Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
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Taxonomic semantic relation prevails in object naming: Larger and earlier effects of taxonomic relation compared to thematic relation
No full textLong-term semantic systems are specialized for taxonomic and thematic relations. In the present study, we investigated the influence of taxonomic and thematic relations on object naming. Leveraging the existing dataset (N = 32) and expanding the sample (total N = 48). Using a blocked cyclic naming paradigm, we explored semantic effects within both taxonomic and thematic contexts, using an identical set of stimuli. A set of sixteen objects was categorized into either a taxonomic context or a thematic context. Our results show that both contexts trigger semantic interference, with a more pronounced interference in the taxonomic context than in the thematic context. The taxonomic context modulated event related potentials (ERPs) within the time windows of 134-456 msec after picture onset, while the thematic context modulated ERPs in 230-362 msec after picture onset. These results reveal larger and earlier effects of taxonomic relations compared to thematic relations, indicating that taxonomic relation prevails in object naming. (c) 2025 Elsevier Ltd. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies.</p
Can this moldy fruit be eaten? Four-to six-year-old children's epistemic trust in food domain experts
No full textChildren's understanding of food is influenced by the information they receive from others. Two studies explored the trust of 180 Chinese children (90 girls and 90 boys; aged 4-6) in information providers with different levels of expertise in the food domain (fruit experts vs. fruit farmers vs. ordinary people) in nonconflict and conflict situations. The results showed that children of all ages were more likely to trust a fruit expert (Study 1) and a fruit farmer (Study 2) than a common person. However, if the statement provided by the expert conflicted with the children's pre-existing beliefs, less than half of the children (Study 1: 33%; Study 2: 46%) chose to accept the expert's statement and revised prior beliefs. The comparative analyses of Studies 1 and 2 indicated that 6-yearolds could accurately judge the level of expertise of fruit experts and fruit farmers, and they tended to trust fruit experts with a higher level of professional knowledge than fruit farmers with a slightly lower level of specialty. Study 3 further confirmed that both adults and children perceived the fruit expert as more knowledgeable than the fruit farmer. These suggest that the children could evaluate the learning situation, the information providers' expertise, and their prior experience when faced with the question of whether high-risk foods were edible.</p
Age-related spatial discrimination: Investigating hippocampal structural foundations
No full textSpatial discrimination is a key cognitive skill for navigating everyday environments, and a decline in spatial discrimination is considered an early sign of pathological aging. The present study aimed to explore the aging mechanisms of spatial discrimination ability for overlapping and non-overlapping routes and its hippocampal structural basis. Sixty participants (30 young adults and 30 older adults) participated in this study. They performed a passive navigation task that required learning and discriminating four different partly overlapping routes, including both overlapping and non-overlapping segments. Moreover, all participants received structural MRI scans. The volumes of the hippocampus and its four subfields, CA1 (cornu ammonis 1), CA2/3 (cornu ammonis 2/3), CA4/DG (cornu ammonis 4/dentate gyrus), and subiculum, were extracted. The results showed that older adults performed worse than young adults on all behavioral measures of spatial discrimination, including reaction time and accuracy of the whole route, overlapping route, and non-overlapping route. However, both age groups showed improved performance with increased learning blocks. Hippocampal subfields volume reductions occurred in CA4/DG (p = 0.002, q2 = 0.166), while CA1 showed a marginal trend toward atrophy (p = 0.053, q2 = 0.065), CA2/3 (p = 0.363, q2 = 0.015) and subiculum (p = 0.142, q2 = 0.038) remained preserved. Smaller hippocampal volume correlated with slower overlapping route reaction time (r = -0.399) and smaller CA4/DG correlated with lower non-overlapping route accuracy (r = 0.386). Mediation analysis revealed that hippocampus volume mediated the relationship between age and the reaction time of overlapping route, and CA4/DG volume mediated the relationship between age and the accuracy of non-overlapping route. The results demonstrate a decrement in spatial discrimination in older adults, and the structural atrophy in hippocampus and subfield CA4/DG may be the underlying mechanism of this decline. These findings demonstrate subfield-specific mediation effects in a passive navigation paradigm, highlighting CA4/DG as a potential biomarker for age-related spatial discrimination deficits and advancing understanding of the hippocampal structural basis of spatial cognitive decline
