Event segmentation in ADHD: neglect of social information and deviant theta activity point to a mechanism underlying ADHD.

Background: Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most frequently diagnosed psychiatric conditions in children and adolescents. Although the symptoms appear to be well described, no coherent conceptual mechanistic framework integrates their occurrence and variance and the associated problems that people with ADHD face. Aims: The current study proposes that altered event segmentation processes provide a novel mechanistic framework for understanding deficits in ADHD. Methods: Adolescents with ADHD and neurotypically developing (NT) peers watched a short movie and were then asked to indicate the boundaries between meaningful segments of the movie. Concomitantly recorded electroencephalography (EEG) data were analysed for differences in frequency band activity and effective connectivity between brain areas. Results: Compared with their NT peers, the ADHD group showed less dependence of their segmentation behaviour on social information, indicating that they did not consider social information to the same extent as their unaffected peers. This divergence was accompanied by differences in EEG theta band activity and a different effective connectivity network architecture at the source level. Specifically, NT adolescents primarily showed error signalling in and between the left and right fusiform gyri related to social information processing, which was not the case in the ADHD group. For the ADHD group, the inferior frontal cortex associated with attentional sampling served as a hub instead, indicating problems in the deployment of attentional control. Conclusions: This study shows that adolescents with ADHD perceive events differently from their NT peers, in association with a different brain network architecture that reflects less adaptation to the situation and problems in attentional sampling of environmental information. The results call for a novel conceptual view of ADHD, based on event segmentation theory.

Tracing conflict-induced cognitive-control adjustments over time using aperiodic EEG activity.

Cognitive-control theories assume that the experience of response conflict can trigger control adjustments. However, while some approaches focus on adjustments that impact the selection of the present response (in trial N), other approaches focus on adjustments in the next upcoming trial (N + 1). We aimed to trace control adjustments over time by quantifying cortical noise by means of the fitting oscillations and one over f algorithm, a measure of aperiodic activity. As predicted, conflict trials increased the aperiodic exponent in a large sample of 171 healthy adults, thus indicating noise reduction. While this adjustment was visible in trial N already, it did not affect response selection before the next trial. This suggests that control adjustments do not affect ongoing response-selection processes but prepare the system for tighter control in the next trial. We interpret the findings in terms of a conflict-induced switch from metacontrol flexibility to metacontrol persistence, accompanied or even implemented by a reduction of cortical noise.

Models need mechanisms, but not labels.

The target article proposes a model involving the important but not well-investigated topics of curiosity and creativity. The model, however, falls short of providing convincing explanations of the basic mechanisms underlying these phenomena. We outline the importance of mechanistic thinking in dealing with the concepts outlined in this article specifically and within psychology and cognitive neuroscience in general.

Dealing With Diversity in Psychology: Science or Ideology?

The increasing use of political activist arguments and reasoning in scientific communication about diversity is criticized. Based on an article of Roberts et al. (2020) on "racial inequality in psychological research," three hallmarks of the intrusion of activist thinking into science are described: blindness to the multidimensional nature of diversity, the failure to distinguish psychological mechanisms from the impact of moderators, and a blindness to agency as an explanation for psychological observations. It is argued that uncritically accepting and introducing political activist arguments into science is likely to damage scientific freedom and independence.

The Role of Stimulus Uncertainty and Curiosity in Attention Control.

Most cognitive psychological studies assume that participants in lab-based tasks maintain a single goal based on task instructions. However, people can be motivated by other factors, such as curiosity. We examined if people attend to seemingly task-irrelevant information out of curiosity by manipulating stimulus uncertainty in a cueing paradigm. Participants were presented with an abrupt-onset cue followed by a letter target (E or H). Next, a mask either at the target location (low uncertainty) or at all four locations (high uncertainty) was shown. We expected high uncertainty to induce a state of curiosity that in turn influences the processing of the cue. Cueing effects were greater in the high-uncertainty condition compared to the low-uncertainty condition. In Experiment 2, we additionally elicited self-report ratings on curiosity. In sum, target-specific uncertainty leads to greater processing of task-irrelevant peripheral cues across two experiments. We tentatively conclude that uncertainty modulates attention control and further research is necessary to examine if this is indeed due to curiosity induced by uncertainty.

Social exclusion in a virtual Cyberball game reduces the virtual hand illusion.

