Infant and Adult Brains Are Coupled to the Dynamics of Natural Communication

Elise A. Piazza, Liat Hasenfratz, Uri Hasson, and Casey Lew-Williams

Piazza and colleagues used functional near-infrared spectroscopy—a noninvasive measure of blood oxygenation resulting from neural activity that is minimally affected by movements and thus allows participants to freely interact and move—to measure brain activation of infants (9–15 months old) and an adult while they communicated and played with each other. An adult experimenter either (a) engaged directly with the infant by playing with some toys, singing nursery rhymes, and reading a story or (b) performed those same tasks while being turned away from the child and directed to another adult in the room. Results indicated that when the adult interacted with the child (but not with the other adult), the activations of many prefrontal cortex (PFC) channels and some parietal channels were intercorrelated, indicating neural coupling. Both infant and adult PFC activation preceded moments of mutual gaze and increased before the infant smiled, with the infant’s PFC response preceding the adult’s. Infant PFC activity was also followed by an increase in pitch variability of the adult’s speech, although no changes occurred in the adult’s PFC, indicating that the adult’s speech probably did not influence neural coupling between the child and the adult. These findings suggest that the adult was sensitive to subtle cues from the infants, which in turn modified the adult’s brain responses and behaviors to improve alignment with, and maximize information transfer to, the infant. This research may advance what is known about infant–adult interactions, and tracking real-time brain activation provides an innovative measure of social interaction.

Predicting Real-Life Self-Control by Brain Activity Encoding the Value of Anticipated Future Outcomes

Klaus-Martin Krönke, Max Wolff, Holger Mohr, et al.

Neural mechanisms involved in the anticipation of future consequences may help to explain self-control in laboratory and real-life tasks. While researchers collected functional MRI data, participants read descriptions of actions with conflicting short-term and long-term consequences (e.g., play video games, study for an exam) and decided whether they would perform those actions. The researchers combined these data with a 7-day smartphone-based assessment of real-life self-control failures and found that participants who were more likely to make shortsighted decisions and commit self-control failures showed a reduced modulation of neural value signals in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex when processing long-term consequences.

Neural Representations of Procedural Knowledge

Robert A. Mason and Marcel Adam Just

The knowledge required for complex procedures, such as tying a knot, can be identified from their functional MRI (fMRI) signatures. Mason and Just trained participants to tie different knots, collecting their fMRI data while they either physically tied the knots or imagined tying the knots. Tying or imagining tying each particular knot created a procedural signature (i.e., an activation pattern) in the frontal, parietal, motor, and cerebellar brain regions. fMRI can thus be useful to further understand procedural knowledge.

What Is the Test-Retest Reliability of Common Task-Functional MRI Measures? New Empirical Evidence and a Meta-Analysis

Maxwell L. Elliott, Annchen R. Knodt, David Ireland, et al.  

The reliability of measuring brain activity using task functional MRI (fMRI) for predicting disease risk and outcomes appears to be low. Elliott and colleagues present a meta-analysis of prior research and an analysis of test-retest reliability of brain activity in certain regions across 11 common fMRI tasks. The authors found that reliability across studies was low and test-retest studies did not reliably show activity in the same areas of interest for the same tasks. These findings suggest that current task-fMRI measures are not suitable for predicting clinical outcomes or studying individual differences.

Neighborhood Deprivation Shapes Motivational-Neurocircuit Recruitment in Children

Teagan S. Mullins, Ethan M. Campbell, Jeremy and Hogeveen

Children from socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods might be at elevated risk for psychopathology because the diminished access to rewards in their environments may shape the motivational neurocircuits that affect their attention and response to rewards. Mullins and colleagues used neuroimaging data from a large study of adolescent brain development and found that when 9- to 10-year-olds from poor neighborhoods were anticipating rewards, fewer motivational neurocircuits were activated than compared to participants from less disadvantaged neighborhoods. This blunted recruitment of motivational neurocircuits in children from disadvantaged neighborhoods may explain why these children may be more likely to have attention problems.

Preverbal Infants Discover Statistical Word Patterns at Similar Rates as Adults: Evidence From Neural Entrainment 

Dawoon Choi, Laura J. Batterink, Alexis K. Black, Ken A. Paller, and Janet F. Werker

Preverbal children (6-months-old) appear to already have the ability to segment words from continuous speech, a process facilitated by learning the statistical patterns of language. Choi and colleagues used electroencephalogram measures to track the ability of infants to segment words. Infants’ neural processing increasingly synchronized with the embedded words over the learning period. This increase in neural synchronization to words during segmentation learning was comparable to that of adults. Thus, infants were likely tracking probabilities among speech and using them to segment words, like adults do. This indicates that speech segmentation may use neural mechanisms that emerge early in life and are maintained throughout adulthood.

