Psychophysiological research links pupil size to neuromodulatory systems like the Locus Coeruleus, yet its role in tracking abstract category learning remains unclear. We used the Weather Prediction Task (WPT) to investigate whether trial-by-trial pupil dynamics reflect this process. Fifty-three participants categorized geometric patterns while pupil diameter was recorded at 500 Hz. Learning was quantified via behavioral performance and strategy analysis, which identified the cognitive approaches utilized (e.g., optimal abstract integration). Results showed significant improvement in 96% of participants, with 81% adopting an optimal strategy. Using a time-resolved analysis of the pupillary signal, we dissociated two distinct, temporally separated dilations: one during the categorization decision and another during feedback processing. These dilations differed for correct and incorrect trials during specific temporal windows within the trial structure. Linear mixed-effects modeling revealed that the integrated pupil responses could be modeled as a function of trial number but not performance, suggesting that pupil size tracks task progression. These findings suggest that pupil size serves as a non-invasive index of the internal dynamics of category learning, reflecting changes in both decision-making and feedback processing.

Objective: To test whether relational context under minimal co-presence (i.e., being alone versus co-present with a friend or an unfamiliar (non-threatening) stranger) modulates stimulus-locked EEG/ERP dynamics during apparent gaze-motion perception.Methods: Fifty healthy adults completed a classic apparent-motion gaze task across three counterbalanced sessions (i.e., Alone, Friend, Stranger) with minimal interactivity. Using identical stimuli, participants performed two instruction framings: self-referential (i.e., toward-me vs away-from-me) and spatial (i.e., left vs right). ERPs time-locked to gaze-motion change were analyzed using mass-univariate TFCE within a non-parametric permutation framework (3×2 repeated-measures design). Behavior was analyzed at the trial level using mixed-effects models (LMM on logRT for correct trials; binomial-logit GLMM for accuracy) with maximal convergent random-effects structure.Results: Relational context produced robust posterior ERP modulations that were characterized by reduced amplitudes in the Friend condition relative to Stranger and Alone. No reliable ERP effects of instruction framing and no reliable interaction were observed. In behavior, instruction framing was associated with higher accuracy and slower responses in the spatial condition relative to the self-referential condition. Relational context and the interaction were not reliable in either model.Conclusions: Even with minimal interactivity and identical stimulus input, who is co-present modulates posterior stimulus-locked ERP dynamics during gaze-motion perception, whereas overt performance primarily reflects instruction framing.Significance: These findings provide an exploratory psychophysiological characterization showing that minimal co-presence is not a neutral baseline for ERPs and should be modeled explicitly in EEG paradigms where social context varies across sessions.

Contexto: Estimaciones recientes sugieren que al menos 65 millones de personas en todo el mundo han padecido secuelas post-COVID y las afectaciones neurocognitivas se encuentran entre las más prevalentes. Propósito: Sintetizar los resultados acerca de hallazgos neurobiológicos asociados a dificultades neurocognitivas en pacientes adultos post-COVID, según lo reportado por la literatura científica. Métodos: Una revisión sistemática de acuerdo a las orientaciones PRISMA, empleando las bases de datos Web of Science, Pubmed y Scopus. Veintiséis artículos científicos que cumplieron con los criterios de inclusión fueron analizados. Un conteo de votos basado en la significancia estadística se usó como método de síntesis. Resultados: En la mayoría de los artículos incluídos [87.5%; n =14] se describieron alteraciones en al menos un dominio neurocognitivo. En 15 de 16 estudios se confirmaron cambios neuropatológicos en los pacientes. La mayoría [94%] reporta asociaciones, y una relación estadísticamente significativa entre desempeños neurocognitivos disminuídos y cambios neurobiológicos. Destacada es la asociación entre desempeños disminuidos en la cognición global y hallazgos neuropatológicos en la anatomía cerebral (p.e. atrofia, daño tisular, isquemia). Conclusiones: El análisis ofrece antecedentes relevantes tanto para informar a las políticas a cargo de abordar las secuelas neurocognitivas del COVID-19 como a la toma de decisiones clínicas.

