Adam Anderson

Cornell University | CU · Department of Human Development

Background Measuring the health of the locus coeruleus (LC), the brainstem site of the first cellular damage in Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) pathogenesis, is of particular interest for early diagnosis. In both rodents and humans (Elman 2017; Kelberman 2023; Malatt 2022; Weinshenker 2008), increased tonic firing rates have been noted in middle age. This...

Focused attention meditation (FAM) training has been shown to improve attention, but the neural basis of FAM on attention has not been thoroughly understood. Here, we aim to investigate the neural effect of a 2-month FAM training on novice meditators in a visual oddball task (a frequently adopted task to evaluate attention), evaluated with both ASL...

The pigment neuromelanin, produced in the locus coeruleus (LC) as a byproduct of catecholamine synthesis, gives the "blue spot" its name, and both identifies LC neurons and is thought to play an important yet complex role in normal and pathological aging. Using neuromelanin-sensitive T1-weighted turbo spin echo MRI scans we characterized volume and...

Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have demonstrated good accuracy and speed in spatially registering high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) images. However, some functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) images, e.g., those acquired from arterial spin labeling (ASL) perfusion fMRI, are of intrinsically lo...

Background Racial and ethnic underrepresentation in aging research and need for effective recruitment strategies is well documented. A Community Research Liaison (CRL) role created under a NIA award is demonstrating the value of embedding staff from underrepresented communities in the research infrastructure. Methods The role and qualifications fo...

The cognitive aging process is not necessarily linear. Central task-evoked pupillary responses, representing a brainstem-pupil relationship, may vary across the lifespan. Thus we examined, in 75 adults ranging in age from 19 to 86, whether task-evoked pupillary responses to an attention task may serve in as an index of cognitive aging. This is beca...

The role of the heart in the experience of time has been long theorized but empirical evidence is scarce. Here, we examined the interaction between fine-grained cardiac dynamics and the momentary experience of subsecond intervals. Participants performed a temporal bisection task for brief tones (80-188 ms) synchronized with the heart. We developed...

Neural markers of attention, including those frequently linked to the event-related potential P3 (P300) or P3b component, vary widely within and across participants. Understanding the neural mechanisms of attention that contribute to the P3 is crucial for better understanding attention-related brain disorders. All ten participants were scanned twic...

The ability to interrogate specific representations in the brain, determining how, and where, difference sources of information are instantiated can provide invaluable insight into neural functioning. Pattern component modeling (PCM) is a recent analytic technique for human neuroimaging that allows the decomposition of representational patterns in...

The role of the heart in the experience of time has been long theorized but empirical evidence is scarce. Here we examined the interaction between fine-grained cardiac dynamics and the momentary experience of subsecond intervals. Participants performed a temporal bisection task for brief tones (80-188 ms) synchronized with the heart. We developed a...

Learning from others provides the foundation for culture and the advancement of knowledge. Learning a new visuospatial skill from others represents a specific challenge—overcoming differences in perspective so that we understand what someone is doing and why they are doing it. The “what” of visuospatial learning is thought to be easiest from a shar...

Background Neural reactivity to dysphoric mood induction indexes the tendency for distress to promote cognitive reactivity and sensory avoidance. Linking these responses to illness prognosis following recovery from Major Depressive Disorder informs our understanding of depression vulnerability and provides engagement targets for prophylactic interv...

Learning which stimuli in our environment co-occur with painful or pleasurable events is critical for survival. Previous research has established the basic neural and behavioural mechanisms of aversive and appetitive conditioning; however, it is unclear what precisely is learned. Here we examined what aspects of the unconditioned stimulus (US), sen...

We aimed to assess whether dynamic arterial spin labeling (dASL), a novel quantitative MRI technique with minimal contamination of subject motion and physiological noises, could detect the longitudinal effect of focused attention meditation (FAM) on resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC). A total of 10 novice meditators who recorded their FAM...

Numerosity, complexity and affect are among factors known to dilate perceived time. While such objective and subjective factors are usually tested in isolation with simple stimuli in the lab, here we examined the perceived passage of time in the ecology of daily social life: crowded public transit. Higher crowding level denotes a higher numerosity...

Changes in brain resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) were investigated using a longitudinal design by following a 2-month focused attention meditation (FAM) practice and analyzing their association with FAM practice time. Ten novice meditators were recruited from a university meditation course. Participants were scanned with a resting-stat...

