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Vol.29 No.3

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Abstract

Cognitive control involves the human ability to attend to relevant information and ignore irrelevant information from environmental inputs. The present study examined neural mechanisms involved in cognitive control for relevant or irrelevant information related to individual cognitive style. Based on the Object-Spatial-Verbal cognitive style questionnaire scores, participants were divided into two preference groups, Spatializers and Verbalizers. The task included two versions of spatial Stroop tasks that required both ignoring spatial distracter while attending to a verbal target (the Word task) or an object target, respectively. Although there was no difference in the behavioral Stroop effects in either task between the two groups, imaging results demonstrated an increase in the neural Stroop effect in the right frontopolar cortex and right superior temporal sulcus for Spatializers compared to Verbalizers during the Word task, with greater activation in the left lingual gyrus and left parahippocampal/fusiform gyrus for Verbalizers compared to Spatializers during the Object task. In addition, functional connectivity between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and task-related regions showed group differences in the neural Stroop effect. The current results provide further evidence that individuals appear to use different strategies for cognitive control processes according to their preferential cognitive style.

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Abstract

The current study examined the emotional effects on visual crowding in which the identification of a target stimulus is difficult when the target is presented with adjacent stimuli in subjects’ peripheral vision. In stead of previous research stimulus such as the English letter or a face as stimulus on visual crowding, the Korean letters were employed because only one Korean letter could have meaning and emotion. In experiment 1, we conducted the target identification task in which participants were asked to report the target that contained emotional values (positive, negative) or did not (neutral) were presented alone (isolated condition), or presented with adjacent meaningless Korean letter distractors (crowded condition). The results indicated that whereas positive and negative targets were identified more correctly in the isolated condition (negative > positive > neutral), this benefit disappeared in the crowded condition. Nevertheless, when the target with the meaningless Korean letter distractors was presented, the emotional value of the target could be damaged because stimuli have forms such as one three-letter word. Therefore, in experiment 2, we employed English letters instead of meaningless Korean letters as distractors. The results indicated that negative targets were identified more correctly in not only the isolated condition but also the crowded condition. The results implied that the emotional value of the target is processed despite the existence of adjacent distractors.

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Abstract

Understanding others’ facial expression is a key component of emotion recognition and social functioning. Contextual cues are known to have important influence on the emotion perception via faces. The aim is to examine 1&#41 the role of others’ faces as contextual cues in emotion perception, and 2&#41 the influence of different variables&#40number, intensity, and present time&#41 of face on the contextual effect. Three experiments were conducted to explore each variables. Participants were asked to judge the intensity of the facial on the target face. The results show that the number of the contextual cues have significant effect on judging the intensity of the target face, whereas the intensity had relatively small influence. The present time of the stimuli did not show significant effect on judgement on the intensity of the target emotion. The implication and the limitation of the study is further discussed.

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Abstract

This study investigated the deficits of emotional body language recognition in college students with schizotypal traits using emotional body language recognition task and event-related potentials (ERPs). Based on the scores of Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire(SPQ), the normal control group (n=20) and the schizotypal-trait group (n=20) were selected. To examine the emotional body language recognition ability, participants were instructed to judge the emotional value conveyed by the presented stimulus, which could be either negative, positive or neutral. Behavioral results of the emotional body language recognition task showed that the control and schizotypal-trait group did not differ significantly in terms of error rate. However, schizotypal-trait group showed significantly delayed response time in neutral condition compared to the control group. In terms of event-related potentials, the control group showed significantly different N170 and P250 amplitudes between emotional stimuli (positive and negative) and neutral ones, whereas schizotypal-trait group did not show these differences between emotional and neutral stimuli. These results indicate that the controls could rapidly discriminate the emotion conveyed by body postures in body configurational encoding stage (N170), and efficiently made the cognitive effort using the stored emotional representations in specific perception stage (P250), whereas individuals with schizotypal traits had difficulties in these emotional processing. These findings suggest that individuals with schizotypal traits have deficits of emotional body language recognition, which could be a trait marker of schizophrenia.

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Abstract

Change detection tasks have been widely used for understanding the information processing properties of visual working memory. Nevertheless, there has been a recent concern against the use of change detection task due to its several methodological limitations that had been unnoticed in the past. The present review introduced the methodological backbone of change detection task, aiming toward an understanding of recent challenges against its use. The study further discussed several major aspects of change detection task in detail that would demand methodological improvement, and accordingly emphasized the necessity of conservative interpretations on the observed experimental results.

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Abstract

Since human errors can cause various accidents, it is necessary to identify the causes of human errors to prevent such accidents. In this study, we investigated the relation between errors and personalities by conducting correlation and multiple regression analyses between locus of control, BIS/BAS scales and errors observed in the stop-signal task. The result showed that internal locus of control was negatively correlated with reaction times and positively correlated with commission errors on go and stop trials. The behavioral inhibition system was negatively correlated with commission errors on the stop trials. Results demonstrated that the higher scores of internal locus of control was associated with more commission errors on go and stop trials due to fast responses, and the lower scores of the behavioral inhibition system was associated with more frequent stop commission errors due to failure of inhibition. The present study suggests the possibility of prevention of errors through the relation between error types and personality traits.

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Abstract

The SNARC(Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes) effect refers to the phenomenon that relatively smaller vs. larger numbers are processed more efficiently in the left vs. right side of space, respectively. The SNARC effect is a representative case of the number-space association. In relation to recent reports of a reduced SNARC effect in the mathematically skilled and high visuospatial ability groups, the present study examined whether individuals with high number acuity and visuospatial working memory capacity manifest a small SNARC effect. Number acuity refers to the sensitivity for the discrimination of numerosity which is thought to serve as one of the foundations for numerical cognition. Our results showed that a SNARC effect was observed only in the groups with low number acuity and visuospatial working memory. In contrast, there were no difference in the size of the SNARC effect between groups high and low in verbal working memory. These results suggest that individuals with high number acuity and visuospatial working memory may have a more flexible association between number and space depending on the task goal and context.

The Korean Journal of Cognitive and Biological Psychology