Sense of ownership and agency are two important aspects of the minimal self, but how self-perception is affected by social conditions remains unclear. Here, we studied how social inclusion or exclusion of participants in the course of a virtual Cyberball game would affect explicit judgments and implicit measures of ownership and agency (proprioceptive drift, skin conductance responses, and intentional binding, respectively) in a virtual hand illusion paradigm, in which a virtual hand moved in or out of sync with the participants' own hand. Results show that synchrony affected all four measures. More importantly, this effect interacted with social inclusion/exclusion in the Cyberball game for both ownership and agency measure, showing that social exclusion reduces perceived agency and ownership.

Interindividual aperiodic resting-state EEG activity predicts cognitive-control styles.

The ability to find the right balance between more persistent and more flexible cognitive-control styles is known as "metacontrol." Recent findings suggest a relevance of aperiodic EEG activity and task conditions that are likely to elicit a specific metacontrol style. Here we investigated whether individual differences in aperiodic EEG activity obtained off-task (during resting state) predict individual cognitive-control styles under task conditions that pose different demands on metacontrol. We analyzed EEG resting-state data, task-EEG, and behavioral outcomes from a sample of N = 65 healthy participants performing a Go/Nogo task. We examined aperiodic activity as indicator of "neural noise" in the EEG power spectrum, and participants were assigned to a high-noise or low-noise group according to a median split of the exponents obtained for resting state. We found that off-task aperiodic exponents predicted different cognitive-control styles in Go and Nogo conditions: Overall, aperiodic exponents were higher (i.e., noise was lower) in the low-noise group, who however showed no difference between Go and Nogo trials, whereas the high-noise group exhibited significant noise reduction in the more persistence-heavy Nogo condition. This suggests that trait-like biases determine the default cognitive-control style, which however can be overwritten or compensated for under challenging task demands. We suggest that aperiodic activity in EEG signals represents valid indicators of highly dynamic arbitration between metacontrol styles, representing the brain's capability to reorganize itself and adapt its neural activity patterns to changing environmental conditions.

Separating binding and retrieval of event files in older adults.

In the literature on human action control, it is assumed that features of stimuli (S) and responses (R) are integrated into internal representations (so-called event files) that are involved in the execution of an action. Experimentally, the impact of this integration on action control is typically analyzed via S-R binding effects. Recent theorizing in the BRAC framework (Frings et al., 2020) suggests to disentangle the processes of S-R binding proper from S-R retrieval as two independent components contributing to S-R binding effects. Since the literature on age effects on S-R binding effects is scarce and does not provide information on whether the existing findings about the two processes can be generalized to older age groups, this is the first study addressing the effects of older age separately on S-R binding proper vs. S-R retrieval. In two established variants of S-R binding tasks (cumulative n = 262), we contrasted binding (by using a saliency manipulation at the time of binding proper) versus retrieval processes (by manipulating the onset of the distractor at the time of retrieval), replicating previous results in younger (18-30 years) and also in older healthy controls (50-70 years). We therefore found no evidence for age effects on S-R binding proper or S-R retrieval. We thus conclude that the processes contributing to S-R binding effects are - at least in the age groups analyzed in this study - robust and age-independent. STATEMENT OF SIGNIFICANCE: In human action control, binding proper and retrieval of features in stimulus-response episodes typically lead to so-called S-R binding effects. Against the background of recent theorizing, binding proper and retrieval should be studied independently. In this article, we ran a younger and an older age group and analyzed possible age-related differences in integration or retrieval. Both groups showed the expected pattern for binding and retrieval as expected from the literature.

The temporal dynamics of how the brain structures natural scenes.

Individuals organize the evolving stream of events in their environment by partitioning it into discrete units. Event segmentation theory (EST) provides a cognitive explanation for the process of this partitioning. Critically, the underlying time-resolved neural mechanisms are not understood, and thus a central conceptual aspect of how humans implement this central ability is missing. To gain better insight into the fundamental temporal dynamics of event segmentation, EEG oscillatory activity was measured while participants watched a narrative video and partitioned the movie into meaningful segments. Using EEG beamforming methods, we show that theta, alpha, and beta band activity in frontal, parietal, and occipital areas, as well as their interactions, reflect critical elements of the event segmentation process established by EST. In sum, we see a mechanistic temporal chain of processes that provides the neurophysiological basis for how the brain partitions and structures continuously evolving scenes and points to an integrated system that organizes the various subprocesses of event segmentation. This study thus integrates neurophysiology and cognitive theory to better understand how the human brain operates in rather variable and unpredictable situations. Therefore, it represents an important step toward studying neurophysiological dynamics in ecologically valid and naturalistic settings and, in doing so, addresses a critical gap in knowledge regarding the temporal dynamics of how the brain structures natural scenes.

