No abstract

Emotional stimuli interfere with other kinds of stimuli processing because they capture attentional resources in accordance with their adaptive importance. This suggests that it would be more difficult to inhibit emotional faces than neutral ones or objects. The present study evaluates the effects of facial emotional expressions on inhibitory processing using event-related brain potentials in a Go/NoGo paradigm. Event-related potentials were obtained in healthy subjects during emotional inhibition tasks involving anger and happiness, compared to non-emotional tasks based on simple objects and gender. Emotional tasks exhibited poorer performance than non-emotional ones. P3 latencies were longer during response inhibition to emotional faces than those obtained while inhibiting non-emotional stimuli. This study provides evidence that facial emotional content interferes with response inhibition since it may elicit additional neural resource demands.

We study the cognitive processing of visual working memory in three different conditions of memory load and configuration change. Altering this features has been shown to alter the brain’s processing in memory tasks. Most studies dealing with this issue have used the verbal-phonological modality. We use complex geometric polygons to assess visual working memory in a modified change detection task. Three different types of backgrounds were used to manipulate memory loading and 18 complex geometric polygons to manipulate stimuli configuration. The goal of our study was to test whether the memory load and configuration affect the correct-recall ratios. We expected that increasing visual items loading and changing configuration of items would induce differences in working memory performance. Brain activity related to the task was assessed through event-related potentials (ERP), during the test phase of each trial. Our results showed that visual items loading and changing of item configuration affect working memory on test phase on ERP component P2, but does not affect performance. However frontal related ERP component—P3—was minimally affected by visual memory loading or configuration changing, supporting that working memory is related to a filtering processing in posterior brain regions.

Memory is an important process of human behavior. In particular visual memory encode, store, and retrieve acquired knowledge about the environment. The visual memory system involves different kinds of processes, such as sensory input and short-term visual memory. The model presents a first approach for visual memory recognition that supports the three stages mentioned above. The model design is based on neuroscience results. The model consists of nodes. Each node represents a brain area that is involved in the visual memory system. The nodes run in a distributed system and send messages with visual memory information. This document presents only the memory system specifications that support a cognitive architecture for visual object identification. The authors validated the model with two case studies: known and unknown stimulus.

Objetivo. El presente estudio tuvo como propósito analizar las propiedades psicométricas de la versión española del Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) (Pérez-Albéniz et al., 2003) en universitarios, para su adaptación al contexto Mexicano. Material y Método. El IRI se aplicó a 729 estudiantes de pregrado de diversas facultades de la Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. Resultados. Los resultados indican que la adaptación del IRI muestra una adecuada consistencia interna (α=.82), y el análisis confirmatorio corroboró la estructura teórica de cuatro factores, similar a la versión original. Asimismo, se presentaron diferencias de género en las dimensiones afectivas, pero no en las cognitivas. Conclusión. El estudio proporciona una adecuada adaptación del IRI para ser utilizado en población mexicana con características similares a los de esta investigación. Sin embargo, se sugiere ampliar la muestra en otras zonas del país para generalizar su validez en todo el territorio mexicano.