Neuropsychologia最新文献

The perception and recognition of faces and scenes rely on distributed neural systems comprising specialised, category-selective regions in visual cortex that interact with an extended network of cortical regions across the brain. While prior work has demonstrated face- and scene-selective responses can be differentiated based on patterns of whole-brain connectivity, it remains unclear whether category-selective regions within each network also possess distinguishable whole-brain connectivity profiles reflecting their specific functional roles. It is also unclear whether individuals have distinct connectivity profiles that might underlie individual differences in face or scene perception. In this study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) from multiple different naturalistic movie watching paradigms and at rest. We identified whole-brain functional connectivity fingerprints for each of the core regions within the face and scene processing networks. We found that patterns of functional connectivity were more similar within than between participants and were distinct across individual regions of the face and scene networks. These findings demonstrate that brain regions within category-selective visual networks are characterised by distinctive connectivity profiles with the rest of the brain.

Segmenting continuous experience into discrete events is fundamental for perception, memory yet the contribution of fine-grained emotion categories to this process remains unclear. Using frame-level annotations of 26 discrete emotion categories, valence, and transient emotional fluctuations, we examined how emotion categories predict behavioral and neural event segmentation during movie viewing. Across hierarchical (event-nesting) behavioral tasks, category-based models, particularly sadness and disappointment, more robustly predicted event boundaries than valence-and-intensity-based models, indicating a unique contribution of emotion semantics to narrative structure. In fMRI, these same emotion categories reliably predicted neural boundaries derived from Hidden Markov Model (HMM) across the cortical hierarchy, from early sensory regions to default-mode hubs. Transient, cosine-based fluctuations of overall emotion semantics additionally predicted coarse-scale boundaries in nucleus accumbens (NAcc). Social salience cues, especially collective presence provided complementary predictive power. Together, these findings indicate that discrete emotion semantics and their dynamics provide cross-timescale signals that support both behavioral and neural event segmentation, highlighting the contribution of emotion to the organization of continuous experience.

The present study aimed to investigate the influences of acute psychological stress on dual mechanisms of control (DMC), namely proactive control and reactive control. Furthermore, the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) was activated by high-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (HF-rTMS) to investigate its role in stress regulation and DMC. The induction of stress was achieved using the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) for the stress-no TMS and TMS-stress groups, while a placebo TSST was administered to the control group. Prior to stress induction, HF-rTMS was applied to activate the left DLPFC in the TMS-stress group. All groups then underwent an AX-Continuous Performance Task. The results showed that, (1) Compared to the control group, the stress-no TMS group showed impaired reactive control, potentially due to a reduction in attentional resources allocated to the probe. (2) In comparison to the stress-no TMS group, the TMS-stress group exhibited enhanced proactive and reactive control, potentially attributed to an increased utilization of contextual cues, allocation of attentional resources towards the probe, and improved conflict resolution. These results demonstrated that acute psychological stress impairs reactive control, and the left DLPFC plays an important role in both stress regulation and DMC.

The human nose occupies approximately ten to fifteen percent of each monocular visual field, yet remains completely absent from conscious awareness during normal binocular vision-a phenomenon that reveals fundamental principles about how the brain constructs perceptual reality. This paper examines the mechanisms underlying nasal suppression through multiple theoretical lenses, integrating historical perspectives from early vision scientists like Wheatstone, Helmholtz, and Hering with contemporary neuroscience research on binocular rivalry, predictive processing, and consciousness. The suppression of nasal awareness operates through sophisticated neural mechanisms that identify the nose's lack of binocular correspondence, its constant predictability, and its irrelevance to behavior, effectively filtering it from conscious perception while preserving attention for environmentally significant information. By analyzing this phenomenon across phenomenological, comparative, anthropological, and experimental dimensions, the paper demonstrates how the invisible nose serves as a crucial model system for understanding perceptual construction, attentional selection, and the fundamental distinction between optical input and subjective experience. The systematic exclusion of the nose from awareness exemplifies broader principles of perceptual organization, including predictive coding, precision-weighting of sensory signals, and the brain's prioritization of behaviorally relevant information over constant anatomical features, ultimately revealing that conscious vision represents an active interpretation rather than a passive recording of sensory data.

A substantial body of prior research has focused on how aging affects the neural processing of speech, whereas less is known about how older adults encode naturalistic music. Here, we investigated whether the neural tracking of different features in naturalistic music differs between age groups. Younger adults (19-34 years) and older adults (58-82 years) listened to excerpts of naturalistic music with different tempi (1-4 Hz) while electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded. The results show an age-related enhancement of neural responses to sound onsets, suggesting a loss of inhibition in the aged auditory cortex that is thought to arise from peripheral decline. This hyperresponsiveness generalized to the neural tracking of multiple features (amplitude envelope, onsets, beat, and spectral flux) in naturalistic music. Crucially, older adults showed reduced sensitivity of early brain responses (0-130 ms) to tempo: Unlike younger adults, whose neural tracking decreased systematically with increasing tempo, older listeners maintained uniformly enhanced tracking across tempi. Although spectral flux best captured tempo-related changes in EEG activity, the effect was diminished in older compared to younger adults. In sum, the current study demonstrates that cortical hyperactivity in aging enhances the tracking of different features during naturalistic music listening but impairs the sensitivity to musical tempo. This might imply that differences in music perception between younger and older adults result from hyperactive neurons in auditory cortex.

