Remembering, imagining, false memories & personal meanings

The Self-Memory System encompasses the working self, autobiographical memory and episodic memory. Specific autobiographical memories are patterns of activation over knowledge structures in autobiographical and episodic memory brought about by the activating effect of cues. The working self can elaborate cues based on the knowledge they initially activate and so control the construction of memories of the past and the future. It is proposed that such construction takes place in the remembering–imagining system – a window of highly accessible recent memories and simulations of near future events. How this malfunctions in various disorders is considered as are the implication of what we term the modern view of human memory for notions of memory accuracy. We show how all memories are to some degree false and that the main role of memories lies in generating personal meanings

Social anxiety in the digital age: The measurement and sequelae of online safety-seeking

The final publication is available at Elsevier via https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.08.023 © 2019. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Online communication is essential to modern life, but its features may also afford socially anxious individuals the ability to conceal themselves, or parts of themselves, from evaluation by others. In this way, Internet-based social interaction may function as a form of safety behavior for socially anxious people seeking to avoid face-to-face encounters. To enhance our understanding of how social anxiety manifests online and examine the nature and impact of safety behaviors within online social contexts, we developed the Seeking Online Safety Questionnaire (SOSQ). The SOSQ measures the degree to which specific features of online communication contribute to the perception of interpersonal safety in online contexts. We explored the measure's factor structure and psychometric properties in a sample of 374 participants who completed the online survey through Mechanical Turk. Exploratory factor analysis suggested two correlated factors: control over self-presentation, and control over personal information. The SOSQ showed good convergent validity, such that as each of the SOSQ factors and total score increased, so too did participants' trait social anxiety, concerns about self-attribute flaws, fear of negative evaluation, and use of offline safety behaviors. Regression analyses demonstrated that control over online self-presentation explained unique variance in social anxiety symptoms and fear of negative evaluation over and above control over personal information. Results expand our understanding of social anxiety-driven safety behaviors in online contexts, which have important implications for conceptualizing the nature and treatment of social anxiety.Canada Research ChairsSocial Sciences and Humanities Council of Canad

Coping with negative mental images in social anxiety disorder: Investigating the potential benefits of image morphing

Negative mental imagery contributes to symptom maintenance in social anxiety disorder (SAD). Here, we investigated the effects of image morphing, a brief mental strategy designed to facilitate access to positive images. Participants with SAD and healthy control (HC) participants were randomly assigned to receive either image morphing or supportive counseling. Although initial training and 1-week daily practice were successful in equipping morphing participants across groups with the required skill, those assigned to morphing failed to demonstrate differential improvements in positive affect, negative affect, or self-perception relative to control participants during a subsequent social stress task. Ancillary analyses revealed that the number of positive details contained in retrieved or morphed images prior to the task significantly predicted the level of positive affect reported after the task, but this effect was observed only for HC participants. We discuss the need for future research to refine innovative imagery-based psychotherapeutic strategies for social anxiety.This research was undertaken thanks to funding awarded to the third author from the Canada Research Chairs Program, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research

Functional Interplay Between Posterior Parietal Cortex and Hippocampus During Detection of Memory Targets and Non-targets

© Copyright © 2020 Ciaramelli, Burianová, Vallesi, Cabeza and Moscovitch. Posterior parietal cortex is frequently activated during episodic memory retrieval but its role during retrieval and its interactions with the hippocampus are not yet clear. In this fMRI study, we investigated the neural bases of recognition memory when study repetitions and retrieval goals were manipulated. During encoding participants studied words either once or three times, and during retrieval they were rewarded more to detect either studied words or new words. We found that (1) dorsal parietal cortex (DPC) was more engaged during detection of items studied once compared to three times, whereas regions in the ventral parietal cortex (VPC) responded more to items studied multiple times; (2) DPC, within a network of brain regions functionally connected to the anterior hippocampus, responded more to items consistent with retrieval goals (associated with high reward); (3) VPC, within a network of brain regions functionally connected to the posterior hippocampus, responded more to items not aligned with retrieval goals (i.e., unexpected). These findings support the hypothesis that DPC and VPC regions contribute differentially to top-down vs. bottom-up attention to memory. Moreover, they reveal a dissociation in the functional profile of the anterior and posterior hippocampi

Effects of ecstasy/polydrug use on memory for associative information

Rationale Associative learning underpins behaviours that are fundamental to the everyday functioning of the individual. Evidence pointing to learning deficits in recreational drug users merits further examination. Objectives A word pair learning task was administered to examine associative learning processes in ecstasy/polydrug users. Methods After assignment to either single or divided attention conditions, 44 ecstasy/polydrug users and 48 non-users were presented with 80 word pairs at encoding. Following this, four types of stimuli were presented at the recognition phase: the words as originally paired (old pairs), previously presented words in different pairings (conjunction pairs), old words paired with new words, and pairs of new words (not presented previously). The task was to identify which of the stimuli were intact old pairs. Results Ecstasy/ploydrug users produced significantly more false-positive responses overall compared to non-users. Increased long-term frequency of ecstasy use was positively associated with the propensity to produce false-positive responses. It was also associated with a more liberal signal detection theory decision criterion value. Measures of long term and recent cannabis use were also associated with these same word pair learning outcome measures. Conjunction word pairs, irrespective of drug use, generated the highest level of false-positive responses and significantly more false-positive responses were made in the divided attention condition compared to the single attention condition. Conclusions Overall, the results suggest that long-term ecstasy exposure may induce a deficit in associative learning and this may be in part a consequence of users adopting a more liberal decision criterion value

