Causal studies show that brain networks of self-control can be changed by various forms of learning and stimulation. One mechanism of these changes is improved connectivity in the brain networks related to control. Evidence suggests that authoritarian contriol is largely supported by people with regidity of thought, but whether rigidity is caused by authoritarianism is not known. In this paper we hypothesize that authoritarianism can reduce the opportunity for conflict resolution that is an important mechanism for improved connectivity in control networks. Evidence suggests that reduced connectivity results in impairment in cognitive and emotional control resulting in likely reduction in IQ, less ability to control emotions and to resolve conflict between competing thoughts and actions. To test our hypothesis of a causal link to authoritarianism one could provide evidence preferable before and after authoritarian governments are implemented that there is a predicted loss of of abilty to control conflict, educational attainment or IQ by the relevant population. Tests of education attainment or IQ would also have alternative reasons such as changes in the educational system or reduced income. This paper proved evidence of a possible mechanism by which the brain could change under authoritarian rule and a hypothesis that requires further tests that authoritarian leaders can cause a loss of self-control in brains of both developing individuals and adults living in their countries.

Paradigm shifts as advocated by Kuhn (1962), should be rarely occurring and based upon true crises. The study of attention, however, is not in crisis requiring a paradigm shift but instead has a firm empirical foundation that can accommodate the findings in visual search cited in the target article.

Situational factors can influence cognitive performance and should be considered for conducting cognitive assessments. The objective of this project was to develop a checklist for Cognitive Assessment Requirements (CARE) to identify these situational factors before conducting cognitive assessments and account for them. This study employed a four-round Delphi approach involving 22 experts to identify situational factors that can impact cognitive assessment results. The development of a robust and well-balanced checklist was guided by a consensus-driven approach, which considered metrics such as Interquartile Deviation (IQD) (> 1.00), Percentage of Positive Responses (PPR, above 60%), and mean importance ratings (< 3 on a 5-point Likert scale) to assess both degree of agreement and item importance. Consensus was reached, leading to a 14-item checklist to evaluate cognitive assessment requirements. These items were categorized into six groups: Acute Illness or Physical Discomfort, Medication Effects and Substance Use, Sleep Quality and Fatigue, Emotional State, Language factors, and Environmental factors. The CARE can be employed prior to cognitive assessments to identify situational factors of relevance to the individual client, thereby creating a more favorable environment for cognitive evaluation, and enhancing the reliability of the assessment findings. Furthermore, the CARE can help determine the level of confidence in the results by assessing whether the conditions are conducive to testing or if situational factors may undermine the validity of the evaluation.

The 50th birthday of the JEP: Human Perception and Performance is an appropriate occasion to salute its influence in the field. In this celebratory article, the author tries to trace some of the work reported in Volume 1 to current research. He hopes that this might be inspirational to some of its readers. His selection was guided by his familiarity with some areas of research, but almost all of the articles can be related to current trends. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

ZUSAMMENFASSUNG In diesem Beitrag werden die zahlreichen Beiträge von Manfred Spitzer gewürdigt, wobei der Schwerpunkt auf seinem Ansatz zur Sucht bei digitalen Geräten liegt. Wir zeigen, dass die Abhängigkeit von einigen Substanzen das Netzwerk der exekutiven Aufmerksamkeit betrifft. Studien am Menschen zeigen, dass Meditationstraining die Konnektivität in diesem Netzwerk verbessern, und diese Veränderung im Gehirn den Substanzmissbrauch verringern kann. Bei Mäusen verbessert niederfrequente Hirnstimulation die Konnektivität des exekutiven Aufmerksamkeitsnetzwerks und reduziert, wie Meditation, die Angst. Wir argumentieren, dass sowohl Meditationstraining als auch Hirnstimulation die Selbstkontrolle bei Menschen verbessern können, die aufgrund von digitaler Sucht mit anhaltender Aufmerksamkeit zu kämpfen haben. Wir verweisen auch auf einige kognitive und Verhaltenstherapien, die zur Behandlung von Sucht eingesetzt werden. Wir glauben, dass ihre Ergebnisse im Rahmen der Aufmerksamkeitsnetze erklärt werden können. Weitere Forschungsarbeiten sollten dazu dienen, diese Ideen zu testen und sie denjenigen zugänglich zu machen, die aufgrund der übermäßigen Nutzung digitaler Medien Schwierigkeiten haben.

