Explore the vast range of titles available.

Cortical morphology is known to differ with age, as measured by cortical thickness, fractal dimensionality, and gyrification. However, head motion during MRI scanning has been shown to influence estimates of cortical thickness as well as increase with age. Studies have also found task-related differences in head motion and relationships between body–mass index (BMI) and head motion. Here I replicated these prior findings, as well as several others, within a large, open-access dataset (Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience, CamCAN). This is a larger dataset than these results have been demonstrated previously, within a sample size of more than 600 adults across the adult lifespan. While replicating prior findings is important, demonstrating these key findings concurrently also provides an opportunity for additional related analyses: critically, I test for the influence of head motion on cortical fractal dimensionality and gyrification; effects were statistically significant in some cases, but small in magnitude.

Emotional arousal is well-known to enhance memory for individual items or events, whereas it can impair association memory. The neural mechanism of this association memory impairment by emotion is not known: In response to emotionally arousing information, amygdala activity may interfere with hippocampal associative encoding (e.g., via prefrontal cortex). Alternatively, emotional information may be harder to unitize, resulting in reduced availability of extra-hippocampal medial temporal lobe support for emotional than neutral associations. To test these opposing hypotheses, we compared neural processes underlying successful and unsuccessful encoding of emotional and neutral associations. Participants intentionally studied pairs of neutral and negative pictures (Experiments 1–3). We found reduced association-memory for negative pictures in all experiments, accompanied by item-memory increases in Experiment 2. High-resolution fMRI (Experiment 3) indicated that reductions in associative encoding of emotional information are localizable to an area in ventral-lateral amygdala, driven by attentional/salience effects in the central amygdala. Hippocampal activity was similar during both pair types, but a left hippocampal cluster related to successful encoding was observed only for negative pairs. Extra-hippocampal associative memory processes (e.g., unitization) were more effective for neutral than emotional materials. Our findings suggest that reduced emotional association memory is accompanied by increases in activity and functional coupling within the amygdala. This did not disrupt hippocampal association-memory processes, which indeed were critical for successful emotional association memory formation. •Association-memory for emotional items is often worse than for neutral items.•This has been proposed to result from the amygdala disrupting hippocampal function.•We found evidence for parallel, not opposing, roles of amygdala and hippocampus.•Forgetting of emotional associations is driven by the amygdala.•But successful encoding of emotional associations continues to engage the hippocampus.

[...]recently, neuroimaging data for a research study needed to be collected within one's own lab. The utility of open-access brain morphology data is numerous, ranging from observing novel patterns of age-related differences in subcortical structures to the development of more robust cortical parcellation atlases, with these advances being translatable to improved methods for characterizing clinical disorders (see Figure 1 for an illustration). [...]structural MRIs are generally more robust than functional MRIs, relative to potential artifacts and in being not task-dependent, resulting in large potential yields. Nonetheless, differences in brain morphology can, however, correspond to a myriad of inter-individual differences, including personality traits (Bjørnebekk et al., 2013; Holmes et al., 2016; Riccelli et al., 2017), genetic risk factors (Mormino et al., 2014; Strike et al., 2015; Chang et al., 2016), and age-related differences (Sowell et al., 2003; Allen et al., 2005; Fjell et al., 2009; Walhovd et al., 2011; Hogstrom et al., 2013; McKay et al., 2014; Madan and Kensinger, 2016; Cao et al., 2017). A population that is even harder to recruit from, at least for those without the relevant collaborators, is patient populations. [...]when patients are being recruited for a study, additional skills are necessary to appropriately characterize the patient's health and cognitive state–making the sharing of this data particularly valuable for further research, albeit with additional considerations related to the sharing of patient data (see Brakewood and Poldrack, 2013).

The science of learning has made a considerable contribution to our understanding of effective teaching and learning strategies. However, few instructors outside of the field are privy to this research. In this tutorial review, we focus on six specific cognitive strategies that have received robust support from decades of research: spaced practice, interleaving, retrieval practice, elaboration, concrete examples, and dual coding. We describe the basic research behind each strategy and relevant applied research, present examples of existing and suggested implementation, and make recommendations for further research that would broaden the reach of these strategies.

