学龄Asperger综合症儿童的注意缺陷与多动症状

目的:分析比较学龄Asperger综合症儿童中的注意缺陷与多动症状。方法:应用Conner's父母用症状问卷、视听整合连续执行测试(IVA-CPT)分别对28例Asperger综合症儿童、30例注意缺陷伴多动障碍儿童以及30例正常儿童的注意缺陷及多动症状进行比较。结果:Asperger综合症儿童有60.7%同时伴有注意缺陷与多动症状;伴注意缺陷及多动症状的Asperger综合症儿童与ADHD儿童相比更多地表现为注意缺陷为主型(52.9%对20.0%,χ2=7.208,P=0.027);AS儿童的品行问题、学习问题、冲动-多动以及多动指数因子分高于正常对照组(0.89±0.44/0.50±0.26,1.67±0.52/0.88±0.50,1.40±0.71/0.68±0.41,1.40±0.57/0.59±0.36,P<0.05);AS儿童的总注意商数、总反应控制商数得分低于正常对照(77.7±23.6/100.2±20.0,P<0.05);AS儿童的总反应控制商数高于ADHD儿童(92.1±21.1/104.6±11.3,P<0.05)。结论:本研究支持Asperger综合症与注意缺陷及多动症状高相关性的观点,建议在对As-perger综合症儿童进行心理评估和制定干预计划时中需将该因素考虑在内。。     

Variations in the serotonin-transporter gene are associated with attention bias patterns to positive and negative emotion faces

Both attention biases to threat and a serotonin-transporter gene polymorphism (5-HTTLPR) have been linked to heightened neural activation to threat and the emergence of anxiety. The short allele of 5-HTTLPR may act via its effect on neurotransmitter availability, while attention biases shape broad patterns of cognitive processing. We examined individual differences in attention bias to emotion faces as a function of 5-HTTLPR genotype. Adolescents (N = 117) were classified for presumed SLC6A4 expression based on 5-HTTLPR—low (SS, SL_G, or L_GL_G), intermediate (SL_A or L_AL_G), or high (L_AL_A). Participants completed the dot-probe task, measuring attention biases toward or away from angry and happy faces. Biases for angry faces increased with the genotype-predicted neurotransmission levels (low > intermediate > high). The reverse pattern was evident for happy faces. The data indicate a linear relation between 5-HTTLPR allelic status and attention biases to emotion, demonstrating a genetic mechanism for biased attention using ecologically valid stimuli that target socioemotional adaptation.     

Attention bias in earthquake-exposed survivors: An event-related potential study

The Chinese Wenchuan earthquake, which happened on the 28th of May in 2008, may leave deep invisible scars in individuals. China has a large number of children and adolescents, who tend to be most vulnerable because they are in an early stage of human development and possible post-traumatic psychological distress may have a life-long consequence. Trauma survivors without post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have received little attention in previous studies, especially in event-related potential (ERP) studies. We compared the attention bias to threat stimuli between the earthquake-exposed group and the control group in a masked version of the dot probe task. The target probe presented at the same space location consistent with earthquake-related words was the congruent trial, while in the space location of neutral words was the incongruent trial. Thirteen earthquake-exposed middle school students without PTSD and 13 matched controls were included in this investigation. The earthquake-exposed group showed significantly faster RTs to congruent trials than to incongruent trials. The earthquake-exposed group produced significantly shorter C1 and P1 latencies and larger C1, P1 and P2 amplitudes than the control group. In particular, enhanced P1 amplitude to threat stimuli was observed in the earthquake-exposed group. These findings are in agreement with the prediction that earthquake-exposed survivors have an attention bias to threat stimuli. The traumatic event had a much greater effect on earthquake-exposed survivors even if they showed no PTSD symptoms than individuals in the controls. These results will provide neurobiological evidences for effective intervention and prevention to post-traumatic mental problems.     

