Medial Prefrontal and Occipito-Temporal Activity At Encoding Determine Enhanced Recognition of Threatening Faces After 1.5 Years

Studies demonstrated that faces with threatening emotional expressions are better remembered than non-threatening faces. However, whether this memory advantage persists over years and which neural systems underlie such an effect remains unknown. Here, we employed an individual difference approach to examine whether the neural activity during incidental encoding was associated with differential recognition of faces with emotional expressions (angry, fearful, happy, sad and neutral) after a retention interval of > 1.5 years (N = 89). Behaviorally, we found a better recognition for threatening (angry, fearful) versus non-threatening (happy and neutral) faces after a > 1.5 years delay, which was driven by forgetting of non-threatening faces compared with immediate recognition after encoding. Multivariate principal component analysis (PCA) on the behavioral responses further confirmed the discriminative recognition performance between threatening and non-threatening faces. A voxel-wise whole-brain analysis on the concomitantly acquired functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) data during incidental encoding revealed that neural activity in bilateral inferior occipital gyrus (IOG) and ventromedial prefrontal/orbitofrontal cortex (vmPFC/OFC) was associated with the individual differences in the discriminative emotional face recognition performance measured by an innovative behavioral pattern similarity analysis (BPSA) based on inter-subject correlation (ISC). The left fusiform face area (FFA) was additionally determined using a regionally focused analysis. Overall, the present study provides evidence that threatening facial expressions lead to persistent face recognition over periods of > 1.5 years and differential encoding-related activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and occipito-temporal cortex may underlie this effect.

Memory and Reward-Based Learning: A Value-Directed Remembering Perspective

The ability to prioritize valuable information is critical for the efficient use of memory in daily life. When information is important, we engage more effective encoding mechanisms that can better support retrieval. Here, we describe a dual-mechanism framework of value-directed remembering in which both strategic and automatic processes lead to differential encoding of valuable information. Strategic processes rely on metacognitive awareness of effective deep encoding strategies that allow younger and healthy older adults to selectively remember important information. In contrast, some high-value information may also be encoded automatically in the absence of intention to remember, but this may be more impaired in older age. These different mechanisms are subserved by different neural substrates, with left-hemisphere semantic processing regions active during the strategic encoding of high-value items, and automatic enhancement of encoding of high-value items may be supported by activation of midbrain dopaminergic projections to the hippocampal region. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Psychology, Volume 73 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Salt Sensation and Regulation

Taste sensation and regulation are highly conserved in insects and mammals. Research conducted over recent decades has yielded major advances in our understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying the taste sensors for a variety of taste sensations and the processes underlying regulation of ingestion depending on our internal state. Salt (NaCl) is an essential ingested nutrient. The regulation of internal sodium concentrations for physiological processes, including neuronal activity, fluid volume, acid–base balance, and muscle contraction, are extremely important issues in animal health. Both mammals and flies detect low and high NaCl concentrations as attractive and aversive tastants, respectively. These attractive or aversive behaviors can be modulated by the internal nutrient state. However, the differential encoding of the tastes underlying low and high salt concentrations in the brain remain unclear. In this review, we discuss the current view of taste sensation and modulation in the brain with an emphasis on recent advances in this field. This work presents new questions that include but are not limited to, “How do the fly’s neuronal circuits process this complex salt code?” and “Why do high concentrations of salt induce a negative valence only when the need for salt is low?” A better understanding of regulation of salt homeostasis could improve our understanding of why our brains enjoy salty food so much.

Differential encoding of safe and risky offers

Common currency theories in neuroeconomics hold that neurons in specific brain regions specifically encode subjective values of offers and not stimulus-specific information. The rationale behind these theories is that abstract value encoding lets the decision maker compare qualitatively different options. Alternatively, expectancy-based theories hold that the brain preferentially tracks the relationship between options and their outcomes, and thus does not abstract away details of offers. To adjudicate between these theories, we examined responses of neurons in six reward regions to risky and safe offers while macaques performed a gambling task. In all regions, responses to safe options are unrelated to responses evoked by equally preferred risky options. Nor does any region appear to contain a specialized subset of value-selective neurons. Finally, in all regions, responses to risky and safe options occupy distinct response subspaces, indicating that the organizational framework for encoding risky and safe offers is different. Together, these results argue against the idea that putative reward regions carry abstract value signals, and instead support the idea that these regions carry information that links specific options to their outcomes in support of a broader cognitive map.

Long-Range Acoustic Communication Using Differential Chirp Spread Spectrum

Here, we propose a new modulation method using chirp spread spectrum (CSS) modulation to indicate the result of long-range acoustic communication (LRAC). CSS modulation had outstanding matched filter characteristics even though the channel was complex. The performance of the matched filter depends on the time–bandwidth product. We studied the method of using the same modulation method while increasing the amount of the time–bandwidth product. When differential encoding is applied, the de-modulation is made using the difference between the current symbol and the previous symbol. If the matched filter is applied using both the current and the previous symbol, such as the use of two symbols, the amount of the time–bandwidth product can be doubled, and this method can make the output of the matched filter larger. The proposed method was verified in lake and sea experiments, in which the experimental environment was analyzed and compared with the result using the channel impulse response (CIR) of the lake and sea. The lake experiment was conducted over a distance of about 100–300 m between the transmitter and receiver and at a depth of ~40 m. As a result of the communication, the conventional method’s bit error rate (BER) was 1.22×10−1, but the proposed method’s BER was 1.98×10−2. The sea experiment was conducted over a distance of ~90 km and at a depth of ~1 km, and the conventional method BER in this experiment was 1.83×10−4, while the proposed method’s BER was 0.