Forgetting of Emotional Information Is Hard: An fMRI Study of Directed Forgetting

Strong evidence suggests that memory for emotional information is much better than for neutral one. Thus, one may expect that forgetting of emotional information is difficult and requires considerable effort. The aim of this item-method directed forgetting functional magnetic resonance imaging study was to investigate this hypothesis both at behavioral and neural levels. Directed forgetting effects were observed for both neutral and emotionally negative International Affective Picture System images. Moreover, recognition rate of negative to-be-forgotten images was higher than in case of neutral ones. In the study phase, intention to forget and successful forgetting of emotionally negative images were associated with widespread activations extending from the anterior to posterior regions mainly in the right hemisphere, whereas in the case of neutral images, they were associated with just one cluster of activation in the right lingual gyrus. Therefore, forgetting of emotional information seems to be a demanding process that strongly activates a distributed neural network in the right hemisphere. In the test phase, in turn, successfully forgotten images—either neutral or emotionally negative—were associated with virtually no activation, even at the lowered P value threshold. These results suggest that intentional inhibition during encoding may be an efficient strategy to cope with emotionally negative memorie

Forgetting of emotional information is hard: an fMRI study of directed forgetting

Strong evidence suggests that memory for emotional information is much better than for neutral one. Thus, one may expect that forgetting of emotional information is difficult and requires considerable effort. The aim of this item-method directed forgetting functional magnetic resonance imaging study was to investigate this hypothesis both at behavioral and neural levels. Directed forgetting effects were observed for both neutral and emotionally negative International Affective Picture System images. Moreover, recognition rate of negative to-be-forgotten images was higher than in case of neutral ones. In the study phase, intention to forget and successful forgetting of emotionally negative images were associated with widespread activations extending from the anterior to posterior regions mainly in the right hemisphere, whereas in the case of neutral images, they were associated with just one cluster of activation in the right lingual gyrus. Therefore, forgetting of emotional information seems to be a demanding process that strongly activates a distributed neural network in the right hemisphere. In the test phase, in turn, successfully forgotten images--either neutral or emotionally negative--were associated with virtually no activation, even at the lowered P value threshold. These results suggest that intentional inhibition during encoding may be an efficient strategy to cope with emotionally negative memories

Intelligent control system for gaseous nitriding process

In the present paper, the solutions of the following research issues have been presented:• dependencies between the process parameters and the layer structure have been defined, which serve todevelop software for the control system of the process, with the view of obtaining a complex layerstructure and optimal kinetics of its creation and growth,• assumptions for the control system of the gaseous nitriding process have been developed on the basis ofa complementary cooperation of the mathematical model and the indications of the magnetic sensorregistering the nucleation and growth of the layer.These issues comprise two complementary ways towards the construction of intelligent control systems.The first one of them consists in developing innovative databases, expert systems to aid the operator indecision making regarding the choice of defined changes to the process parameters. This is connectedwith the knowledge of possibly all the factors and mechanisms which have an influence on the result ofthe process and which make it possible to design an algorithm of changes of process parameters thatcould guarantee optimal kinetics of the layer growth and its required structure. The other one additionallymakes use of specially constructed sensors, which having been placed directly in the processes react tothe growth of layers and their structure

Personal semantics: Is it distinct from episodic and semantic memory? An electrophysiological study of memory for autobiographical facts and repeated events in honor of Shlomo Bentin

Declarative memory is thought to consist of two independent systems: episodic and semantic. Episodic memory represents personal and contextually unique events, while semantic memory represents culturally-shared, acontextual factual knowledge. Personal semantics refers to aspects of declarative memory that appear to fall somewhere in between the extremes of episodic and semantic. Examples include autobiographical knowledge and memories of repeated personal events. These two aspects of personal semantics have been studied little and rarely compared to both semantic and episodic memory. We recorded the event-related potentials (ERPs) of 27 healthy participants while they verified the veracity of sentences probing four types of questions: general (i.e., semantic) facts, autobiographical facts, repeated events, and unique (i.e., episodic) events. Behavioral results showed equivalent reaction times in all 4 conditions. True sentences were verified faster than false sentences, except for unique events for which no significant difference was observed. Electrophysiological results showed that the N400 (which is classically associated with retrieval from semantic memory) was maximal for general facts and the LPC (which is classically associated with retrieval from episodic memory) was maximal for unique events. For both ERP components, the two personal semantic conditions (i.e., autobiographical facts and repeated events) systematically differed from semantic memory. In addition, N400 amplitudes also differentiated autobiographical facts from unique events. Autobiographical facts and repeated events did not differ significantly from each other but their corresponding scalp distributions differed from those associated with general facts. Our results suggest that the neural correlates of personal semantics can be distinguished from those of semantic and episodic memory, and may provide clues as to how unique events are transformed to semantic memory

