Showing papers in "Trends in Cognitive Sciences in 2014"

TL;DR: Evidence is provided that theta band activities over the midfrontal cortex appear to reflect a common computation used for realizing the need for cognitive control, and frontal theta is a compelling candidate mechanism by which emergent processes, such as 'cognitive control', may be biophysically realized.

TL;DR: It is proposed that the rIFC (along with one or more fronto-basal-ganglia networks) is best characterized as a brake, and this brake can be turned on in different modes and in different contexts.

TL;DR: This work proposes that gamma-band oscillations are generically involved in the maintenance of WM information, and addresses the role of cross-frequency coupling (CFC) in enabling alpha-Gamma and theta-gamma codes for distinct WM information.

TL;DR: By testing at which moment a specific mental content becomes decodable in brain activity, this work can characterize the time course of cognitive codes and provide a novel way to understand how mental representations are manipulated and transformed.

TL;DR: A competing model that develops a non-resource-based account of self-control is advanced, suggesting that apparent regulatory failures reflect the motivated switching of task priorities as people strive to strike an optimal balance between engaging cognitive labor to pursue 'have- to' goals versus preferring cognitive leisure in the pursuit of 'want-to' goals.

TL;DR: Although scale-free brain activity and brain oscillations coexist, the understanding of the former remains limited and a deeper understanding of this prevalent brain signal should provide new insights into, and analytical tools for, cognitive neuroscience.

TL;DR: Surprising new findings indicate that many conclusions about sex differences and similarities in cognitive abilities need to be reexamined and how biological and environmental factors interact could help maximize cognitive potential and address pressing societal issues.

TL;DR: It is proposed that a language network plausibly includes a functionally specialized 'core' and a domain-general 'periphery' (a set of brain regions that may coactivate with the language core regions at some times but with other specialized systems at other times, depending on task demands).

TL;DR: A neurobiological model of memory control can inform disordered control over memory and electrophysiological activity during motivated forgetting implicates active inhibition.

TL;DR: A novel framework is proposed that differentiates between deprivation (absence of expected cognitive and social input) and threat (presence of a threat to one's physical integrity) to highlight potential mechanisms through which experiences of threat and deprivation could affect neural structure and function in humans.

TL;DR: This review discusses the available empirical evidence for the presence of publication and reporting biases across the neuroimaging, animal, other preclinical, psychological, clinical trials, and genetics literature in the cognitive sciences.

TL;DR: This work highlights multiple neural mechanisms supporting working memory, including temporally dynamic population coding in addition to persistent activity, and argues that sensory cortex, not the lPFC, maintains high-fidelity representations of WM content.

TL;DR: Evidence from EEG recordings in humans is reviewed and shows that monitored events elicit a rather uniform sequence of cortical activity reflecting the detection, accumulation, and weighting of evidence for the necessity to adapt and (re)act.

TL;DR: This work proposes abandoning the catchall term of empathy in favor of more precise concepts, such as emotional sharing, empathic concern, and affective perspective-taking, to better understand relations between morality and empathy.

TL;DR: It is concluded that, consistent with interactive accounts, higher-order linguistic representations modulate early orthographic processing and can advance theories of visual word recognition and other domains.

TL;DR: A ‘dual systems’ framework for thinking about metacognition is proposed that allows agents to share metacognitive representations and creates benefits for the group and facilitates cumulative culture.

TL;DR: Electrophysiological recordings on the human scalp provide a wealth of information about the temporal dynamics and nature of face perception at a global level of brain organization and the first objective signature of integration of facial parts in the human brain.

TL;DR: It is suggested that studying entrainment in selective-attention paradigms is likely to reveal mechanisms underlying deficits across multiple disorders.

TL;DR: A pluralist view of cognition is proposed that encompasses abstract and grounded symbols and distinguishes five levels of embeddedness: demonstration, instruction, projection, displacement, and abstraction.

TL;DR: This review describes four temporally and functionally dissociable stages of attention in visual search (preparation, guidance, selection, and identification).

TL;DR: Boosting dopamine enhances the dominance of action over valence in the striatum and dopaminergic midbrain and decreases the extent of the behavioral coupling between action and valence.

TL;DR: It is asked whether traversing distance is a general mental ability and whether distance should replace expectancy in expected-utility theories and the implications for prediction, choice, communication, negotiation, and self-control.

TL;DR: An emerging body of work that highlights spatiotemporal heterogeneity and autocorrelation as key properties of most real-world environments that may help to understand why cognitive biases evolved are highlighted is reviewed.

TL;DR: Using computational modeling, it is proposed that internally generated sequences may be productively considered a component of goal-directed decision systems, implementing a sampling-based inference engine that optimizes goal acquisition at multiple timescales of on-line choice, action control, and learning.

TL;DR: Three representative cognitive theories of emotion continue to develop productively: the action-readiness theory, the core-affect theory, and the communicative theory.

TL;DR: It is argued that understanding how brains change across development requires understanding the interplay between behavior and brain networks: changing bodies and activities modify the statistics of inputs to the brain; these changing inputs mold brain networks; and these networks, in turn, promote further change in behavior and input.

TL;DR: S–R bindings are more flexible and pervasive than previously thought and enable rapid yet context-dependent behaviors that complicate interpretations of priming.

TL;DR: This work suggests that consciousness holds an enabling role in establishing integrative mechanisms that can later operate unconsciously, and in allowing wider-range integration, over bigger semantic, spatiotemporal, and sensory integration windows.

TL;DR: This paper reviewed four core domains of difficulty: systematic biases in favor of negative material, impoverished access and responses to positive memories, reduced access to the specific details of the personal past, and dysfunctional processes of rumination and avoidance around personal autobiographical material.

TL;DR: Research linking facial morphological traits to important social outcomes and various factors that moderate this relationship are summarized.