持续性注意是个体在一段时间内将注意保持在某个客体或活动上的能力，是顺利完成日常活动和工作学习的关键。然而，随着时间的推移，注意水平会不断波动，对正在进行的活动产生负面影响。持续性注意的正常发展，及其在神经、精神类疾病患者中的异常波动发生在多个亚慢波频率。现有研究把持续性注意的波动简化为有限认知资源的权衡和分配，难以涵盖其多种认知成分、多个波动频率的复杂特征。本研究旨在探究持续性注意低频波动的认知神经机制，包括：（1）探究持续性注意核心认知成分波动的脑时空特征，建构持续性注意的认知成分波动假说；（2）通过亚慢波经颅电刺激，从频率（时间）和靶点（空间）两方面探索基于持续性注意成分低频波动特征的干预机制，并验证提出的持续性注意的认知成分波动假说；（3）考察持续性注意和注意网络之间的交互作用，探索持续性注意的成分波动假说的外延。本研究有助于深化对持续性注意认知结构和神经波动时空特征的理解，并为持续性注意波动的精准干预提供重要参考。

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is the leading mental disorder and afflicts more than 350 million people worldwide. The underlying neural mechanisms of MDD remain unclear, hindering the accurate treatment. Recent brain imaging studies have observed functional abnormalities in multiple brain regions in patients with MDD, identifying core brain regions is the key to locating potential therapeutic targets for MDD. The Granger causality analysis (GCA) measures directional effects between brain regions and, therefore, can track causal hubs as potential intervention targets for MDD. We reviewed literature employing GCA to investigate abnormal brain connections in patients with MDD. The total degree of effective connections in the thalamus (THA) is more than twice that in traditional targets such as the superior frontal gyrus and anterior cingulate cortex. Altered causal connections in patients with MDD mainly included enhanced bottom-up connections from the thalamus to various cortical and subcortical regions and reduced top-down connections from these regions to the THA, indicating excessive uplink sensory information and insufficient downlink suppression information for negative emotions. We suggest that the thalamus is the most crucial causal hub for MDD, which may serve as the downstream target for non-invasive brain stimulation and medication approaches in MDD treatment.

Theories of embodied cognition suggest that hand motions and cognition are closely interconnected. An emerging technique of tracking how participants move a computer mouse (i.e., the mouse-tracking technique) has shown advantages over the traditional response time measurement to detect implicit cognitive conflicts. Previous research suggests that attention is essential for subliminal processing to take place at a semantic level. However, this assumption is challenged by evidence showing the presence of subliminal semantic processing in the near-absence of attention. The inconsistency of evidence could stem from the insufficient sensitivity in the response time measurement. Therefore, we examined the role of attention in subliminal semantic processing by analyzing participants’ hand motions using the mouse-tracking technique. The results suggest that subliminal semantic processing is not only enhanced by attention but also occurs when attention is disrupted, challenging the necessity of facilitated top-down attention for subliminal semantic processing, as claimed by a number of studies. In addition, by manipulating the color of attentional cues, our experiment shows that the cue color per se could influence participants’ response patterns. Overall, the current study suggests that attentional status and subliminal semantic processing can be reliably revealed by temporal–spatial features extracted from cursor motion trajectories.

通过反复执行某种特定的任务或游戏以提高多种认知功能是认知训练的重要目标。然而，基于领域特殊性的认知训练难以产生远迁移。认知训练理论认为远迁移的缺失表明认知功能之间相对独立。脑成像研究发现，认知功能之间虽共享大量局部脑区和脑网络活动，但其全局活动模式却不相同。领域特殊性认知训练强化了认知特异性全局脑活动模式，阻碍了迁移；而领域一般性认知训练包含了多个认知领域，可能产生远迁移。未来研究应关注领域特殊性和领域一般性认知训练的不同机制和应用场景，进一步推动认知训练和认知结构理论的发展。

Previous research on early deafness has primarily focused on the behavioral and neural changes in the intact visual and tactile modalities. However, how early deafness changes the interplay of these two modalities is not well understood. In the current study, we investigated the effect of auditory deprivation on visuo-tactile interaction by measuring the cross-modal motion aftereffect. Consistent with previous findings, motion aftereffect transferred between vision and touch in a bidirectional manner in hearing participants. However, for deaf participants, the cross-modal transfer occurred only in the tactile-to-visual direction but not in the visual-to-tactile direction. This unidirectional cross-modal motion aftereffect found in the deaf participants could not be explained by unisensory motion aftereffect or discrimination threshold. The results suggest a reduced visual influence on tactile motion perception in early deaf individuals.

Recent evidence suggests that top-down attention facilitates unconscious semantic processing. To clarify the role of attention in unconscious semantic processing, we traced trajectories of the computer mouse in a semantic priming task and scrutinized the extent to which top-down attention enhances unconscious semantic processing in four different stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA: 50, 200, 500, or 1000ms) conditions. Participants judged whether a target digit (e.g., "6") was larger or smaller than five, preceded by a masked priming digit (e.g., "9"). The pre-prime duration changed randomly from trial to trial to disrupt participants' top-down attention in an uncued condition (in a cued condition, a green square cue was presented to facilitate participants' top-down attention). The results show that top-down attention modifies the time course of subliminal semantic processing, and the temporal attention window lasts more than 1000ms; attention facilitated by the cue may amplify semantic priming to some extent, yet the amplification effect of attention is relatively minor.

