Learning which stimuli in our environment co-occur with painful or pleasurable events is critical for survival. Previous research has established the basic neural and behavioral mechanisms of aversive and appetitive conditioning; however, it is unclear precisely what information content is learned. Here we examined the degree to which aspects of the unconditioned stimulus (US)-sensory information versus affective salience-are transferred to the conditioned stimulus (CS). To decode what stimuli features (e.g., valence vs. discriminative somatosensation) are represented in patterns of brain activation elicited during appetitive (soft touch) and aversive (painful touch) conditioning to faces, a novel approach to using modeling with representational similarity analysis (RSA) based on theoretically driven representational patterns of interest (POIs) was applied to fMRI data. Once associations were learned through conditioning, globally, the CS reactivated US representational patterns showing conditioning-dependent reactivation in specific high-order brain regions: In the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, the CS reactivated patterns associated with the affective salience of the US-suggesting that, with affective conditioning, these regions carry forward the affective associations of the experience.

An emerging view in cognitive neuroscience holds that the extraction of emotional relevance from sensory experience extends beyond the centralized appraisal of sensation in associative brain regions, including frontal and medial‐temporal cortices. This view holds that sensory information can be emotionally valenced from the point of contact with the world. This view is supported by recent research characterizing the human affiliative touch system, which carries signals of soft, stroking touch to the central nervous system and is mediated by dedicated C‐tactile afferent receptors. This basic scientific research on the human affiliative touch system is informed by, and informs, technology design for communicating and regulating emotion through touch. Here, we review recent research on the basic biology and cognitive neuroscience of affiliative touch, its regulatory effects across the lifespan, and the factors that modulate it. We further review recent work on the design of haptic technologies, devices that stimulate the affiliative touch system, such as wearable technologies that apply the sensation of soft stroking or other skin‐to‐skin contact, to promote physiological regulation. We then point to future directions in interdisciplinary research aimed at both furthering scientific understanding and application of haptic technology for health and wellbeing.

While a delicious dessert being presented to us may elicit strong feelings of happiness and excitement, the same treat falling slowly away can lead to sadness and disappointment. Our emotional response to the item depends on its visual motion direction. Despite this importance, it remains unclear whether (and how) cortical areas devoted to decoding motion direction represents or integrates emotion with perceived motion direction. Motion-selective visual area V5/MT+ sits, both functionally and anatomically, at the nexus of dorsal and ventral visual streams. These pathways, however, differ in how they are modulated by emotional cues. The current study was designed to disentangle how emotion and motion perception interact, as well as use emotion-dependent modulation of visual cortices to understand the relation of V5/MT+ to canonical processing streams. During functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), approaching, receding, or static motion after-effects (MAEs) were induced on stationary positive, negative, and neutral stimuli. An independent localizer scan was conducted to identify the visual-motion area V5/MT+. Through univariate and multivariate analyses, we demonstrated that emotion representations in V5/MT+ share a more similar response profile to that observed in ventral visual than dorsal, visual structures. Specifically, V5/MT+ and ventral structures were sensitive to the emotional content of visual stimuli, whereas dorsal visual structures were not. Overall, this work highlights the critical role of V5/MT+ in the representation and processing of visually acquired emotional content. It further suggests a role for this region in utilizing affectively salient visual information to augment motion perception of biologically relevant stimuli.

The ability to interrogate specific representations in the brain, determining how, and where, difference sources of information are instantiated can provide invaluable insight into neural functioning. Pattern component mod-eling (PCM) is a recent analytic technique for human neuroimaging that allows the decomposition of represen-tational patterns in brain into contributing subcomponents. In the current study, we present a novel PCM variant that tracks the contribution of prespecified representational patterns to brain representation across areas, thus allowing hypothesis-guided employment of the technique. We apply this technique to investigate the contributions of hedonic and nonhedonic information to the neural representation of tactile experience. We applied aversive pressure (AP) and appetitive brush (AB) to stimulate distinct peripheral nerve pathways for tactile information (C-/CT-fibers, respectively) while patients underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning. We performed representational similarity analyses (RSAs) with pattern component modeling to dissociate how discriminatory versus hedonic tactile information contributes to population code representa-tions in the human brain. Results demonstrated that information about appetitive and aversive tactile sensation is represented separately from nonhedonic tactile information across cortical structures. This also demon-strates the potential of new hypothesis-guided PCM variants to help delineate how information is instantiated in the brain.