Practicing self-compassion weakens the relationship between fear of receiving compassion and the desire to conceal negative experiences from others

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Mindfulness. The final authenticated version is available online from Springer at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12671-017-0792-0Disclosure of personal distress is linked to important inter- and intrapersonal benefits. However, people who tend to view self-disclosure as being risky are likely to conceal their feelings and forgo opportunities to receive valuable social support. One such group of people may be those who fear receiving compassion. The current study of 85 female undergraduates investigated (a) whether fear of receiving compassion would predict decreased distress disclosure, and (b) whether inducing a self-compassionate mindset could help to temper the association between fear of receiving compassion and perceived risks of revealing one’s distress to others. Participants completed self-report questionnaires to measure trait-like fears of receiving compassion as well as general distress disclosure tendencies. They were then enrolled in a laboratory experiment in which they recalled a personal past negative experience and were randomly assigned to write about it in a self-compassionate, self-esteem enhancing, or non-directive way. Finally, they rated how risky disclosing their experience would feel and disclosed the event in a written letter to another person. At a trait level, results indicated that the more participants feared receiving compassion, the less they tended to disclose. Moreover, self-compassion training – but neither of the comparison conditions – significantly weakened the positive link between fear of receiving compassion and perceived risks of distress disclosure. These novel findings suggest that practicing self-compassion could help to neutralize the maladaptive relationship between fear of receiving compassion and perceived risk of disclosure.Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Grant 435-2012-0017 || Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Grant 430-2013-000757|| Canada Research Chairs, Grant 950-22314

Longer fixation duration while viewing face images

The spatio-temporal properties of saccadic eye movements can be influenced by the cognitive demand and the characteristics of the observed scene. Probably due to its crucial role in social communication, it is argued that face perception may involve different cognitive processes compared with non-face object or scene perception. In this study, we investigated whether and how face and natural scene images can influence the patterns of visuomotor activity. We recorded monkeys’ saccadic eye movements as they freely viewed monkey face and natural scene images. The face and natural scene images attracted similar number of fixations, but viewing of faces was accompanied by longer fixations compared with natural scenes. These longer fixations were dependent on the context of facial features. The duration of fixations directed at facial contours decreased when the face images were scrambled, and increased at the later stage of normal face viewing. The results suggest that face and natural scene images can generate different patterns of visuomotor activity. The extra fixation duration on faces may be correlated with the detailed analysis of facial features

Cognitive mapping style relates to posterior-anterior hippocampal volume ratio

As London taxi drivers acquire "the knowledge" and develop a detailed cognitive map of London, their posterior hippocampi (pHPC) gradually increase in volume, reflecting an increasing pHPC/aHPC volume ratio. In the mnemonic domain, greater pHPC/aHPC volume ratios in young adults have been found to relate to better recollection ability, indicating that the balance between pHPC and aHPC volumes might be reflective of cross-domain individual differences. Here, we examined participants' self-reported use of cognitive map-based navigational strategies in relation to their pHPC/aHPC hippocampal volume ratio. We find that greater reported cognitive map use was related to significantly greater posterior, relative to anterior, hippocampal volume in two separate samples of young adults. Further, greater reported cognitive map usage correlated with better performance on a self-initiated navigation task. Together, these data help to advance our understanding of differences between aHPC and pHPC and the greater role of pHPC in spatial mapping

Grey and white matter correlates of recent and remote autobiographical memory retrieval:Insights from the dementias

The capacity to remember self-referential past events relies on the integrity of a distributed neural network. Controversy exists, however, regarding the involvement of specific brain structures for the retrieval of recently experienced versus more distant events. Here, we explored how characteristic patterns of atrophy in neurodegenerative disorders differentially disrupt remote versus recent autobiographical memory. Eleven behavioural-variant frontotemporal dementia, 10 semantic dementia, 15 Alzheimer's disease patients and 14 healthy older Controls completed the Autobiographical Interview. All patient groups displayed significant remote memory impairments relative to Controls. Similarly, recent period retrieval was significantly compromised in behavioural-variant frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer's disease, yet semantic dementia patients scored in line with Controls. Voxel-based morphometry and diffusion tensor imaging analyses, for all participants combined, were conducted to investigate grey and white matter correlates of remote and recent autobiographical memory retrieval. Neural correlates common to both recent and remote time periods were identified, including the hippocampus, medial prefrontal, and frontopolar cortices, and the forceps minor and left hippocampal portion of the cingulum bundle. Regions exclusively implicated in each time period were also identified. The integrity of the anterior temporal cortices was related to the retrieval of remote memories, whereas the posterior cingulate cortex emerged as a structure significantly associated with recent autobiographical memory retrieval. This study represents the first investigation of the grey and white matter correlates of remote and recent autobiographical memory retrieval in neurodegenerative disorders. Our findings demonstrate the importance of core brain structures, including the medial prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, irrespective of time period, and point towards the contribution of discrete regions in mediating successful retrieval of distant versus recently experienced events