"Sound" Decisions: The Combined Role of Ambient Noise and Cognitive Regulation on the Neurophysiology of Food Cravings.

Our ability to evaluate long-term goals over immediate rewards is manifested in the brain's decision circuit. Simplistically, it can be divided into a fast, impulsive, reward "system 1" and a slow, deliberate, control "system 2." In a noisy eating environment, our cognitive resources may get depleted, potentially leading to cognitive overload, emotional arousal, and consequently more rash decisions, such as unhealthy food choices. Here, we investigated the combined impact of cognitive regulation and ambient noise on food cravings through neurophysiological activity. Thirty-seven participants were recruited for an adapted version of the Regulation of Craving (ROC) task. All participants underwent two sessions of the ROC task; once with soft ambient restaurant noise (∼50 dB) and once with loud ambient restaurant noise (∼70 dB), while data from electroencephalography (EEG), electrodermal activity (EDA), and self-reported craving were collected for all palatable food images presented in the task. The results indicated that thinking about future ("later") consequences vs. immediate ("now") sensations associated with the food decreased cravings, which were mediated by frontal EEG alpha power. Likewise, "later" trials also increased frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA) -an index for emotional motivation. Furthermore, loud (vs. soft) noise increased alpha, beta, and theta activity, but for theta activity, this was solely occurring during "later" trials. Similarly, EDA signal peak probability was also higher during loud noise. Collectively, our findings suggest that the presence of loud ambient noise in conjunction with prospective thinking can lead to the highest emotional arousal and cognitive load as measured by EDA and EEG, respectively, both of which are important in regulating cravings and decisions. Thus, exploring the combined effects of interoceptive regulation and exteroceptive cues on food-related decision-making could be methodologically advantageous in consumer neuroscience and entail theoretical, commercial, and managerial implications.

Emotional metacognition: stimulus valence modulates cardiac arousal and metamemory.

Emotion alters how we feel, see, and experience the world. In the domain of memory, the emotional valence and arousal of memorised stimuli can modulate both the acuity and content of episodic recall. However, no experiment has investigated whether arousal and valence also influence metacognition for memory (i.e. the process of self-monitoring memories). In a pre-registered study, we applied a novel psychophysiological design together with computational models of metacognition to assess the influence of stimulus valence and arousal on the sensitivity, bias, and efficiency of metamemory. To estimate the role of physiological arousal in mediating these effects, we recorded cardiac measures through pulse oximetry. We found that negative valence substantially decreased both memory performance and subjective confidence, in particular for low arousal words. Simultaneously, we found that emotional valence modulated both heart rate and heart-rate variability (HRV) during recognition memory. Exploratory trial-level analyses further revealed that subjective confidence was encoded in instantaneous heart-rate fluctuations and that this relationship was also modulated by emotional valence. Our results demonstrate that recognition memory and metacognition are influenced by the emotional valence of encoded items and that this correlation is in part related to cardiac activity.

Fatores que participam da tomada de decisão em humanos

Decisões são escolhas baseadas em propósitos, que podem envolver ações orientadas a objetivos. Isso requer o funcionamento orquestrado do sistema nervoso na seleção e ponderação das informações e estímulos aos quais o organismo é exposto e aos quais deve reagir, optando. Recentemente, tem havido tentativas de avaliar em que extensão a tomada de decisões é influenciada por contingências ambientais, antes mesmo da percepção consciente dessa influência. O objetivo deste estudo foi investigar em que extensão a exposição prévia a determinadas contingências da ocorrência de eventos recentemente pareados influencia as escolhas e também quais os fatores que contribuem para que o indivíduo identifique explicitamente a influência dessas contingências no processo de tomada de decisões. Isso foi implementado pela exposição de pessoas saudáveis a um teste de atenção numa versão modificada do modelo de atenção encoberta de Posner (1980), em que as contingências de apresentação de pistas e de alvos foram manipuladas experimentalmente de modo a influenciar o desempenho no processo de direcionamento da atenção. E fora seguido de um teste em que se avaliou o quanto essas contingências interferiram na tomada de decisão dos voluntários; foram manipulados o grau de incerteza das contingências e a quantidade de treino a que cada voluntário foi exposto antes do teste de tomada de decisões. Paralelamente, acessamos o conhecimento declarativo dos participantes sobre essas contingências. Os resultados indicaram a existência de escolhas baseadas em conhecimento implícito sobre as contingências previamente expostas ao invés de conhecimento declarativo dos voluntários sobre os motivos de suas próprias decisões. Em outras palavras, as decisões tomadas pelos voluntários foram consistentes com sua experiência sobre as relações entre os estímulos e não com o conteúdo declarativo sobre os motivos que guiaram as suas escolhas

Decision making requires an integrated functioning of the nervous system in selecting and weighting information about stimuli to which the organism is exposed and to which it may react by opting. There have been attempts to assess to which extent decision making is influenced by environmental contingencies, even before the conscious awareness of them. The aim of this study was to investigate to which extent prior exposure to certain contingencies of recently paired events also influences choices and the factors that allow the subjects to identify explicitly the influence of these contingencies. Healthy subjects were exposed to a modified version of the Posners (1980) covert attention test, in which contingencies of cues and targets were manipulated experimentally in order to influence performance in the orienting of attention task, followed by a test that assessed how these contingencies interfered with decision making; the degree of uncertainty of these contingencies and amount of training were varied. Later the participants' declarative knowledge about the presented contingencies was evaluated. The results indicate that the subjects choices relied on the implicit knowledge about the presented contingencies, instead of on the declarative knowledge about them. In other words, decision making by the subjects was consistent with the implicit knowledge acquired about the stimuli contingencies instead of with the declarative knowledge of the factors that guided their choices