Facial emotional recognition is something used often in our daily lives. How does the brain process the face search? Can taste modify such a process? This study employed two tastes to investigate the cross-modal interaction between taste and emotional face recognition. The behavior responses and the event-related potential were applied to analyze the interaction between taste and face processing. Behavior data showed that when detecting a negative target face with a positive face as a distractor, the participants perform the task (...) faster with an acidic taste than with sweet. No interaction effect was observed with correct response ratio analysis. The early and mid-stage [early posterior negativity ] components have shown that sweet and acidic tastes modified the ERP components with the affective face search process in the ERP results. No interaction effect was observed in the late-stage component. Our data have extended the understanding of the cross-modal mechanism and provided electrophysiological evidence that affective facial processing could be influenced by sweet and acidic tastes. (shrink)

Numerical inductive reasoning has been considered as one of the most important higher cognitive functions of the human brain. Importantly, previous behavioral studies have consistently reported that one critical component of numerical inductive reasoning is checking, which often occurs when a discrepant element is discovered, and reprocessing is needed to determine whether the discrepancy is an error of the original series. However, less is known about the neural mechanism underlying the checking process. Given that the checking effect involves cognitive control (...) processes, such as the incongruent resolution, that are linked to the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, this study hypothesizes that the right DLPFC may play a specific role in the checking process. To test the hypothesis, this study utilized the transcranial direct current stimulation, a non-invasive brain stimulation method that could modulate cortical excitability, and examined whether and how the stimulation of the right DLPFC via tDCS could modulate the checking effect during a number-series completion problem task. Ninety healthy participants were allocated to one of the anodal, cathodal, and sham groups. Subjects were required to verify whether number sequences formed rule-based series, and checking effect was assessed by the difference in performance between invalid and valid conditions. It was found that significantly longer response times were exhibited in invalid condition compared with valid condition in groups of anodal, cathodal, and sham tDCS. Furthermore, the anodal tDCS significantly shortened the checking effect than those of the cathodal and sham groups, whereas no significantly prolonged checking effect was detected in the cathodal group. The current findings indicated that anodal tDCS affected the process of checking, which suggested that the right DLPFC might play a critical role in the checking process of numerical inductive reasoning by inhibiting incongruent response. (shrink)