Regaining control over opioid use? The potential application of auricular transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation to improve opioid treatment in China.

Opioid use disorder (OUD) is a critical problem in China and is accompanied by depression and deficits in cognitive control. In China, the most successful intervention for OUD is the community drug rehabilitation where methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) plays a key role. Even though methadone for the treatment of OUD can be helpful, it can cause severe somatic side-effects, which limit its effectivity. Even worse, it can have detrimental effects on cognitive control, which is crucial to regain control over drug intake. Here, we consider the potential use of auricular transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (atVNS) as an addition to MMT for opioid withdrawal treatment. Compared to other non-invasive brain stimulation methods, atVNS also targets the locus coeruleus (LC) important for noradrenaline (NA) synthesis. NA is an essential neurotransmitter impacted in opioid withdrawal and also critically involved in cognitive control processes. Its ADD-ON to MMT might be a useful mean to improve mood and enhance cognitive control processes impacted in OUD. We discuss the translational advantages of atVNS in China such as the cultural acceptance of the modality of treatment similar to electroacupuncture. Additionally, the wearability of the ear electrode and at-home self-administration without intense medical supervision makes of atVNS a useful tool to enhance clinical and cognitive outcomes especially in everyday life situation. We discuss how atVNS can be integrated in tele-medical health approaches allowing that innovative treatments can widely be disseminated and continued even in situations of restricted medical access.

Trust in virtual ingroup or outgroup members relies on perceived self-other overlap.

Why do we trust each other? We carried out three experiments to test whether interpersonal trust depends on perceived self-other overlap. As previous studies suggest that enfacing (feeling ownership for, and include more into oneself of the face of) an avatar might make one trust this avatar more, we exposed participants to faces of ingroup and outgroup avatars that moved in synchrony or out of synchrony with the participant's own facial movements, and assessed the impact of synchrony on self-other overlap and trust measures. Experiment 1 used ingroup faces and successfully showed that synchrony (manipulated within-participants) increased self-other overlap and trust, which we assessed by means of the Trust Game and the Implicit Association Test (IAT). In Experiment 2, which used outgroup faces and a within-participants design, synchrony still increased scores in the Trust Game but the IAT was no longer affected. Experiment 3 replicated Experiment 2 but with synchrony varying between participants, which eliminated the synchrony effect in both trust measures. Importantly, Inclusion of Other in the Self (IOS) ratings were found to predict the IAT effect in synchronous conditions. Taken altogether, our findings suggest that interpersonal trust is mainly driven by perceived self-other overlap. Besides group identification, appearance, and voluntary movement, synchrony is just one of several sources contributing to perceived self-other overlap.

In vivo analyses reveal hippocampal subfield volume reductions in adolescents with schizophrenia, but not with major depressive disorder.

BACKGROUND: Adult studies have reported atypicalities in the hippocampus and subfields in patients with schizophrenia (SCZ) and major depressive disorder (MDD). Both affective and psychotic disorders typically onset in adolescence, when human brain develops rapidly and shows increased susceptibility to adverse environments. However, few in vivo studies have investigated whether hippocampus subfield abnormalities occur in adolescence and whether they differ between SCZ and MDD cases. METHODS: We recruited 150 adolescents (49 SCZ patients, 67 MDD patients, and 34 healthy controls) and obtained their structural images. We used FreeSurfer to automatically segment hippocampus into 12 subfields and analyzed subfield volumetric differences between groups by analysis of covariance, covarying for age, sex, and intracranial volume. Composite measures by summing subfield volumes were further compared across groups and analyzed in relation to clinical characteristic. RESULTS: SCZ adolescents showed significant volume reductions in subfields of CA1, molecular layer, subiculum, parasubiculum, dentate gyrus and CA4 than healthy controls, and almost significant reductions, as compared to the MDD group, in left molecular layer, dentate gyrus, CA2/3 and CA4. Composite analyses showed smaller volumes in SCZ group than in healthy controls in all bilateral composite measures, and reduced volumes in comparison to MDD group in all left composite measures only. CONCLUSIONS: SCZ adolescents exhibited both hippocampal subfield and composite volumes reduction, and also showed greater magnitude of deviance than those diagnosed with MDD, particularly in core CA regions. These results indicate a hippocampal disease process, suggesting a potential intervention marker of early psychotic patients and risk youths.

