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10.1016/j.bandl.2017.09.002

Brain and language

Brain Lang

Alpha band event-related desynchronization underlying social situational context processing during irony comprehension: A magnetoencephalography source localization study.

Irony comprehension requires integration of social contextual information. Previous studies have investigated temporal aspects of irony processing and its neural substrates using psychological/electroencephalogram or functional magnetic resonance imaging methods, but have not clarified the temporospatial neural mechanisms of irony comprehension. Therefore, we used magnetoencephalography to investigate the neural generators of alpha-band (8-13Hz) event-related desynchronization (ERD) occurring from 600 to 900ms following the onset of a critical sentence at which social situational contexts activated ironic representation. We found that the right anterior temporal lobe, which is involved in processing social knowledge and evaluating others' intentions, exhibited stronger alpha ERD following an ironic statement than following a literal statement. We also found that alpha power in the left anterior temporal lobe correlated with the participants' communication abilities. These results elucidate the temporospatial neural mechanisms of language comprehension in social contexts, including non-literal processing.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.schres.2017.08.064

Schizophrenia research

Schizophr Res

Impaired contextual fear-conditioning in MAM rodent model of schizophrenia.

The methylazoxymethanol acetate (MAM) rodent neurodevelopmental model of schizophrenia exhibits aberrant dopamine system activation attributed to hippocampal dysfunction. Context discrimination is a component of numerous behavioral and cognitive functions and relies on intact hippocampal processing. The present study explored context processing behaviors, along with dopamine system activation, during fear learning in the MAM model. Male offspring of dams treated with MAM (20mg/kg, i.p.) or saline on gestational day 17 were used for electrophysiological and behavioral experiments. Animals were tested on the immediate shock fear conditioning paradigm, with either different pre-conditioning contexts or varying amounts of context pre-exposure (0-10 sessions). Amphetamine-induced locomotor activity and dopamine neural activity was measured 1-week after fear conditioning. Saline, but not MAM animals, demonstrated enhanced fear responses following a single context pre-exposure in the conditioning context. One week following fear learning, saline rats with 2 or 7min of context pre-exposure prior to fear conditioning also demonstrated enhanced amphetamine-induced locomotor response relative to MAM animals. Dopamine neuron recordings showed fear learning-induced reductions in spontaneous dopamine neural activity in MAM rats that was further reduced by amphetamine. Apomorphine administration confirmed that reductions in dopamine neuron activity in MAM animals resulted from over excitation, or depolarization block. These data show a behavioral insensitivity to contextual stimuli in MAM rats that coincide with a less dynamic dopamine response after fear learning.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1017/S0033291717001076

Psychological medicine

Psychol Med

Altered activation of the ventral striatum under performance-related observation in social anxiety disorder.

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is characterized by fear of social and performance situations. The consequence of scrutiny by others for the neural processing of performance feedback in SAD is unknown. We used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate brain activation to positive, negative, and uninformative performance feedback in patients diagnosed with SAD and age-, gender-, and education-matched healthy control subjects who performed a time estimation task during a social observation condition and a non-social control condition: while either being monitored or unmonitored by a body camera, subjects received performance feedback after performing a time estimation that they could not fully evaluate without external feedback. We found that brain activation in ventral striatum (VS) and midcingulate cortex was modulated by an interaction of social context and feedback type. SAD patients showed a lack of social-context-dependent variation of feedback processing, while control participants showed an enhancement of brain responses specifically to positive feedback in VS during observation. The present findings emphasize the importance of social-context processing in SAD by showing that scrutiny prevents appropriate reward-processing-related signatures in response to positive performances in SAD.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1162/jocn_a_01090

Journal of cognitive neuroscience

J Cogn Neurosci

Pace Yourself: Intraindividual Variability in Context Use Revealed by Self-paced Event-related Brain Potentials.

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) have revealed multiple mechanisms by which contextual constraints impact language processing. At the same time, little work has examined the trial-to-trial dynamics of context use in the brain. In the current study, we probed intraindividual variability in behavioral and neural indices of context processing during reading. In a concurrent self-paced reading and ERP paradigm, participants read sentences that were either strongly or weakly constraining completed with an expected or unexpected target word. Our findings revealed substantial within-subject variability in behavioral and neural responses to contextual constraints. First, context-based amplitude reductions of the N400, a component linked to semantic memory access, were largest among trials eliciting the slowest RTs. Second, the RT distribution of unexpected words in strongly constraining contexts was positively skewed, reflecting an increased proportion of very slow RTs to trials that violated semantic predictions. Among those prediction-violating trials eliciting faster RTs, a late sustained anterior positivity was observed. However, among trials producing the differentially slowed RTs to prediction violations, we observed a markedly earlier effect of constraint in the form of an anterior N2, a component linked to conflict resolution and the cognitive control of behavior. The current study provides the first neurophysiological evidence for the direct role of cognitive control functions in the volitional control of reading. Collectively, our findings suggest that context use varies substantially within individual participants and that coregistering behavioral and neural indices of online sentence processing offers a window into these single-item dynamics.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.01.024

Neuropsychologia

Neuropsychologia

Language context processing deficits in schizophrenia: The role of attentional engagement.

Individuals with schizophrenia exhibit problems in language comprehension that are most evident during discourse processing. We hypothesized that deficits in cognitive control contribute to these comprehension deficits during discourse processing, and investigated the underlying cognitive-neural mechanisms using EEG (alpha power) and ERPs (N400). N400 amplitudes to globally supported or unsupported target words near the end of stories were used to index sensitivity to previous context. ERPs showed reduced sensitivity to context in patients versus controls. EEG alpha-band activity was used to index attentional engagement while participants listened to the stories. We found that context effects varied with attentional engagement in both groups, as well as with negative symptom severity in patients. Both groups demonstrated trial-to-trial fluctuations in alpha. Relatively high alpha power was associated with compromised discourse processing in participants with schizophrenia when it occurred during any early portion of the story. In contrast, discourse processing was only compromised in controls when alpha was relatively high for longer segments of the stories. Our results indicate that shifts in attention from the story context may be more detrimental to discourse processing for participants with schizophrenia than for controls, most likely due to an impaired ability to benefit from global context.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1007/s11682-016-9662-y

Brain imaging and behavior

Brain Imaging Behav

The GABAergic system in prefrontal cortex and hippocampus modulates context-related extinction learning and renewal in humans.

Context-related extinction learning and renewal in humans is mediated by hippocampal and prefrontal regions. Renewal is defined as the reoccurrence of an extinguished response if the contexts present during extinction learning and recall differ. Animal studies implicate hippocampal γ-aminobutyric acid (GABA) A receptors in extinction and renewal. However, human studies on GABAergic mechanisms in extinction learning are lacking. In this fMRI study, we therefore investigated the role of the GABAergic system in context-related extinction learning and renewal. Participants treated with the GABA A agonist lorazepam prior to extinction learning were impaired in encoding changed associations during extinction learning, regardless of context, and in retrieving extinction associations during recall. In contrast, retrieval of associations learned during acquisition was largely unaffected, which led to reduced genuine renewal, since acquisition associations were retrieved context-independently. These deficits, which were presumably due to weak encoding of extinction associations, were related to altered BOLD activation in regions relevant for context processing and retrieval, as well as response selection: reduced activation in bilateral PFC and hippocampus during extinction learning and recall, and increased ventromedial/orbitofrontal cortex activation during recall. Our findings indicate that the GABergic system is involved in context-related extinction learning and recall in humans, by modulating hippocampus-based context processing and PFC-based processing of changed associations and subsequent response selection.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.neulet.2016.11.014

Neuroscience letters

Neurosci Lett

Circuit dysregulation and circuit-based treatments in posttraumatic stress disorder.

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a psychiatric disorder that develops in some individuals in the aftermath of exposure to traumatic events, such as actual or threatened death, serious injury or sexual assault. It has been hypothesized that dysregulations in a number of specific neurocircuits, characterized by heightened responsivity of amygdala, dACC and insula, diminished responsivity of mPFC, impaired hippocampal function and deficits in cortical regions, underlie the development and expression of key PTSD symptoms. Here, we concisely describe three functional neural circuits implicated in PTSD pathophysiology and briefly review selected treatment strategies in the context of these neural circuits. We start with the commonly implicated neurocircuit model, namely, the fear learning and threat detection circuits, and then discuss the context processing circuitry, which plays an important role among others, in fear regulation. We then discuss the emotion regulation circuitry, which can further contribute to PTSD pathophysiology, and conclude with a discussion of the therapeutic approaches that might be targeting dysregulation in these circuits in PTSD patients. Specifically, we discuss how exposure-based treatments might be targeting fear learning circuits, and the pharmacological and brain-stimulation interventions aimed to augment these therapies. Finally, we discuss other pharmacological and cognitive therapeutic approaches that can augment or restore the function of the context processing and emotional regulation circuits.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1037/pag0000139

Psychology and aging

Psychol Aging

Habitual attention in older and young adults.

Age-related decline is pervasive in tasks that require explicit learning and memory, but such reduced function is not universally observed in tasks involving incidental learning. It is unknown if habitual attention, involving incidental probabilistic learning, is preserved in older adults. Previous research on habitual attention investigated contextual cuing in young and older adults, yet contextual cuing relies not only on spatial attention but also on context processing. Here we isolated habitual attention from context processing in young and older adults. Using a challenging visual search task in which the probability of finding targets was greater in 1 of 4 visual quadrants in all contexts, we examined the acquisition, persistence, and spatial-reference frame of habitual attention. Although older adults showed slower visual search times and steeper search slopes (more time per additional item in the search display), like young adults they rapidly acquired a strong, persistent search habit toward the high-probability quadrant. In addition, habitual attention was strongly viewer-centered in both young and older adults. The demonstration of preserved viewer-centered habitual attention in older adults suggests that it may be used to counter declines in controlled attention. This, in turn, suggests the importance, for older adults, of maintaining habit-related spatial arrangements. (PsycINFO Database Record

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.neuron.2016.09.039

Neuron

Neuron

Context Processing and the Neurobiology of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Progress in clinical and affective neuroscience is redefining psychiatric illness as symptomatic expression of cellular/molecular dysfunctions in specific brain circuits. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has been an exemplar of this progress, with improved understanding of neurobiological systems subserving fear learning, salience detection, and emotion regulation explaining much of its phenomenology and neurobiology. However, many features remain unexplained and a parsimonious model that more fully accounts for symptoms and the core neurobiology remains elusive. Contextual processing is a key modulatory function of hippocampal-prefrontal-thalamic circuitry, allowing organisms to disambiguate cues and derive situation-specific meaning from the world. We propose that dysregulation within this context-processing circuit is at the core of PTSD pathophysiology, accounting for much of its phenomenology and most of its biological findings. Understanding core mechanisms like this, and their underlying neural circuits, will sharpen diagnostic precision and understanding of risk factors, enhancing our ability to develop preventive and "personalized" interventions.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1002/aur.1676

Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research

Autism Res

Context processing in adolescents with autism spectrum disorder: How complex could it be?

The ability of individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to process context has long been debated: According to the Weak Central Coherence theory, ASD is characterized by poor global processing, and consequently-poor context processing. In contrast, the Social Cognition theory argues individuals with ASD will present difficulties only in social context processing. The complexity theory of autism suggests context processing in ASD will depend on task complexity. The current study examined this controversy through two priming tasks, one presenting human stimuli (facial expressions) and the other presenting non-human stimuli (animal faces). Both tasks presented visual targets, preceded by congruent, incongruent, or neutral auditory primes. Local and global processing were examined by presenting the visual targets in three spatial frequency conditions: High frequency, low frequency, and broadband. Tasks were administered to 16 adolescents with high functioning ASD and 16 matched typically developing adolescents. Reaction time and accuracy were measured for each task in each condition. Results indicated that individuals with ASD processed context for both human and non-human stimuli, except in one condition, in which human stimuli had to be processed globally (i.e., target presented in low frequency). The task demands presented in this condition, and the performance deficit shown in the ASD group as a result, could be understood in terms of cognitive overload. These findings provide support for the complexity theory of autism and extend it. Our results also demonstrate how associative priming could support intact context processing of human and non-human stimuli in individuals with ASD. Autism Res 2017, 10: 520-530. © 2016 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.pnpbp.2016.07.005

Progress in neuro-psychopharmacology & biological psychiatry

Prog Neuropsychopharmacol Biol Psychiatry

The influence of the COMT genotype in the underlying functional brain activity of context processing in schizophrenia and in relatives.

Context processing deficits have been shown to be present in chronic and first episode schizophrenia patients and in their relatives. This cognitive process is linked to frontal functioning and is highly dependent on dopamine levels in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). The catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) enzyme plays a prominent role in regulating dopamine levels in PFC. Genotypic variations in the functional polymorphism Val(158)Met COMT appear to have an impact in dopamine signaling in the PFC of healthy subjects and schizophrenia patients. We aimed to explore the effect of the Val(158)Met COMT polymorphism on brain activation during the performance of a context processing task in healthy subjects, schizophrenia spectrum patients and their healthy relatives. 56 participants performed the Dot Probe Expectancy task (DPX) during the fMRI session. Subjects were genotyped and only the Val and Met homozygotes participated in the study. Schizophrenia spectrum patients and their relatives showed worse performance on context processing measures than healthy control subjects. The Val allele was associated with more context processing errors in healthy controls and in relatives compared to patients. There was a greater recruitment of frontal areas (supplementary motor area/cingulate gyrus) during context processing in patients relative to healthy controls. Met homozygotes subjects activated more frontal areas than Val homozygotes subjects. The Val(158)Met COMT polymorphism influences context processing and on its underlying brain activation, showing less recruitment of frontal areas in the subjects with the genotype associated to lower dopamine availability in PFC.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1186/s12993-016-0103-2

Behavioral and brain functions : BBF

Behav Brain Funct

Brain activation differences in schizophrenia during context-dependent processing of saccade tasks.

Brain function in schizophrenia has been probed using saccade paradigms and functional magnetic resonance imaging, but little information exists about how changing task context impacts saccade related brain activation and behavioral performance. We recruited schizophrenia and comparison subjects to perform saccade tasks in differing contexts: (1) two single task runs (anti- or pro-saccades alternating with fixation) and (2) one dual task run (antisaccades alternating with prosaccades). Context-dependent differences in saccade circuitry were evaluated using ROI analyses. Distinction between anti- and pro-saccade activation across contexts (single versus dual task) suggests that the schizophrenia group did not respond to context in the same way as the comparison group. Further investigation of context processing effects on brain activation and saccade performance measures informs models of cognitive deficits in the disorder and enhances understanding of antisaccades as a potential endophenotype for schizophrenia.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.neuroimage.2016.06.026

NeuroImage

Neuroimage

Attention mechanisms during predictable and unpredictable threat - A steady-state visual evoked potential approach.

Fear is elicited by imminent threat and leads to phasic fear responses with selective attention, whereas anxiety is characterized by a sustained state of heightened vigilance due to uncertain danger. In the present study, we investigated attention mechanisms in fear and anxiety by adapting the NPU-threat test to measure steady-state visual evoked potentials (ssVEPs). We investigated ssVEPs across no aversive events (N), predictable aversive events (P), and unpredictable aversive events (U), signaled by four-object arrays (30s). In addition, central cues were presented during all conditions but predictably signaled imminent threat only during the P condition. Importantly, cues and context events were flickered at different frequencies (15Hz vs. 20Hz) in order to disentangle respective electrocortical responses. The onset of the context elicited larger electrocortical responses for U compared to P context. Conversely, P cues elicited larger electrocortical responses compared to N cues. Interestingly, during the presence of the P cue, visuocortical processing of the concurrent context was also enhanced. The results support the notion of enhanced initial hypervigilance to unpredictable compared to predictable threat contexts, while predictable cues show electrocortical enhancement of the cues themselves but additionally a boost of context processing.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1093/schbul/sbw081

Schizophrenia bulletin

Schizophr Bull

Impaired Context Processing is Attributable to Global Neuropsychological Impairment in Schizophrenia and Psychotic Bipolar Disorder.