In times of stress or danger, the autonomic nervous system (ANS) signals the fight or flight response. A canonical function of ANS activity is to globally mobilize metabolic resources, preparing the organism to respond to threat. Yet a body of research has demonstrated that, rather than displaying a homogenous pattern across the body, autonomic responses to arousing events, as measured through changes in electrodermal activity (EDA), can differ between right and left body locations. Surprisingly, an attempt to identify a function of ANS asymmetry consistent with its metabolic role has not been investigated. In the current study, we investigated whether asymmetric autonomic responses could be induced through limb-specific aversive stimulation. Participants were given mild electric stimulation to either the left or right arm while EDA was monitored bilaterally. In a group-level analyses, an ipsilateral EDA response bias was observed, with increased EDA response in the hand adjacent to the stimulation. This effect was observable in ∼50% of individual participants. These results demonstrate that autonomic output is more complex than canonical interpretations suggest. We suggest that, in stressful situations, autonomic outputs can prepare either the whole-body fight or flight response, or a simply a limb-localized flick, which can effectively neutralize the threat while minimizing global resource consumption. These findings are consistent with recent theories proposing evolutionary leveraging of neural structures organized to mediate sensory responses for processing of cognitive emotional cues.

Nurses and surgeons must identify and handle specialized instruments with high temporal and spatial precision. It is crucial that they are trained effectively. Traditional training methods include supervised practices and text-based study, which may expose patients to undue risk during practice procedures and lack motor/haptic training respectively. Tablet-based simulations have been proposed to mediate some of these limitations. We implemented a learning task that simulates surgical instrumentation nomenclature encountered by novice perioperative nurses. Learning was assessed following training in three distinct conditions: tablet-based simulations, text-based study, and real-world practice. Immediately following a 30-minute training period, instrument identification was performed with comparable accuracy and response times following tablet-based versus text-based training, with both being inferior to real-world practice. Following a week without practice, response times were equivalent between real-world and tablet-based practice. While tablet-based training does not achieve equivalent results in instrument identification accuracy as real-world practice, more practice repetitions in simulated environments may help reduce performance decline. This project has established a technological framework to assess how we can implement simulated educational environments in a maximally beneficial manner.

In times of stress or danger, the autonomic nervous system (ANS) signals the fight or flight response. A canonical function of ANS activity is to globally mobilize metabolic resources, preparing the organism to respond to threat. Yet a body of research has demonstrated that, rather than displaying a homogenous pattern across the body, autonomic responses to arousing events — as measured through changes in electrodermal activity (EDA) — can differ between right and left body locations. Surprisingly, the metabolic function of such ANS asymmetry has not been investigated. In the current study, we investigated whether asymmetric autonomic responses could be induced through limb-specific aversive stimulation. Participants were given mild electric stimulation to either the left or right arm while EDA was monitored bilaterally. Across participants, a strong ipsilateral EDA response bias was observed, with increased EDA response in the hand adjacent to the stimulation. This effect was observable in over 50% of individual subjects. These results demonstrate that autonomic output is more complex than canonical interpretations suggest. We suggest that, in stressful situations, autonomic outputs can prepare either the whole-body fight or flight response, or a simply a limb-localized flick , which can effectively neutralize the threat while minimizing global resource consumption. These findings provide insight into the evolutionary pathway of neural systems processing general arousal by linking observed asymmetry in the peripheral arousal response to a historical leveraging of neural structures organized to mediate responses to localized threat.

ABSTRACT The integrative framework proposed by Luck and colleagues [Luck, S. J., Gaspelin, N., Folk, C. L., Remington, R. W., & Theeuwes, J. (2021). Progress toward resolving the attentional capture debate. Visual Cognition, 29(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/13506285.2020.1848949] represents major progress in the field of attention research, and remaining areas of disagreement provide an opportunity to test hypotheses by drawing on other research traditions. From the perspective of research in cognitive-affective neuroscience, we first suggest ways in which recent analytic innovations in human neuroimaging can be used to test hypotheses proposed by Folk and Remington about how biases within distinct brain systems may be integrated within a control state. We then shift focus and extend recent critiques of the generalizability of vision-centred frameworks of emotional guidance of attention to the integrative framework, citing evidence that vision-based frameworks of attentional capture do not necessarily extend to other sensory modalities.