Attentional deployment (AD) constitutes an emotion regulation (ER) strategy that shifts the attentional focus to modulate the emotional experience. There are very few experimental paradigms that can study AD. One such task studies AD by using emotional images with zones of focus within them, to manipulate visual attention toward arousing or non-arousing portions of the scene. However, this task has only been implemented with participants inside a scanner and has no replications beyond the work of the original research group. In the present study, we replicated and extended a previously introduced AD task, implementing it with a sample of 55 adult participants. Our sample performed the task in a regular laboratory setting, including eye-tracking to monitor instruction following, and in addition, participants completed an attentional test. We replicated the original AD effect in a new population sample, although we found a lower effect size. We conceived and computed an estimate of AD abilities by comparing intensity and valence ratings across attentional conditions. We also analyzed the association between attention measured through the Attention Network Test (ANT) and AD capacities and found no relationship. The task can be used in the laboratory to analyze the AD process. Our replication and expansion of the AD task provide valuable insights into the behavioral and neuropsychological correlates of ER strategies.

A current problem in the philosophy of neuroscience consists in determining how to individuate cognitive capacities using neurobiological evidence. One recent proposal grounded on fundamental insights from mechanistic philosophy is an iterative strategy that cycles between neural mechanisms and cognitive capacities, using the former to individuate the latter and vice versa (Francken et al. Synthese, 200(5):378, 2022). However, this view cannot be applied to a fundamental aspect of research on cognitive capacities. Understanding a capacity requires delineating its behavioral profile by identifying the different effects or phenomena associated with it in different task settings. If mechanisms are necessary for integrating these phenomena into a single capacity in a bottom-up way, the iterative cyclic strategy requires a criterion for assessing the across-context identity of the mechanism, which is missing from this view. However, we argue that introducing this criterion turns the strategy into something else. It requires substituting its bottom-up phase with a bi-dimensional stage in which the capacity and its mechanism are individuated simultaneously through the identification of the generalization that connects them and the assessment of how the generalization behaves across contexts.

Cognitive performance depends on contextual elements, such as the response type ("Go/No-Go" (GNG) or "Two-Alternative Choice" (TAC)) used in experimental tasks. In general, it is assumed that GNG shows faster response times and lower error rates than TAC. To systematically analyze these effects, we conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to assess the effect of GNG and TAC on cognitive processing across experimental paradigms. After examination of diverse databases, 24 scientific articles were included. We found eight different cognitive tasks, presentling results mainly of behavioural variables, with only three studies including neural recordings. We found that GNG shows faster response times and lower error rates than TAC, although this changes depending on task configurations. The scarce neural evidence suggests that the differences might occur at early processing stages. Future simultaneously recorded behavioural and electrophysiological data is needed to gain better understanding of these contextual effects.

Work-related traumatic brain injury (wr-TBI) is a serious occupational health condition with mortality and secondary sequelae associated with it. Knowing its epidemiology and risk factors is crucial for preventing and planning treatment interventions. The COVID-19 pandemic allowed assessing how risk factors affect the incidence of wr-TBI and its clinical presentation. IntroductionWork-related traumatic brain injury is a frequent cause of chronic morbidity, mortality, and high treatment costs. Its causes are highly environmentally determined and were affected by COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.ObjectiveWe aimed to describe traumatic brain injury (TBI) epidemiology in working population and evaluate its modifications during the COVID-19 pandemic.MethodsWe performed a 2-year retrospective epidemiological analysis of TBI patients hospitalized in a tertiary work-related hospital before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.ResultsIn the prepandemic period, TBI patients were predominantly men, with a bimodal age distribution. Crash accidents were the leading work-related traumatic brain injury cause. During COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, there was a positive correlation between street traffic and TBI rate, presenting increased motor crash accidents as a cause of TBI.ConclusionsThese results are relevant for planning and focalization of resources for TBI prevention.