Context processing may reflect a specific cognitive impairment in schizophrenia. Whether impaired context processing is observed across psychotic disorders or among relatives of affected individuals, and whether it is a deficit that is independent from the generalized neuropsychological deficits seen in psychotic disorders, are less established. Schizophrenia, schizoaffective, and psychotic bipolar probands (n = 660), their first-degree relatives (n = 741), and healthy individuals (n = 308) studied by the Bipolar-Schizophrenia Network on Intermediate Phenotypes consortium performed an expectancy task requiring use of contextual information to overcome a pre-potent response. Sensitivity for target detection and false alarm rates on trials requiring inhibition or goal maintenance were measured. Proband groups and relatives with psychosis spectrum personality traits demonstrated reduced target sensitivity and elevated false alarm rates. False alarm rate was higher under inhibition vs goal maintenance conditions although this difference was attenuated in schizophrenia and schizoaffective proband groups. After accounting for global neuropsychological impairment, as reflected by the composite score from the Brief Assessment of Cognition in Schizophrenia neuropsychological battery, deficits in schizophrenia and bipolar proband groups were no longer significant. Performance measures were moderately familial. Reduced target detection, but not a specific deficit in context processing, is observed across psychotic disorders. Impairments in both goal maintenance and response inhibition appear to contribute comparably to deficits in schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder, whereas greater difficulty with response inhibition underlies deficits in bipolar disorder. Yet, these deficits are not independent from the generalized neurocognitive impairment observed in schizophrenia and psychotic bipolar disorder.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1007/7854_2016_443

Current topics in behavioral neurosciences

Curr Top Behav Neurosci

The Social Context Network Model in Psychiatric and Neurological Diseases.

The role of contextual modulations has been extensively studied in basic sensory and cognitive processes. However, little is known about their impact on social cognition, let alone their disruption in disorders compromising such a domain. In this chapter, we flesh out the social context network model (SCNM), a neuroscientific proposal devised to address the issue. In SCNM terms, social context effects rely on a fronto-temporo-insular network in charge of (a) updating context cues to make predictions, (b) consolidating context-target associative learning, and (c) coordinating internal and external milieus. First, we characterize various social cognition domains as context-dependent phenomena. Then, we review behavioral and neural evidence of social context impairments in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD), highlighting their relation with key SCNM hubs. Next, we show that other psychiatric and neurological conditions involve context-processing impairments following damage to the brain regions included in the model. Finally, we call for an ecological approach to social cognition assessment, moving beyond widespread abstract and decontextualized methods.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2016.04.009

International journal of psychophysiology : official journal of the International Organization of Psychophysiology

Int J Psychophysiol

Impaired context processing during irony comprehension in schizotypy: An ERPs study.

Mentalizing deficits are a core manifestation of schizophrenia spectrum disorders. They contribute to the social handicap associated with the pathology, leading to disruption in autonomy, professional achievement, and interpersonal relationships. However, the underlying mechanisms of these deficits remain poorly understood. The aim of the present study was to test the hypothesis that context processing deficits would be responsible for mentalizing difficulties in schizotypy (personality traits considered as attenuated manifestations of schizophrenic symptoms) by using an irony comprehension task. Irony processing is a mentalizing exercise that requires the ability to take into account the semantic context to understand the literal meaning of the utterance, and to integrate the pragmatic context to infer the speaker's intention. These two steps of processing can be indexed by the N400 and P600 components, respectively, of event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Forty participants were assigned to high or low schizotypy groups according to their Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (SPQ) score, and ERPs were recorded while they read short stories ending with a literal, ironic, or incompatible statement. In the low-SPQ group, there was a significant N400 semantic context effect (literal targets elicited less negative N400 amplitudes compared to incompatible targets) followed by a P600 pragmatic context effect (ironic targets evoked greater positive P600 amplitudes than literal targets). In contrast, there was neither a N400 nor P600 effect in the high-SPQ group. These abnormalities were associated with high interpersonal SPQ factor scores. These results show a strong association between context processing, mentalizing abilities, and interpersonal functioning in schizophrenia spectrum.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1098/rstb.2015.0376

Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences

Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci

The role of the basolateral amygdala in the perception of faces in natural contexts.

The amygdala is a complex structure that plays its role in perception and threat-related behaviour by activity of its specific nuclei and their separate networks. In the present functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we investigated the role of the basolateral amygdala in face and context processing. Five individuals with focal basolateral amygdala damage and 12 matched controls viewed fearful or neutral faces in a threatening or neutral context. We tested the hypothesis that basolateral amygdala damage modifies the relation between face and threatening context, triggering threat-related activation in the dorsal stream. The findings supported this hypothesis. First, activation was increased in the right precentral gyrus for threatening versus neutral scenes in the basolateral amygdala damage group compared with the control group. Second, activity in the bilateral middle frontal gyrus, and left anterior inferior parietal lobule was enhanced for neutral faces presented in a threatening versus neutral scene in the group with basolateral amygdala damage compared with controls. These findings provide the first evidence for the neural consequences of basolateral amygdala damage during the processing of complex emotional situations.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1093/schbul/sbw036

Schizophrenia bulletin

Schizophr Bull

Reduced Frontoparietal Activity in Schizophrenia Is Linked to a Specific Deficit in Goal Maintenance: A Multisite Functional Imaging Study.

Patients with schizophrenia (SZ) previously demonstrated specific deficits in an executive function known as goal maintenance, associated with reduced middle frontal gyrus (MFG) activity. This study aimed to validate a new tool-the Dot Pattern Expectancy (DPX) task-developed to facilitate multisite imaging studies of goal maintenance deficits in SZ or other disorders. Additionally, it sought to arrive at recommendations for scan length for future studies using the DPX. Forty-seven SZ and 56 healthy controls (HC) performed the DPX in 3-Tesla functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanners at 5 sites. Group differences in DPX-related activity were examined with whole brain voxelwise analyses. SZs showed the hypothesized specific performance deficits with as little as 1 block of data. Reduced activity in SZ compared with HC was observed in bilateral frontal pole/MFG, as well as left posterior parietal lobe. Efficiency analyses found significant group differences in activity using 18 minutes of scan data but not 12 minutes. Several behavioral and imaging findings from the goal maintenance literature were robustly replicated despite the use of different scanners at different sites. We did not replicate a previous correlation with disorganization symptoms among patients. Results were consistent with an executive/attention network dysfunction in the higher levels of a cascading executive system responsible for goal maintenance. Finally, efficiency analyses found that 18 minutes of scanning during the DPX task is sufficient to detect group differences with a similar sample size.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3578-15.2016

The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience

J Neurosci

Monkey Prefrontal Neurons Reflect Logical Operations for Cognitive Control in a Variant of the AX Continuous Performance Task (AX-CPT).

Cognitive control is the ability to modify the behavioral response to a stimulus based on internal representations of goals or rules. We sought to characterize neural mechanisms in prefrontal cortex associated with cognitive control in a context that would maximize the potential for future translational relevance to human neuropsychiatric disease. To that end, we trained monkeys to perform a dot-pattern variant of the AX continuous performance task that is used to measure cognitive control impairment in patients with schizophrenia (MacDonald, 2008;Jones et al., 2010). Here we describe how information processing for cognitive control in this task is related to neural activity patterns in prefrontal cortex of monkeys, to advance our understanding of how behavioral flexibility is implemented by prefrontal neurons in general, and to model neural signals in the healthy brain that may be disrupted to produce cognitive control deficits in schizophrenia. We found that the neural representation of stimuli in prefrontal cortex is strongly biased toward stimuli that inhibit prepotent or automatic responses. We also found that population signals encoding different stimuli were modulated to overlap in time specifically in the case that information from multiple stimuli had to be integrated to select a conditional response. Finally, population signals relating to the motor response were biased toward less frequent and therefore less automatic actions. These data relate neuronal activity patterns in prefrontal cortex to logical information processing operations required for cognitive control, and they characterize neural events that may be disrupted in schizophrenia. Functional imaging studies have demonstrated that cognitive control deficits in schizophrenia are associated with reduced activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (MacDonald et al., 2005). However, these data do not reveal how the disease has disrupted the function of prefrontal neurons to produce the observed deficits in cognitive control. Relating cognitive control to neurophysiological signals at a cellular level in prefrontal cortex is a necessary first step toward understanding how disruption of these signals could lead to cognitive control failure in neuropsychiatric disease. To that end, we translated a task that measures cognitive control deficits in patients with schizophrenia to monkeys and describe here how neural signals in prefrontal cortex relate to performance.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.neuroimage.2016.03.048

NeuroImage

Neuroimage

Temporal context processing within hippocampal subfields.

The episodic memory system can differentiate similar events based on the temporal information associated with the events. Temporal context, which is at least partially determined by the events that precede or follow the critical event, may be a cue to differentiate events. The purpose of the present study is to investigate whether the hippocampal dentate gyrus (DG)/CA3 and CA1 subfields are sensitive to changes in temporal context and, if so, whether the subregions show a linear or threshold-like response to similar temporal contexts. Participants incidentally encoded a series of object picture triplets and 20 of them were included in final analyses. The third picture in each triplet was operationally defined as the target and the first two pictures served as temporal context for the target picture. Each target picture was presented twice with temporal context manipulated to be either repeated, high similarity, low similarity, or new on the second presentation. We extracted beta parameters for the repeated target as a function of the type of temporal context. We expected to see repetition suppression, a reduction in the beta values, in response to repetition of the target. If temporal context information is included in the representation of the target within a given region, this repetition suppression should be greater for target images that were preceded by their original context than for target images preceded by a new context. Neuroimaging results showed that CA1, but not DG/CA3, modifies the target's representation based on its temporal context. Right CA1 did not distinguish high similarity temporal context from repeated context but did distinguish low similarity temporal context from repeated context. These results indicate that CA1 is sensitive to temporal context and suggest that it does not differentiate between a substantially similar temporal context and an identical temporal context. In contrast, DG/CA3 does not appear to process temporal context as defined in the current experiment.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.neuroimage.2016.03.010

NeuroImage

Neuroimage

Contextually sensitive power changes across multiple frequency bands underpin cognitive control.

Flexible control of cognition bestows a remarkable adaptability to a broad range of contexts. While cognitive control is known to rely on frontoparietal neural architecture to achieve this flexibility, the neural mechanisms that allow such adaptability to context are poorly understood. In the current study, we quantified contextual demands on the cognitive control system via a priori estimation of information across three tasks varying in difficulty (oddball, go/nogo, and switch tasks) and compared neural responses across these different contexts. We report evidence of the involvement of multiple frequency bands during preparation and implementation of cognitive control. Specifically, a common frontoparietal delta and a central alpha process corresponded to rule implementation and motor response respectively. Interestingly, we found evidence of a frontal theta signature that was sensitive to increasing amounts of information and a posterior parietal alpha process only seen during anticipatory rule updating. Importantly, these neural signatures of context processing match proposed frontal hierarchies of control and together provide novel evidence of a complex interplay of multiple frequency bands underpinning flexible, contextually sensitive cognition.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1037/abn0000137

Journal of abnormal psychology

J Abnorm Psychol

Frontal-striatum dysfunction during reward processing: Relationships to amotivation in schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia is characterized by deficits of context processing, thought to be related to dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) impairment. Despite emerging evidence suggesting a crucial role of the DLPFC in integrating reward and goal information, we do not know whether individuals with schizophrenia can represent and integrate reward-related context information to modulate cognitive control. To address this question, 36 individuals with schizophrenia (n = 29) or schizoaffective disorder (n = 7) and 27 healthy controls performed a variant of a response conflict task (Padmala & Pessoa, 2011) during fMRI scanning, in both baseline and reward conditions, with monetary incentives on some reward trials. We used a mixed state-item design that allowed us to examine both sustained and transient reward effects on cognitive control. Different from predictions about impaired DLPFC function in schizophrenia, we found an intact pattern of increased sustained DLPFC activity during reward versus baseline blocks in individuals with schizophrenia at a group level but blunted sustained activations in the putamen. Contrary to our predictions, individuals with schizophrenia showed blunted cue-related activations in several regions of the basal ganglia responding to reward-predicting cues. Importantly, as predicted, individual differences in anhedonia/amotivation symptoms severity were significantly associated with reduced sustained DLPFC activation in the same region that showed overall increased activity as a function of reward. These results suggest that individual differences in motivational impairments in schizophrenia may be related to dysfunction of the DLPFC and striatum in motivationally salient situations.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1503/jpn.150045

Journal of psychiatry & neuroscience : JPN

J Psychiatry Neurosci

Eye-tracking reveals a slowdown of social context processing during intention attribution in patients with schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia is associated with poor theory of mind (ToM), particularly in the attribution of intentions to others. It is also associated with abnormal gaze behaviours and contextual processing. This study investigated to what extent impaired ToM in patients with schizophrenia is related to abnormal processing of social context. We evaluated ToM using a nonverbal intention attribution task based on comic strips depicting social/nonsocial and contextual/noncontextual events while eye movements were recorded. Eye-tracking was used to assess processing time dedicated to visual cues contained in regions of interest identified in a pilot study. We measured cognitive contextual control on a separate task. We tested 29 patients with schizophrenia and 29 controls. Compared with controls, patients were slower in intention attribution but not in physical reasoning. They looked longer than controls at contextual cues displayed in the first 2 context pictures of the comic strips, and this difference was greater for intention attribution than for physical reasoning. We found no group difference in time spent looking at noncontextual cues. Patients' impairment in contextual control did not explain their increased reaction time and gaze duration on contextual cues during intention attribution. Difficulty may not have been equivalent between intention attribution and physical reasoning conditions. Overall, schizophrenia was characterized by a delay in intention attribution related to a slowdown of social context processing that was not explained by worse executive contextual control.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1162/jocn_a_00928

Journal of cognitive neuroscience

J Cogn Neurosci

Hippocampal Context Processing during Acquisition of a Predictive Learning Task Is Associated with Renewal in Extinction Recall.

Renewal is defined as the recovery of an extinguished response if extinction and retrieval contexts differ. The context dependency of extinction, as demonstrated by renewal, has important implications for extinction-based therapies. Persons showing renewal (REN) exhibit higher hippocampal activation during extinction in associative learning than those without renewal (NOREN), demonstrating hippocampal context processing, and recruit ventromedial pFC in retrieval. Apart from these findings, brain processes generating renewal remain largely unknown. Conceivably, processing differences in task-relevant brain regions that ultimately lead to renewal may occur already in initial acquisition of associations. Therefore, in two fMRI studies, we investigated overall brain activation and hippocampal activation in REN and NOREN during acquisition of an associative learning task in response to presentation of a context alone or combined with a cue. Results of two studies demonstrated significant activation differences between the groups: In Study 1, a support vector machine classifier correctly assigned participants' brain activation patterns to REN and NOREN groups, respectively. In Study 2, REN and NOREN showed similar hippocampal involvement during context-only presentation, suggesting processing of novelty, whereas overall hippocampal activation to the context-cue compound, suggesting compound encoding, was higher in REN. Positive correlations between hippocampal activation and renewal level indicated more prominent hippocampal processing in REN. Results suggest that hippocampal processing of the context-cue compound rather than of context only during initial learning is related to a subsequent renewal effect. Presumably, REN participants use distinct encoding strategies during acquisition of context-related tasks, which reflect in their brain activation patterns and contribute to a renewal effect.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.pscychresns.2016.01.003

Psychiatry research. Neuroimaging

Psychiatry Res Neuroimaging

Altered balance of functional brain networks in Schizophrenia.