Judgments of emotion in words and faces: ERP correlates

Visual event-related potentials (ERPs) to two types of stimuli (faces and words) were analyzed to determine the effects of the perceived emotional connotations of the stimuli (positive, neutral, or negative) in 10 right-handed normal functioning adult males. Principal component analysis (PCA) of the ERPs reveals 5 factors accounting for over 90% of the ERP waveform variance for both faces and words. In the facial data, two ERP components varied in amplitude according to the perceived emotional connotation of the stimulus. For the P3 component, neutrally rated stimuli produced significantly larger amplitudes than stimuli rated as positive or negative. This effect was lateralized to the left hemisphere. A later positive component, the slow wave (448-616 ms), manifested complementary effects, i.e. faces perceived as positive and negative produced larger amplitudes than those perceived as neutral over the right hemisphere. The verbal stimuli did not result in significant main effects for perceived emotional connotation, but produced subtle connotation-related differences in slow wave topography. Hemispheric asymmetries, unrelated to affective connotation, were evident in the verbal data, manifesting different patterns of lateralization depending on the ERP component. The results suggest that differential processing of emotional connotation affects ERP waveforms and that the effects can be understood in terms of ERP components known to be associated with more general aspects of cognitive processing.     

Neural correlates of intrusion of emotion words in a modified Stroop task.

Behavioural studies have demonstrated that the emotional Stroop task is a valuable tool for investigating emotion-attention interactions in a variety of healthy and clinical populations, showing that participants are typically more distracted by negative stimuli as compared to neutral or positive stimuli. The main aim of this study was to find and examine the neural correlates of this greater intrusion from negative emotional stimuli. Reliable reaction time (RT) and event-related potential (ERP) data were collected from 23 participants who performed a manual emotional Stroop task with short (40 ms) and long (500 ms) inter-trial intervals. In the short interval condition, participants were found to produce longer RTs for negative than neutral words, suggesting that these stimuli were more difficult to ignore. This RT effect disappeared in the long interval condition, although larger P1 amplitudes were found for the negative words. This suggests that differences in early attention allocation may be unrelated to the degree of intrusion at the behavioural level. In addition, a larger negative slow wave around 300-700 ms post-stimulus was observed in the long interval condition, but only for those negative words that produced prolonged RTs as compared to their matched controls. This late and broadly distributed effect is believed to reflect suppression of meaning representations.     

Neuropsychological Differences Among Children With Asperger Syndrome,Nonverbal Learning Disabilities,Attention Deficit Disorder,and Controls

Confusion is present as to possible diagnostic differences between Asperger syndrome (AS) and Nonverbal learning disabilities (NLD) and the relation of these disorders to attentional difficulties. Three-hundred and forty-five children participated in this study in 5 groups; NLD, AS, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD): Combined type, ADHD: Inattentive type, and controls. The NLD group showed particular difficulty on visual-spatial, visual-motor, and fluid reasoning measures compared to the other groups. There was also a significant verbal-performance IQ split in this group related to difficulty in social functioning. This study extends the findings from previous studies and extends these findings to differences between AS and NLD groups.     

Pictures as prepulse: Attention and emotion in startle modification

The effects of an emotional stimulus prepulse on probe startle response were examined here. Pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant pictures were viewed for 6 s, and an acoustic startle probe was presented either 300, 800, 1,300, or 3,800 ms after slide onset, or 300 or 3,800 ms after slide offset. Blink magnitude and onset latency demonstrated (a) an early (prepulse) inhibition effect in which reflexes elicited immediately after slide onset were smaller than reflexes elicited later in the viewing interval, and (b) affective modulation, in which unpleasant stimuli prompted larger reflexes than pleasant. Interactive effects of probe time and picture valence indicated attention/arousal effects early and pleasantness effects late in the picture interval. Effects of both attention and emotion can be simultaneously measured using this startle-probe paradigm, encouraging its use in both basic and clinical contexts.     