Emotion-based decision making (EBDM) is the capacity to make decisions based on prior emotional consequences of actions. Several neuropsychological tasks, using different gambling paradigms and with different levels of complexity, have been designed to assess EBDM. The Bangor Gambling Task (BGT) was created as a brief and simple card gambling-task to assess EBDM. BGT contains a single-card deck and requires participants to decide whether to gamble or not, which can result in wins or losses. Unknown to the participant, the winning probabilities decrease throughout the task (from 0.75 in the first block to 0.25 in the fifth block), requiring participants to reduce their gambling probability to avoid long-term losses. A few studies have offered evidence regarding the BGT convergent validity. However, there are no computerized versions of BGT available, thus slowing the process of gathering information to explore the EBDM mechanisms behind the task, its validity, and clinical usefulness. In this article, we present a computerized version of the BGT using the Matlab environment and make all our code available. We explore BGT's replicability and analyze its probabilistic structure, providing trial-level and block-level analyses. Eighty-one participants performed the computerized version, which followed the same structure as the original version. It took participants 8.5 ± 3.3 minutes to complete the task, which is faster than the paper version. Replicating previous studies, participants diminished their gambling probability throughout the task, learning to inhibit the initially rewarded gambling behavior. This change in gambling probability could be considered a proxy for EBDM. Our analyses suggest that the last blocks are especially sensitive to capturing deficits in EBDM, and we propose some modifications to BGT's original version to enhance the initial exploratory and learning phase. Our results show that the BGT constitutes a quick and simple task to evaluate EBDM capacities.

Drift-diffusion models (DDM) have been proposed as a way to study unobservable cognitive processes underlying decision-making. DDM have been widely used and developed in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, but there are no general references in Spanish on the subject. The purpose of this review is to develop reference materials for Spanish-speaking researchers, professionals and scholars in the area of cognitive sciences who are interested in the experimental study of decision-making in the psychology and neuroscience fields. It will also explore the standard description of DDM, its parameters, mathematical expression and applications in cognitive tasks. Recent publications in the fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience that use DDM are reviewed, and their prospects for new and future applications are discussed, in light of current discussions of cognitive processes.

Experiments in cognitive neuroscience build a setup whose set of controlled stimuli and rules elicits a cognitive process in a participant. This setup requires researchers to decide the value of quite a few parameters along several dimensions. We call ‘’contextual factors’’ the parameters often assumed not to change the cognitive process elicited and are free to vary across the experiment’s repetitions. Against this assumption, empirical evidence shows that many of these contextual factors can significantly influence cognitive performance. Nevertheless, it is not entirely clear what it means for a cognitive phenomenon to be context-sensitive and how to identify context-sensitivity experimentally. We claim that a phenomenon can be context-sensitive either because it is only triggered within a specific context or because different contexts change its manifestation conditions. Assessing which of these forms of context-sensitivity is present in a given phenomenon requires a criterion for individuating it across contextual variations. We argue that some inter-level experiments that, within the mechanistic approach to explanation, are required to identify relations of constitutive relevance between a phenomenon and a mechanism, are also necessary for individuating the phenomenon across its contextual variations. We articulate a criterion according to which behavioral variations across contexts indicate different phenomena if and only if the mechanistic activities, components and/or organizational properties recruited in each context are different. We support this approach by showing how it is applied in paradigmatic studies addressing cognitive performance differences resulting from contextual variations of task features, such as stimulus type and response modality. Finally, we address the challenge that a form of context-sensitivity possessed by the so-called ‘multifunctional mechanisms’ is incompatible with our proposal because it entails that the same mechanism can be recruited in different contexts to produce different phenomena. We examine key cases of multifunctionality and argue that they are consistent with our proposal because a single mechanism can have different components, activities and/or organizational properties in different contexts. Thus, these modifications may not affect the identity of a mechanism, and they could explain how it produced different phenomena in those contexts.