Activity in dorsal attention (DAN) and frontoparietal (FPN) functional brain networks is linked to allocation of attention to external stimuli, and activity in the default-mode network (DMN) is linked to allocation of attention to internal representations. Tasks requiring attention to external stimuli shift activity to the DAN/FPN and away from the DMN, and optimal task performance depends on balancing DAN/FPN against DMN activity. The current functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study assessed the balance of DAN/FPN and DMN activity in 13 schizophrenia patients and 13 healthy controls while they were engaged in a task switching Stroop paradigm which demanded internally directed attention to task instructions. The typical pattern of reciprocity between the DAN/FPN and DMN was observed for healthy controls but not for patients, suggesting a reduction in the internally focussed thought important for maintenance of instructions and strategies in schizophrenia. The observed alteration in the balance between DAN/FPN and DMN in patients may reflect a general mechanism underlying multiple forms of cognitive impairment in schizophrenia, including global processing deficits such as cognitive inefficiency and impaired context processing.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1167/16.1.2

Journal of vision

J Vis

Identifying separate components of surround suppression.

Surround suppression is a well-known phenomenon in which the response to a visual stimulus is diminished by the presence of neighboring stimuli. This effect is observed in neural responses in areas such as primary visual cortex, and also manifests in visual contrast perception. Studies in animal models have identified at least two separate mechanisms that may contribute to surround suppression: one that is monocular and resistant to contrast adaptation, and another that is binocular and strongly diminished by adaptation. The current study was designed to investigate whether these two mechanisms exist in humans and if they can be identified psychophysically using eye-of-origin and contrast adaptation manipulations. In addition, we examined the prediction that the monocular suppression component is broadly tuned for orientation, while suppression between eyes is narrowly tuned. Our results confirmed that when center and surrounding stimuli were presented dichoptically (in opposite eyes), suppression was orientation-tuned. Following adaptation in the surrounding region, no dichoptic suppression was observed, and monoptic suppression no longer showed orientation selectivity. These results are consistent with a model of surround suppression that depends on both low-level and higher level components. This work provides a method to assess the separate contributions of these components during spatial context processing in human vision.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.beproc.2015.12.008

Behavioural processes

Behav Processes

Attention to irrelevant contexts decreases as training increases: Evidence from eye-fixations in a human predictive learning task.

Participants were trained in a human predictive learning task in which they had to predict whether the ingestion of a given food (cue) by the imaginary customer of an imaginary restaurant (context) was followed by gastric malaise (outcome). One food was always followed by gastric malaise in one of the contexts, while other foods were not followed by gastric malaise in the same, or in an alternative context. Predictive responses and eye-fixations were recorded throughout the 48 training trials with each cue involved in the task. In agreement with the predictions of the Attentional Theory of Context Processing, attention to the contexts measured through eye-fixations decreased while attention to the cues increased as training progressed. The results of this study give support to the idea that contexts are actively processed at the beginning of acquisition, and that this processing decreases as training increases.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.3758/s13415-015-0384-1

Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience

Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci

The neural circuitry supporting goal maintenance during cognitive control: a comparison of expectancy AX-CPT and dot probe expectancy paradigms.

Goal maintenance is an aspect of cognitive control that has been identified as critical for understanding psychopathology according to criteria of the NIMH-sponsored CNTRICS (Cognitive Neuroscience Treatment Research to Improve Cognition in Schizophrenia) and Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) initiatives. CNTRICS proposed the expectancy AX-CPT, and its visual-spatial parallel the dot probe expectancy (DPX), as valid measures of the cognitive and neural processes thought to be relevant for goal maintenance. The goal of this study was to specifically examine the functional neural correlates and connectivity patterns of both goal maintenance tasks in the same subset of subjects to further validate their neural construct validity and clarify our understanding of the nature and function of the neural circuitry engaged by the tasks. Twenty-six healthy control subjects performed both the letter (AX) and dot pattern (DPX) variants of the CPT during fMRI. Behavioral performance was similar between tasks. The 2 tasks engaged the same brain networks including dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and dorsal parietal regions, supporting their validity as complementary measures of the goal maintenance construct. Interestingly there was greater engagement of the frontal opercular insula region during the expectancy AX-CPT (letter) and greater functional connectivity between the PFC and medial temporal lobe in the DPX (dot pattern). These differences are consistent with differential recruitment of phonological and visual-spatial processes by the two tasks and suggest that additional long-term memory systems may be engaged by the dot probe version.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.3389/fnhum.2015.00492

Frontiers in human neuroscience

Front Hum Neurosci

Neural regions discriminating contextual information as conveyed through the learned preferences of others.

The human brain consists of a network of regions that are engaged when one observes the movements of others. Observing unexpected movements, as defined by the context, often elicits greater activity, particularly in the right posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS). This implies that observers use contextual information to form expectations about an agent's goal and subsequent movements. The current study sought to identify regions that support the formation of these context-dependent expectations, with the pSTS being one candidate, given the consistent contextual modulation of its activity. We presented participants with fictitious individuals who had emotion-dependent food preferences, and instructed participants to indicate which food they expected each individual to choose based on the individual's current emotional state. Each individual's preference and emotional state therefore created a context that informed the observer's expectation of the individual's choice. Multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) was used to assess if these different contexts could be discriminated in the pSTS and elsewhere in the brain. No evidence for context discrimination was found in the pSTS. Context discrimination was found instead a network of other brain regions including the anterior medial prefrontal cortex (amPFC), bilateral parietal cortex, left middle temporal gyrus (L MTG) and left anterior temporal lobe (L ATL), which have been previously associated with context processing, and semantic and memory retrieval. All together, these regions possibly support the formation of context-dependent expectations of an agent's goal.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.7554/eLife.06121

eLife

Elife

Cortical network architecture for context processing in primate brain.

Context is information linked to a situation that can guide behavior. In the brain, context is encoded by sensory processing and can later be retrieved from memory. How context is communicated within the cortical network in sensory and mnemonic forms is unknown due to the lack of methods for high-resolution, brain-wide neuronal recording and analysis. Here, we report the comprehensive architecture of a cortical network for context processing. Using hemisphere-wide, high-density electrocorticography, we measured large-scale neuronal activity from monkeys observing videos of agents interacting in situations with different contexts. We extracted five context-related network structures including a bottom-up network during encoding and, seconds later, cue-dependent retrieval of the same network with the opposite top-down connectivity. These findings show that context is represented in the cortical network as distributed communication structures with dynamic information flows. This study provides a general methodology for recording and analyzing cortical network neuronal communication during cognition.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1037/abn0000082

Journal of abnormal psychology

J Abnorm Psychol

Visual context processing dysfunctions in youth at high risk for psychosis: Resistance to the Ebbinghaus illusion and its symptom and social and role functioning correlates.

Impaired visual context processing is closely linked with expression of symptoms in people with psychosis. However, to date, there have been no investigations of this phenomenon in the critical ultra high-risk (UHR) period immediately preceding the onset of psychosis. In total, 73 participants (33 UHR, 40 control) were evaluated with clinical and global functioning interviews and with a computerized task that required comparing the size of 2 target circles. Targets could appear by themselves (no-context condition), or within a context that made size judgment easier (helpful condition) or more difficult (misleading condition). Susceptibility to illusion was measured as the accuracy differences between the no-context and the helpful (i.e., helpful-index) and the misleading (i.e., misleading-index) conditions. Both groups exhibited approximately the same percentage of accurate responses to the no-context condition. However, the UHR subjects exhibited significantly less susceptibility to the illusion, performing superior to controls on the misleading index. The UHR group also showed less susceptibility on the helpful index, but this was not significant. Lower susceptibility on the misleading index was associated with increased negative symptoms and role functioning at a trend level. Lower susceptibility on the helpful index was significantly associated with increased negative symptoms and both poor role and social functioning. These results indicate that visual context processing is impaired during the UHR period, and is related to core illness features, suggesting that this task may be a useful biomarker in studies of UHR participants.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.psychres.2015.07.021

Psychiatry research

Psychiatry Res

A possible contributory mechanism for impaired idiom perception in schizophrenia.

In this review, we focus on the ability of people with schizophrenia to correctly perceive the meaning of idioms; figurative language expressions in which intended meaning is not derived from the meaning of constituent words. We collate evidence on how idiom perception is impaired, ascertain the clinical relevance of this impairment, and consider possible psychological and neural mechanisms behind the impairment. In reviewing extant literature, we searched the PubMed database, from 1975-2014, focussing on articles that directly concerned schizophrenia and idioms, with follow up searches to explore the viability of possible underlying mechanisms. We learn that there is clear evidence of impairment, with a tendency to err towards literal interpretations unless the figurative meaning is salient, and despite contextual cues to figurative interpretations. Given the importance of idioms in everyday language, the potential impact is significant. Clinically, impaired idiom perception primarily relates to positive symptoms of schizophrenia, but also to negative symptoms. The origins of the impairment remain speculation, with impaired executive function, impaired semantic functions, and impaired context processing all proposed to explain the phenomenon. We conclude that a possible contributory mechanism at the neural level is an impaired dorsolateral prefrontal cortex system for cognitive control over semantic processing.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.3389/fpsyt.2015.00098

Frontiers in psychiatry

Front Psychiatry

Theory of Mind and Context Processing in Schizophrenia: The Role of Social Knowledge.

The present study sought to determine whether social knowledge such as speaker occupation stereotypes may impact theory of mind (ToM) ability in patients with schizophrenia (SZ). Thirty individuals with SZ and 30 matched healthy control (HC) participants were tested individually on their ToM ability using a paradigm showing that stereotypes such as speaker occupation influences the extent to which speaker ironic intent is understood. ToM ability was assessed with open questions on the speaker ironic intent, irony rating, and mockery rating. Social perception was also assessed through politeness rating. The main results showed that SZ participants, like HC participants, were sensitive to the social stereotypes. They used these stereotypes adequately to attribute mental states such as speaker ironic intent to a protagonist while they found it difficult to explicitly judge and attribute negative attitude and emotion, as evidenced by mockery rating. No difference was found between the two groups regarding social perception ability. These performances were not associated with clinical symptoms. The integration of contextual information seems to be a good target for cognitive remediation aiming to increase social cognition ability.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1123/jpah.2014-0468

Journal of physical activity & health

J Phys Act Health

Aerobic Fitness and Context Processing in Preadolescent Children.

There is a growing trend of inactivity among children, which may not only result in poorer physical health but also poorer cognitive health. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between aerobic fitness and proactive and reactive cognitive control using a continuous performance task (CPT). Forty-eight 9- to 10-year-old children (n = 24 higher fit [HF] and n = 24 lower fit [LF]) performed an AX-CPT requiring them to respond to target cue-probe pairs (AX) or nontarget pairs (AY, BX, BY) under 2 different trial duration conditions, which modulated working memory demands. Across trials and conditions, HF children had greater accuracy than LF children. For target trials, the long duration resulted in lower accuracy than the short duration. For nontarget trials, an interaction of duration and trial was observed, indicating that the long duration resulted in decreased BX and BY accuracy relative to the short duration. AY trials had greater accuracy during the long duration compared with the short duration. These data suggest that fitness may modulate cognitive control strategies during tasks requiring context updating and maintenance, key components of working memory and further support aerobic fitness as a marker of cognitive and brain health in children.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1037/xlm0000122

Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition

J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn

Remembering to prepare: The benefits (and costs) of high working memory capacity.

The dual mechanisms of control framework postulates that cognitive control can operate in 2 distinct modes: a "proactive" preparatory mode and a "reactive" wait-and-see mode. Importantly, the 2 modes are associated with both costs and benefits in cognitive performance. Here we explore this framework, in terms of its relationship with working memory capacity (WMC). We hypothesize that high-WMC individuals are more likely to utilize proactive control yielding not only benefits, but also specific costs to performance. Across 2 separate, large-sample experiments, healthy young adults performed different variants of the AX-Continuous Performance Test context processing task, a well-established probe of proactive and reactive cognitive control. In 2 experiments, WMC predicted both improvements and relative impairments in task performance in a manner that was consistent with usage of proactive control. These findings suggest that individuals differ in the degree to which they utilize proactive control based on WMC.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1007/s12311-015-0670-z

Cerebellum (London, England)

Cerebellum

Cerebellar Contribution to Context Processing in Extinction Learning and Recall.

Whereas acquisition of new associations is considered largely independent of the context, context dependency is a hallmark of extinction of the learned associations. The hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex are known to be involved in context processing during extinction learning and recall. Although the cerebellum has known functional and anatomic connections to the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex, cerebellar contributions to context processing of extinction have rarely been studied. In the present study, we reanalyzed functional brain imaging data (fMRI) of previous work investigating context effects during extinction in a cognitive associative learning paradigm in 28 young and healthy subjects (Lissek et al. Neuroimage. 81:131-3, 2013). In that study, event-related fMRI analysis did not include the cerebellum. The 3 T fMRI dataset was reanalyzed using a spatial normalization method optimized for the cerebellum. Data of seven participants had to be excluded because the cerebellum had not been scanned in full. Cerebellar activation related to context change during extinction learning was most prominent in lobule Crus II bilaterally (p < 0.01, t > 2.53; partially corrected by predetermined cluster size). No significant cerebellar activations were observed related to context change during extinction retrieval. The posterolateral cerebellum appears to contribute to context-related processes during extinction learning, but not (or less) during extinction retrieval. The cerebellum may support context learning during extinction via its connections to the hippocampus. Alternatively, the cerebellum may support the shifting of attention to the context via its known connections to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Because the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is critically involved in context-related processes during extinction retrieval, and there are no known connections between the cerebellum and the vmPFC, the cerebellum may be less important during extinction recall.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1080/17470919.2014.998840

Social neuroscience

Soc Neurosci

Concepts in context: Processing mental state concepts with internal or external focus involves different neural systems.

According to embodied cognition theories, concepts are contextually situated and grounded in neural systems that produce experiential states. This view predicts that processing mental state concepts recruits neural regions associated with different aspects of experience depending on the context in which people understand a concept. This neuroimaging study tested this prediction using a set of sentences that described emotional (e.g., fear, joy) and nonemotional (e.g., thinking, hunger) mental states with internal focus (i.e., focusing on bodily sensations and introspection) or external focus (i.e., focusing on expression and action). Consistent with our predictions, data suggested that the inferior frontal gyrus, a region associated with action representation, was engaged more by external than internal sentences. By contrast, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a region associated with the generation of internal states, was engaged more by internal emotion sentences than external sentence categories. Similar patterns emerged when we examined the relationship between neural activity and independent ratings of sentence focus. Furthermore, ratings of emotion were associated with activation in the medial prefrontal cortex, whereas ratings of activity were associated with activation in the inferior frontal gyrus. These results suggest that mental state concepts are represented in a dynamic way, using context-relevant interoceptive and sensorimotor resources.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.3758/s13415-015-0335-x

Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience

Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci

The influence of monetary incentives on context processing in younger and older adults: an event-related potential study.

