Neuroscience and climate change:How brain recordings can help us understand human responses to climate change

There is little published neuroscience research on the psychology of climate change. This review outlines how carefully designed experiments that measure key neural processes, linked to specific cognitive processes, can provide powerful tools to answer research questions in climate change psychology. We review relevant literature from social neuroscience that can be applicable to environmental research-the neural correlates of fairness and cooperation, altruistic behaviour and personal values-and discuss important factors when translating environmental psychology constructs to neuroscientific measurement. We provide a practical overview of how to implement environmental neuroscience using electroencephalography, summarising important event-related potential components and how they can be used to answer questions in climate change psychology. Challenges for the field include accurate attribution of findings, both within and between studies, the need for interdisciplinary collaboration, peer review and reporting processes

Neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying adaptation:Brain mechanisms that change the priority of future information based on their behavioral relevance

The ability of the human brain to change the priority of which information is being processed is a key property that underlies day-to-day functioning. We constantly shift our attention to those stimuli or events that are behaviorally important. This thesis is focused on understanding the biological neural mechanisms by which the brain accomplishes this feat and what the long term consequences are. In the studies described in this dissertation we asked participants to do computer-run cognitive tasks during which we recorded high-temporal resolution electroencephalography (EEG) measures of their electrical brain activity. We used rewards to change the behavioral relevance of certain events, and investigated how the brain was able to facilitate the processing of those events. Besides improved behavioral performance for rewarded stimuli or events, as measured by fast and accurate responses, EEG results indicated that the brain was able to boost the neural activity in less than a second following a reward in those neural populations involved in the processing of those potentially rewarding stimuli or events. These mechanisms were very similar to those involved in the control of attention, suggesting that attention is guided by reward. Moreover, these prioritization processes do not only work on a moment-to-moment basis but can also occur on a much longer timescale, by changing the priority of stimuli by integrating multiple encounters of rewards. Accordingly, as a consequence, the evaluation and use of rewards enables the brain to continually facilitate optimization of specialized neural pathways in the processing and responses to incoming information

Dynamic modulation of neural feedback processing and attention during spatial probabilistic learning

Learned stimulus-reward associations can modulate behavior and the underlying neural processing of information. We investigated the cascade of these neurocognitive mechanisms involved in the learning of spatial stimulus-reward associations. Using electroencephalogram recordings while participants performed a probabilistic spatial reward learning task, we observed that the feedback-related negativity component was more negative in response to loss feedback compared to gain feedback but showed no modulation by learning. The late positive component became larger in response to losses as the learning set progressed but smaller in response to gains. In addition, feedback-locked alpha frequency oscillations measured over occipital sites were predictive of N2pc amplitudes—a marker of spatial attention orienting—observed on the next trial. This relationship was found to become stronger with learning set progression. Taken together, we elucidated neurocognitive dynamics underlying feedback processing during spatial reward learning, and the subsequent effects of these learned spatial stimulus-reward associations on spatial attention