Learning which stimuli in our environment co-occur with painful or pleasurable events is critical for survival. Previous research has established the basic neural and behavioural mechanisms of aversive and appetitive conditioning; however, it is unclear what precisely is learned. Here we examined what aspects of the unconditioned stimulus (US) – sensory and hedonic – are transferred to the conditioned stimulus (CS). To decode the content of brain activation patterns elicited during appetitive (soft touch) and aversive (painful touch) conditioning of faces, a novel variation of representational similarity analysis (RSA) based on theoretically driven representational patterns of interest (POIs) was applied to fMRI data. Once face associations were learned through conditioning, globally the CS reactivated US representational patterns showing conditioning-dependent reactivation. More specifically, in higher order brain regions, the CS only reactivated hedonic but not sensory aspects of the US – suggesting that affective conditioning primarily carries forward the valence of the experience rather than its sensory origins.

There is substantial evidence demonstrating that emotional information influences perception. Yet across studies, findings of how it does so have been highly inconsistent. In particular, emotional context (task-unrelated emotional information in the environment) has a variable influence on spatial perceptual accuracy, sometimes improving and sometimes impairing the ability to localize objects. Here, we tested the hypothesis that the heterogenous nature of emotional influences on target localization is influenced by the specific combination of sensory modalities used in the task. In the present series of experiments, we used a cross-modal localization task to identify how emotional context influences the accuracy of spatial perception. By presenting nonemotional target stimuli alongside emotional nonspatial distractor items (facial expressions or vocalizations), we were able to systematically investigate how emotional stimuli presented to individual sensory modalities acted to modulate spatial perception at distinct stages of perception and action. In three separate experiments, distractor items were presented prior to or during target presentation or after presentation during the localization response. Intramodal emotional distractors influenced localization accuracy when they overlapped in timing with targets, and the direction of this effect was both modality and valence specific (Experiment I). Additionally, targeted contrasts revealed that auditory but not visual emotional distractors influenced localization of visual targets when presented during the behavioral response, with negative cues improving localization accuracy compared to neutral or positive cues (Experiment II). We suggest such effects reflect distinct patterns of unimodal versus multimodal processing in brain regions involved in early versus late stages of perceptual processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Emotion is typically understood to be an internal subjective experience originating in the brain. Yet in the somatosensory system hedonic information is coded by mechanoreceptors at the point of sensory contact before it reaches the central nervous system. It remains unknown, however, how these distinct peripheral channels for tactile hedonic information contribute to representations of interoceptive states relative to exteroceptive experience. In this fMRI study we applied representational similarity analyses with pattern component modeling, a technique that deconstructs representational states into a weighted set of distinct predefined constructs, to dissociate how discriminatory vs. hedonic tactile information, carried by A- and C-/CT-fibers respectively, contributes to population code representations in the human brain. Results demonstrated that information about appetitive and aversive tactile sensation is represented separately from non-hedonic tactile information across cortical structures. Specifically, although hedonic touch originates as a peripheral signal, labeled at the point of contact, representations in somatosensory cortices are guided by experiences of non-hedonic touch, By contrast, representations in regions associated with interoception and affect encode signals of hedonic touch. This provides evidence of complex tactile encoding that involves both external-exteroceptive and internal-interoceptive dimensions. Importantly, hedonic touch contributes to representations of internal state as well as those of externally generated stimulation.

In the somatosensory system, hedonic information is coded by mechanoreceptors at the point of contact. Pleasure and pain signals travel along peripheral nerve pathways distinct from those for discriminative touch. Yet it remains unknown whether the central nervous system represents tactile hedonic information in sensory cortices as another dimension of exteroceptive information, similar to discriminative touch signals, or if tactile hedonic information is instantiated in regions mediating internal interoceptive states. Employing representational similarity analysis with a new approach of pattern component modeling, we decomposed multivoxel patterns to demonstrate that signals of painful but not pleasurable touch are represented in primary somatosensory cortices. By contrast, all hedonic touch representations were identified in regions associated with affect and interoception. This suggests that touch should be divided into external-exteroceptive and internal-interoceptive dimensions, with hedonic touch represented as an internal state, even though evoked by external stimulation.

Emotional appraisal in humans is often considered a centrally mediated process by which sensory signals, void of emotional meaning, are assessed by integrative brain structures steps removed from raw sensation. We review emerging evidence that the emotional value of the environment is coded by nonvisual sensory systems as early as the sensory receptors and that these signals inform the emotional state of an organism independent of sensory cortical processes. We further present evidence for cross-species conservation of sensory projections to central emotion-processing brain regions. Based on this, we argue not only that emotional appraisal is a decentralized process, but that all human emotional experience may reflect the sensory experience of our ancestors.