Recent evidence has indicated that neuronal activity related to reward anticipation benefits subsequent stimulus processing, but the effect of penalties remains largely unknown. Since the dual-mechanisms-of-control theory (DMC; Braver & Barch, Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 26, 809-81, 2002) assumes that temporal differences in context updating underlie age differences in cognitive control, in this study we investigated whether motivational cues (signaling the chance to win or the risk to lose money, relative to neutral cues) preceding context information in a modified AX-CPT paradigm influence the temporal stages of context processing in younger and older adults. In the behavioral data, younger adults benefited from gain cues, evident in their enhanced context updating, whereas older adults exhibited slowed responding after motivational cues, irrespective of valence. Event-related potentials (ERPs) revealed that the enhanced processing of motivational cues in the P2 and P3b was mainly age-invariant, whereas age-differential effects were found for the ERP correlates of context processing. Younger adults showed improved context maintenance (i.e., a larger negative-going CNV), as well as increased conflict detection (larger N450) and resolution (indicated by a sustained positivity), whenever incorrect responding would lead to a monetary loss. In contrast, motivationally salient cues benefited context representations (in cue-locked P3b amplitudes), but increased working memory demands during response preparation (via a temporally prolonged P3b) in older adults. In sum, motivational valence and salience effects differentially modulated the temporal stages of context processing in younger and older adults. These results are discussed in terms of the DMC theory, recent findings of emotion regulation in old age, and the relationship between cognitive and affective processing.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.schres.2014.11.022

Schizophrenia research

Schizophr Res

Task-based functional connectivity as an indicator of genetic liability to schizophrenia.

Impaired functional connectivity has been hypothesized as a potential source of the cognitive deficits routinely observed in patients with schizophrenia. Additionally, these deficits may be manifestations of the genetic liability to schizophrenia and present in the non-psychotic first-degree relatives of that group. However, no study has examined task-based functional connectivity in schizophrenia relatives using independent component analysis (ICA). We employed group ICA to test the hypothesis that the unexpressed genetic liability to schizophrenia is reflected in the functional connectivity between brain regions during a task measuring context processing. We compared 20 schizophrenia patients and 32 patients' first-degree relatives to 22 controls demographically matched to the patients and 28 controls' relatives, respectively. The group ICA showed differential connectivity between patients and controls in a task-related network constituting right middle frontal gyrus (MFG) and right posterior parietal lobe. A network constituting left MFG and left posterior parietal, which was also related to the context processing task, did not differ between groups. These findings demonstrate that connectivity abnormalities associated with the genetic liability to schizophrenia are most strongly expressed in a right lateralized executive fronto-parietal network, and that these abnormalities are linked to context processing impairments.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1111/jnp.12056

Journal of neuropsychology

J Neuropsychol

Inhibiting reactions to emotional versus non-emotional response cues in schizophrenia: Insights from a motor-process paradigm.

Recent models of schizophrenia suggest deficient use of contextual response cues when confronted with countermanding emotional cues. It is important to clinically validate these models by testing patients diagnosed with schizophrenia on tasks with competing emotional and contextual response determinants. Control and schizophrenia groups completed a novel task that elicited motor responses consistent with, or in opposition to, pre-potent emotional actions (i.e., approach vs. avoidance). An analogous non-emotional task was also used to examine cue-conflict impairment more generally. The groups demonstrated statistically equivalent performance decrements on incongruent versus congruent trials on both tasks. However, within the schizophrenia group, the incongruency effect was significantly greater in the emotional versus non-emotional task. These data suggest that, while patients with schizophrenia were able to employ contextual response cues to override competing emotional responses, they were slower to resolve emotional versus non-emotional response conflict. When patients were subdivided according to the presence or absence of disorganized symptoms, this effect was confined to patients with disorganized symptoms.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.2147/NDT.S71922

Neuropsychiatric disease and treatment

Neuropsychiatr Dis Treat

Remediation of context-processing deficits in schizophrenia: preliminary data with ambiguous sentences.

Processing of contextual information is essential for the establishment of good interpersonal relations and communicational interactions. Nevertheless, it is known that schizophrenic patients present impairments in the processing of contextual information. The aim of this study is to explore the influence of the remediation of context processing in schizophrenic patients. Thirty-one schizophrenic patients and 28 matched healthy participants were included in this study. All participants were assessed on verbal knowledge (Mill-Hill test) and depression intensity (Beck Depression Scale 21 items). Schizophrenic patients were also assessed on thought, language, and communication disorders (Thought, Language and Communication scale). All participants completed a disambiguation task with two different levels of contextualization (high or low context) and a context-processing remediation task containing social scenarios that included ambiguous words and were presented with two different types of instruction: with or without context explanation. For the disambiguation task, results showed no effect of group, but a main effect of context, with better performances in the high-context than the low-context condition. For the context-processing remediation task, results showed a main effect of group: The performance of schizophrenic patients who had received explanations differed from that both of healthy participants and of schizophrenic patients who had not received explanations. This study revealed that for all participants, the structuring of context had a positive effect on the contextual integration of ambiguous words. Concerning the remediation task, explanations about the strategies that could be used to take context into account improved the schizophrenic patients' performances. This allows us to consider new methods of remediation that could improve social interaction in schizophrenia.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.3389/fnins.2014.00270

Frontiers in neuroscience

Front Neurosci

The effects of context processing on social cognition impairments in adults with Asperger's syndrome.

Social cognition-the basis of all communicative and otherwise interpersonal relationships-is embedded in specific contextual circumstances which shape intrinsic meanings. This domain is compromised in the autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), including Asperger's syndrome (AS) (DSM-V). However, the few available reports of social cognition skills in adults with AS have largely neglected the effects of contextual factors. Moreover, previous studies on this population have also failed to simultaneously (a) assess multiple social cognition domains, (b) examine executive functions, (c) follow strict sample selection criteria, and (d) acknowledge the cognitive heterogeneity typical of the disorder. The study presently reviewed (Baez et al., 2012), addressed all these aspects in order to establish the basis of social cognition deficits in adult AS patients. Specifically, we assessed the performance of AS adults in multiple social cognition tasks with different context-processing requirements. The results suggest that social cognition deficits in AS imply a reduced ability to implicitly encode and integrate contextual cues needed to access social meaning. Nevertheless, the patients' performance was normal when explicit social information was presented or when the situation could be navigated with abstract rules. Here, we review the results of our study and other relevant data, and discuss their implications for the diagnosis and treatment of AS and other neuropsychiatric conditions (e.g., schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, frontotemporal dementia). Finally, we analyze previous results in the light of a current neurocognitive model of social-context processing.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.psychres.2014.07.077

Psychiatry research

Psychiatry Res

Perception of emotion-related conflict in human communications: what are the effects of schizophrenia?

Our ability to make sense of emotional cues is of paramount importance for understanding state of mind and communicative intent. However, emotional cues often conflict with each other; this presents a significant challenge for people with schizophrenia. We conducted a theoretical review to determine the extent and types of impaired processing of emotion-related conflict in schizophrenia; we evaluated the relationship with medication and symptoms, and considered possible mediatory mechanisms. The literature established that people with schizophrenia demonstrated impaired function: (i) when passively exposed to emotion cues whilst performing an unrelated task, (ii) when selectively attending to one source of emotion cues whilst trying to ignore interference from another source, and (iii) when trying to resolve conflicting emotion cues and judge meta-communicative intent. These deficits showed associations with both negative and positive symptoms. There was limited evidence for antipsychotic medications attenuating impaired emotion perception when there are conflicting cues, with further direct research needed. Impaired attentional control and context processing may underlie some of the observed impairments. Neuroanatomical correlates are likely to involve interhemispheric transfer via the corpus callosum, limbic regions such as the amygdala, and possibly dorsolateral prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortex through their role in conflict processing.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00831

Frontiers in psychology

Front Psychol

Age-related changes in the temporal dynamics of executive control: a study in 5- and 6-year-old children.

Based on the Dual Mechanisms of Control theory (Braver et al., 2007), this study conducted in 5- and 6-year-olds, tested for a possible shift between two modes of control, proactive vs. reactive, which differ in the way goal information is retrieved and maintained in working memory. To this end, we developed a children-adapted version of the AX-Continuous-Performance Task (AX-CPT). Twenty-nine 5-year-olds and 28-6-year-olds performed the task in both low and high working-memory load conditions (corresponding, respectively, to a short and a long cue-probe delay). Analyses suggested that a qualitative change in the mode of control occurs within the 5-year-old group. However, quantitative, more graded changes were also observed both within the 5-year-olds, and between 5 and 6 years of age. These graded changes demonstrated an increasing efficiency in proactive control with age. The increase in working memory load did not impact the type of dynamics of control, but had a detrimental effect on sensitivity to cue information. These findings highlight that the development of the temporal dynamics of control can be characterized by a shift from reactive to proactive control together with a more protracted and gradual improvement in the efficiency of proactive control. Moreover, the question of whether the observed shift in the mode of control is task dependant is debated.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

Nihon shinkei seishin yakurigaku zasshi = Japanese journal of psychopharmacology

Nihon Shinkei Seishin Yakurigaku Zasshi

[Significance of the pharmacotherapy of schizophrenia in the emotional context processing of cognition].

Emotional disorders and cognitive dysfunctions are important treatment targets in psychiatric clinical settings. The biological mechanisms of emotional disorders have been studied with methods that include fear conditioning, schizophrenia models are studied with methamphetamine-induced reverse tolerance in rats, and dynamic changes in brain neurotransmitters are studied with microdialysis and high-performance liquid chromatography. We combined these methods in order to evaluate dopamine dynamics in the amygdala and the biological bases and relationships of emotional disorder and cognitive dysfunction. Fear-conditioned rats showed freezing behavior and dopamine release in the amygdala in response to conditioned stimuli. Methamphetamine-induced reverse tolerance rats showed increased dopamine release in the amygdala in response to conditioned stimuli. The increased release of dopamine continued after the freezing behavior had ended. This increased and long-lasting dopamine release may reflect abnormal emotional context processing in cognition in schizophrenia. Antipsychotic drugs, such as haloperidol, aripiprazole, and clozapine, suppress this increased release of dopamine in the amygdala in response to conditioned stimuli. These findings suggest that antipsychotic drugs may stabilize abnormal emotional context processing in cognition in this model. We conclude that the significance of pharmacotherapy in schizophrenia is that antipsychotic drugs stabilize the emotional context processing in cognition and adjust the relationship of emotion and cognition.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1111/psyp.12289

Psychophysiology

Psychophysiology

Abnormal interactions between context, memory structure, and mood in schizophrenia: an ERP investigation.

This study used event-related potentials to examine interactions between mood, sentence context, and semantic memory structure in schizophrenia. Seventeen male chronic schizophrenia and 15 healthy control subjects read sentence pairs after positive, negative, or neutral mood induction. Sentences ended with expected words (EW), within-category violations (WCV), or between-category violations (BCV). Across all moods, patients showed sensitivity to context indexed by reduced N400 to EW relative to both WCV and BCV. However, they did not show sensitivity to the semantic memory structure. N400 abnormalities were particularly enhanced under a negative mood in schizophrenia. These findings suggest abnormal interactions between mood, context processing, and connections within semantic memory in schizophrenia, and a specific role of negative mood in modulating semantic processes in this disease.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.schres.2014.06.037

Schizophrenia research

Schizophr Res

Patients with schizophrenia demonstrate reduced cortical sensitivity to auditory oddball regularities.

Individuals with schizophrenia demonstrate deficits in context processing. These deficits can be characterized by examining the influence of auditory context on ERP responses to rare target tones. Previous studies demonstrate that target ERP deficits in schizophrenia depend on the number of non-targets that precede the target ERP. Our goal was to extend these findings by examining whether patients with schizophrenia demonstrate a reduced sensitivity to subtle differences in the auditory context preceding rare target stimuli, as quantified by Itti and Baldi's Bayesian prediction error model. Cortical responses to auditory oddball tones were measured within 59 individuals with schizophrenia (SZ) and 59 controls (HC). Individual trial amplitudes were estimated by conducting group ICA on the EEG time series and analyzing the reconstructed individual temporal sources. We quantified the auditory context of target tones using the Bayesian prediction error model and determined whether ERP amplitudes to tones were sensitive to this measure of context, or the number of preceding non-targets directly, within HC and SZ. Individuals with schizophrenia show a significant reduction in ERP response amplitudes to targets approximately 244-412 ms following target onsets. Individual amplitudes within this window showed significantly greater sensitivity to the modeled prediction error within the controls than in individuals with schizophrenia. These differences approached significance when examining differences in amplitudes as a function of the number of preceding non-targets. These findings further clarify differences in HC and SZ with regard to their attentional and perceptual sensitivity to subtle environmental regularities.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2014.02.006

International journal of psychophysiology : official journal of the International Organization of Psychophysiology

Int J Psychophysiol

Event-related brain potential study of expectancy and semantic matching in schizotypy.

Priming studies have revealed semantic processing abnormalities in subjects that display high schizotypal traits. The objective of the present study was to further elucidate the contribution of predictive (expectancy) and integrative (semantic matching) context processing to the semantic deficit described in schizotypy. Thirty-six participants were assigned into high or low schizotypy groups according to their score on the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (SPQ), and event-related brain potentials were recorded while these individuals performed semantic judgments based on asymmetrically associated word pairs. Viewed in one direction (forward), the target was highly predictable from the prime, whereas in the backward direction, the prime-to-target association was weak. It was assumed that the forward condition would be dependent on expectancy generation, while the backward condition would rely on semantic matching. In the low-SPQ group, forward and backward related words evoked a reduced (less negative) N400 amplitude compared to unrelated words, resulting in a significant forward and backward N400 priming effect, respectively. By contrast, only forward related words were facilitated in the high-SPQ group, resulting in significant forward priming and a lack of backward priming. Furthermore, the N400 amplitude for forward related words was less negative within the high-SPQ group in comparison to the low-SPQ group, which indicated easier semantic access to predictable words for high-SPQ individuals. Therefore, schizotypy may be associated with an imbalance in the use of predictive and integrative context processing strategies, namely preserved, if not over allocated, expectancy generation along with altered integration of unpredictable words due to semantic matching deficit.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.3758/s13415-014-0268-9

Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience

Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci

Age-differential effects on updating cue information: evidence from event-related potentials.

Recent models on cognitive aging consider the ability to maintain and update context information to be a key source of age-related impairments in various cognitive tasks (Braver & Barch in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 26: 809-817, 2002). Context updating has been investigated with a modified AX-continuous-performance task by comparing performance and brain activity between context-dependent trials (i.e., correct responses require updating of the preceding cue information) and context-independent trials (i.e., correct responses are independent of cue information). We used an event-related potential (ERP) approach to identify sources of age differences in context processing in the early and late processing of cue information. Our behavioral data showed longer latencies and higher error rates on context-dependent than on context-independent trials for older than for younger adults, suggesting age-related impairments in context updating. The ERP data revealed larger P3b amplitudes for context-dependent than for context-independent trials only in younger adults. In contrast, in older adults, P3b amplitudes were more evenly distributed across the scalp and did not differ between context conditions. Interestingly, older but not younger adults were sensitive to changes of cue identity, as indicated by larger P3b amplitudes on cue-change than on cue-repeat trials, irrespective of the actual context condition. We also found a larger CNV on context-dependent than on context-independent trials, reflecting active maintenance of context information and response preparation. The age-differential effects in the P3b suggest that both younger and older adults were engaged in updating task-relevant information, but relied on different information: Whereas younger participants indeed relied on context cues to update and reconfigure the task settings, older adults relied on changes in cue identity, irrespective of context information.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.psychres.2013.12.034

Psychiatry research

Psychiatry Res

Do cognitive measures of response inhibition differentiate between attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and borderline personality disorder?

