In this study, we report evidence that neural activity reflecting the encoding of emotionally neutral information in memory is reduced when neutral and emotional stimuli are intermixed during encoding. Specifically, participants studied emotional and neutral pictures organized in mixed lists (in which emotional and neutral pictures were intermixed) or in pure lists (only-neutral or only-emotional pictures) and performed a recall test. To estimate encoding efficiency, we used the Dm effect, measured with event-related potentials. Recall for neutral items was lower in mixed compared to pure lists and posterior Dm activity for neutral items was reduced in mixed lists, whereas it remained robust in pure lists. These findings might be caused by an asymmetrical competition for attentional and working memory resources between emotional and neutral information, which could be a major determinant of emotional memory effects.

A large body of evidence shows that buying behaviour is strongly determined by consumers’ price expectations and the extent to which real prices violate these expectations. Despite the importance of this phenomenon, little is known regarding its neural mechanisms. Here we show that two patterns of electrical brain activity known to index prediction errors–the Feedback-Related Negativity (FRN) and the feedback-related P300 –were sensitive to price offers that were cheaper than participants’ expectations. In addition, we also found that FRN amplitude time-locked to price offers predicted whether a product would be subsequently purchased or not, and further analyses suggest that this result was driven by the sensitivity of the FRN to positive price expectation violations. This finding strongly suggests that ensembles of neurons coding positive prediction errors play a critical role in real-life consumer behaviour. Further, these findings indicate that theoretical models based on the notion of prediction error, such as the Reinforcement Learning Theory, can provide a neurobiologically grounded account of consumer behavior.

It has previously been shown that moving images are remembered better than static ones. In two experiments, we investigated the basis for this dynamic superiority effect. Participants studied scenes presented as a single static image, a sequence of still images, or a moving video clip, and 3 days later completed a recognition test in which familiar and novel scenes were presented in all three formats. We found a marked congruency effect: For a given study format, accuracy was highest when test items were shown in the same format. Neither the dynamic superiority effect nor the study–test congruency effect was affected by encoding (Experiment 1) or retrieval (Experiment 2) manipulations, suggesting that these effects are relatively impervious to strategic control. The results demonstrate that the spatio-temporal properties of complex, realistic scenes are preserved in long-term memory.

Self-regulatory trainings can be an effective complementary treatment for mental health disorders. We investigated the effects of a six-week-focused meditation training on emotion and attention regulation in undergraduates randomly allocated to a meditation, a relaxation, or a wait-list control group. Assessment comprised a discrimination task that investigates the relationship between attentional load and emotional processing and self-report measures. For emotion regulation, results showed greater reduction in emotional interference in the low attentional load condition in meditators, particularly compared to relaxation. Only meditators presented a significant association between amount of weekly practice and the reduction in emotion interference in the task and significantly reduced image ratings of negative valence and arousal, perceived anxiety and difficulty during the task, and state and trait-anxiety. For attention regulation, response bias during the task was analyzed through signal detection theory. After training, meditation and relaxation significantly reduced bias in the high attentional load condition. Importantly, there was a dose-response effect on general bias: the lowest in meditation, increasing linearly across relaxation and wait-list. Only meditators reduced omissions in a concentrated attention test. Focused meditation seems to be an effective training for emotion and attention regulation and an alternative for treatments in the mental health context.

Previous research has found that masked repetition primes, presented immediately prior to the test item in a recognition memory test, increase the likelihood that participants think that the item was present in a previous study phase, even if it was not. This memory illusion is normally associated with a feeling of familiarity, rather than recollection (e.g., as indexed by Remember/Know judgments), and has been explained in terms of an increased fluency of processing the test item, which, in the absence of awareness of the cause of that fluency (i.e., the masked prime), is attributed instead to prior exposure in the study phase. Recently however, we have found that masked conceptual primes (semantically rather than associatively related to the test item) have the opposite effect of increasing Remember but not Know judgments. This result appears difficult to explain in terms of existing theories of recollection and familiarity. Here we report data from a functional magnetic resonance imaging study using the same design, in which we replicate our previous behavioral findings, and find converging evidence for increased activity following conceptual primes in brain regions associated with recollection. This neural evidence supports an account in terms of “true” recollection (for example, conceptual primes reactivating semantically related information that was generated at encoding), rather than an artifact of the mutually-exclusive nature of the Remember/Know procedure.