Acupuncture for depression: Decoding neuroimmune crosstalk and targeting anti-inflammatory mechanisms
No full textDepression, a leading global health burden, involves neuroimmune dysregulation and neuroinflammation. As a promising non-pharmacological approach, acupuncture has been supported by numerous studies as an effective intervention for alleviating depression. The antidepressant mechanisms of acupuncture involve a multitarget modulation of neuroimmune crosstalk, such as restoring hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis homeostasis, inhibiting microglial and astrocytic activation, regulating autophagy, inhibiting key inflammatory signaling pathways, activating anti-inflammatory pathways via the vagus nerve, and rebalancing gut-brain axis communication by modifying microbiota. Integrating acupuncture with advanced neuromodulation techniques may enhance its effectiveness in treating depression. It needs further study to validate acupuncture as an effective therapeutic strategy in the field of neuroimmunology for depression. This review summarizes evidence elucidating how acupuncture regulates neuroimmune crosstalk in depression. It not only provides a scientific basis for its application but also advances the understanding of the pathophysiology of depression by highlighting the interplay between neuroimmune interaction and inflammatory pathways
The role of oxytocin and cultural tightness in model-based learning of social Incongruency
No full textSocial norms are defined as implicit or explicit rules that maintain organizational and social harmony, yet norm violations are omnipresent. While encountering norm-based incongruency is an inherent part of life, how humans dynamically adapt to and resolve conflicts raised from such norm-based incongruency remains unclear-particularly with regard to the cognitive mechanisms involved and their neurobiological and sociocultural modulators. To address this within a specific daily setting, we conducted two pre-registered studies with 137 participants, integrating a social congruency task, Bayesian modeling, intranasal oxytocin (placebo control) administration, and cultural values. Behavioral results of Study 1 (n = 50) revealed that congruency effects were shown but most of congruency sequence effects were absent in the social congruency task, indicating a limited adaptation (trial-based learning) in the social domain. In Study 2 (n = 87), congruency and congruency sequence effects were replicated in the placebo condition. Additionally, oxytocin administration facilitated adaptive learning of social incongruency in both trial-based processing of successive weakly incongruent stimuli and model-based learning trend over time, which supports the social salience theory. Notably, oxytocin's modulation on the learning process was more pronounced in individuals perceiving more cultural tightness in daily life. These findings advance our understanding of social conflict resolution by identifying the computational mechanisms underlying dynamic adaptation to social incongruency-mechanisms that are distinct from those engaged in non-social domains. Moreover, the findings further elucidate how this adaptive process is modulated by oxytocin and individual perceptions of cultural tightness. In conclusion, the results highlight a culturally sensitive neuromolecular basis for managing social conflicts, offering important implications for promoting positive social interactions and harmony across diverse contexts
The Impact of Online Argumentation Strategies on Audience Persuasion: The Moderating Effect of the Big Five Personality
No full textOnline persuasion increasingly shapes public opinion, yet audience psychological traits remain underexplored. This study investigates whether individuals with different Big Five personality profiles perceive argumentative strategies differently. We conducted a user study using CMV posts annotated with five argumentative units (EUs) and collected persuasiveness ratings, personality, and demographic data from 426 participants. Regression analyses revealed that the effects of Fact and Policy units on persuasiveness were moderated by traits such as Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. These findings highlight the importance of tailoring persuasive strategies to audience profiles and offer implications for adaptive online communication.</p
Spiking neural network analysis of MT-MST pathways in biological motion processing
No full textUnderstanding the neural mechanisms underlying biological motion perception remains a significant challenge in neuroscience. To further explore this mechanism, we construct the BioMotionNet model using real bio-neural data from the MT to MST regions in macaques. To characterize neuron activity within particular time windows, we propose the window learning strategy, which employs windowed learning to extract crucial information related to specific events or stimuli. By analyzing the connectivity structure of the BioMotionNet model, we identify regular projection patterns from MT to MST, reflected in the varying response characteristics of MT neurons based on their projection strength to different MST neuron populations.</p