This study examined whether cognitive measures of response inhibition derived from the AX-CPT are able to differentiate between adult attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), borderline personality disorder (BPD), and healthy controls (HC). Current DSM-IV-TR symptoms of ADHD and BPD were assessed by structured diagnostic interviews, and parent developmental interviews were used to assess childhood ADHD symptoms. Patients (14 ADHD, 12 BPD, 7 ADHD and BPD, and 37 HC) performed the AX-CPT. Seventy percent of AX-CPT trials were target (AX) trials, creating a bias to respond with a target response to X probes in the nontarget (AY, BX, BY) trials. On BX trials, context, i.e. the non-'A' letter, must be used to inhibit this prepotent response tendency. On AY trials context actually causes individuals to false alarm. The effects of ADHD and BPD on AX-CPT outcome were tested using two-way ANOVA. BPD was associated with higher percentage of errors across the task and more errors and slower responses on BX trials, whereas ADHD was associated with slower responses on AY trials. The findings suggest response inhibition problems to be present in both ADHD and BPD, and patients with BPD to be particularly impaired due to poor context processing.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.3389/fncom.2013.00175

Frontiers in computational neuroscience

Front Comput Neurosci

Linking reward processing to behavioral output: motor and motivational integration in the primate subthalamic nucleus.

The expectation and detection of motivationally relevant events is a major determinant of goal-directed behavior and there is a strong interest in the contribution of basal ganglia in the integration of motivational processes into behavioral output. Recent research has focused on the role of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) in the motivational control of action, but it remains to be determined how information about reward is encoded in this nucleus. We recorded the activity of single neurons in the STN of two behaving monkeys to examine whether activity was influenced by the delivery of reward in an instrumental task, a Pavlovian stimulus-reward association, or outside of a task context. We confirmed preliminary findings indicating that STN neurons were sensitive not only to rewards obtained during task performance, but also to the expectation of reward when its delivery was delayed in time. Most of the modulations at the onset of reaching movement were combined with modulations following reward delivery, suggesting the convergence of signals related to the animal's movement and its outcome in the same neurons. Some neurons were also influenced by the visuomotor contingencies of the task, i.e., target location and/or movement direction. In addition, modulations were observed under conditions where reward delivery was not contingent on an instrumental response, even in the absence of a reward predictive cue. Taken as a whole, these results demonstrate a potential contribution of the STN to motivational control of behavior in the non-human primate, although problems in distinguishing neuronal signals related to reward from those related to motor behavior should be considered. Characterizing the specificity of reward processing in the STN remains challenging and could have important implications for understanding the influence of this key component of basal ganglia circuitry on emotional and motivated behaviors under normal and pathological conditions.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.clinph.2013.10.046

Clinical neurophysiology : official journal of the International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology

Clin Neurophysiol

Do you see what I feel?--Electrophysiological correlates of emotional face and body perception in schizophrenia.

We aimed to elucidate whether impaired affective face processing--behaviourally and with regard to P100 and N170 components--is paralleled by similar deficits in body processing in schizophrenia. Furthermore, we aimed to assess modulations by the processing of emotional or personal identity of the stimuli. Fourteen patients with schizophrenia and 15 healthy controls were assessed with a Delayed Matching-to-Sample Task involving variations of the emotional (same vs. different valence) and personal identity (same vs. different person) of bodies and faces. Patients showed overall poorer behavioural performance. In controls, P100 amplitudes were enhanced in the "same identity/different emotions" vs. "same identity/same emotion" condition and N170 amplitudes were larger for different vs. same emotions. In the patients, P100 amplitudes were enhanced in the right relative to the left hemisphere for faces, but not for bodies. Patients with schizophrenia show deficient modulation of the P100 and N170 components by emotional and personal identity of faces and bodies, which may relate to deficient context processing. Our findings suggest for the first time alterations of the electrophysiological correlates of body processing in schizophrenia.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.pscychresns.2013.09.001

Psychiatry research

Psychiatry Res

Impaired context processing as a potential marker of psychosis risk state.

While structural abnormalities of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) may pre-date and predict psychosis onset, the relationships between functional deficits, cognitive and psychosocial impairments has yet to be explored in the at-risk period. An established measure of cognitive control (AXCPT) was administered to demographically matched clinical-high-risk (CHR; n=25), first-episode schizophrenia (FE; n=35), and healthy control (HC; n=35) participants during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate these relationships. CHR and FE individuals demonstrated impaired context processing and reduced DLPFC activation relative to HC individuals during increased cognitive control demands. FE and CHR individuals' ability to increase DLPFC activity in response to cognitive control demands was associated with better task performance. Task performance was also associated with severity of disorganization and poverty symptoms in FE participants. These findings support more extensive studies using fMRI to examine the clinical significance of prefrontal cortical functioning in the earliest stages of psychosis.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.3389/fnbeh.2013.00132

Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience

Front Behav Neurosci

Context prediction analysis and episodic memory.

Events that happen at a particular place and time come to define our episodic memories. Extensive experimental and clinical research illustrate that the hippocampus is central to the processing of episodic memories, and this is in large part due to its analysis of context information according to spatial and temporal references. In this way, hippocampus defines ones expectations for a given context as well as detects errors in predicted contextual features. The detection of context prediction errors is hypothesized to distinguished events into meaningful epochs that come to be recalled as separate episodic memories. The nature of the spatial and temporal context information processed by hippocampus is described, as is a hypothesis that the apparently self-regulatory nature of hippocampal context processing may ultimately be mediated by natural homeostatic operations and plasticity. Context prediction errors by hippocampus are suggested to be valued by the midbrain dopamine system, the output of which is ultimately fed back to hippocampus to update memory-driven context expectations for future events. Thus, multiple network functions (both within and outside hippocampus) combine to result in adaptive episodic memories.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.jpsychires.2013.09.003

Journal of psychiatric research

J Psychiatr Res

P300 in obsessive-compulsive disorder: source localization and the effects of treatment.

Converging evidence suggests that frontostriatal abnormalities underlie OCD symptoms. The event-related potential P300 is generated along a widely distributed network involving several of the areas implicated in OCD. P300 abnormalities reported in patients with OCD suggest increased activity in these areas. The aim of the present study was to investigate this assumption in unmedicated patients with OCD, and to assess the effects of OCD treatment on P300 brain activity patterns. Seventy-one unmedicated patients with a DSM-IV diagnosis of OCD and 71 age- and gender-matched healthy control subjects participated in the study. The P300 was obtained through 32-channel EEG during an auditory oddball paradigm. Forty-three patients underwent a second EEG assessment after treatment with sertraline and behavioural therapy. Low-resolution electromagnetic tomography (LORETA) was used to localize the sources of brain electrical activity. Increased P300-related activity was observed predominantly in the left orbitofrontal cortex, but also in left prefrontal, parietal and temporal areas, in patients compared to controls at baseline. After treatment, reduction of left middle frontal cortex hyperactivity was observed in patients. Findings of increased activity in frontoparietal areas in patients are consistent with several previous studies. Importantly, OCD treatment led to reduction of hyperactivity in the left middle frontal cortex, an area associated with context processing and uncertainty that might be important for the emergence of OCD symptoms. Thus, the present study is the first to show an association between P300 abnormalities and activity in brain regions postulated to be involved in the pathophysiology of OCD.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.ridd.2013.08.031

Research in developmental disabilities

Res Dev Disabil

Space representation in children with dyslexia and children without dyslexia: contribution of line bisection and circle centering tasks.

Line bisection tasks (different space locations and different line lengths) and circle centering tasks (visuo-proprioceptive and proprioceptive explorations, with left or right starting positions) were used to investigate space representation in children with dyslexia and children without dyslexia. In line bisection, children with dyslexia showed a significant rightward bias for central and right-sided locations and a leftward bias for left-sided location. Furthermore, the spatial context processing was asymmetrically more efficient in the left space. In children without dyslexia, no significant bias was observed in central lines but the spatial context processing was symmetrical in both spaces. When the line length varied, no main effect was shown. These results strengthen the 'inverse pseudoneglect' hypothesis in dyslexia. In the lateral dimension of the circle centering tasks, children showed a response bias in the direction of the starting hand location for proprioceptive condition. For radial dimension, the children showed a forward bias in visuo-proprioceptive condition and more backward error in proprioceptive condition. Children with dyslexia showed a forward bias in clockwise exploration and more accurate performance in counterclockwise exploration for left starting position which may be in accordance with leftward asymmetrical spatial context processing in line bisection. These results underline the necessity to use the line bisection task with different locations as an appropriate experimental paradigm to study lateral representational bias in dyslexia. The contribution of the present results in the understanding of space representation in children with dyslexia and children without dyslexia is discussed in terms of attentional processes and neuroanatomical substrate.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00569

Frontiers in psychology

Front Psychol

Visual context processing in bipolar disorder: a comparison with schizophrenia.

Anomalous perception has been investigated extensively in schizophrenia, but it is unclear whether these impairments are specific to schizophrenia or extend to other psychotic disorders. Recent studies of visual context processing in schizophrenia (Tibber et al., 2013; Yang et al., 2013) point to circumscribed, task-specific abnormalities. Here we examined visual contextual processing across a comprehensive set of visual tasks in individuals with bipolar disorder and compared their performance with that of our previously published results from schizophrenia and healthy participants tested on those same tasks. We quantified the degree to which the surrounding visual context alters a center stimulus' appearance for brightness, size, contrast, orientation and motion. Across these tasks, healthy participants showed robust contextual effects, as indicated by pronounced misperceptions of the center stimuli. Participants with bipolar disorder showed contextual effects similar in magnitude to those found in healthy participants on all tasks. This result differs from what we found in schizophrenia participants (Yang et al., 2013) who showed weakened contextual modulations of contrast but intact contextual modulations of perceived luminance and size. Yet in schizophrenia participants, the magnitude of the contrast illusion did not correlate with symptom measures. Performance on the contrast task by the bipolar disorder group also could not be distinguished from that of the schizophrenia group, and this may be attributed to the result that bipolar patients who presented with greater manic symptoms showed weaker contrast modulation. Thus, contrast gain control may be modulated by clinical state in bipolar disorder. Stronger motion and orientation context effects correlated with worse clinical symptoms across both patient groups and especially in schizophrenia participants. These results highlight the complexity of visual context processing in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1177/2167702612464618

Clinical psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science

Clin Psychol Sci

Visual context processing in schizophrenia.

Abnormal perceptual experiences are central to schizophrenia but the nature of these anomalies remains undetermined. We investigated contextual processing abnormalities across a comprehensive set of visual tasks. For perception of luminance, size, contrast, orientation and motion, we quantified the degree to which the surrounding visual context altered a center stimulus' appearance. Across tasks, healthy participants showed robust contextual effects, as evidenced by pronounced misperceptions of center stimuli. Schizophrenia patients exhibited intact contextual modulations of luminance and size, but showed weakened contextual modulations of contrast, performing more accurately than controls. Strong motion and orientation context effects correlated with worse symptoms and social functioning. Importantly, the overall strength of contextual modulation across tasks did not differ between controls and schizophrenia patients. Additionally, performance measures across contextual tasks were uncorrelated, implying discrete underlying processes. These findings reveal that abnormal contextual modulation in schizophrenia is selective, arguing against the proposed unitary contextual processing dysfunction.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1371/journal.pone.0068090

PloS one

PLoS One

Abnormal contextual modulation of visual contour detection in patients with schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia patients demonstrate perceptual deficits consistent with broad dysfunction in visual context processing. These include poor integration of segments forming visual contours, and reduced visual contrast effects (e.g. weaker orientation-dependent surround suppression, ODSS). Background image context can influence contour perception, as stimuli near the contour affect detection accuracy. Because of ODSS, this contextual modulation depends on the relative orientation between the contour and flanking elements, with parallel flankers impairing contour perception. However in schizophrenia, the impact of abnormal ODSS during contour perception is not clear. It is also unknown whether deficient contour perception marks genetic liability for schizophrenia, or is strictly associated with clinical expression of this disorder. We examined contour detection in 25 adults with schizophrenia, 13 unaffected first-degree biological relatives of schizophrenia patients, and 28 healthy controls. Subjects performed a psychophysics experiment designed to quantify the effect of flanker orientation during contour detection. Overall, patients with schizophrenia showed poorer contour detection performance than relatives or controls. Parallel flankers suppressed and orthogonal flankers enhanced contour detection performance for all groups, but parallel suppression was relatively weaker for schizophrenia patients than healthy controls. Relatives of patients showed equivalent performance with controls. Computational modeling suggested that abnormal contextual modulation in schizophrenia may be explained by suppression that is more broadly tuned for orientation. Abnormal flanker suppression in schizophrenia is consistent with weaker ODSS and/or broader orientation tuning. This work provides the first evidence that such perceptual abnormalities may not be associated with a genetic liability for schizophrenia.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1111/psyp.12124

Psychophysiology

Psychophysiology

An event-related potential study of predictive and integrative semantic context processing in subjects with schizotypal traits.

Context processing abnormalities may explain thought disorder in schizophrenia/schizotypy. This study aimed to assess predictive and integrative context processing in subjects with high or low scores on the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (SPQ). The N400 amplitude was recorded during semantic judgment of sentence pairs ending with a lateralized expected or unexpected word from the same or a different category (related and unrelated violation). In both groups, the N400 amplitude was less negative for expected words versus unrelated violations, regardless of which hemisphere received the stimulus, and for related versus unrelated violations, but only for left-hemisphere stimuli. The N400 amplitude for unrelated violations was less negative in subjects with high SPQ scores for both hemispheres. These results indicate that subjects with schizotypal traits use context to predict or integrate congruent words, but fail to inhibit incongruent words.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.bandl.2013.05.017

Brain and language

Brain Lang

Irony comprehension and context processing in schizophrenia during remission--a functional MRI study.

Schizophrenic patients have Theory of Mind (ToM) deficits even during remission, but it is yet unknown whether this could be influenced. We examined the neural correlates of irony understanding in schizophrenic patients, as an indicator of ToM capacity, and evaluated how linguistic help inserted into the context phase could affect irony comprehension. Schizophrenic patients in remission and healthy controls were subjected to event-related functional MRI scanning while performing irony, 'irony with linguistic help', and control tasks. Patients understood irony significantly worse than healthy controls. The patients showed stronger brain activity in the parietal and frontal areas in the early phase of irony task, however the healthy controls exhibited higher activation in frontal, temporal and parietal regions in the latter phase of the irony task. Interestingly the linguistic help not only improved the patients' ToM performance, but it also evoked similar activation pattern to healthy controls.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1038/npp.2013.118

Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology

Neuropsychopharmacology

Effects of ketamine on context-processing performance in monkeys: a new animal model of cognitive deficits in schizophrenia.