Humans and now computers can derive subjective valuations from sensory events although such transformation process is largely a black box. In this study, we elucidate unknown neural mechanisms by comparing representations of humans and convolutional neural networks (CNNs). We optimized CNNs to predict aesthetic valuations of paintings and examined...

In the somatosensory system, hedonic information is coded by mechanoreceptors at the point of contact. Pleasure and pain signals travel along peripheral nerve pathways distinct from those for discriminative touch. Yet it remains unknown whether the central nervous system represents tactile hedonic information in sensory cortices as another dimensio...

Emotional appraisal in humans is often considered a centrally mediated process by which sensory signals, void of emotional meaning, are assessed by integrative brain structures steps removed from raw sensation. We review emerging evidence that the emotional value of the environment is coded by nonvisual sensory systems as early as the sensory recep...

Visual wavelengths are not only associated with the subjective experience of color but also have long been thought to regulate affect. Here we examined the attracting rewarding properties of opposite ends of the wavelength spectrum, as well as their individual variation. As reward is multifaceted, we sought convergent evidence from subjective and o...

Fluctuations in mental and bodily states have both been shown to be associated with negative affective experience. Here we examined how momentary fluctuations in attentional and cardiac states combine to regulate the perception of positive social value. Faces varying in trustworthiness were presented during a go/no-go letter target discrimination t...

The bipolar valence-arousal model is assumed by many to be an underlying structure of conscious experience of core affect and emotion. In this work, we compare three versions of the bipolar valence-arousal model at the neural domain, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Specifically, we systematically contrast three models of arousal...

Recent advances in our understanding of information states in the human brain have opened a new window into the brain's representation of emotion. While emotion was once thought to constitute a separate domain from cognition, current evidence suggests that all events are filtered through the lens of whether they are good or bad for us. Focusing on...

The mammalian tongue contains gustatory receptors tuned to basic taste types, providing an evolutionarily old hedonic compass for what and what not to ingest. Although representation of these distinct taste types is a defining feature of primary gustatory cortex in other animals, their identification has remained elusive in humans, leaving the dema...

Background: To investigate whether usage of treatment-acquired regulatory skills is associated with prevention of depressive relapse/recurrence. Method: Remitted depressed outpatients entered a 24-month clinical follow up after either 8 weekly group sessions of cognitive therapy (CT; N = 84) or mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT; N = 82)....

Studies on mind-body interactions have largely focused on how mental states modulate bodily physiological responses. Increasing evidence suggests that bodily states also modulate mental states. Here we investigated how both may be integrated in the brain at the resolution of a heartbeat, examining how phasic fluctuations of peripheral blood pressur...

People are often characterized as poor savers. Here we examined whether cues associated with earning and saving have differential salience for attention and action. We first modeled earning and saving after positive and negative variants of monetary reinforcement, i.e., gains versus avoiding loss. Despite their equivalent absolute magnitude in a mo...

People are often characterized as poor savers. To understand why, we examined earning and saving and their potential differential salience for action and attention. We first modelled earning and saving after positive and negative variants of monetary reinforcement (i.e., gains versus avoiding loss). Despite their equivalent absolute magnitude in a...

The basal forebrain (BF) is poised to play an important neuromodulatory role in brain regions important to cognition due to its broad projections and complex neurochemistry. While significant in vivo work has been done to elaborate BF function in nonhuman rodents and primates, comparatively limited work has examined the in vivo function of the huma...

In this commentary, we discuss how one's internal body state and the appraisals an individual utilizes at encoding alter later episodic memory irrespective of social discourse. We suggest that the purpose of episodic memory is originally the preservation of the self, which may have been co-opted to navigating the social world.

Objective: Both Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) and Cognitive Therapy (CT) enhance self-management of prodromal symptoms associated with depressive relapse, albeit through divergent therapeutic procedures. We evaluated rates of relapse in remitted depressed patients receiving MBCT and CT. Decentering and dysfunctional attitudes were ass...

The affective biasing of attention is not typically considered to be a form of emotion regulation. In this article, we argue that ‘affect-biased attention’ – the predisposition to attend to certain categories of affectively salient stimuli over others – provides an important component of emotion regulation. Affect-biased attention regulates subsequ...

