In the past decade, cultural differences in perceptual judgment and memory have been observed: Westerners attend more to focal objects, whereas East Asians attend more to contextual information. However, the underlying mechanisms for the apparent differences in cognitive processing styles have not been known. In the present study, we examined the possibility that the cultural differences arise from culturally different viewing patterns when confronted with a naturalistic scene. We measured the eye movements of American and Chinese participants while they viewed photographs with a focal object on a complex background. In fact, the Americans fixated more on focal objects than did the Chinese, and the Americans tended to look at the focal object more quickly. In addition, the Chinese made more saccades to the background than did the Americans. Thus, it appears that differences in judgment and memory may have their origins in differences in what is actually attended as people view a scene.attention ͉ culture ͉ memory ͉ eye-tracking ͉ visual cognition

Although tailored health interventions can be more effective in eliciting positive behavior change then generic interventions, the underlying neural mechanisms are not yet understood. Ninety-one smokers participated in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) session and a tailored smoking-cessation program. We found that increases in activations in self-related processing regions, particularly dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, to tailored messages predicted quitting during a 4-month follow-up.

Both affective neuroscience and decision science focus on the role of emotions in decisions. Regret and disappointment are emotions experienced with negative decision outcomes. The present research examines the neural substrates of regret and disappointment as well as the role of regret and disappointment in decision making. Experiment 1 compared the subjective experience of regret and disappointment. Participants selected one of two gambles and received different types of feedback during the outcome phase. Despite identical nominal losses, regret induced a more intense dislike of the outcomes and a stronger desire to switch choices than disappointment. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, Experiment 2 examined the neural correlates of regret and disappointment. Both regret and disappointment activated anterior insula and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex relative to fixation, with greater activation in regret than in disappointment. In contrast to disappointment, regret also showed enhanced activation in the lateral orbitofrontal cortex. These findings suggest that regret and disappointment, emotions experienced during decision-related loss, share a general neural network but differ in both the magnitude of subjective feelings and with regret activating some regions with greater intensity.

BACKGROUND Smoking leads to illnesses including addiction, cancer, and cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. Different intervention programs have become available. In the past decade, providing tailored smoking cessation messages has been shown to be more effective in inducing smoking cessation than one-size-fits-all interventions. However, little is known about the brain responses of smokers when they receive tailored smoking cessation messages. METHODS A neuroimaging study using blocked and event-related designs examined neural activity in 24 smokers exposed to high-tailored and low-tailored smoking cessation messages. RESULTS: In both blocked and event-related conditions, rostral medial prefrontal cortex and precuneus/posterior cingulate were engaged more during the processing of high-tailored smoking cessation messages than low-tailored smoking cessation messages. CONCLUSION The activation patterns of smokers to tailored cessation messages show involvement of brain areas commonly implicated in self-related processing. Results seem to add support to the suggested role of self-relevance in tailored cessation programs, where previous studies have shown a potential mediating role of self-relevance on smoking abstinence. The findings are relevant to understanding the cognitive mechanisms underlying tailored message processing and may point to new directions for testing response to health communications programming.

No abstract