Automatic Misguidance of Visuospatial Attention by Acquired Scene Memory: Evidence From an N1pc Polarity Reversal

Artyom Zinchenko, Markus Conci, Thomas Töllner, Hermann J. Müller, and Thomas Geyer

Zinchenko and colleagues used electroencephalogram (EEG) data to explore how memory influences the identification of visual targets among distractors. They found that when the targets appeared in the same position in layouts that preserved the position of distractors, finding the target was easy due to contextual cuing, which was accompanied by an EEG-amplitude increase, starting with early posterior negativity (N1pc). However, when the target was relocated, contextual cuing did not occur and the N1pc was reversed in polarity. This indicates that the similar layouts lead attention to be misguided to the original target location, interfering with contextual relearning.

Effective Connectivity Between Broca’s Area and Amygdala as a Mechanism of Top-Down Control in Worry

Anika Guha, Jeffrey M. Spielberg, Jessica Lake, Tzvetan Popov, Wendy Heller, Cindy M. Yee, and Gregory A. Miller

An individual high tendency to worry, rather than worry as a reaction to a specific situation, is often considered maladaptive and may increase interference from irrelevant but negative distractors in cognitive tasks. However, this research shows that enhanced connectivity between Broca’s area (implicated in language production, inner speech, and inhibitory processing) and the amygdala (implicated in the processing of emotions) in individuals with high worry might represent a mechanism of control that fosters compensation for interference effects. Participants completed a questionnaire to assess their level of  worry (or anxious apprehension) and performed an emotion-word Stroop task, in which they saw blocks of positive (pleasant) or negative (unpleasant) words alternated with blocks of neutral words depicted in different colors and were instructed to indicate the color of the word and ignore its meaning. While doing the Stroop task, participants’ brain activation was measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging. The connectivity between Broca’s area and the amygdala was higher when participants responded to negative words. In participants with higher trait worry, activity in Broca’s area preceded and suppressed the activity in the amygdala while the participants processed negative words. Worriers in which the connection from Broca’s area to the amygdala was much higher than the connection from the amygdala to Broca’s area were more accurate than those with a smaller asymmetry in connectivity patterns. These findings indicate that activation in Broca’s area precedes amygdala activation during inhibition of processing of negative material and this connectivity may be an adaptive process that allows worriers to successfully regulate emotions.

Neural Connectivity Subtypes Predict Discrete Attentional Bias Profiles Among Heterogeneous Anxiety Patients

Rebecca B. Price, Adriene M. Beltz, Mary L. Woody, Logan Cummings, Danielle Gilchrist, and Greg J. Siegle

On average, patients with anxiety tend to show early vigilance toward threat and later avoidance of threat, accompanied by altered connectivity between brain regions. Price and colleagues organized patients with anxiety into two subgroups characterized by different altered brain connectivity associated with their attention to threat. One group exhibited executive network influences on sensory brain regions and the referred “vigilance-avoidance” patterns, whereas the other group exhibited limbic influences on sensory brain regions and atypical and inconsistent attention to threat.

Effort, Avolition, and Motivational Experience in Schizophrenia: Analysis of Behavioral and Neuroimaging Data With Relationships to Daily Motivational Experience

Adam J. Culbreth, Erin K. Moran, Sri Kandala, Andrew Westbrook, and Deanna M. Barch

Some patients with schizophrenia may be hard-wired to be less willing to allocate effort. Participants with schizophrenia and severe negative symptoms (e.g., anhedonia, reduced social drive, amotivation) expended less effort for monetary rewards, relative to their healthy counterparts and patients with fewer negative symptoms. Neuroimaging data indicated that this group showed reduced activation of the bilateral ventral striatum while performing an effortful task. The decreased effort to obtain rewards among these individuals seems to vary with the severity of their negative symptoms, associated with hypoactivation of the ventral striatum during effort-based choice.

Clarifying the Link Between Amygdala Functioning During Emotion Processing and Antisocial Behaviors Versus Callous-Unemotional Traits Within a Population-Based Community Sample

Hailey L. Dotterer, Rebecca Waller, Tyler C. Hein, et al.