Conversation plays a vital role in daily social interactions, serving as a key channel for transmitting information and emotions. According to the interpersonal process model of intimacy, emotional self-disclosure predicts interpersonal closeness. However, the specific effects of emotional self-disclosure during conversation on interpersonal closeness and its underlying neural mechanisms remain unknown. This study employed functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) hyperscanning to examine speaker-listener dyads during positive and negative emotional self-disclosure and non-disclosure conditions. It measured both individual-level brain activation and group-level interpersonal neural synchronization (INS), as well as functional mechanisms underlying INS. At the behavioral level, we revealed that the self-disclosure group reported significantly higher ratings of interpersonal closeness compared to the non-disclosure group. Furthermore, interpersonal closeness was influenced by gender, with females reporting greater closeness than males. Interpersonal closeness also showed positive correlations with both affective and cognitive empathy. At the individual brain activation level, speakers exhibited greater activation in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (rDLPFC) during positive relative to negative emotional expression. Additionally, both speakers and listeners showed enhanced activation in the IFG during self-disclosure compared to non-disclosure. At the interpersonal neural synchronization level, increased INS was found in the rDLPFC during self-disclosure relative to non-disclosure. Furthermore, females exhibited greater INS than males under both positive self-disclosure and negative non-disclosure conditions, and we found that INS mediates the effect of empathy on interpersonal closeness, with gender moderating this mediation pathway. In summary, our study reveals that both cognitive and affective empathy jointly enhance interpersonal closeness during emotional self-disclosure. The INS generated in this process significantly predicted closeness, with gender moderating the effect, highlighting distinct neural pathways for intimacy formation, particularly in negative emotional contexts. These findings advance our understanding of the mechanisms underlying interpersonal intimacy and offer new directions for exploring the neural basis of complex social interactions.

Aphantasia, the strong diminution or complete absence of mental imagery, challenges long-standing views of imagery as central to cognition. Competing accounts variously explain the phenomenon as a failure of sensory reactivation or as unconscious mental imagery. Here, we propose a new framework, the integration model of aphantasia, which argues that reactivated sensory information must undergo multi-stage integration to yield imagery experience. Against unconscious imagery accounts, we argue that the neural activations observed in aphantasics are not imagery but sensory precursors: rudimentary sensory codes that lack perceptual status. Only when sensory precursors are locally integrated do they become perceptual representations, and only when these are further integrated with interoceptive signals do they give rise to conscious imagery experience. We present the integration model as a dual-stream framework that unifies recent attention- and interoception-based accounts, situate it within existing theories of mental imagery and aphantasia, and highlight its clinical relevance. In doing so, we reframe the debate on unconscious imagery and draw attention to the role of multi-stage integration as a key mechanism underlying mental imagery and its absence across different subtypes of aphantasia.

We present a perspective that integrates clinical and neuroimaging evidence to argue that voluntary visual mental imagery is supported by a distributed network organized around the Fusiform Imagery Node (FIN) of the left fusiform gyrus. Lesion evidence shows that imagery is consistently impaired when the FIN is damaged or disconnected, while neuroimaging confirms robust, domain-independent activation of this cortical area. Recent 7 T fMRI data further clarify the putative functional attributes of the FIN. First, the FIN appears to subserve domain-general processes, supporting imagery for objects, colors, words, faces, and spatial relationships, whereas adjacent ventral temporal regions display domain selectivity. Second, it encodes semantic information, as shown by shared multivoxel activity patterns between the FIN, the left inferior frontal gyrus, and the intraparietal sulcus, indicating common representational codes for semantic content. Third, FIN representational overlap between imagery and perception correlates with subjective vividness-the more perceptual-like the representation, the more vivid the experience. This overlap is absent in congenital aphantasia. Fourth, the FIN exhibits functional connectivity with both frontoparietal control regions and domain-specific areas, consistent with a role as a semantic integration hub. Notably, FIN-prefrontal connectivity is markedly reduced in aphantasia. Fifth, the FIN is strongly left-lateralized, mirroring the asymmetry of the semantic system that provides a major input to imagery. Collectively, these features suggest that the FIN serves as a central bridge between semantic and visual information, essential for constructing mental images. Its connectivity may account for individual variability in imagery vividness-from aphantasia to typical imagery-and offers theoretical insight into the neural mechanisms of conscious processing and hemispheric asymmetries, with implications for both clinical and applied domains.