While it is well established that cortical morphology differs in relation to a variety of inter-individual factors, it is often characterized using estimates of volume, thickness, surface area, or gyrification. Here we developed a computational approach for estimating sulcal width and depth that relies on cortical surface reconstructions output by FreeSurfer. While other approaches for estimating sulcal morphology exist, studies often require the use of multiple brain morphology programs that have been shown to differ in their approaches to localize sulcal landmarks, yielding morphological estimates based on inconsistent boundaries. To demonstrate the approach, sulcal morphology was estimated in three large sample of adults across the lifespan, in relation to aging. A fourth sample is additionally used to estimate test–retest reliability of the approach. This toolbox is now made freely available as supplemental to this paper: https://cmadan.github.io/calcSulc/ .

When making decisions on the basis of past experiences, people must rely on their memories. Human memory has many well-known biases, including the tendency to better remember highly salient events. We propose an extreme-outcome rule, whereby this memory bias leads people to overweight the largest gains and largest losses, leading to more risk seeking for relative gains than for relative losses. To test this rule, in two experiments, people repeatedly chose between fixed and risky options, where the risky option led equiprobably to more or less than did the fixed option. As was predicted, people were more risk seeking for relative gains than for relative losses. In subsequent memory tests, people tended to recall the extreme outcome first and also judged the extreme outcome as having occurred more frequently. Across individuals, risk preferences in the risky-choice task correlated with these memory biases. This extreme-outcome rule presents a novel mechanism through which memory influences decision making.

What makes some words more memorable than others? Words can vary in many dimensions, and a variety of lexical, semantic, and affective properties have previously been associated with variability in recall performance. Free recall data were used from 147 participants across 20 experimental sessions from the Penn Electrophysiology of Encoding and Retrieval Study (PEERS) data set, across 1,638 words. Here, I consider how well 20 different word properties—across lexical, semantic, and affective dimensions—relate to free recall. Semantic dimensions, particularly animacy (better memory for living), usefulness (with respect to survival; better memory for useful), and size (better memory for larger) demonstrated the strongest relationships with recall probability. These key results were then examined and replicated in the free recall data from Lau, Goh, and Yap ( Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 71 , 2207–2222, 2018 ), which had 532 words and 116 participants. This comprehensive investigation of a variety of word memorability demonstrates that semantic and function-related psycholinguistic properties play an important role in verbal memory processes.

While magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data is itself 3D, it is often difficult to adequately present the results papers and slides in 3D. As a result, findings of MRI studies are often presented in 2D instead. A solution is to create figures that include perspective and can convey 3D information; such figures can sometimes be produced by standard functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) analysis packages and related specialty programs. However, many options cannot provide functionality such as visualizing activation clusters that are both cortical and subcortical (i.e., a 3D glass brain), the production of several statistical maps with an identical perspective in the 3D rendering, or animated renderings. Here I detail an approach for creating 3D visualizations of MRI data that satisfies all of these criteria. Though a 3D ‘glass brain’ rendering can sometimes be difficult to interpret, they are useful in showing a more overall representation of the results, whereas the traditional slices show a more local view. Combined, presenting both 2D and 3D representations of MR images can provide a more comprehensive view of the study’s findings.

Peer review of research articles is a core part of our scholarly communication system. In spite of its importance, the status and purpose of peer review is often contested. What is its role in our modern digital research and communications infrastructure? Does it perform to the high standards with which it is generally regarded? Studies of peer review have shown that it is prone to bias and abuse in numerous dimensions, frequently unreliable, and can fail to detect even fraudulent research. With the advent of web technologies, we are now witnessing a phase of innovation and experimentation in our approaches to peer review. These developments prompted us to examine emerging models of peer review from a range of disciplines and venues, and to ask how they might address some of the issues with our current systems of peer review. We examine the functionality of a range of social Web platforms, and compare these with the traits underlying a viable peer review system: quality control, quantified performance metrics as engagement incentives, and certification and reputation. Ideally, any new systems will demonstrate that they out-perform and reduce the biases of existing models as much as possible. We conclude that there is considerable scope for new peer review initiatives to be developed, each with their own potential issues and advantages. We also propose a novel hybrid platform model that could, at least partially, resolve many of the socio-technical issues associated with peer review, and potentially disrupt the entire scholarly communication system. Success for any such development relies on reaching a critical threshold of research community engagement with both the process and the platform, and therefore cannot be achieved without a significant change of incentives in research environments.