Do I Have My Attention? Speed of Processing Advantages for the Self-Face Are Not Driven by Automatic Attention Capture

We respond more quickly to our own face than to other faces, but there is debate over whether this is connected to attention-grabbing properties of the self-face. In two experiments, we investigate whether the self-face selectively captures attention, and the attentional conditions under which this might occur. In both experiments, we examined whether different types of face (self, friend, stranger) provide differential levels of distraction when processing self, friend and stranger names. In Experiment 1, an image of a distractor face appeared centrally – inside the focus of attention – behind a target name, with the faces either upright or inverted. In Experiment 2, distractor faces appeared peripherally – outside the focus of attention – in the left or right visual field, or bilaterally. In both experiments, self-name recognition was faster than other name recognition, suggesting a self-referential processing advantage. The presence of the self-face did not cause more distraction in the naming task compared to other types of face, either when presented inside (Experiment 1) or outside (Experiment 2) the focus of attention. Distractor faces had different effects across the two experiments: when presented inside the focus of attention (Experiment 1), self and friend images facilitated self and friend naming, respectively. This was not true for stranger stimuli, suggesting that faces must be robustly represented to facilitate name recognition. When presented outside the focus of attention (Experiment 2), no facilitation occurred. Instead, we report an interesting distraction effect caused by friend faces when processing strangers’ names. We interpret this as a “social importance” effect, whereby we may be tuned to pick out and pay attention to familiar friend faces in a crowd. We conclude that any speed of processing advantages observed in the self-face processing literature are not driven by automatic attention capture

I Undervalue You but I Need You: The Dissociation of Attitude and Memory Toward In-Group Members

In the present study, the in-group bias or in-group derogation among mainland Chinese was investigated through a rating task and a recognition test. In two experiments,participants from two universities with similar ranks rated novel faces or names and then had a recognition test. Half of the faces or names were labeled as participants' own university and the other half were labeled as their counterpart. Results showed that, for either faces or names, rating scores for out-group members were consistently higher than those for in-group members, whereas the recognition accuracy showed just the opposite. These results indicated that the attitude and memory for group-relevant information might be dissociated among Mainland Chinese

Discovery of serum biomarkers for pancreatic adenocarcinoma using proteomic analysis

Background and aims:The serum/plasma proteome was explored for biomarkers to improve the diagnostic ability of CA19-9 in pancreatic adenocarcinoma (PC).Methods:A Training Set of serum samples from 20 resectable and 18 stage IV PC patients, 54 disease controls (DCs) and 68 healthy volunteers (HVs) were analysed by surface-enhanced laser desorption and ionisation time-of-flight mass spectrometry (SELDI-TOF MS). The resulting protein panel was validated on 40 resectable PC, 21 DC and 19 HV plasma samples (Validation-1 Set) and further by ELISA on 33 resectable PC, 28 DC and 18 HV serum samples (Validation-2 Set). Diagnostic panels were derived using binary logistic regression incorporating internal cross-validation followed by receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis.Results:A seven-protein panel from the training set PC vs DC and from PC vs HV samples gave the ROC area under the curve (AUC) of 0.90 and 0.90 compared with 0.87 and 0.91 for CA19-9. The AUC was greater (0.97 and 0.99, P0.05) when CA19-9 was added to the panels and confirmed on the validation-1 samples. A simplified panel of apolipoprotein C-I (ApoC-I), apolipoprotein A-II (ApoA-II) and CA19-9 was tested on the validation-2 set by ELISA, in which the ROC AUC was greater than that of CA19-9 alone for PC vs DC (0.90 vs 0.84) and for PC vs HV (0.96 vs 0.90).Conclusions:A simplified diagnostic panel of CA19-9, ApoC-I and ApoA-II improves the diagnostic ability of CA19-9 alone and may have clinical utility