To what extent are our conscious intentions and strategies in control of the way information is processed in our minds? This seems to be a question of importance to us both as psychologists and as human beings. Yet as Shallice (1972) has pointed out, most theorists in psychology have avoided consideration of the relationship between conscious and unconscious mental events. While psychological writers rarely deal with this distinction directly, the reader of psychological publications can hardly avoid it. On the one hand, the pages of journals are full of studies in which the "strategies" or "optional processes" of the subject are used to explain the results obtained; on the other hand, we are told that human memory is an associational machine that operates entirely without control of the subjects' strategies (Anderson & Bower, 1973). Both of these views need to be accommodated. Even the most cognitive of theorists recognizes that people are not always able to adapt their thought processes to the strategies required by the task, and Anderson and Bower (1973) explicitly recognize that their strategy-free memory system must be coupled to other strategydependent systems.

Humans orient to their sensory world through foveation of target location or through covert shifts of attention. Orienting provides primacy to the selected location and in humans improves the precision of discrimination. Covert orienting appears to arise separately from the mechanisms involved in saccadic eye movements. Covert orienting can serve to prioritize processing the target even increasing its subjective intensity and its acuity. However, this network does not appear to be involved in the operations related to binding and segmentation. Cells exist in the early visual cortex that are activated by both color and form features without attention, however, color and form appear to remain independent even when oriented to the target that is required to be reported. An understanding of the pathways that connect attention networks to memory networks may allow us to understand more complex aspects of spatial cognition and enhance orienting and thus improve spatial cognition.

Contemporary conceptualizations on infant cognitive development focus on predictive processes; the basic idea is that the brain continuously creates predictions about what is expected and that the divergence between predicted and actual perceived data yields a prediction error. This prediction error updates the model from which the predictions are generated and therefore is a basic mechanism for learning and adaptation to the dynamics of the ever-changing environment. In this article, we review the types of available empirical evidence supporting the idea that predictive processes can be found in infancy, especially emphasizing the contribution of electrophysiology as a potential method for testing the similarity of the brain mechanisms for processing prediction errors in infants to those of adults. In infants, as with older children, adolescents, and adults, predictions involve synchronization bursts of middle-central theta reflecting brain activity in the anterior cingulate cortex. We discuss how early in development such brain mechanisms develop and open questions that still remain to be empirically investigated.

The goal of this paper is to examine how the development of attention networks has left many important issues unsolved and to propose possible directions for solving them by combining human and animal studies. The paper starts with evidence from citation mapping that indicates attention has played a central role in integrating cognitive and neural studies into Cognitive Neuroscience. The integration of the fields depends in part upon similarities and differences in performance over a wide variety of animals. In the case of exogenous orienting of attention primates, rodents and humans are quite similar, but this is not so with executive control. In humans, attention networks continue to develop at different rates during infancy and childhood and into adulthood. From age four on, the Attention Network Test (ANT) allows measurement of individual differences in the alerting, orienting and executive networks. Overt and covert orienting do overlap in their anatomy, but there is evidence of some degree of functional independence at the cellular level. The attention networks frequently work together with sensory, memory and other networks. Integration of animal and human studies may be advanced by examining common genes involved in individual attention networks or their integration with other brain networks. Attention networks involve widely scattered computation nodes in different brain areas, both cortical and subcortical. Future studies need to attend to the white matter that connects them and the direction of information flow during task performance.

The goal of this study was to examine commonalities in the molecular basis of learning in mice and humans. In previous work we have demonstrated that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and hippocampus (HC) are involved in learning a two-choice visuospatial discrimination task. Here, we began by looking for candidate genes upregulated in mouse ACC and HC with learning. We then determined which of these were also upregulated in mouse blood. Finally, we used RT-PCR to compare candidate gene expression in mouse blood with that from humans following one of two forms of learning: a working memory task (network training) or meditation (a generalized training shown to change many networks). Two genes were upregulated in mice following learning: caspase recruitment domain-containing protein 6 (Card6) and inosine monophosphate dehydrogenase 2 (Impdh2). The Impdh2 gene product catalyzes the first committed step of guanine nucleotide synthesis and is tightly linked to cell proliferation. The Card6 gene product positively modulates signal transduction. In humans, Card6 was significantly upregulated, and Impdh2 trended toward upregulation with training. These genes have been shown to regulate pathways that influence nuclear factor kappa B (NF-κB), a factor previously found to be related to enhanced synaptic function and learning.