Deficits in amygdala functioning related to antisocial behavior (AB) may extend across all emotions, this research suggests. Dotterer and colleagues examined amygdala reactivity and connectivity while participants viewed emotional faces (e.g., angry, happy). They found that participants who scored higher on AB showed increased amygdala activation in response to all emotions; however, callous-unemotional (CU) traits moderated the relationship between AB and amygdala activity such that participants with lower levels of CU traits and higher AB showed greater amygdala activity. AB and CU traits were also associated with distinct patterns of amygdala connectivity (with other parts of the brain), suggesting the need for further research on amygdala connectivity during emotion processing in relation to AB and CU traits.

The Neural Basis of Religious Cognition

Jordan Grafman, Irene Cristofori, Wanting Zhong, and Joseph Bulbulia

What are the regions of the brain involved in religious cognition—the processing of moral, ritual, and supernatural beliefs? Grafman and colleagues review evidence indicating that brain regions involved in cognitive control, social reasoning, social motivations, and ideological beliefs play a complex role in religious cognition. They report studies using functional neuroimaging and electroencephalography and studies of patients with neurological lesions, concluding that common human social and cognitive systems seem to support the processing of religious beliefs.

Neurocognitive Psychometrics of Intelligence: How Measurement Advancements Unveiled the Role of Mental Speed in Intelligence Differences

Anna-Lena Schubert and Gidon T. Frischkorn

What is the relationship between mental speed and intelligence? To identify elementary processes underlying intelligence differences and how the processes might be related to the multiple processes represented by mental speed, Schubert and Frischkorn present a neurocognitive-psychometrics account of mental speed. This account combines mathematical models of cognition and neural correlates of cognitive processes. Results suggest that smarter individuals have faster higher-order processing, which may reflect an advantageous organization of brain networks. The authors conclude that adopting a similar account for other processes associated with intelligence (e.g., working memory) may help to better understand the basic processes of intelligence.

Your Brain Is Not an Onion With a Tiny Reptile Inside 

Joseph Cesario, David J. Johnson, and Heather L. Eisthen

SummaryCesario and colleagues describe a model of neural evolution that challenges the widespread misconception that as vertebrate animals evolved, they added “newer” brain structures to the “older” existing ones, enabling them to have more complex psychological functions (e.g., language). Neurobiologists have long discredited this misconception that the reptile brain is still part of the human brain, which just added more layers. The authors provide examples of how this inaccurate view of brain evolution has impeded progress in psychology.

Toward a Refined Mindfulness Model Related to Consciousness and Based on ERP 

Charles Verdonk, Marion Trousselard, Frédéric Canini, Francois Vialatte, and Céline Ramdani

Verdonk and colleagues reference event-related potential (ERP) literature to discuss the proposed mechanisms of mindfulness (focusing attention on one’s present experiences), such as self-regulation of attention, improved body awareness, improved emotion regulation, and change in self-perspective. The neural features of mindfulness appear to be associated with attention self-regulation, reduced brain reactivity to emotional stimuli, and improved cognitive control. The researchers propose a unified model of mindfulness positing that mindfulness decreases the threshold of conscious access to information.

Bittersweet: The Neuroscience of Ambivalent Affect 

Anthony G. Vaccaro, Jonas T. Kaplan, and Antonio Damasio

Do ambivalent affective states, such as bittersweetness, correspond to a rapid vacillation between positive and negative states or to a simultaneously positive and negative state? Vaccaro and colleagues hypothesize that ambivalent affect involves both mechanisms. A rapid vacillating univalent affect is dependent on the brainstem nuclei, an area that allows for a rapid switch between emotions while inhibiting behavioral responses to conflicting emotions. As vacillating occurs, further processing of the “emotional moment” at the level of the insular cortex can allow the experience of one simultaneously positive and negative feeling.

Visualization of Brain Statistics With R Packages ggseg and ggseg3d

Athanasia M. Mowinckel and Didac Vidal-Piñeiro

In this tutorial, Mowinckel and Vidal-Piñeiro present two packages for the statistical software R that integrate a spatial component in data visualization, inherent in neuroimaging data. However, this spatial component is lost in common statistical representations, such as bar charts. These packages visualize predefined brain segmentations in 2D polygons and 3D meshes and are integrated with other R packages. The researchers describe the main data and functions in these packages. Mowinckel and Vidal-Piñeiro suggest that these tools may improve and facilitate the dissemination of neuroimaging results.