CT-MIFNet: Convolutional transformer-based multi-view interaction and fusion network for EEG decoding
Full text linkConvolutional neural networks (CNNs) are effective at extracting local features but are limited in capturing long-term dependencies due to their fixed kernel size. In contrast, Transformers are capable of capturing long-range dependencies through the self-attention mechanism.Although there are frameworks that extract both local and global features by combining CNN with Transformer in brain-computer interface (BCI) systems, multi-view features have not been effectively explored in Electroencephalography (EEG) decoding. Moreover, the increased computational complexity introduced by the attention mechanism in Transformers poses challenges, hindering their application to EEG signals with long sequence. Therefore, a novel Convolutional Transformer-based multi-view Interaction and Fusion Network (CT-MIFNet) is proposed. Initially, the preprocessed EEG signals are passed through a spatial transformation module, which reduces dimensionality while minimizing noise. After undergoing fast fourier transform (FFT) and branching into two separate paths, the signals are input into a Patch Embedding module with multi-scale convolution mapping to extract temporal, frequency, and spatial features. Subsequently, to enhance feature representations, these local features are processed by the Transformer-based Feature Interaction and Fusion module, which leverages Cross-Covariance Attention (CCA) to reduce computational complexity while facilitating the exchange and fusion of feature tokens from various perspectives. Extensive experiments showed that CT-MIFNet demonstrated the superior performance and generalization ability on the BCI Competition IV-2a, BCI Competition IV-2b, and the EEG datasets for laser-evoked pain datasets, achieving accuracies of 81.67%, 86.75%, and 83.48%, respectively. To enhance model interpretability, t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) and heatmap were employed for visualization.</p
Children and adults across 15 countries believe in human uniqueness of mind: a cross-cultural investigation of cross-species mind perception
No full textThe way humans relate to other animals is fundamentally shaped by whether we perceive ourselves as unique, with feelings and thoughts not shared by other animals. How beliefs about animals' ability to feel and think develop across cultures remains largely unexplored. We asked children and adolescents (4-17 years, N = 1025) and adults (N = 190) from 33 urban and rural communities across 15 countries whether animals have thoughts or feelings (judgments of presence), and whether those thoughts or feelings are human-like (judgments of similarity). Bayesian analyses revealed that participants generally ascribed non-human animals the ability for thoughts and feelings. However, they universally denied that animals have human-like thoughts, with these beliefs emerging early in development across all societies and remaining stable across the lifespan. There was more cultural variation found in whether participants attributed human-like feelings to animals. Human mental exceptionalism appears to be a human universal and is restricted to human-like thoughts. Implications for human-animal relationships and ethical considerations for the treatment and conservation of other animals are discussed.</p
Insufficient cognitive resources allocation with compensatory sensory enhancement in children with attention difficulties
No full textA subset of children exhibits ADHD symptoms without meeting full diagnostic criteria. These children demonstrate behavioral difficulties and functional impairments but often lack access to evidence-based interventions. This study examined the neural mechanisms underlying the ADHD symptoms in these children by using classic and modified oddball paradigms that incorporated novel stimuli and rare repetitive distractors and analyzed event-related potential (ERP) components across different stages of visual attentional processing. Forty-six children participated in the study and were categorized into a group with normal visual attention (Group 1) and a group with attention difficulties (Group 2) by the Integrated Visual and Auditory Continuous Performance Test (IVA-CPT). Behavioral results revealed that Group 2 children had lower accuracy rates in both tasks, though no interaction emerged between stimulus condition and group. Reaction times did not differ significantly between groups. ERP results indicated that Group 2 exhibited reduced N2 amplitudes and prolonged N2 latencies across all conditions. In the modified task, they also showed attenuated P3 amplitudes to target stimuli. Additionally, Group 2 displayed shorter P2 latencies across conditions. These findings suggest deficits in top-down attention and early bottom-up sensory processing in children with ADHD symptoms. Furthermore, we propose a compensatory mechanism wherein heightened early sensory sensitivity may partially counteract deficient neural resource allocation in later attentional stages. Together, these results imply that training programs targeting cognitive abilities could help alleviate behavioral symptoms
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