Asperger综合征儿童的心理理论测试

目的：研究Asperger综合征（AS）儿童心理理论测试的完成情况。方法：使用中文版“心理理论”测试工具和图片词汇测验（PPVT）测试7～12岁AS儿童32名和正常对照儿童30名。结果：AS儿童表情辨认测试通过率94%,与正常对照组通过率（100%）比较差异无统计学意义（P=0.494）,表情归因测试通过率低于正常对照组（81%,100%,χ2=4.23,P=0.039）。“地点变换”和“内容变换”两项错误信念测试通过率分别为69%和63%,均明显低于正常对照组通过率（100%,97%,χ2=8.99、10.91,P=0.003,0.001）。结论：部分学龄期AS儿童缺乏表情归因和判断他人错误信念的能力。     

How experience shapes memory for faces: An event-related potential study on the own-age bias

Young adults more accurately remember own-age than older faces. We tested whether this own-age bias (OAB) is reduced by increased experience. Young experts (geriatric nurses) and controls performed a recognition experiment with young and old faces. Critically, while control participants demonstrated better memory for young faces, no OAB was observed in the experts. Event-related potentials revealed larger N170 and P2 amplitudes for young than old faces in both groups, suggesting no group differences during early perceptual processing. At test, N250 repetition effects were more anteriorily distributed for own- than other-age faces in control participants, whereas experts showed no corresponding effects. A larger late positive component (LPC) for old than young faces was observed in controls, but not in experts. Larger LPCs may reflect prolonged stimulus processing compromising memory retrieval. In sum, experience with other-age faces does not affect early perceptual processing, but modulates later stages related to memory retrieval.     

Typicality range deficit in schizophrenics' recognition of emotion in faces

Severity of thought disorder in schizophrenics was assessed by a task that involved recognition of joy and shame expressions, with the expressions varied for typicality of the emotion category. Accuracy, typicality rating, and reaction time were measured in schizophrenic patients who were high or low on Whitaker's Index of Schizophrenic Thinking (WIST) and in depressive and normal controls. All groups had significant variation of typicality ratings for joy (normal typicality range), but the clinical groups had smaller typicality ranges for shame recognition and higher mean typicality ratings than did normals. High WIST schizophrenics were least accurate on low typical shame expressions. Results imply that, for shame recognition, schizophrenic and depressive groups used common categorization (no typicality variation in category members) rather than resemblance categorization.     

Looking for faces: Attention modulates early occipitotemporal object processing

Looking for somebody's face in a crowd is one of the most important examples of visual search. For this goal, attention has to be directed to a well-defined perceptual category. When this categorically selective process starts is, however, still unknown. To this end, we used magnetoencephalography (MEG) recorded over right human occipitotemporal cortex to investigate the time course of attentional modulation of perceptual processes elicited by faces and by houses. The first face-distinctive MEG response was observed at 160-170 ms (M170). Nevertheless, attention did not start to modulate face processing before 190 ms. The first house-distinctive MEG activity was also found around 160-170 ms. However, house processing was not modulated by attention before 280 ms (90 ms later than face processing). Further analysis revealed that the attentional modulation of face processing is not due to later, for example, back-propagated activation of the M170 generator. Rather, subsequent stages of occipitotemporal object processing were modulated in a category-specific manner and with preferential access to face processing.     

Face recognition in Asperger syndrome: a study on EEG spectral power changes

Anticipatory postural adjustments (APAs) are thought to compensate for upcoming and predictable perturbations before they occur, e.g., a backward shift of the body center of pressure (COP) before raising the arm. When the goal of arm movements is to reach, grasp, and manipulate an object, predicting the effect of raising the arm on body COP before reach onset could incorporate the properties of the object to be lifted, as both will affect postural control during reaching and object manipulation. Alternatively, the central nervous system (CNS) might use separate APAs to compensate for the effect of arm raising from raising the arm and object. To distinguish between these two scenarios, we asked subjects to reach, grasp, and lift an object whose mass (100 g, 750 g, or 1400 g) was either constant across trials or variable from trial to trial (‘predictable’ and ‘unpredictable’ condition, respectively). We hypothesized that object mass would affect the magnitude of APAs in the predictable condition before the onset of object lift but not before the initial arm onset. We also expected COP variability following object lift to be reduced as a result of APAs. For the unpredictable condition, we expected ‘default’ APAs that would minimize postural perturbation following object lift. We found that both magnitude and timing of APAs were modulated as a function of predictable object mass prior to contact, rather than at the onset of the reaching movement. Specifically, COP position moved forward with increasing object load (p < 0.05) and peak COP velocity related to object contact occurred significantly early for heavier loads (p < 0.05). For the random condition, the COP position and timing at all loads resembled that associated with larger predictable loads. These findings suggest that modulating COP to a future event might be more accurate when timed to temporally close events, thus potentially reducing the computational load as well as risks of prediction errors. Additionally, our results might suggest limitations in the predictive capability of the CNS in relation to ‘how far in the future’ it can go when predicting the consequences of planned actions.     