Recent research has shown that event-related brain potentials (ERPs) recorded while participants view lists of different consumer goods can be modulated by their preferences toward these products. However, it remains largely unknown whether ERP activity specific to a single consumer item can be informative about whether or not this item will be preferred in a shopping context. In this study, we examined whether single-item ERPs could reliably predict consumer preferences toward specific consumer goods. We recorded scalp EEG from 40 participants while they were viewing pictures of consumer goods and we subsequently asked them to indicate their preferences for each of these items. Replicating previous results, we found that ERP activity averaged over the six most preferred products was significantly differentiated from ERP activity averaged across the six least preferred products for three ERP components: The N200, the late positive potential (LPP) and positive slow waves (PSW). We also found that using single-item ERPs to infer behavioral preferences about specific consumer goods led to an overall predictive accuracy of 71%, although this figure varied according to which ERPs were targeted. Later positivities such as the LPP and PSW yielded relatively higher predictive accuracy rates than the frontal N200. Our results suggest that ERPs related to single consumer items can be relatively accurate predictors of behavioral preferences depending on which type of ERP effects are chosen by the researcher, and ultimately on the level of prediction errors that users choose to tolerate.

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Recognition memory is better for moving images than for static images (the dynamic superiority effect), and performance is best when the mode of presentation at test matches that at study (the study-test congruence effect). We investigated the basis for these effects. In Experiment 1, dividing attention during encoding reduced overall performance but had little effect on the dynamic superiority or study-test congruence effects. In addition, these effects were not limited to scenes depicting faces. In Experiment 2, movement improved both old-new recognition and scene orientation judgments. In Experiment 3, movement improved the recognition of studied scenes but also increased the spurious recognition of novel scenes depicting the same people as studied scenes, suggesting that movement improves the identification of individual objects or actors without necessarily improving the retrieval of associated information. We discuss the theoretical implications of these results and highlight directions for future investigation. Memory for moving scenes 2 Exploring the memory advantage for moving scenesThe visual world is intrinsically dynamic and our visual and mnemonic systems have developed to encode and retrieve information about a moving environment (Gibson, 1979). In recent years there has been a surge of interest in the effects of movement on memory for faces (Knight & Johnston, 1997;Lander & Bruce, 2003;Lander & Chuang, 2005;O'Toole, Roark, & Abdi, 2002;Pike, Kemp, Towell, & Phillips, 1997) and objects (Balas & Sinha, 2009;Koban & Cook, 2009;Stone, 1998Stone, , 1999Vuong & Tarr, 2004). These studies have shown that dynamic information can be stored in long-term memory; people encode the temporal sequence of views of a moving stimulusits "spatiotemporal signature" -so that the information extracted from dynamic stimuli is more than just a set of static views, particularly when the motion is non-rigid (Knight & Johnston, 1997;Lander & Chuang, 2005;Stone, 1999).To date, there has been surprisingly little research on memory for moving scenes -natural images depicting complex agglomerations of objects and people. In an early study, Goldstein, Chance, Hoisington, and Buescher (1982) had participants study film clips or still images taken from those clips, and administered a recognition memory test a few minutes later. They reported a dynamic superiority effect: Recognition was better for moving images than for static images, although Goldstein et al.'s comparison was not well controlled as the durations of moving and static stimuli were not equal. More recently, Matthews, Benjamin, and Osborne (2007) presented participants with moving and static scenes of equal duration drawn from a wide variety of sources, and tested recognition memory at intervals ranging from 3 days to 1 month. Recognition of moving scenes was better than that of static scenes, and this moving advantage was independent of chromaticity. Matthews et al. also examined performance in a "multistatic" condition in which single frames drawn from regu...