Notes

Prostatitis: imaging shows along with analytical considerations.
From an incoming stream of visual information, only a limited number of stimuli can be selected for extensive processing. Much of the literature assumes that selection of cued items in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) streams is a result of attentional sampling being triggered by the cue. We provide evidence for another process-selection from a buffer of stimulus representations. This can yield selection of stimuli presented before the cue, despite the common theoretical claim that such stimuli should be unavailable. Our novel statistical method provides quantitative evidence that stimuli presented before the cue are sometimes selected. This phenomenon occurred when two RSVP streams were presented simultaneously and one was cued at a random time. When the number of streams was increased, evidence for precue reports diminished and selection was delayed. These results indicated that stimuli in RSVP evoke representations that persist long enough to be selected, provided attention is fast enough. The speed and variability of temporal selection of items is affected by endogenous attention and possibly by competition among stimulus representations. In conditions with fewer streams, faster selection and buffering may occur thanks to participants applying endogenous attention before the cue is presented, speeding the response to the cue and leading to more reports of the item before the cue. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).Psychopathy and externalizing are distinct forms of disinhibitory psychopathology whose destructive social behaviors are thought to be underpinned by different aberrations in social cognition. Facial emotion processing is a foundational component of social cognition, yet previous studies on facial emotion processing in psychopathy and externalizing have focused on traditional behavioral measures (e.g., response accuracy), which have limited reliability and precision. Diffusion modeling is a valuable tool for elucidating more reliable and precise sources of performance differences because it estimates parameters that reflect latent cognitive processes, including bias, drift rate (efficiency of evidence accumulation), threshold separation (extent of evidence accumulation), and nondecision time (time spent on non-decision-related processes such as stimulus encoding and motor response execution). In a sample of 92 incarcerated males, we applied diffusion modeling to an emotion identification task in which ambiguous blends of anger, happiness, and fear were identified while contextual threat (i.e., apparent movement of faces) was manipulated. Results indicated that psychopathy was associated with longer nondecision time (i.e., slower processing) across all the emotion blends in the task and particularly for mostly angry faces under greater ambiguity. In direct contrast, externalizing was associated with shorter nondecision time (i.e., faster processing) as well as greater threshold separation (i.e., more extensive evidence accumulation) for mostly angry faces under greater ambiguity, but this pattern of preferential processing of anger was only evident in the absence of contextual threat. These findings link psychopathy and externalizing to different profiles of cognitive processes influencing facial emotion processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).When laboratory studies lose touch with real world context, they may generate fundamental misunderstandings of the principles of human cognition, behaviour, and associated brain processes. This article describes how this can occur, and proposes an alternative research approach-cognitive ethology-that enables researchers to link cognitions and behaviours as they operate in everyday life, with those studied in controlled, lab-based investigations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).Accumulated empirical evidence suggests that death anxiety is strongly associated with multiple mental health conditions. Despite this, few studies have experimentally explored whether manipulating reminders of death could influence the symptoms of mental illnesses. The present, preregistered study used a mortality salience design to assess whether death reminders could increase anxious behavior (i.e., time spent scanning one's body, identification with images consistent with poorer health, and intention to visit a medical practitioner) among individuals with relevant disorders. A total of 128 treatment-seeking participants with either a body scanning disorder (i.e., panic disorder, illness anxiety, or somatic symptom disorder) or a nonscanning disorder (i.e., depression) were randomly allocated to either a mortality salience or control condition. Following this, participants were presented with a series of images of various body parts, which purportedly predicted particular life outcomes, and asked to check their own body and select the image that most closely matched their own. As hypothesized, the results revealed that mortality salience produced an overall increase in all three anxiety-related behaviors. Further, mortality salience selectively increased scanning duration and identification with images indicating poorer health for individuals with a scanning disorder. This effect only occurred when participants were told the body part predicted a health-relevant outcome. In contrast, mortality salience increased intention to visit a medical specialist regardless of one's disorder. The findings support theoretical predictions that death anxiety may have a causal role in multiple mental disorders. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).Individuals with schizophrenia may fail to appropriately use temporal context and apply past environmental regularities to the interpretation of incoming sensory information. selleck compound Here we use the visual system as a test bed for investigating how prior experience shapes perception in individuals with schizophrenia. Specifically, we use visual aftereffects, illusory percepts resulting from prior exposure to visual input, to measure the influence of prior events on current processing. At a neural level, visual aftereffects arise due to attenuation in the responses of neurons that code the features of the prior stimulus (neuronal adaptation) and subsequent disinhibition of neurons signaling activity at the opposite end of the feature dimension. In the current study, we measured tilt aftereffects and negative afterimages, 2 types of aftereffects that reflect, respectively, adaptation of cortical orientation-coding neurons and adaptation of subcortical and retinal luminance-coding cells in persons with schizophrenia (PSZ; n = 36) and demographically matched healthy controls (HC; n = 22).
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