Effects of 15-Day Head-Down Bed Rest on Emotional Time Perception

Accurate time perception is clearly essential for the successful implementation of space missions. To elucidate the effect of microgravity on time perception, we used three emotional picture stimuli: neutral, fear, and disgust, in combination with a temporal bisection task to measure 16 male participants’ time perception in 15 days of –6° head-down bed rest, which is a reliable simulation model for most physiological effects of spaceflight. We found that: (1) participants showed temporal overestimation of the fear stimuli in the middle phase (day 8), suggesting that when participants’ behavioral simulations were consistent with the action implications of the emotional stimuli, they could still elicit an overestimation of time even if the subjective arousal of the emotional stimuli was not high. (2) Participants’ temporal sensitivity tends to get worse in the bed rest phase (days 8 and 15) and better in the post-bed rest phase, especially for neutral and fear stimuli, suggesting that multiple presentations of short-term emotional stimuli may also lead to a lack of affective effects. This reduced the pacemaker rate and affected temporal perceptual sensitivity. Also, this may be related to changes in physiological factors in participants in the bed rest state, such as reduced vagal excitability. These results provide new evidence to support the theory of embodied cognition in the context of time perception in head-down bed rest and suggest important perspectives for future perception science research in special environments such as microgravity.

Normative ratings for 111 Swedish nouns and corresponding picture stimuli

Normative ratings are a means to control for the effects of confounding variables in psycholinguistic experiments. This paper introduces a new dataset of normative ratings for Swedish encompassing 111 concrete nouns and the corresponding picture stimuli in the MultiPic database (Duñabeitia et al. 2017). The norms for name agreement, category typicality, age of acquisition and subjective frequency were collected using online surveys among native speakers of the Finland-Swedish variety of Swedish. The paper discusses the inter-correlations between these variables and compares them against available ratings for other languages. In doing so, the paper argues that ratings for age of acquisition and subjective frequency collected for other languages may be applied to psycholinguistic studies on Finland-Swedish, at least with respect to concrete and highly imageable nouns. In contrast, norms for name agreement should be collected from speakers of the same language variety as represented by the subjects in the actual experiments.

Self-referential false associations: A self-enhanced constructive effect for verbal but not pictorial stimuli

Memory is considered to be a flexible and reconstructive system. However, there is little experimental evidence demonstrating how associations are falsely constructed in memory, and even less is known about the role of the self in memory construction. We investigated whether false associations involving non-presented stimuli can be constructed in episodic memory and whether the self plays a role in such memory construction. In two experiments, we paired participants’ own names (i.e., self-reference) or the name “Adele” (i.e., other-reference) with words and pictures from Deese/Roediger–McDermott (DRM) lists. We found that (1) participants not only falsely remembered the non-presented lure words and pictures as having been presented, but also misremembered that they were paired with their own name or “Adele,” depending on the referenced person of related DRM lists; and (2) there were more critical lure–self associations constructed in the self-reference condition than critical lure–other associations in the other-reference condition for word but not for picture stimuli. These results suggest a self-enhanced constructive effect that might be driven by both relational and item-specific processing. Our results support the spreading-activation account for constructive episodic memory.

The role of prosodic and visual information in disambiguating wh-indeterminates: The case of Korean three-year-olds

In Korean language, questions containing ambiguous wh-words may be interpreted as either wh-questions or yes-no questions. This study investigated 43 Korean three-year-olds’ ability to disambiguate eight indeterminate questions using prosodic and visual cues. The intonation of each question provided a cue as to whether it should be interpreted as a wh-question or a yes-no question. The questions were presented alongside picture stimuli, which acted as either a matched (presentation of corresponding auditory-visual stimuli) or a mismatched contextual cue (presentation conflicting auditory-visual stimuli). Like adults, the children preferred to comprehend questions involving ambiguous wh-words as wh-questions, rather than yes-no questions. In addition, children were as effective as adults in disambiguating indeterminate questions using prosodic cues regardless of the visual cue. However, when confronted with conflicting auditory-visual stimuli (mismatched), the quality of children's responses was less accurate than adults’ responses.

FACIAL EXPRESSION RECOGNITION IN MILD AND MODERATE ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE

Background: Facial expression recognition is essential for social cognition. Objectives: To compare facial expression recognition in mild and moderate Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and identify the cognitive and clinical factors associated with impairment according to disease severity. Methods: Participants with AD (n=52). FACES includes four subtasks: matching expressions with picture stimuli (tasks1and 2), labelling emotions (task 3) and recognizing emotional situations (task 4). Results: There were significant differences between groups in FACES global score, task 2 and task 4. In mild AD, FACES global score was related to educational level and cognition; comprehension and constructive praxis impacted task 1; cognitive flexibility impacted task 2, and task 3 was related to word finding. There were no significant associations in task 4 after adjusting for level of cognition. The moderate AD group showed that awareness of emotional state was related to FACES global score, constructive praxis impacted task 2, task 3 was related to neuropsychiatric symptoms, and the ability to recognize emotions through situations impacted task 4. There was no significant associations in task 2, after adjusting for level of cognition. Conclusions: There are emotional processing difficulties across AD stages. However, there was no influence of cognitive impairment in the recognition of emotional situations in both groups.

Make or break it: boundary conditions for integrating multiple elements in episodic memory

Event memories are characterized by the holistic retrieval of their constituent elements. Studies show that memory for individual event elements (e.g. person, object and location) are statistically related to each other, and that the same associative memory structure can be formed by learning all pairwise associations across separated encoding contexts (person–object, person–location, object–location). Counter to previous studies that have shown no differences in holistic retrieval between simultaneously and separately encoded event elements, adults did not show evidence of holistic retrieval from separately encoded event elements when using a similar paradigm adapted for children (Experiment 1). We conducted a further five online experiments to explore the conditions under which holistic retrieval emerges following separated encoding of within-event associations, testing for influences of trial length (Experiment 2), the number of events learned (Experiment 3a) and stimulus presentation format (Experiments 3b, 4a, 4b). Presentation of written words was optimal for integrating elements across encoding trials, whereas the addition of spoken words disrupted integration across separately presented associations. The use of picture stimuli also produced effect sizes smaller than those of previously published research. We discuss the ways in which memory integration processes may be disrupted by these differences in presentation format. The findings have practical implications for the utility of this paradigm across research and learning contexts.