Cognitive deficits are at the crux of why many schizophrenia patients have poor functional outcomes. One of the cognitive symptoms experienced by schizophrenia patients is a deficit in context processing, the ability to use contextual information stored in working memory to adaptively respond to subsequent stimuli. As such, context processing can be thought of as the intersection between working memory and executive control. Although deficits in context processing have been extensively characterized by neuropsychological testing in schizophrenia patients, they have never been effectively translated to an animal model of the disease. To bridge that gap, we trained monkeys to perform the same dot pattern expectancy (DPX) task, which has been used to measure context-processing deficits in human patients with schizophrenia. In the DPX task, the first stimulus in each trial provides the contextual information that subjects must remember in order to appropriately respond to the second stimulus in the trial. We found that administration of ketamine, an N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor antagonist, in monkeys caused a dose-dependent failure in context processing, replicating in monkeys the same specific pattern of errors committed by patients with schizophrenia when performing the same task. Therefore, our results provide the first evidence that context-processing dysfunction can be modeled in animals. Replicating a schizophrenia-like behavioral performance pattern in monkeys performing the same task used in humans provides a strong bridge to better understand the biological basis for this psychiatric disease and its cognitive manifestations using animal models.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1037/a0032237

Psychology of addictive behaviors : journal of the Society of Psychologists in Addictive Behaviors

Psychol Addict Behav

Context-processing abilities in chronic cocaine users.

Cocaine dependence is a particularly severe problem in the United States, resulting in broad economic and personal costs. Significant evidence of generalized cognitive deficits associated with cocaine dependence has been reported. Two studies evaluated whether context processing, the processes involved in representing and maintaining information regarding the context of one's environment, might be seen as a process-specific deficit that may explain some aspects of the broader cognitive deficits associated with cocaine dependence. Study 1 used the expectancy variant of the AX task to assess this ability; Study 2 employed the Dot Pattern Expectancy task. Significant between-groups differences were found in each study for d'-context, a comparison of AX hits and BX misses; these results indicated significant between-groups differences in context-processing ability. In Study 1, significant between-groups a priori contrasts of AY versus BX trials indicated the likelihood of a specific deficit in context processing in the cocaine group; however, this contrast was not significant in Study 2. Overall, the results of these studies support the theory of impaired context-processing ability associated with cocaine misuse. However, these results do not allow for the interpretation of a process-specific deficit in context-processing ability. Future research targeted at investigating aspects of this context-processing impairment associated with cocaine misuse can shed light on the specificity of this deficit.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.schres.2013.02.020

Schizophrenia research

Schizophr Res

Persistence, diagnostic specificity and genetic liability for context-processing deficits in schizophrenia.

Context-processing deficits have been shown in schizophrenia during first-episode, medication-naïve status, that persist after short-term antipsychotic treatment and also in first-degree relatives of individuals with schizophrenia. To confirm longer term persistence of deficits, we examined schizophrenia patients (n=63) during first-episode, medication-naïve status through to one-year follow-up, compared to healthy control (n=83) and non-schizophrenia psychosis comparison (n=47) groups, as well as unaffected first-degree relatives of individuals with schizophrenia (n=31). Context-processing ability was assessed by performance on the AX-CPT (Continuous Performance Test) at baseline, 8 weeks, 6 months, and 1 year (relatives only at baseline). Reaction time, error rates and signal detection indices (d'-context) of context processing were analyzed. Linear discriminant analyses (LDA) on early timepoints (baseline, 8 weeks) were conducted to predict confirmatory diagnosis (schizophrenia vs. psychosis control) at 6 months. Schizophrenia patients showed evidence of impaired context-processing relative to both the healthy and psychosis comparator groups at baseline and continued through to 1 year. While context-processing impairments persisted in schizophrenia patients through one year, the impairments in psychosis controls, which were more modest at baseline, remitted at follow-up. First-degree relatives showed deficits that were intermediate between the schizophrenia and healthy control groups. LDA showed 67% classification rates for distinguishing schizophrenia from non-schizophrenia psychosis. The persistence, diagnostic specificity and association with genetic liability give support for context processing impairments serving as a cognitive endophenotype for schizophrenia and evaluation of context processing could contribute to diagnostic assessments.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1521/pedi_2013_27_090

Journal of personality disorders

J Pers Disord

Social perception in borderline personality disorder: the role of context.

The purpose of this study was to examine social and nonsocial context processing in persons with borderline personality disorder (BPD). A secondary goal was to examine social perception in this population. The performance of 23 individuals with DSM-IV-diagnosed BPD was compared to a nonclinical control sample of 40 individuals. The participants were asked to perform both a social perceptual task that requires social context processing and a nonsocial context processing task. Social perception was examined using the Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity (PONS). The results demonstrate that the group with BPD was impaired on all tasks relative to the control group. Yet their reaction time improved when provided with social context. Implications for future research are discussed.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1037/a0030759

Journal of experimental psychology. Animal behavior processes

J Exp Psychol Anim Behav Process

Extinction arouses attention to the context in a behavioral suppression method with humans.

One experiment assessed predictions from the attentional theory of context processing (ATCP, J. M. Rosas, J. E. Callejas-Aguilera, M. M. Ramos-Álvarez, & M. J. F. Abad, 2006, Revision of retrieval theory of forgetting: What does make information context-specific? International Journal of Psychology & Psychological Therapy, Vol. 6, pp. 147-166) that extinction arouses attention to contextual stimuli. In a video-game method, participants learned a biconditional discrimination (RG+/BG-/RY-/BY+) either after extinction of another stimulus had occurred, or not. When contextual stimuli were relevant to solving the discrimination (i.e., all RG+/BG- trials occurred in one context and all RY-/BY+ in another), prior extinction of another stimulus facilitated the discrimination, as if extinction enhanced attention to the contexts. Results are discussed briefly in terms of ATCP and the model of N. A. Schmajuk, Y. W. Lam, & J. A. Gray (1996, Latent inhibition: A neural network approach, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, Vol. 22, pp. 321-349).

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.psychres.2012.09.043

Psychiatry research

Psychiatry Res

Impact of COMT genotype on cognition in schizophrenia spectrum patients and their relatives.

Cognitive impairment in schizophrenia is a core feature and seems to be related mainly to dopaminergic dysfunction in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). The functional polymorphism Val158Met of the COMT (catechol-O-methyltransferase) gene could mediate the relationship between cognition and dopamine activity in PFC. The present study tested the influence of this polymorphism on the cognitive performance of schizophrenia spectrum patients and their relatives, using some subtests of the neuropsychological battery, the Measurement and Treatment Research to Improve Cognition in Schizophrenia (MATRICS) Consensus Cognitive Battery, and evaluated the impact of this polymorphism on a specific prefrontal cognitive function using a cognitive neuroscience paradigm. A Group of 74 schizophrenia spectrum disorder patients, 48 relatives and 67 controls performed some subtests of the MATRICS Consensus Cognitive Battery. In addition, 40 schizophrenia spectrum disorder patients, 26 relatives and 63 controls performed the Dot Pattern Expectancy Task (DPX) to study context processing. For the neuropsychological battery, no differences in any of the cognitive domains were found according to genotype. The DPX task was sensitive to genotype effects in patients as well as in relatives. Context processing deficits in schizophrenia patients and their relatives may be mediated by COMT genotype. The influence of the COMT genotype on cognition is more relevant in specific cognitive tasks related to prefrontal function. These results should be replicated in larger samples.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.07.017

NeuroImage

Neuroimage

Neurocircuits underlying cognition-emotion interaction in a social decision making context.

Decision making (DM) in the context of others often entails complex cognition-emotion interaction. While the literature suggests that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), striatum, and amygdala are involved in valuation-based DM and hippocampus in context processing, how these neural mechanisms subserve the integration of cognitive and emotional values in a social context remains unclear. In this study we addressed this gap by systematically manipulating cognition-emotion interaction in a social DM context, when the participants played a card game with a hypothetical opponent in a behavioral study (n=73) and a functional magnetic-resonance-imaging study (n=16). We observed that payoff-based behavioral choices were influenced by emotional values carried by face pictures and identified neurocircuits involved in cognitive valuation, emotional valuation, and concurrent cognition-emotion value integration. Specifically, while the vmPFC, amygdala, and ventral striatum were all involved in both cognitive and emotional domains of valuation, these regions played dissociable roles in social DM. The payoff-dependent responses in vmPFC and amygdala, but not ventral striatum, were moderated by the social context. Furthermore, the vmPFC, but not amygdala, not only encoded the opponent's gains as if self's losses, but also represented a "final common currency" during valuation-based decisions. The extent to which emotional input influenced choices was associated with the functional connectivity between the value-signaling amygdala and value integrating vmPFC, and also with the functional connectivity between the context-setting hippocampus and value-signaling amygdala and ventral striatum. These results identify brain pathways through which emotion shapes subjective values in a social DM context.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1111/j.1460-9568.2012.08223.x

The European journal of neuroscience

Eur J Neurosci

Dynamics of anticipatory mechanisms during predictive context processing.

We employed an electroencephalography paradigm manipulating predictive context to dissociate the neural dynamics of anticipatory mechanisms. Subjects either detected random targets or targets preceded by a predictive sequence of three distinct stimuli. The last stimulus in the three-stimulus sequence (decisive stimulus) did not require any motor response but 100% predicted a subsequent target event. We showed that predictive context optimises target processing via the deployment of distinct anticipatory mechanisms at different times of the predictive sequence. Prior to the occurrence of the decisive stimulus, enhanced attentional preparation was manifested by reductions in the alpha oscillatory activities over the visual cortices, resulting in facilitation of processing of the decisive stimulus. Conversely, the subsequent 100% predictable target event did not reveal the deployment of attentional preparation in the visual cortices, but elicited enhanced motor preparation mechanisms, indexed by an increased contingent negative variation and reduced mu oscillatory activities over the motor cortices before movement onset. The present results provide evidence that anticipation operates via different attentional and motor preparation mechanisms by selectively pre-activating task-dependent brain areas as the predictability gradually increases.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.psychres.2012.06.011

Psychiatry research

Psychiatry Res

Theory of mind and context processing in schizophrenia: the role of cognitive flexibility.

The present study sought to identify whether cognitive flexibility and context processing may impact theory of mind (ToM) ability in schizophrenia. Thirty two patients with schizophrenia and 29 matched healthy participants were tested individually on their ToM ability using a task involving attribution and comprehension of a speaker's ironic intent. This task made it possible to determine whether the degree of incongruity between contextual information and a target sentence has an impact on the attribution of ironic intent to the protagonists of a story. Participants were also assessed on their cognitive flexibility and working memory. The main results revealed that participants with schizophrenia correctly perceived contextual information cueing attribution of ironic intent to the protagonist of the stimulus, but they showed difficulty to correctly integrate this information, performing significantly worse than healthy participants when they attributed mental states. However, some participants with schizophrenia performed like healthy control participants on the ToM task while others did not. A lack of flexibility seems to differentiate the two schizophrenia subgroups thereby obtained, suggesting that cognitive flexibility has an impact on ToM performances in schizophrenia. These difficulties were not associated with clinical symptoms. Such results will have an impact on cognitive remediation.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.euroneuro.2012.06.005

European neuropsychopharmacology : the journal of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology

Eur Neuropsychopharmacol

Effects of a small dose of olanzapine on healthy subjects according to their schizotypy: an ERP study using a semantic categorization and an oddball task.

Delusions and hallucinations are often meaningful. They thus reveal abnormal semantic activations. To start testing whether antipsychotics act by reducing abnormal semantic activations we focused on the N400 event-related brain potential, which is elicited by meaningful stimuli, such as words, and whose distribution on the scalp is known to depend on the semantic category of these stimuli. We used a semantic-categorization task specially designed to reduce the impact of the variations of context processing across subjects' groups and a classical oddball task as a control. Healthy subjects were recruited rather than psychotic patients to ensure that the medication effects could not be secondary to a reduction of symptoms. These participants (n=47) were tested in a double-blind cross-over paradigm where the ERP effects of 2.5mg of olanzapine taken on the eve of the testing were compared to those of the placebo. The amplitudes of the N400s elicited by the target words were greater at anterior scalp sites in the half of the subjects having higher schizotypal scores. Olanzapine reduced these larger N400s and had no effect on the small anterior N400s of the half of the subjects with lower scores. These results are discussed as consistent with the idea that antipsychotics reduce abnormal activations of particular semantic representations. Further studies should thus be done to see if this reduction correlates with and predicts the decrease of psychotic symptoms in patients.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.2174/138161212802884735

Current pharmaceutical design

Curr Pharm Des

Antipsychotic profile of cannabidiol and rimonabant in an animal model of emotional context processing in schizophrenia.

Clinical and neurobiological findings suggest that cannabinoids and their receptors are implicated in schizophrenia. Cannabidiol (CBD), a non-psychotomimetic compound of the Cannabis sativa plant, has been reported to have central therapeutic actions, such as antipsychotic and anxiolytic effects. We have recently reported that spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR) present a deficit in contextual fear conditioning (CFC) that is specifically ameliorated by antipsychotics and aggravated by proschizophrenia manipulations. These results led us to suggest that the CFC deficit presented by SHR could be used as a model to study emotional processing impairment in schizophrenia. The aim of this study is to evaluate the effects of CBD and rimonabant (CB1 receptor antagonist) on the contextual fear conditioning in SHR and Wistar rats (WR). Rats were submitted to CFC task after treatment with different doses of CBD (experiment 1) and rimonabant (experiment 2). In experiment 1, SHR showed a decreased freezing response when compared to WR that was attenuated by 1 mg/kg CBD. Moreover, all CBD-treated WR presented a decreased freezing response when compared to control rats. In experiment 2, SHR showed a decreased freezing response when compared to WR that was attenuated by 3 mg/kg rimonabant. Our results suggest a potential therapeutical effect of CBD and rimonabant to treat the emotional processing impairment presented in schizophrenia. In addition, our results reinforce the anxiolytic profile of CBD.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.psychres.2012.04.014

Psychiatry research

Psychiatry Res

Emotional context processing in severe mental illness: scale development and preliminary construct validity.

There is growing recognition that emotional context may play an important role in emotion perception and severe mental illness (SMI). Limited instruments directly assess and adequately account for emotional context processing. To measure this construct in schizophrenia research, this study aimed to develop and validate the Emotional Context Processing Scale (ECOS) using cartoon portrayals originally developed by Masuda et al. (2008). In Study 1, we piloted the measure with 99 college students and selected 20 cartoon portrayals (4 simple emotions only+16 simple emotions with contextual emotions). In Study 2, we confirmed the emotion-specificity and factor structure of the measure by administering it to 73 individuals with SMI. Item response theory (IRT) modeling confirmed a 4-factor structure of the ECOS, providing evidence that emotional context processing is specific to particular emotions. Internal consistency of the ECOS subscales ranged from 0.61 to 0.83. In Study 3, we examined the convergent and divergent validity of the ECOS in a separate sample of 36 individuals with SMI. Even after controlling for facial affect perception, the ECOS is uniquely related to multi-modal emotion perception and executive functioning measures.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5153-11.2012

The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience

J Neurosci

A corticostriatal neural system enhances auditory perception through temporal context processing.

The temporal context of an acoustic signal can greatly influence its perception. The present study investigated the neural correlates underlying perceptual facilitation by regular temporal contexts in humans. Participants listened to temporally regular (periodic) or temporally irregular (nonperiodic) sequences of tones while performing an intensity discrimination task. Participants performed significantly better on intensity discrimination during periodic than nonperiodic tone sequences. There was greater activation in the putamen for periodic than nonperiodic sequences. Conversely, there was greater activation in bilateral primary and secondary auditory cortices (planum polare and planum temporale) for nonperiodic than periodic sequences. Across individuals, greater putamen activation correlated with lesser auditory cortical activation in both right and left hemispheres. These findings suggest that temporal regularity is detected in the putamen, and that such detection facilitates temporal-lobe cortical processing associated with superior auditory perception. Thus, this study reveals a corticostriatal system associated with contextual facilitation for auditory perception through temporal regularity processing.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1093/schbul/sbs063

Schizophrenia bulletin

Schizophr Bull

An intact social cognitive process in schizophrenia: situational context effects on perception of facial affect.