Vicarious ostracism reduces observers' sense of agency.

Previous findings revealed that social ostracism reduces people's implicit sense of agency. Based on theoretical claims that observed behavior of others may be cognitively represented similarly to one's own behavior, we conducted two experiments to test whether people's own sense of agency can also be impaired by observed social exclusion of others. In Experiment 1, participants recalled episodes referring to vicarious ostracism or inclusion before completing a temporal interval estimation task to assess intentional binding effects (an established implicit measure of the sense of agency). In Experiment 2, participants immersed into a newly designed virtual Cyberball game, in which they witnessed a vicarious ostracism or inclusion scenario, before completing a Libet-style temporal estimation task and an agency questionnaire (an explicit measure of the sense of agency). The findings show, for the first time, that vicarious ostracism reduces both implicit and explicit measures of agency in observers.

Aperiodic neural activity reflects metacontrol.

Higher-level cognitive functions are mediated via complex oscillatory activity patterns and its analysis is dominating cognitive neuroscience research. However, besides oscillatory (period) activity, also aperiodic activity constitutes neural dynamics, but its relevance for higher-level cognitive functions is only beginning to be understood. The present study examined whether the broadband EEG aperiodic activity reflects principles of metacontrol. Metacontrol conceptualizes whether it is more useful to engage in more flexible processing of incoming information or to shield cognitive processes from incoming information (persistence-heavy processing). We examined EEG and behavioral data from a sample of n = 191 healthy participants performing a Simon Go/NoGo task that can be assumed to induce different metacontrol states (persistence-biased vs. flexibility-biased). Aperiodic activity was estimated using the FOOOF toolbox in the EEG power spectrum. There was a higher aperiodic exponent and offset in NoGo trials compared with Go trials, in incongruent (Go) trials compared with congruent (Go) trials. Thus, aperiodic activity increases during persistence-heavy processing, but decreases during flexibility-heavy processing. These findings link aperiodic features of the EEG signal and concepts describing the dynamics of how cognitive control modes are applied. Therefore, the study substantially extends the importance of aperiodic activity in understanding cognitive functions.

A Prospect to Ameliorate Affective Symptoms and to Enhance Cognition in Long COVID Using Auricular Transcutaneous Vagus Nerve Stimulation.

Long COVID, the postviral disorder caused by COVID-19, is expected to become one of the leading causes of disability in Europe. The cognitive consequences of long COVID have been described as "brain fog" and characterized by anxiety and depression, and by cognitive deficits. Long COVID is assumed to be a complex condition arising from multiple causes, including persistent brainstem dysfunction and disrupted vagal signaling. We recommend the potential application of auricular transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (atVNS) as an ADD-ON instrument to compensate for the cognitive decline and to ameliorate affective symptoms caused by long COVID. This technique enhances vagal signaling by directly activating the nuclei in the brainstem, which are hypoactive in long COVID to enhance mood and to promote attention, memory, and cognitive control-factors affected by long COVID. Considering that atVNS is a non-pharmacological intervention, its ADD-ON to standard pharmaceutical agents will be useful for non-responders, making of this method a suitable tool. Given that atVNS can be employed as an ecological momentary intervention (EMI), we outline the translational advantages of atVNS in the context of accelerating the cognitive and affective recovery from long COVID.

Predictability reduces event file retrieval.

There is growing consensus that stimulus-response bindings (event files) play a central role in human action control. Here, we investigated how the integration and the retrieval of event files are affected by the predictability of stimulus components of event files. We used the distractor-response binding paradigm, in which nominally task-irrelevant distractors are repeated or alternated from a prime to a probe display. The typical outcome of these kinds of tasks is that the effects of distractor repetition and response repetition interact: Performance is worse if the distractor repeats but the response does not, or vice versa. This partial-repetition effect was reduced when the distractor was highly predictable (Experiment 1). Separate manipulations of distractor predictability in the prime and probe trial revealed that this pattern was only replicated if the probe distractors were predictable (Experiment 2b, 3), but not if prime distractors were predictable (Experiment 2a). This suggests that stimulus predictability does not affect the integration of distractor information into event files, but the retrieval of these files when one or more of the integrated features are repeated. We take our findings to support theoretical claims that integration and retrieval of event files might differ concerning their sensitivity to top-down factors.