquisas que relacionam as emoções aos falsos reconhecimentos. Por fim, apresentamos algumas sugestões para futuros estudos, e o atual estado de pesquisas desenvolvidas no Brasil

Visual imagery and false memory for pictures:a functional magnetic resonance imaging study in healthy participants

BACKGROUND: Visual mental imagery might be critical in the ability to discriminate imagined from perceived pictures. Our aim was to investigate the neural bases of this specific type of reality-monitoring process in individuals with high visual imagery abilities. METHODS: A reality-monitoring task was administered to twenty-six healthy participants using functional magnetic resonance imaging. During the encoding phase, 45 words designating common items, and 45 pictures of other common items, were presented in random order. During the recall phase, participants were required to remember whether a picture of the item had been presented, or only a word. Two subgroups of participants with a propensity for high vs. low visual imagery were contrasted. RESULTS: Activation of the amygdala, left inferior occipital gyrus, insula, and precuneus were observed when high visual imagers encoded words later remembered as pictures. At the recall phase, these same participants activated the middle frontal gyrus and inferior and superior parietal lobes when erroneously remembering pictures. CONCLUSIONS: The formation of visual mental images might activate visual brain areas as well as structures involved in emotional processing. High visual imagers demonstrate increased activation of a fronto-parietal source-monitoring network that enables distinction between imagined and perceived pictures

Reading football in Brazil through a boy’s own story

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health on 12 Feb 2014, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/2159676X.2013.877962This essay is a contribution to debates about football in Brazil. It is also an attempt to engage in discussions about how we come to know and talk about the social world around us. The central element of the essay is the story of one young man’s interaction with a particular sporting space and the emotions and insights that are triggered by memories of that place, situated as it is in a rapidly developing country but retaining many of the problems associated with under development. Absolved from any responsibility to adhere to a dominant value system or to feel constrained by research ethics, the storyteller is free to offer honest, if conflicted, personal reflections on a range of issues, including poverty, ‘race’ and sporting values. The result is a story which does not negate the necessity of more orthodox research on sport in Brazil, particularly related to the hosting of sport mega events but which reminds us of the importance of understanding the world through everyday personal experience

Illusory Memories of Emotionally Charged Words in Autism Spectrum Disorder: Further Evidence for Atypical Emotion Processing Outside the Social Domain

Recent evidence suggests that individuals with ASD may not accumulate distinct representations of emotional information throughout development. On the basis of this observation we predicted that such individuals would not be any less likely to falsely remember emotionally significant as compared to neutral words when such illusory memories are induced by asking participants to study lists of words that are orthographically associated to these words. Our findings showed that typical participants are far less likely to experience illusory memories of emotionally charged as compared to neutral words. Individuals with ASD, on the other hand, did not exhibit this emotional modulation of false memories. We discuss this finding in relation to the role of emotional processing atypicalities in ASD