Impaired facial affect recognition is the most consistent social cognitive finding in schizophrenia. Although social situations provide powerful constraints on our perception, little is known about how situational context modulates facial affect recognition in schizophrenia. Study 1 was a single-site study with 34 schizophrenia patients and 22 healthy controls. Study 2 was a 2-site study with 68 schizophrenia patients and 28 controls. Both studies administered a Situational Context Facial Affect Recognition Task with 2 conditions: a situational context condition and a no-context condition. For the situational context condition, a briefly shown face was preceded by a sentence describing either a fear- or surprise-inducing event. In the no-context condition, a face was presented without a sentence. For both conditions, subjects rated how fearful or surprised the face appeared on a 9-point Likert scale. For the situational context condition of study 1, both patients and controls rated faces as more afraid when they were paired with fear-inducing sentences and as more surprised when they were paired with surprise-inducing sentences. The degree of modulation was comparable across groups. For the no-context condition, patients rated faces comparably to controls. The findings of study 2 replicated those from study 1. Despite previous abnormalities in other types of context paradigms, this study found intact situational context processing in schizophrenia, suggesting that patients benefit from situational context when interpreting ambiguous facial expression. This area of relative social cognitive strength in schizophrenia has implications for social cognitive training programs.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1093/schbul/sbr172

Schizophrenia bulletin

Schizophr Bull

Optimization of a goal maintenance task for use in clinical applications.

We sought to develop a Dot Pattern Expectancy task (DPX) to assess goal maintenance for use in clinical trials. Altering the standard task created 5 versions of the DPX to compare-a standard version and 4 others. Alterations in the interstimulus interval (ISI) length and the strength of a learned prepotent response distinguished the different tasks. These adjustments were designed to decrease administration time and/or improve reliability of the data. We determined participant eligibility in an initial session (the first of 3) using clinical interviewing tools. The initial session also included a demographic assessment and assessments of community functioning and symptom severity. All versions of the DPX were administered, across 3 sessions. Specific deficits on the context processing compared with difficulty control condition were evaluated using mixed-effects logistic regression within a hierarchical linear model. We analyzed the data from 136 control participants and 138 participants with schizophrenia. Relative to a difficulty control condition, patients performed worse than controls on context processing conditions that required goal maintenance. ISI did not predict errors. Stronger prepotency was associated with increased errors in the difficulty control relative to context processing condition for controls, which improved the interpretability of findings for patients. Reliability was acceptable for a version of the task with a 10-minute running time. The best compromise between task duration and interpretability occurred on a version with a short ISI and a strong prepotency.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.tics.2011.11.015

Trends in cognitive sciences

Trends Cogn Sci

Cognition in schizophrenia: core psychological and neural mechanisms.

The challenge in understanding cognitive impairment in schizophrenia is that people with this illness have deficits in an array of domains. Here, we briefly review evidence regarding the pattern of deficits within three domains: context processing, working memory and episodic memory. We suggest that there may be a common mechanism driving deficits in these domains - an impairment in the ability to actively represent goal information in working memory to guide behavior, a function we refer to as proactive control. We suggest that such deficits in proactive control reflect impairments in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, its interactions with other brain regions, such as parietal cortex, thalamus and striatum, and the influence of neurotransmitter systems, such as dopamine, GABA and glutamate.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.3389/fnhum.2011.00152

Frontiers in human neuroscience

Front Hum Neurosci

Disparity Context Processing in the Primate Brain: And If the Question was Both "What" and "When"….

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1080/0361073X.2011.619874

Experimental aging research

Exp Aging Res

Context processing in aging: older mice are impaired in renewal of extinguished fear.

Fear conditioning, extinction, and renewal were evaluated in adult (6-month-old) and aging (17-month-old) male C57Bl/6 mice. Mice were subjected to five tone-shock trials and later exposed to 150 tone-alone trials. Thereafter, all mice showed little fear in the extinction context. Adult mice demonstrated return of fear in a distinct context (renewal) but aging mice did not. Aging mice showed normal shock sensitivity, tone fear learning, and extinction. Aging mice thus exhibited a very selective deficit in the contextual gating of extinguished fear. This contextual gating deficit may reflect age-related pathology in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.concog.2011.09.004

Consciousness and cognition

Conscious Cogn

Setting the stage subliminally: unconscious context effects.

An important approach to understand how the brain gives rise to consciousness is to probe the depth of unconscious processing, thus to define the key features that cause conscious awareness. Here, we investigate the possibility for subliminal stimuli to shape the context for unconscious processing. Context effects have generally been assumed to require consciousness. In the present experiment, unconscious context processing was investigated by looking at the impact of the context on the response activation elicited by a subliminal prime. We compared the effects of the same subliminal prime on target processing when the prime was embedded in different unconscious contexts. Results showed that the same prime can evoke opposite responses depending on the unconscious context in which it is presented. Taken together, the results of this study show that context effects can be unconscious.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.adolescence.2011.08.004

Journal of adolescence

J Adolesc

Unique relations of age and delinquency with cognitive control.

Context processing has significant empirical support as an explanation of age- and psychopathology-related deficiencies in cognitive control. We examined whether context processing generalizes to younger individuals who are in trouble with the law. We tested whether age and delinquency might have unique relations to context processing skills in four samples of male participants: adolescent offenders (n = 43), control adolescents (n = 33), young adult offenders (n = 40), and control young adults (n = 31). We used a modified Stroop task to measure context processing (i.e., attention, memory, and response inhibition). Task performance was superior for older participants in conditions most demanding of context processing skills. Adolescent offenders and control adolescents showed difficulties engaging selective attention to filter out irrelevant information, even after controlling for the effects of age. Control adolescents made the most errors in the condition most demanding of context processing, whereas the other three samples showed slower processing but fewer errors in context processing.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1037/a0025098

Psychology and aging

Psychol Aging

Genetic architecture of context processing in late middle age: more than one underlying mechanism.

Studies comparing young and older adults suggest a deficit in processing context information as a key mechanism underlying cognitive aging. However, the genetic architecture of context processing has not been examined. Consistent with previous results, we found evidence of functionally dissociable components of context processing accuracy in 1127 late middle-aged twins ages 51-60. One component emphasizes use of context cues to prepare responses (proactive cognitive control), and the other emphasizes adjustment of responses after probes are presented (reactive control). Approximately one-quarter of the variance in each component was accounted for by genes. Multivariate twin analysis indicated that genetic factors underlying two important components of context processing were independent of one another, thus implicating more than one underlying mechanism. Slower reaction time (RT) on noncontext processing trials was positively correlated with errors on the strongly proactive control component on which young adults outperform older adults, but RT was negatively correlated with errors on the strongly reactive control component on which older adults perform better. Although this RT measure was uncorrelated with chronological age in our age-homogeneous sample, slower RT was associated with performance patterns that were more like older adults. However, this did not generalize to other processing speed measures. Genetic correlations, which reflect shared genetic variance, paralleled the phenotypic correlations. There was also a positive genetic correlation between general cognitive ability and accuracy on the proactive control component, but there were still mostly distinct genetic influences underlying these measures. In contrast, the reactive control component was unrelated to general cognitive ability.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.neulet.2011.07.022

Neuroscience letters

Neurosci Lett

Cortical mechanisms of visual context processing in singleton search.

When searching for a target object presented in a context of other, irrelevant objects, the dissimilarity between target and surrounding context elements as well as the similarity between context elements themselves affect search efficiency. The present functional imaging study explored the cortical mechanisms involved in processing the same target when surrounded by context arrangements of varying homogeneity. Results showed that brain activity increased in the precuneus, cingulate gyrus, and the middle temporal gyrus as context homogeneity and local feature contrast increased. Contexts with low homogeneity and local feature contrast, compared to contexts with high homogeneity and local feature contrast, increasingly involved areas near the corpus callosum and the medial frontal gyrus. The results support the assumption that contextual grouping and local target detection both contribute to perform the visual search task.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.schres.2011.05.028

Schizophrenia research

Schizophr Res

The effect of emotional context on facial emotion ratings in schizophrenia.

Individuals with schizophrenia show deficits both in facial emotion recognition and context processing (Kohler, C.G., Walker, J.B., Martin, E.A., Healey, K.M., Moberg, P.J., 2010. Facial emotion perception in schizophrenia: a meta-analytic review. Schizophr. Bull. 36, 1009-1019). Recent evidence suggests context information can affect facial emotion recognition (Aviezer, H., Bentin, S., Hassin, R.R., Meschino, W.S., Kennedy, J., Grewal, S., Esmail, S., Cohen, S., Moscovitch, M., 2009. Not on the face alone: perception of contextualized face expressions in Huntington's disease. Brain 132, 1633-1644). Thus, individuals with schizophrenia may have deficits in facial emotion processing, at least in part, due to impairments in processing context information (Green, M.J., Waldron, J.H., Coltheart, M., 2007. Emotional context processing is impaired in schizophrenia. Cogn. Neuropsychiatry 12, 259-280.). We used a novel experimental task, the Emotion Context Processing Task (ECPT) to examine the influences of emotional context (IAPS pictures) on the processing of subtle surprised faces in schizophrenia. One of the task conditions included a manipulation designed to determine whether enhancing attention to the context (by requiring a categorization judgment on the context pictures) would facilitate the influence of context on facial emotion processing in schizophrenia. In addition, we tested whether deficits on a non-social context processing would predict deficits in the influence of context on facial emotion processing in schizophrenia. We administered the Dot Probe Expectancy Task (a non-social context processing task) and the ECPT to individuals with schizophrenia (n=35) and healthy controls (n=32). Individuals with schizophrenia showed an intact influence of context information on facial emotion recognition. The manipulation designed to enhance attention to emotional context reduced the effect of context for both groups. In schizophrenia, better processing of non-social context was associated with a stronger influence of context on valence ratings of facial expressions in the negative context condition. These results suggest in schizophrenia, similar mechanisms may influence the processing of context for both social and non-social information.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1177/0018720811402068

Human factors

Hum Factors

Preparatory processes and compensatory effort in older and younger participants in a driving-like dual task.

The nature of increased-age-related dual-task interference was examined during a driving-like dual task in the laboratory. Previous research revealed age-related deficits in dual tasks especially when cognitive and motor demands are involved. The specific contributions of sensory input, working memory demands, and/or coordination of motor responses to dual-task interference are not clear and should be clarified in the present study. Younger and older participants performed a driving-like tracking task and a visually cued attention task within a dual task. Behavioral and electrophysiological data were recorded during task performance. Overall tracking performance was lower for the older versus younger participants. This age-related decline was particularly pronounced in the time interval after the stimulus when the attention task demanded a motor response. In contrast, older participants tracked relatively better than the younger participants in the time interval preceding the stimulus. In the attention task, the older versus younger participants showed increased responses times and rates of false alarms and misses, suggesting a deficit in retaining the context in the cue-stimulus interval. The electroencephalogram data suggest that the older participants invested more resources than the younger participants in dual-task management during the cue-stimulus interval. Evidence was found for increased motor interference and a deficient context processing as well as for an increased investment of processing resources in the older compared with the younger group. The results suggest that in-vehicle information systems for older drivers should be designed to support cue maintenance and that simultaneous motor demands should not be required.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1093/schbul/sbr055

Schizophrenia bulletin

Schizophr Bull

Visual context processing deficits in schizophrenia: effects of deafness and disorganization.

Visual illusions allow for strong tests of perceptual functioning. Perceptual impairments can produce superior task performance on certain tasks (i.e., more veridical perception), thereby avoiding generalized deficit confounds while tapping mechanisms that are largely outside of conscious control. Using a task based on the Ebbinghaus illusion, a perceptual phenomenon where the perceived size of a central target object is affected by the size of surrounding inducers, we tested hypotheses related to visual integration in deaf (n = 31) and hearing (n = 34) patients with schizophrenia. In past studies, psychiatrically healthy samples displayed increased visual integration relative to schizophrenia samples and thus were less able to correctly judge target sizes. Deafness, and especially the use of sign language, leads to heightened sensitivity to peripheral visual cues and increased sensitivity to visual context. Therefore, relative to hearing subjects, deaf subjects were expected to display increased context sensitivity (ie, a more normal illusion effect as evidenced by a decreased ability to correctly judge central target sizes). Confirming the hypothesis, deaf signers were significantly more sensitive to the illusion than nonsigning hearing patients. Moreover, an earlier age of sign language acquisition, higher levels of linguistic ability, and shorter illness duration were significantly related to increased context sensitivity. As predicted, disorganization was associated with reduced context sensitivity for all subjects. The primary implications of these data are that perceptual organization impairment in schizophrenia is plastic and that it is related to a broader failure in coordinating cognitive activity.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.schres.2011.05.021

Schizophrenia research

Schizophr Res

Neural basis of semantic priming in schizophrenia during a lexical decision task: a magneto-encephalography study.

Numerous behavioral and electrophysiological studies have provided evidence of abnormal semantic processing in schizophrenia. However, the neural basis of these deficits is poorly understood. We investigated magnetic cortical responses elicited by a word-pair lexical decision task in 20 patients with schizophrenia and 12 healthy control subjects. The task involved presentation of a prime word (200 ms), followed by a blank (250 ms), and then a target stimulus (1200 ms); the subject had to decide whether the target was a real word or not. During this task, bilateral temporal and left prefrontal activations were observed in both groups. However, in contrast to controls, patients with schizophrenia did not show increased activation in the left temporal and anterior cingulate cortices between 200 and 450 ms in response to semantic incongruity. These results suggested that schizophrenia was associated with a functional disturbance in some semantic regions that gave rise to the N400 component. Moreover, a significant modulation in the right temporal cortex was observed in patients, but not in controls. This suggested the existence of alternative processes in patients because both groups showed similar behavioral priming. Finally, we elucidated some functional abnormalities in the semantic network during prime word processing in patients, indicated by prolonged activation compared to healthy controls. Thus, in addition to context integration impairment, abnormal activations during the prime word provided new evidence of context processing deficits in schizophrenia.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1080/17470218.2011.577226

Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006)

Q J Exp Psychol (Hove)

Integrating working memory capacity and context-processing views of cognitive control.

Individuals low in working memory capacity (WMC) exhibit impaired performance on a variety of cognitive control tasks. The executive-attention theory of WMC (Engle & Kane, 2004) accounts for these findings as failures of goal maintenance and response conflict resolution. Similarly, the context-processing view (Braver et al., 2001) provides an explanation of cognitive control deficits observed in schizophrenia patients and older adults that is based on the ability to maintain context information. Instead of maintenance deficits, the inhibition view (Hasher, Lustig, & Zacks, 2007) states that older adults and individuals low in WMC primarily have an impairment in the ability to inhibit information. In the current experiment, we explored the relationships among these theories. Individuals differing in performance on complex span measures of WMC performed the AX-Continuous Performance Test to measure context-processing performance. High-WMC individuals were predicted to maintain the context afforded by the cue, whereas low-WMC individuals were predicted to fail to maintain the context information. Low-WMC individuals made more errors on AX and BX trials and were slower to respond correctly on AX, BX, and BY trials. The overall pattern of results is most consistent with both the executive-attention and context-processing theories of cognitive control.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1002/hipo.20958

Hippocampus

Hippocampus

Complimentary roles of the hippocampus and retrosplenial cortex in behavioral context discrimination.