Striking individual differences exist in the human capacity to recollect past events, yet, little is known about the neural correlates of such individual differences. Studies investigating hippocampal volume in relation to individual differences in laboratory measures of episodic memory in young adults suggest that whole hippocampal volume is unrel...

The basal forebrain (BF) is poised to play an important neuromodulatory role in brain re-gions important to cognition due to its broad projections and complex neurochemistry. While significant in vivo work has been done to elaborate BF function in nonhuman rodents and primates, comparatively limited work has examined the in vivo function of the hum...

Distaste is a primitive rejection impulse triggered by the ingestion of unpleasant tasting substances, many of which are toxic. Theoretical work has suggested that distaste may be the evolutionary precursor for both physical disgust, which serves to defend against disease and other threats to biological fitness, and moral disgust, which defends aga...

Human eyes convey a remarkable variety of complex social and emotional information. However, it is unknown which physical eye features convey mental states and how that came about. In the current experiments, we tested the hypothesis that the receiver’s perception of mental states is grounded in expressive eye appearance that serves an optical func...

Color has long been thought to have metaphorical affective associations; however, it is unclear whether colors have genuine affective properties. We sought affective, behavioral, perceptual and neural evidence for the differential rewarding properties of color. Spanning the visible spectrum, we pitted the short wavelength, blue, versus the long wav...

Facial expressions aid social transactions and serve as socialization tools, with smiles signaling approval and reward, and angry faces signaling disapproval and punishment. The present study examined whether the subjective experience of positive vs. negative facial expressions differs between children and adults. Specifically, we examined age-rela...

Data for Studies 1 & 2. (XLSX)

Contemporary neuroscience suggests that perception is perhaps best understood as a dynamically iterative process that does not honor cleanly segregated “bottom-up” or “top-down” streams. We argue that there is substantial empirical support for the idea that affective influences infiltrate the earliest reaches of sensory processing and even that pri...

In this commentary we focus on individual differences in proposed mechanisms underlying arousal-based enhancement of prioritized stimuli. We discuss the potential of genotyping studies for examining effects of noradrenergic processes on stimulus prioritization in humans and stress the importance of potential individual differences in the activity o...

Growing evidence suggests that emotional stimuli are not only better remembered than mundane ones, but that affective salience alters their perception. In a previous study, we demonstrated that emotional events are perceived with the subjective experience of enhanced perceptual vividness, or EEV as assessed with a visual magnitude estimation task (...

We investigated the neural correlates of remote traumatic reexperiencing in survivors of a life-threatening incident: the near crash of Air Transat (AT) Flight 236. Survivors’ brain activity was monitored during video-cued recollection of the AT disaster, September 11, 2001 (9/11), and a comparatively nonemotional (neutral) event. Passengers showed...

Emotionally salient aspects of the world are experienced with greater perceptual vividness than mundane ones; however, such emotionally enhanced vividness (EEV) may be experienced to different degrees for different people. We examined whether BOLD activity associated with a deletion variant of the ADRA2b gene coding for the α2b adrenoceptor modulat...

In the founding of psychology as a scientific discipline, Wilhelm Wundt suggested that our internal “subjective” affective world can be studied with equal rigor and physiologic precision as other “objective” dimensions of experience originating from external events. We have promoted this viewpoint by examining feelings and the subjective/objective...

The bipolar valence-arousal model of conscious experience of emotions is prominent in emotion research. In this work, we examine the validity of this model in the context of feelings elicited by visual stimuli. In particular, we examine whether arousal has a unique contribution over bivariate valence (separate measures for pleasure and displeasure)...

The substantial health burden associated with major depressive disorder (MDD) is a product of both its high prevalence and the significant risk of relapse, recurrence, and chronicity. Establishing recurrence vulnerability factors (VFs) could improve the long-term management of MDD by identifying the need for further intervention in seemingly recove...

The processing of emotional as compared to neutral information is associated with different patterns in eye movement and neural activity. However, the ‘emotionality’ of a stimulus can be conveyed not only by its physical properties, but also by the information that is presented with it. There is very limited work examining the how emotional informa...

The fifth edition of a work that defines the field of cognitive neuroscience, with entirely new material that reflects recent advances in the field. Each edition of this classic reference has proved to be a benchmark in the developing field of cognitive neuroscience. The fifth edition of The Cognitive Neurosciences continues to chart new directions...