Objective To determine whether intranasal oxytocin, alone or in combination with instructed mimicry of facial expressions, would augment neural activity in patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD) in brain regions associated with empathy, emotion processing, and the simulation network, as indexed by blood oxygen–level dependent (BOLD) signal during fMRI. Methods In a placebo-controlled, randomized crossover design, 28 patients with FTD received 72 IU intranasal oxytocin or placebo and then completed an fMRI facial expression mimicry task. Results Oxytocin alone and in combination with instructed mimicry increased activity in regions of the simulation network and in limbic regions associated with emotional expression processing. Conclusions The findings demonstrate latent capacity to augment neural activity in affected limbic and other frontal and temporal regions during social cognition in patients with FTD, and support the promise and need for further investigation of these interventions as therapeutics in FTD. ClinicalTrials.gov identifier NCT01937013. Classification of evidence This study provides Class III evidence that a single dose of 72 IU intranasal oxytocin augments BOLD signal in patients with FTD during viewing of emotional facial expressions.

In this paper we argue that predictive processing (PP) theory cannot account for the phenomenon of affect-biased attention - prioritized attention to stimuli that are affectively salient because of their associations with reward or punishment. Specifically, the PP hypothesis that selective attention can be analyzed in terms of the optimization of precision expectations cannot accommodate affect-biased attention; affectively salient stimuli can capture our attention even when precision expectations are low. We review the prospects of three recent attempts to accommodate affect with tools internal to PP theory: Miller and Clark's (2018) embodied inference; Seth's (2013) interoceptive inference; and Joffily and Coricelli's (2013) rate of change of free energy. In each case we argue that the account does not resolve the challenge from affect-biased attention. For this reason, we conclude that prediction error minimization is not sufficient to explain all mental phenomena, contrary to the claim that the PP framework provides a unified theory of all mental phenomena or the brain's cognitive functioning. Nevertheless, we suggest that empirical investigation of the interaction between affective salience and precision expectations should prove helpful in understanding the limits of PP theory, and may provide new directions for the application of a Bayesian perspective to perception.

Research suggests that spatial ability may predict success in complex disciplines including anatomy, where mastery requires a firm understanding of the intricate relationships occurring along the course of veins, arteries, and nerves, as they traverse through and around bones, muscles, and organs. Debate exists on the malleability of spatial ability, and some suggest that spatial ability can be enhanced through training. It is hypothesized that spatial ability can be trained in low-performing individuals through visual guidance. To address this, training was completed through a visual guidance protocol. This protocol was based on eye-movement patterns of high-performing individuals, collected via eye-tracking as they completed an Electronic Mental Rotations Test (EMRT). The effects of guidance were evaluated using 33 individuals with low mental rotation ability, in a counterbalanced crossover design. Individuals were placed in one of two treatment groups (late or early guidance) and completed both a guided, and an unguided EMRT. A third group (no guidance/control) completed two unguided EMRTs. All groups demonstrated an increase in EMRT scores on their second test (P < 0.001); however, an interaction was observed between treatment and test iteration (P = 0.024). The effect of guidance on scores was contingent on when the guidance was applied. When guidance was applied early, scores were significantly greater than expected (P = 0.028). These findings suggest that by guiding individuals with low mental rotation ability "where" to look early in training, better search approaches may be adopted, yielding improvements in spatial reasoning scores. It is proposed that visual guidance may be applied in spatial fields, such as STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine), surgery, and anatomy to improve student's interpretation of visual content. Anat Sci Educ. © 2018 American Association of Anatomists.

[Peer commentary on “Visual selection: usually fast and automatic; seldom slow and volitional,” by J. Theeuwes]. 'Journal of Cognition'. In his current opinion piece, Theeuwes emphasizes the role of selection history as a third source of attentional selection, beyond top-down and bottom-up mechanisms, thus challenging traditional dual-process models of attention. While we agree that selection history impacts the allocation of attention, our own work suggests that this terminology may be too restrictive, and propose the simple term 'history' as a better reflection of the impact of learning on our selection biases. Furthermore, we propose that the role of selection/experiential history on attention may not be as a unique third source of attentional selection, but rather as a tuning parameter, allowing certain categories of item to be endowed with greater task-based or feature-driven salience in a context and history dependent manner. This conceptualization presents an alternative to abandoning dual-process models of attention altogether. Rather, we can reimagine how task-based and feature-driven processes may be controlled by past experience in a dynamic and adaptable system.

