Lars Kuchinke

Emotion word recognition: discrete information effects first, continuous later?

Manipulations of either discrete emotions (e.g. happiness) or affective dimensions (e.g. positivity) have a long tradition in emotion research, but interactive effects have never been studied, based on the assumption that the two underlying theories are incompatible. Recent theorizing suggests, however, that the human brain relies on two affective processing systems, one working on the basis of discrete emotion categories, and the other working along affective dimensions. Presenting participants with an orthogonal manipulation of happiness and positivity in a lexical decision task, the present study meant to test the appropriateness of this assumption in emotion word recognition. Behavioral and electroencephalographic data revealed independent effects for both variables, with happiness affecting the early visual N1 component, while positivity affected an N400-like component and the late positive complex. These results are interpreted as evidence for a sequential processing of affective information, with discrete emotions being the basis for later dimensional appraisal processes.

Acquired Affective Associations Induce Emotion Effects in Word Recognition: An ERP Study.

The present study examined how contextual learning and in particular emotionality conditioning impacts the neural processing of words, as possible key factors for the acquisition of words emotional connotation. 21 participants learned on five consecutive days associations between meaningless pseudowords and unpleasant or neutral pictures using an evaluative conditioning paradigm. Subsequently, event-related potentials were recorded while participants implicitly processed the learned emotional relevance in a lexical decision paradigm. Emotional and neutral words were presented together with the conditioned pseudowords and a set of new pseudowords. Conditioned and new pseudowords differed in the late positive complex. Emotionally and neutrally conditioned stimuli differed in an early time window (80-120 ms) and in the P300. These results replicate ERP effects known from emotion word recognition and indicate that contextual learning and in particular evaluative conditioning is suitable to establish emotional associations in words, and to explain early ERP effects in emotion word recognition.

The role of orbitofrontal cortex in processing empathy stories in 4- to 8-year-old children.

This study investigates the neuronal correlates of empathic processing in children aged 4–8 years, an age range discussed to be crucial for the development of empathy. Empathy, defined as the ability to understand and share another persons inner life, consists of two components: affective (emotion-sharing) and cognitive empathy (Theory of Mind). We examined the hemodynamic responses of preschool and school children (Nu2009=u200948), while they processed verbal (auditory) and non-verbal (cartoons) empathy stories in a passive following paradigm, using functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy. To control for the two types of empathy, children were presented blocks of stories eliciting either affective or cognitive empathy, or neutral scenes which relied on the understanding of physical causalities. By contrasting the activations of the younger and older children, we expected to observe developmental changes in brain activations when children process stories eliciting empathy in either stimulus modality toward a greater involvement of anterior frontal brain regions. Our results indicate that childrens processing of stories eliciting affective and cognitive empathy is associated with medial and bilateral orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) activation. In contrast to what is known from studies using adult participants, no additional recruitment of posterior brain regions was observed, often associated with the processing of stories eliciting empathy. Developmental changes were found only for stories eliciting affective empathy with increased activation, in older children, in medial OFC, left inferior frontal gyrus, and the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Activations for the two modalities differ only little, with non-verbal presentation of the stimuli having a greater impact on empathy processing in children, showing more similarities to adult processing than the verbal one. This might be caused by the fact that non-verbal processing develops earlier in life and is more familiar.

Emotions in reading: Dissociation of happiness and positivity

The hierarchical emotion model proposed by Panksepp (1998) predicts that affective processing will rely on three functionally and neuroanatomically distinct levels, engaging subcortical networks (primary level), the limbic system (secondary level), and the neocortex (tertiary level). In the present fMRI study, we manipulated happiness and positivity, which are assumed to rely on secondary- and tertiary-level processes, respectively, to test these assumptions in a word recognition task. In accordance with the model predictions, evidence for a double dissociation was found in the brain activation patterns: Secondary-level processes engaged parts of the limbic system—specifically, the right hemispheric amygdala. Tertiary-level processes, in contrast, relied predominantly on frontal neocortical structures such as the left inferior frontal and medial frontal gyri. These results are interpreted as support for Panksepp’s (1998) model and as an indicator of a semantic foundation of affective dimensions.

Grids in Topographic Maps Reduce Distortions in the Recall of Learned Object Locations

To date, it has been shown that cognitive map representations based on cartographic visualisations are systematically distorted. The grid is a traditional element of map graphics that has rarely been considered in research on perception-based spatial distortions. Grids do not only support the map reader in finding coordinates or locations of objects, they also provide a systematic structure for clustering visual map information (“spatial chunks”). The aim of this study was to examine whether different cartographic kinds of grids reduce spatial distortions and improve recall memory for object locations. Recall performance was measured as both the percentage of correctly recalled objects (hit rate) and the mean distance errors of correctly recalled objects (spatial accuracy). Different kinds of grids (continuous lines, dashed lines, crosses) were applied to topographic maps. These maps were also varied in their type of characteristic areas (LANDSCAPE) and different information layer compositions (DENSITY) to examine the effects of map complexity. The study involving 144 participants shows that all experimental cartographic factors (GRID, LANDSCAPE, DENSITY) improve recall performance and spatial accuracy of learned object locations. Overlaying a topographic map with a grid significantly reduces the mean distance errors of correctly recalled map objects. The paper includes a discussion of a square grids usefulness concerning object location memory, independent of whether the grid is clearly visible (continuous or dashed lines) or only indicated by crosses.