Attention bias for paranoia-relevant visual stimuli in schizophrenia

Introduction. A number of studies indicate that patients with schizophrenia share a bias for paranoia-relevant material. The presence of an attentional bias for such stimuli would be of utter importance for our pathogenetic understanding of the disorder in view of ample evidence that patients with schizophrenia gather little information before arriving at strong conclusions: A both scarce and affectively biased data selection of available information may heavily distort its inner representation and thus prompt the formation of false beliefs. To date, the profile of this putative attentional bias in schizophrenia (e.g., automatic vs. controlled; hypervigilance towards vs. problems to disengage from such stimuli) is not fully uncovered.Methods.To shed light on this aspect of information processing in schizophrenia, we administered a novel task based on the inhibition of return paradigm (IOR). Twenty-four schizophrenia patients and thirty-four healthy controls were presented neutral (e.g., cup), anxiety-relevant (e.g., shark), and paranoia-relevant cue pictures (e.g., gun) at either of two possible locations. Subsequent to either a short or long interval, a target appeared at the same or opposite location. Participants were requested to press a spatially corresponding button.

Results. Both currently paranoid and nonparanoid schizophrenia patients responded faster to all kinds of targets following paranoia-relevant pictures, that is, such stimuli speeded reaction times irrespective of the cue–target interval and spatial correspondence.

Conclusions. This indicates that paranoia-relevant information generally alerts patients more than other stimuli and facilitates processing of subsequent information. Possible implications of this finding for our understanding of delusion formation and maintenance are outlined.     

Earthquake experience interference effects in a modified Stroop task: An ERP study

The effects of the modified Stroop task on ERP were investigated in 20 subjects who had experienced the Sichuan earthquake and a matched control group. ERP data showed that Incongruent stimuli elicited a more negative ERP deflection (N300–450) than did Congruent stimuli between 300 and 450 ms post-stimulus in the earthquake group but not found in the control group, and the N300–450 might reflect conflict monitor (the information of color and meaning do not match) in the early phase of perception identification due to their sensitivity to the external stimulus. Then, Incongruent stimuli elicited a more negative ERP deflection than did Congruent stimuli between 450 and 650 ms post-stimulus in both the groups. Dipole source analysis showed that the N450–650 was mainly generated in the ACC contributed to this effect in the control group, which might be related to monitor and conflict resolution. However, in the earthquake group, the N450–650 was generated in the thalamus, which might be involved in inhibiting and compensating of the ACC which may be related to conflict resolution process.     

社交焦虑大学生对情绪面孔的注意偏向

目的:探讨高、低社交焦虑大学生对情绪面孔的注意偏向及其加工机制/内在机制.方法:使用简明版惧怕否定评价量表筛选出15名高社交焦虑、16名低社交焦虑大学生被试.采用2(被试类型:高、低社交焦虑)x5(情绪面孔对类型:高兴—平静、愤怒—平静、厌恶—平静、愤怒—高兴、厌恶—高兴)x2(探测刺激呈现位置:一致、不一致)混合实验...     

Neural processing of human faces: a magnetoencephalographic study

This is a whole head magnetoencephalographic (MEG) study of the neural processing of briefly presented images of human faces in 14 normal subjects. The experiments involved three tasks of increasing complexity, involving image categorisation, image comparison and the identification of emotion. The analyses were based on average responses to repeated stimuli in the different image categories. These averages were processed to give numerical measures of the power within defined regions and latency spans. The only statistically significant difference in these data between the response to faces and other images is in the right occipito-temporal channels at a latency of 140 ms. The face-specific response is largely independent of the task. Source modelling suggests an extended source in the ventral occipito-temporal region. The analysis supports the notions of both face-specificity and right hemisphere dominance for all image types at early latencies.