ABSTRACTCognitive control enables us to adjust behaviours according to task demands, and emotion influences the cognitive control. We examined how task-irrelevant emotional stimuli impact the ability to inhibit a prepared response and then programme another appropriate response. In the study, either a single target or two sequential targets appeared after emotional face images. Subjects were required to freely viewed the emotional faces and make a saccade quickly upon target onset, but inhibit their initial saccades and redirect gaze to the second (...) target if it appeared. We found that subjects were less successful at inhibiting their initial saccades as the inter-target delay increased. Emotional faces further reduced their inhibition ability with a longer delay, but not with a shorter delay. When subjects failed to inhibit the initial saccade, the longer delay produced longer intersaccadic interval. Especially, positive faces lengthened the intersaccadic interval with a l... (shrink)

Marshall McLuhan once proposed the concept of “global village,” believing that with the help of electronic media, Earth has become indistinguishable from a community, and there is only one Earth for human beings and one world for all countries. Today, with the continuous development of media technology, the concept of a human destiny community has also gained the general consensus of people around the world. The global value of the human destiny community encompasses the interdependent concept of international power, the (...) concept of common interests, the concept of sustainable development, and the concept of global governance. In particular, the concepts of sustainable development and global governance have been advocated by the public, which in turn has led to extensive public discussions on Socioscientific Issues, in which the teaching of SSI is gradually considered by the international science education community as one of the important goals of science education. The current issues and challenges facing SSI teaching and how immersive media technologies can facilitate SSI teaching have become important issues of keen public interest. (shrink)

Noninvasive brain stimulation provides a promising approach for the treatment of neuropsychiatric conditions. Despite the increasing research on the facilitatory effects of this kind of stimulation on the cognitive processes, the majority of the studies have used the standard stimulation approaches such as the transcranial direct current stimulation and the conventional repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation which seem to be limited in robustness and the duration of the transient effects. However, a recent specialized type of rTMS, theta-burst stimulation, patterned to mimic (...) the natural cross-frequency coupling of the human brain, may induce robust and longer-lasting effects on cortical activity. Here, we aimed to investigate the effects of the intermittent TBS, a facilitatory form of TBS, over the right DLPFC, a brain area implicated in higher-order cognitive processes, on visuospatial working memory performance. Therefore, iTBS was applied over either the rDLPFC or the vertex of 24 healthy participants, in two separate sessions. We assessed VSWM performance using 2-back and 4-back visuospatial tasks before iTBS, and after the iTBS. Our results indicate that the iTBS over the rDLPFC significantly enhanced VSWM performance in the 2-back task, as measured by the discriminability index and the reaction time. However, the 4-back task performance was not significantly modulated by iTBS. These findings demonstrate that the rDLPFC plays a critical role in VSWM and that iTBS is a safe and effective approach for investigating the causal role of the specific brain areas. (shrink)