Affective computing research has advanced emotion recognition systems using facial expressions, voices, gaits, and physiological signals, yet these methods are often impractical. This study integrates mouse cursor motion analysis into affective computing and investigates the idea that movements of the computer cursor can provide information about emotion of the computer user. We extracted 16-26 trajectory features during a choice-reaching task and examined the link between emotion and cursor motions. Participants were induced for positive or negative emotions by music, film clips, or emotional pictures, and they indicated their emotions with questionnaires. Our 10-fold cross-validation analysis shows that statistical models formed from "known" participants (training data) could predict nearly 10%-20% of the variance of positive affect and attentiveness ratings of "unknown" participants, suggesting that cursor movement patterns such as the area under curve and direction change help infer emotions of computer users.

The perception of emotion is critical for social interactions. Nonlinguistic signals such as those in the human voice and musical instruments are used for communicating emotion. Using an adaptation paradigm, this study examines the extent to which common mental mechanisms are applied for emotion processing of instrumental and vocal sounds. In two experiments we show that prolonged exposure to affective non-linguistic vocalizations elicits auditory after effects when participants are tested on instrumental morphs (Experiment 1a), yet no aftereffects are apparent when participants are exposed to affective instrumental sounds and tested on non-linguistic voices (Experiment 1b). Specifically, results indicate that exposure to angry vocal sounds made participants perceive instrumental sounds as angrier and less fearful, but not vice versa. These findings suggest that there is a directionality for emotion perception in vocal and instrumental sounds. Significantly, this unidirectional relationship reveals that mechanisms used for emotion processing is likely to be shared from vocal sounds to instrumental sounds, but not vice versa.

Choice reaching, e.g., reaching a targeted object by hand, involves a dynamic online integration of perception, action and cognition, where neural activities of prefrontal cortical regions are concurrently coordinated with sensori-motor subsystems. On the basis of this theoretical development, the authors investigate the extent to which cursor movements in a simple choice-reaching task reveal people’s emotions, such as anxiety. The results show that there is a strong correlation between cursor trajectory patterns and self-reported anxiety in male participants. Because computer cursors are ubiquitous, our trajectory analysis can be augmented to existing affective computing technologies.

Measuring response times has been a staple for evaluating masked semantic priming. Its efficacy, however, has been challenged on several grounds — reported effect sizes of these studies are relatively small, and priming effects pertaining to response time measures are difficult to be replicated. Here, we report a complementary method — recording trajectories of a computer cursor. Participants judged whether two digits were the same or different, preceded by a briefly presented masked prime. Each prime had either positive or negative connotations, and the priming effects were evaluated either by response times or cursor trajectories associated with the area under the curve. Results indicate that the effect size of the congruency effect measured by cursor trajectories (i.e. area under the curve) was far greater than that measured by response times, suggesting that the cursor trajectory measure is more sensitive to masked semantic priming than the response time measure.

This study investigates dynamic time warping (DTW) as a possible analysis method for EEG-based affective computing in a self-paced learning task in which inter- and intra-personal differences are large. In one experiment, participants (N=200) carried out an implicit category learning task where their frontal EEG signals were collected throughout the experiment. Using DTW, we measured the dissimilarity distances of EEG signals between participants and examined the extent to which a k-Nearest Neighbors algorithm could predict self-rated feelings of a participant from signals taken from other participants (between-participants prediction). Results showed that DTW provides potentially useful characteristics for EEG data analysis in a heterogeneous setting. In particular, theory-based segmentation of time-series data were particularly useful for DTW analysis while smoothing and standardization were detrimental when applied in a self-paced learning task.

The role of attention in subliminal semantic priming remains controversial: some researchers argue that attention is necessary for subliminal semantic priming, while others suggest that subliminal semantic processing is free from the influence of attention. The present study employs a cursor motion method to measure priming and evaluate the influence of attention. Specifically, by employing a semantic priming task developed by Naccache, Blandin, and Dehaene (2002), we investigate the extent to which top-down attention influences semantic priming. Results indicate that, consistent with the Naccache et al. (2002) results, attention facilitates priming. However, inconsistent with their theory, significant priming is still observed even in near absence of attention. We suggest that top-down attention helps but is not necessary for subliminal semantic processing.

Congruency effects are taken as evidence that semantic information can be processed automatically. However, these effects are often weak, and the straightforward association between primes and targets can exaggerate congruency effects. To address these problems, a mouse movement method is applied to scrutinize congruency effects. In one experiment, participants judged whether two numbers were the same ("3\3") or different ("3\5"), preceded by briefly presented pictures with either positive or negative connotations. Participants indicated their responses by clicking a "Same" or "Different" button on the computer screen, while their cursor trajectories were recorded for each trial. The trajectory data revealed greater deviation to unselected buttons in incongruent trials (e.g., "3\5" preceded by a green traffic light picture). This effect was influenced by the type of responses but not by prime durations. We suggest that the mouse movement method can complement the reaction time to study masked semantic priming. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.