The hedonic principle maintains that humans strive to maximize pleasant feelings and avoid unpleasant feelings. Surprisingly, and contrary to hedonic logic, previous experiments have demonstrated a relationship between picture viewing time and arousal (activation) but not with valence (pleasure vs. displeasure), suggesting that arousal rather than...

It remains unclear how the brain represents external objective sensory events alongside our internal subjective impressions of them-affect. Representational mapping of population activity evoked by complex scenes and basic tastes in humans revealed a neural code supporting a continuous axis of pleasant-to-unpleasant valence. This valence code was d...

Although there is an emerging consensus that disgust plays a role in human morality, it remains unclear whether this role is limited to transgressions that contain elements of physical disgust (e.g., gory murders, sexual crimes), or whether disgust is also involved in "pure" forms of morality. To address this issue, we examined the relationship bet...

Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) and mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) are particularly effective treatment approaches in terms of alleviating depressive symptoms and preventing relapse once remission has been achieved. Although engaging in mindfulness practice is an essential element of both treatments; it is unclear whether info...

Darwin theorized that emotional expressions originated as opposing functional adaptations for the expresser, not as distinct categories of social signals. Given that two thirds of the eye's refractive power comes from the cornea, we examined whether opposing expressive behaviors that widen the eyes (e.g., fear) or narrow the eyes (e.g., disgust) ma...

This volume examines the “New Wave” of research in cognitive neuroscience that has developed primarily in the last decade. It is divided into four sections. The first section looks at emotion and how it relates to perception and attention, as well as the link between emotion and cognition. It also discusses genetic and developmental approaches to e...

Emotionally arousing events reach awareness more easily and evoke greater visual cortex activation than more mundane events. Recent studies have shown that they are also perceived more vividly and that emotionally enhanced perceptual vividness predicts memory vividness. We propose that affect-biased attention (ABA) - selective attention to emotiona...

A deletion variant of the ADRA2B gene that codes for the α2b adrenoceptor has been linked to greater susceptibility to traumatic memory as well as attentional biases in perceptual encoding of negatively valenced stimuli. The goal of the present study was to examine whether emotional enhancements of memory associated with the ADRA2B deletion variant...

Emotionally enhanced memory and susceptibility to intrusive memories after trauma have been linked to a deletion variant (i.e., a form of a gene in which certain amino acids are missing) of ADRA2B, the gene encoding subtype B of the α2-adrenergic receptor, which influences norepinephrine activity. We examined in 207 participants whether variations...

The KIBRA gene has been associated with episodic memory in several recent reports; carriers of the T-allele show enhanced episodic memory performance relative to noncarriers. Gene expression studies in human and rodent species show high levels of KIBRA in the hippocampus, particularly in the subfields. The goal of the present study was to determine...

Language is a social act. We have previously argued that language remains embedded in sociality because the motivation to communicate exists only within a social context. Schilbach et al. underscore the importance of studying linguistic behavior from within the motivated, socially interactive frame in which it is learnt and used, as well as provide...

Numerous emotion researchers have asked their study participants to attend to the distinct feelings of arousal and valence, and self-report and physiological data have supported the independence of the two. We examined whether this dissociation reflects introspection about distinct emotional qualia or the way in which valence is measured. With eith...

We explored the attentional demands of unpleasant picture viewing and emotion regulation strategies. Participants received instructions to view, reappraise, or suppress their emotional experience to unpleasant and neutral pictures, while performing a concurrent auditory discrimination task, both during and after the picture presentation period. Rea...

It is well-known that emotionally salient events are remembered more vividly than mundane ones. Our recent research has demonstrated that such memory vividness (Mviv) is due in part to the subjective experience of emotional events as more perceptually vivid, an effect we call emotionally enhanced vividness (EEV). The present study built on previous...

Facial expressions may have originated from a primitive sensory regulatory function that was then co-opted and further shaped for the purposes of social utility. In the research reported here, we tested such a hypothesis by investigating the functional origins of fear expressions for both the expresser and the observer. We first found that fear-bas...

Much like unpalatable foods, filthy restrooms, and bloody wounds, moral transgressions are often described as "disgusting." This linguistic similarity suggests that there is a link between moral disgust and more rudimentary forms of disgust associated with toxicity and disease. Critics have argued, however, that such references are purely metaphori...