Previous research has shown that the autonomic nervous system provides essential constraints over ongoing cognitive function. However, there is currently a relative lack of direct empirical evidence for how this interaction manifests in the brain at the macroscale level. Here, we examine the role of ascending arousal and attentional load on large-scale network dynamics by combining pupillometry, functional MRI, and graph theoretical analysis to analyze data from a visual motion-tracking task with a parametric load manipulation. We found that attentional load effects were observable in measures of pupil diameter and in a set of brain regions that parametrically modulated their BOLD activity and mesoscale network-level integration. In addition, the regional patterns of network reconfiguration were correlated with the spatial distribution of the α2a adrenergic receptor. Our results further solidify the relationship between ascending noradrenergic activity, large-scale network integration, and cognitive task performance.

Social isolation can be a consequence of acquired brain injury (ABI). Few studies have examined the relationship between social isolation and mental health after ABI. In this cross-sectional and case-control study, we compared 51 ABI survivors and 51 matched healthy controls on measures of social isolation (network size, social support and loneliness) mental health and mental health problems. We explored the relationship between structural, functional and subjective components of social isolation and examined whether they were associated with mental health outcomes. No group differences were found on size of the network and perceived social support. The ABI group exhibited marginally higher levels of loneliness. The ABI group presented higher levels of depression, lower levels of quality of life and emotional wellbeing. In both groups, perception of social support was inversely related to subjective experience of loneliness. The relationship between network size and loneliness was only significant in the ABI group. Only loneliness significantly predicted quality of life, emotional wellbeing, depression and anxiety in people with brain injury. The relationship between social isolation variables in ABI is discussed, as well as the theoretical and clinical implications of focusing on loneliness to improve mental health after brain injury.

Letter to the Editor

OPINION article Front. Psychol., 14 January 2020Sec. Cognitive Science Volume 10 - 2019 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.03005

Attention Deficit/Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) is diagnosed based on observed behavioral outcomes alone. Given that some brain attentional networks involve circuits that control the eye pupil, we monitored pupil size in ADHD- diagnosed children and also in control children during a visuospatial working memory task. We present here the full dataset, consisting of pupil size time series for each trial and subject. There are data from, 22 control, and 28 ADHD-diagnosed children. There are also data from a subset of 17 ADHD children that performed the task twice, on- and off-medication. In addition, our dataset also includes gaze position data from each trial and subject, and also scores from the Weschler Intelligence Scale for Children. In this context, the dataset can serve as a resource to analyze dynamic eye movement and pupil changes as a function of known behavioral changes and scores in neuropsychological tests, which reflect neurocognitive processing.

Recent studies have shown that slow cortical potentials in archi-, paleo- and neocortex can phase-lock with nasal respiration. In some of these areas, gamma activity (gamma: 30-100 Hz) is also coupled to the animal's respiration. It has been hypothesized that these functional relationships play a role in coordinating distributed neural activity. In a similar way, inter-cortical interactions at gamma frequency have also been associated as a binding mechanism by which the brain generates temporary opportunities necessary for implementing cognitive functions. The aim of the present study is to explore whether nasal respiration entrains inter-cortical functional interactions at gamma frequency during both wakefulness and sleep. Six adult cats chronically prepared for electrographic recordings were employed in this study. Our results show that during wakefulness, slow cortical respiratory potentials are present in the olfactory bulb and several areas of the neocortex. We also found that these areas exhibit cross-frequency coupling between respiratory phase and gamma oscillation amplitude. We demonstrate that respiratory phase modulates the inter-cortical gamma coherence between neocortical electrode pairs. On the contrary, slow respiratory oscillation and gamma cortical oscillatory entrainments disappear during non-rapid eye movement and rapid eye movement sleep. These results suggest that a single unified phenomenon involves cross-frequency coupling and long-range gamma coherence across the neocortex. This fact could be related to the temporal binding process necessary for cognitive functions during wakefulness.