Christine D. Wilson-Mendenhall

TL;DR: A basic model of naturalistic cognitive fluctuations between mind wandering and attentional states derived from the practice of focused attention meditation is presented and theories about cognitive correlates of distributed brain networks are extended.

TL;DR: A neuroimaging experiment tested two core hypotheses of the Conceptual Act Theory of Emotion: different situated conceptualizations produce different forms of the same emotion in different situations, and the composition of a situated conceptualization emerges from shared multimodal circuitry distributed across the brain that produces emotional states generally.

TL;DR: A neuroimaging study revealed that participants’ subjective ratings of valence and of arousal evoked by various fear, happiness, and sadness experiences correlated with neural activity in specific brain regions (orbitofrontal cortex and amygdala, respectively), suggesting that neural circuitry realizes more basic processes across discrete emotions.

TL;DR: Broad evidence that words do not have conceptual cores is reviewed, and that even the most salient features in a word's meaning are not activated automatically, and further evidence that grounded congruency effects rely dynamically on context is provided.

TL;DR: This study assessed the hypothesis that, like concrete concepts, distributed neural patterns of relevant nonlinguistic semantic content represent the meanings of abstract concepts, and predicted that brain regions underlying mentalizing and social cognition and numerical cognition would become active to represent semantic content central to arithmetic.