Neural correlates of episodic memory: Associative memory and confidence drive hippocampus activations

The present study used a study-test recognition memory task to examine the brain regions engaged in episodic and associative memory processes. Participants evaluated on a six-point rating scale how confident they were on whether or not an item was presented in a previous study phase. Neural activations for high- and low-confidence decisions were examined in old and new items at two levels of between-item-associations. Items had different amounts of associations within the stimulus set, while associations were defined by co-occurrence statistics. The medial frontal gyrus, the posterior cingulate gyrus, the superior temporal gyrus and the right hippocampus revealed U-shaped activation functions with greater activations for high-confidence OLD and NEW decisions. This was independent of the associative memory manipulation, which suggests that not episodic memory, but rather processes related to confidence account for the activation in these brain regions. In contrast, left hippocampus followed a different activation pattern that was modulated by the amount of associations. This provides evidence for the role of the left hippocampus in associative memory.

Occipital and orbitofrontal hemodynamics during naturally paced reading: an fNIRS study.

Humans typically read at incredibly fast rates, because they predict likely occurring words from a given context. Here, we used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to track the ultra-rapid hemodynamic responses of words presented every 280 ms in a naturally paced sentence context. We found a lower occipital deoxygenation to unpredictable than to predictable words. The greater hemodynamic responses to unexpected words suggest that the visual features of expected words have been pre-activated previous to stimulus presentation. Second, we tested opposing theoretical proposals about the role of the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC): Either OFC may respond to the breach of expectation; or OFC is activated when the present stimulus matches the prediction. A significant interaction between word frequency and predictability indicated OFC responses to breaches of expectation for low- but not for high-frequency words: OFC is sensitive to both, bottom-up processing as mediated by word frequency, as well as top-down predictions. Particularly, when a rare word is unpredictable, OFC becomes active. Finally, we discuss how a high temporal resolution can help future studies to disentangle the hemodynamic responses of single trials in such an ultra-rapid event succession as naturally paced reading.

Caffeine improves left hemisphere processing of positive words.

A positivity advantage is known in emotional word recognition in that positive words are consistently processed faster and with fewer errors compared to emotionally neutral words. A similar advantage is not evident for negative words. Results of divided visual field studies, where stimuli are presented in either the left or right visual field and are initially processed by the contra-lateral brain hemisphere, point to a specificity of the language-dominant left hemisphere. The present study examined this effect by showing that the intake of caffeine further enhanced the recognition performance of positive, but not negative or neutral stimuli compared to a placebo control group. Because this effect was only present in the right visual field/left hemisphere condition, and based on the close link between caffeine intake and dopaminergic transmission, this result points to a dopaminergic explanation of the positivity advantage in emotional word recognition.

True-3D Accentuating of Grids and Streets in Urban Topographic Maps Enhances Human Object Location Memory

Cognitive representations of learned map information are subject to systematic distortion errors. Map elements that divide a map surface into regions, such as content-related linear symbols (e.g. streets, rivers, railway systems) or additional artificial layers (coordinate grids), provide an orientation pattern that can help users to reduce distortions in their mental representations. In recent years, the television industry has started to establish True-3D (autostereoscopic) displays as mass media. These modern displays make it possible to watch dynamic and static images including depth illusions without additional devices, such as 3D glasses. In these images, visual details can be distributed over different positions along the depth axis. Some empirical studies of vision research provided first evidence that 3D stereoscopic content attracts higher attention and is processed faster. So far, the impact of True-3D accentuating has not yet been explored concerning spatial memory tasks and cartography. This paper reports the results of two empirical studies that focus on investigations whether True-3D accentuating of artificial, regular overlaying line features (i.e. grids) and content-related, irregular line features (i.e. highways and main streets) in official urban topographic maps (scale 1/10,000) further improves human object location memory performance. The memory performance is measured as both the percentage of correctly recalled object locations (hit rate) and the mean distances of correctly recalled objects (spatial accuracy). It is shown that the True-3D accentuating of grids (depth offset: 5 cm) significantly enhances the spatial accuracy of recalled map object locations, whereas the True-3D emphasis of streets significantly improves the hit rate of recalled map object locations. These results show the potential of True-3D displays for an improvement of the cognitive representation of learned cartographic information.

Emotion processing in different media types: Realism, complexity, and immersion

With the aim to improve the ecological validity when studying real life phenomena, research has increasingly been employing more complex and realistic materials, from pictorial and verbal (e.g., movies vs. pictures, narratives vs. single words), to interactive or virtual settings. This article has the objective to understand the emotional impact of these different types of media. It first summarizes neuroimaging findings on emotion processing, focusing on the development toward more realistic and complex materials. The presented literature shows that all media types, simple words or complex movies, may induce consistent emotional responses, mirrored in activations in core emotion regions. Regions related to the (embodied) simulation of another’s bodily state, and mentalizing, the cognitive representation of another’s mental state, are particularly reported in response to more complex, narrative or social materials. Other media-specific responses are described in sensory or language brain regions, while dynamic and multimodal stimuli are reported to yield behavioral advantages together with increased emotional brain responses. Finally, the article discusses the role of immersive processes for emotional engagement in different media settings. The potential to make the viewer immerse into fictional or artificial worlds, is proposed as a crucial modulator for emotional responses in different media types, leading to the formulation of open questions and implications for future research on emotion processing. Correspondence to: Lorna Schlochtermeier, FreieUniversität Berlin, HabelschwerdterAllee 45, 14195 Berlin, Tel: +49 (0)176 64760649, Fax: +49 (0)30 838 55620; E-mail: l.schlochtermeier@fu-berlin.de