Emotion can have diverse effects on behaviour and perception, modulating function in some circumstances, and sometimes having little effect. Recently, it was identified that part of the heterogeneity of emotional effects could be due to a dissociable representation of emotion in dual pathway models of sensory processing. Our previous fMRI experiment using traditional univariate analyses showed that emotion modulated processing in the auditory 'what' but not 'where' processing pathway. The current study aims to further investigate this dissociation using a more recently emerging multi-voxel pattern analysis searchlight approach. While undergoing fMRI, participants localized sounds of varying emotional content. A searchlight multi-voxel pattern analysis was conducted to identify activity patterns predictive of sound location and/or emotion. Relative to the prior univariate analysis, MVPA indicated larger overlapping spatial and emotional representations of sound within early secondary regions associated with auditory localization. However, consistent with the univariate analysis, these two dimensions were increasingly segregated in late secondary and tertiary regions of the auditory processing streams. These results, while complimentary to our original univariate analyses, highlight the utility of multiple analytic approaches for neuroimaging, particularly for neural processes with known representations dependent on population coding.

Considerable evidence demonstrates that the presence of emotionally salient cues can influence the representation and processing of sensory information. These cues have the ability to enhance the representation of target stimuli, as well as potentiate the effect of sensory distractors. Interestingly, such effects appear to be influenced by subtle design details, including the sensory mode of both emotional distraction and target presentation. As most studies utilize consistent modes for stimulus presentation, delineation of emotional effects between the senses remains incomplete. The current experiment employed a search paradigm in which observers localized either an auditory (beep) or visual (dot) target within a 180° sensory array (3 monitors and 13 speakers). Simultaneously, task-irrelevant positive, negative, or neutral distractors, chosen from standardized databases and matched for arousal and valence, were presented across the entire sensory field. Thus, there were four unique blocks of trials (2 target modes X 2 distractor modes) with two intra-modal and two cross-modal conditions. After presentation of individual target-distractor pairings, observers indicated target location via mouse-click on a visual semicircle array. Confidence ratings were collected on a trial-by-trial basis. Whereas effects of emotion on target localization accuracy were identified in intra-modal conditions, no effects were observed in cross-modal conditions. During intra-modal conditions, task performance was poorest (greatest angular deviation between response and target direction) for targets paired with positive distractors. Furthermore, during auditory intra-modal trials, negative emotional distractors augmented localization performance, resulting in lower angular deviation between response direction and target location. These results, which are consistent with findings indicating impaired attentional focus in positive emotional contexts, suggest that emotional competition during stimulus location acquisition may arise in early stages of sensory processing, prior to cross-modal influence. Moreover, this study highlights importance of considering subtle experimental design features when interpreting emotional-related influences on sensory processes. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2017

How does the emergence of a neural representation of affective salience differ between individuals? Previous research has shown that with successful aversive conditioning visual representations of two conditioned stimuli can converge [1]. Here we used representational similarity analysis (RSA) of fMRI data to study individual differences in the changes that accrue to the representations of visual stimuli over the course of emotional learning. Participants were scanned during a Pavlovian conditioning task using both aversive and pleasurable reinforcers in a slow event-related design. In separate blocks, participants learned to associate two individual faces with either a painful pinch or pleasurable brush stroke (CS+), while a third face remained unreinforced (CS-). Faces were rated for likability before and after conditioning and participants were grouped into conditioners and non-conditioners based on changes in likability ratings. Ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) and ventral visual cortex regions of interest (ROIs) were anatomically defined. For each ROI, multivariate representational similarity matrices were calculated using the patterns of activation for each stimulus presentation. Finally, inferential statistics were performed to evaluate similarity of adjacent trials within each stimulus category and of corresponding trials between different stimulus categories. Results showed that in the VMPFC, similarity of representations for CS+ stimuli steadily increased during learning for conditioners only. Furthermore, the representations of the two CS+ stimuli became more similar for conditioners than non-conditioners. This suggests such a convergence in stimulus representation is driven by affective processes. This pattern was not observed in the ventral visual ROI, suggesting a dissociation between how affect information accumulates over time in PFC compared to ventral visual regions. The nature of such affect-driven information accumulation was further probed through exploratory RSA on ROIs defined by specific resting state networks. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2017