Imaging the human brain during the last 35 years offers potential for improving education. What is needed is knowledge on the part of educators of all types of how this potential can be realized in practical terms. This paper briefly reviews the current level of understanding of brain networks that underlie aspects of elementary education and its preparation for later learning. This includes the acquisition of reading, writing and number processing, improving attention and increasing the motivation to learn. This knowledge can enhance assessment devices, improve child behavior and motivation and lead to immediate and lasting improvements in educational systems.

At the time of the start of Biological Psychology cognitive studies had developed approaches to measuring cognitive processes. However, linking these to the underlying biology in the typical human brain had hardly begun. A critical step came in 1988 when methods for imaging the human brain in cognitive tasks began. By 1990 it was possible to describe three brain networks that carried out the hypothesized cognitive functions outlined 20 years before. Their development was traced in infancy, first using age-appropriate tasks and later through resting state imaging. Imaging was applied to both voluntary and involuntary cued shifts of visual orienting in humans and primates, and a summary was presented in 2002. By 2008 these new imaging findings were used to test hypotheses about the genes involved in each network. Recently, studies of mice using optogenetics to control populations of neurons have brought us closer to a synthesis of how attention and memory networks operate together in human learning. Perhaps the coming years will bring us to an integrated theory of aspects of attention using data from all the levels that can illuminate these issues, thus fulfilling a key goal of the Journal.

OBJECTIVESTo examine the physical, mental, and general health among young adult childhood cancer survivors (CCS).SAMPLE & SETTINGThis secondary analysis study used data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. The analytic sample included 697 young adult CCS (537 women; 160 men).METHODS & VARIABLESChi-square tests of independence were done to compare the rates across cancer survivorship groups on categorical variables. Logistic regression was performed to determine correlates with physical, mental, and general health.RESULTSFemale CCS had a significantly (p < 0.0001) greater number of "no days" in which they reported good physical, mental, and general health compared to male CCS. Female CCS were more likely to experience 30 days of poor physical health compared to male CCS (odds ratio [OR] = 1.8, p < 0.05) when controlling for education, race, and age. Depressed female CCS had higher odds of being in poor physical, mental, and general health (OR = 2.9, 7.6, and 2.6, respectively).IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSINGFindings support the need for continued screening, following published practice guidelines, among young adult female CCS for emotional distress with the use of well-established distress and psychosocial assessment measures.

Temperament has been defined as individual differences in biologically based reactivity and self-regulation. In this paper, we consider the efficiency of underlying neural networks as basic mechanisms for individual differences in temperament. We consider whether the effort to relate temperament to brain networks might best be at the level of temperament factor scores. We also consider some relations between temperament and the five-factor measures of personality derived from natural language. We examine how genetic variation shapes neural networks underlying temperament. We further suggest directions for understanding temperament during development and consider the possibilities of increasing the efficiency of brain networks underlying temperament. Our paper, while firmly based on past ideas in the field, seeks to develop the integration between temperament and neuroscience by emphasizing brain networks, their molecular basis and the dynamics of their development.

Attention is a necessary component in many forms of human and animal learning. Numerous studies have described how attention and memory interact when confronted with a choice point during skill learning. In both animal and human studies, pathways have been found that connect the executive and orienting networks of attention to the hippocampus. The anterior cingulate cortex, part of the executive attention network, is linked to the hippocampus via the nucleus reuniens of the thalamus. The parietal cortex, part of the orienting attention network, accesses the hippocampus via the entorhinal cortex. These studies have led to specific predictions concerning the functional role of each pathway in connecting the cortex to the hippocampus. Here, we review some of the predictions arising from these studies. We then discuss potential methods for manipulating the two pathways and assessing the directionality of their functional connection using viral expression techniques in mice. New studies may allow testing of a behavioral model specifying how the two pathways work together during skill learning.