Complex cognitive functions, such as learning and memory, arise from the interaction of multiple brain regions that comprise functional circuits and different components of these circuits make unique contributions to learning. The hippocampus and the retrosplenial cortex (RSC) are anatomically interconnected and both regions are involved in learning and memory. Previous studies indicate that the hippocampus exhibits unique firing patterns for different contexts and that RSC neurons selectively respond to cues that predict reinforcement or the need for a behavioral response, suggesting a hippocampal role in encoding contexts and an RSC role in encoding behaviorally significant cues. To test this, we simultaneously recorded hippocampal and RSC neuronal activity as rats learned to discriminate two behavioral contexts. The rats learned to approach the east arm of a plus maze for reward during the first half of each session and to approach the west arm during the second half. The "go east" and "go west" conditions constitute distinct behavioral contexts, which were cued by the reward location. Neurons in both regions developed highly context-specific responses as subjects learned to discriminate the contexts, but the response patterns differed in the two brain regions. Consistent with a context processing role, hippocampal neurons developed context-specific responses to a variety of task stimuli and events. In contrast, RSC neurons only developed context-specific responses to the reward location, which served as the context identifying cue. These results suggest that the hippocampus and RSC play distinct, but complimentary roles in mediating context appropriate memories and behaviors.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.jpsychires.2011.04.004

Journal of psychiatric research

J Psychiatr Res

Alogia and formal thought disorder: differential patterns of verbal fluency task performance.

There is evidence that alogia and formal thought disorder (FTD), two prominent speech symptoms in schizophrenia, are associated with different patterns of verbal fluency task deficits. Verbal fluency is thought to involve several cognitive mechanisms, including controlled retrieval, semantic memory, and context processing. The current research examined whether alogia and FTD were associated with different patterns of verbal fluency performance and whether these patterns of verbal fluency performance would implicate deficits in controlled retrieval, semantic memory, or context processing. In the current research, 34 people with schizophrenia completed letter and category fluency tasks and detailed ratings of alogia and FTD symptoms were made from typed transcripts. Overall, alogia was associated with increased response latency between each word on the category fluency task, suggesting an association between alogia and poor controlled retrieval. In contrast, FTD was associated with a decreased proportion of semantically-related words on letter fluency, suggesting an association between FTD and poor context processing. Alogia and FTD appear to be associated with unique patterns of fluency performance, implicating separate cognitive mechanisms.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1002/hipo.20953

Hippocampus

Hippocampus

Hippocampal context processing is critical for interference free recall of odor memories in rats.

Interference is a critical problem for memory systems and a primary cause of retrieval failure. One strategy for minimizing interference is to associate the items to be remembered with the context in which they were learned. For example, human subjects who learn two lists of words in separate contexts experience less interference and better recall than subjects who learn both lists in the same context. The hippocampus has long been known to be involved in processing contextual information and recent studies have shown that hippocampal neurons exhibit context-unique firing patterns that could serve as a neural representation of the context. These observations suggest that hippocampal context processing may play a critical role in overcoming interference. To test this hypothesis, we adapted the context based list learning procedure for use with rats. Control rats and rats given temporary lesions of the hippocampus were trained on two lists of eight odor pairs, either in the same context or in different contexts. To induce interference, some of the odors appeared on both lists with their predictive value reversed. As with human subjects, rats that learned the two lists in different contexts performed significantly better than rats that learned the lists in the same context. However, hippocampal lesions completely abolished this contextual learning advantage. We also trained rats on a low interference version of the task by using lists that did not contain any common items. Interestingly, rats with hippocampal lesions were entirely unimpaired when the learning situation did not involve high levels of interference. These findings are consistent with the idea that the hippocampus encodes contexts and further suggest that hippocampal context coding is beneficial because it provides a means of overcoming interference.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1037/a0023582

Behavioral neuroscience

Behav Neurosci

Spontaneous recovery but not reinstatement of the extinguished conditioned eyeblink response in the rat.

Reinstatement--the return of an extinguished conditioned response (CR) after reexposure to the unconditioned stimulus (US)--and spontaneous recovery--the return of an extinguished CR with the passage of time--are 2 of 4 well-established phenomena that demonstrate that extinction does not erase the conditioned stimulus (CS)-US association. However, reinstatement of extinguished eyeblink CRs has never been demonstrated, and spontaneous recovery of extinguished eyeblink CRs has not been systematically demonstrated in rodent eyeblink conditioning. In Experiment 1, US reexposure was administered 24 hr prior to a reinstatement test. In Experiment 2, US reexposure was administered 5 min prior to a reinstatement test. In Experiment 3, a long, discrete cue (a houselight), present in all phases of training and testing, served as a context within which each trial occurred to maximize context processing, which in other preparations has been shown to be required for reinstatement. In Experiment 4, an additional group was included that received footshock exposure, rather than US reexposure, between extinction and test, and contextual freezing was measured prior to test. Spontaneous recovery was robust in Experiments 3 and 4. In Experiment 4, context freezing was strong in a group given footshock exposure but not in a group given eye shock US reexposure. There was no reinstatement observed in any experiment. With stimulus conditions that produce eyeblink conditioning and research designs that produce reinstatement in other forms of classical conditioning, we observed spontaneous recovery but not reinstatement of extinguished eyeblink CRs. This suggests that reinstatement, but not spontaneous recovery, is a preparation- or substrate-dependent phenomenon.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1073/pnas.1013760108

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A

Early onset of neural synchronization in the contextual associations network.

Objects are more easily recognized in their typical context. However, is contextual information activated early enough to facilitate the perception of individual objects, or is contextual facilitation caused by postperceptual mechanisms? To elucidate this issue, we first need to study the temporal dynamics and neural interactions associated with contextual processing. Studies have shown that the contextual network consists of the parahippocampal, retrosplenial, and medial prefrontal cortices. We used functional MRI, magnetoencephalography, and phase synchrony analyses to compare the neural response to stimuli with strong or weak contextual associations. The context network was activated in functional MRI and preferentially synchronized in magnetoencephalography (MEG) for stimuli with strong contextual associations. Phase synchrony increased early (150-250 ms) only when it involved the parahippocampal cortex, whereas retrosplenial-medial prefrontal cortices synchrony was enhanced later (300-400 ms). These results describe the neural dynamics of context processing and suggest that context is activated early during object perception.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.01.018

Neuropsychologia

Neuropsychologia

Neural correlates of language comprehension in autism spectrum disorders: when language conflicts with world knowledge.

In individuals with ASD, difficulties with language comprehension are most evident when higher-level semantic-pragmatic language processing is required, for instance when context has to be used to interpret the meaning of an utterance. Until now, it is unclear at what level of processing and for what type of context these difficulties in language comprehension occur. Therefore, in the current fMRI study, we investigated the neural correlates of the integration of contextual information during auditory language comprehension in 24 adults with ASD and 24 matched control participants. Different levels of context processing were manipulated by using spoken sentences that were correct or contained either a semantic or world knowledge anomaly. Our findings demonstrated significant differences between the groups in inferior frontal cortex that were only present for sentences with a world knowledge anomaly. Relative to the ASD group, the control group showed significantly increased activation in left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) for sentences with a world knowledge anomaly compared to correct sentences. This effect possibly indicates reduced integrative capacities of the ASD group. Furthermore, world knowledge anomalies elicited significantly stronger activation in right inferior frontal gyrus (RIFG) in the control group compared to the ASD group. This additional RIFG activation probably reflects revision of the situation model after new, conflicting information. The lack of recruitment of RIFG is possibly related to difficulties with exception handling in the ASD group.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1037/a0020222

Psychology and aging

Psychol Aging

How does context affect assessments of facial emotion? The role of culture and age.

People from Asian cultures are more influenced by context in their visual processing than people from Western cultures. In this study, we examined how these cultural differences in context processing affect how people interpret facial emotions. We found that younger Koreans were more influenced than younger Americans by emotional background pictures when rating the emotion of a central face, especially those younger Koreans with low self-rated stress. In contrast, among older adults, neither Koreans nor Americans showed significant influences of context in their face emotion ratings. These findings suggest that cultural differences in reliance on context to interpret others' emotions depend on perceptual integration processes that decline with age, leading to fewer cultural differences in perception among older adults than among younger adults. Furthermore, when asked to recall the background pictures, younger participants recalled more negative pictures than positive pictures, whereas older participants recalled similar numbers of positive and negative pictures. These age differences in the valence of memory were consistent across culture.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1037/a0018527

Journal of experimental psychology. Animal behavior processes

J Exp Psychol Anim Behav Process

Ambiguity and context processing in human predictive learning.

Two experiments explored the role of ambiguity on context processing by using relative stimulus validity designs in human predictive learning. Two groups of participants were trained with 2 stimulus compounds (XY and XZ). In Group TD (true discrimination), compound XY was always followed by the outcome, whereas compound XZ was never followed by it. In Group PD (pseudodiscrimination) the presentation of each compound was followed by the outcome in half of the trials. Experiment 1 found that pseudodiscrimination facilitated context dependency of reliable predictors regardless of whether they were trained in the same context in which pseudodiscrimination took place or in an alternative context in which true discrimination was conducted. Experiment 2 found context dependency of reliable predictors trained and tested in PD contexts, suggesting that the ambiguity in the meaning of the cues produced by pseudodiscrimination training is at least partially responsible for the context switch effects found in ambiguous situations in human predictive learning.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.07.036

NeuroImage

Neuroimage

What is right-hemisphere contribution to phonological, lexico-semantic, and sentence processing? Insights from a meta-analysis.

To evaluate the relative role of left and right hemispheres (RH) and describe the functional anatomy of RH during ortholinguistic tasks, we re-analyzed the 128 papers of a former left-hemisphere (LH) meta-analysis (Vigneau et al., 2006). Of these, 59 articles reported RH participation, providing 105 RH language contrasts including 218 peaks compared to 728 on the left, a proportion reflecting the LH language dominance. To describe inter-hemispheric interactions, in each of the language contrasts involving both hemispheres, we distinguished between unilateral and bilateral peaks, i.e. having homotopic activation in the LH in the same contrast. We also calculated the proportion of bilateral peaks in the LH. While the majority of LH peaks were unilateral (79%), a reversed pattern was observed in the RH; this demonstrates that, in contrast to the LH, the RH works in an inter-hemispheric manner. To analyze the regional pattern of RH participation, these unilateral and bilateral peaks were spatially clustered for each language component. Most RH phonological clusters corresponded to bilateral recruitment of auditory and motor cortices. Notably, the motor representation of the mouth and phonological working memory areas were exclusively left-lateralized, supporting the idea that the RH does not host phonological representations. Right frontal participation was not specific for the language component involved and appeared related to the recruitment of attentional and working memory areas. The fact that RH participation during lexico-semantic tasks was limited to these executive activations is compatible with the hypothesis that active inhibition is exerted from the LH during the processing of meaning. Only during sentence/text processing tasks a specific unilateral RH-temporal involvement was noted, likely related to context processing. These results are consistent with split-brain studies that found that the RH has a limited lexicon, with no phonological abilities but active involvement in the processing of context.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1007/s00213-010-1934-4

Psychopharmacology

Psychopharmacology (Berl)

5-HT modulation by acute tryptophan depletion of human instrumental contingency judgements.

The concept of 'depressive realism', that depression leads to more accurate perception of causal control, has been influential in the field of depression research, but remains controversial. Recent work testing contingency learning has suggested that contextual processing might determine realism-like effects. Serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine, (5-HT)), which is implicated in the pathophysiology of depression, might also influence contextual processing. Using acute tryptophan depletion (ATD), we tested the hypothesis that dysfunctional serotoninergic neurotransmission influences contingency judgements in dysphoric subjects via an effect on contextual processing. We employed a novel contingency learning task to obtain separate measures (ratings) of the causal effect of participants' responses and efficacy of the background context over an outcome. Participants, without a history of depression, completed this task on and off ATD in a double-blind, placebo-controlled, within-subjects design. As with other work on contingency learning, the effects of ATD were related to baseline mood levels. Although no overall effects of ATD were observed, the subgroup of participants with low Beck depression inventory (BDI) scores showed reduced ratings of contextual control and improved accuracy of contingency judgements under positive contingencies following ATD, compared to placebo. High BDI participants demonstrated low accuracy in contingency judgements, regardless of serotoninergic status. No effect of ATD on contingency judgements was observed in the group as a whole, but effects were observed in a subgroup of participants with low BDI scores. We discuss these data in light of the context processing hypothesis, and prior research on 5-HT and depressive realism.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1037/a0017828

Psychological assessment

Psychol Assess

The dot pattern expectancy task: reliability and replication of deficits in schizophrenia.

The dot pattern expectancy (DPX) task was created to efficiently assess context-processing deficits in patients with schizophrenia. Three studies investigated the characteristics of the DPX relevant for clinical applications. To answer questions regarding the psychometric properties of the task, performance on this task was studied in 2 healthy samples. Acceptable reliability and internal consistency and retest reliability were found for most measures of context processing, but not for a difficulty control condition. These characteristics were also found in a suggested brief version (DPX(brf)), which may be more practical for clinical purposes. In a 3rd study, schizophrenia patients showed a specific deficit in context processing, replicating previous findings. Findings of these studies indicated some promise for use of this task in measuring context processing and also identified characteristics of this task that need to be strengthened to increase reliability, feasibility, and single-subject interpretability.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing

10.1093/schbul/sbq012

Schizophrenia bulletin

Schizophr Bull

The effect of context processing on different aspects of social cognition in schizophrenia.

It is well known that individuals with schizophrenia have impaired social cognition. The construct of social cognition involves several components, including perception, interpretation, and the ability to integrate context (Adolphs R. The neurobiology of social cognition. Curr Opin Neurobiol. 2001;11:231-239; Brothers L. The social brain: a project for integrating primate behavior and neurophysiology in a new domain. Concepts Neurosci. 1990;1:27-61). Importantly, a number of studies have suggested that deficits in context processing underlie cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia (Penn DL, Corrigan PW, Bentall RP, Racenstein JM, Newman L. Social cognition in schizophrenia. Psychol Bull. 1997;121(1):114-132; Green MF, Nuechterlein KH. Should schizophrenia be treated as a neurocognitive disorder? Schizophr Bull. 1999;25:309-319). Thus, the purpose of the current study was to investigate the relationship between context processing and different aspects of social cognition in schizophrenia. Individuals with schizophrenia (n = 41) and the healthy controls (n = 32) participated in this study. The participants completed 2 sections of The Awareness of Social Inference Test: (1) social inference minimal (SI-M) and (2) social inference enriched (SI-E). They also completed face and voice emotion discrimination tasks. In addition, we used the AX-Continuous Performance Test (AX-CPT) to measure context processing and the n-back task to measure working memory more generally. AX-CPT performance in schizophrenia was positively correlated with both SI-M and SI-E performance but not with either the face or the voice discrimination. Furthermore, the correlation between AX-CPT performance and SI-M/SI-E performance was significantly stronger in individuals with schizophrenia than in controls. These results suggest that impairments in context processing are related to inferential components of social cognition in schizophrenia but not to the ability to recognition facial or vocal emotion. As such, deficits in context processing may contribute to deficits in both "hot" and "cold" aspects of cognition in schizophrenia.

CognitiveConstruct

ContextProcessing