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1. Moment-to-moment decisions of when and how to help another person

   Osborn_Popp, PJ; Gureckis, TM (July 2024, Cognitive Science Society)

   Helping is a universal human behavior, and is a core aspect of a functioning society. However, the decision to provide help, and what type of help to provide, is a complex cognitive calculation that weights many costs and benefits simultaneously. In this paper, we explore how various costs influence the moment-tomoment decision to help in a simple video game. Participants were paired with another human participant and were asked to make repeated decisions that could benefit either themselves or their partner. Several preregistered manipulations altered the cost each person paid for actions in the environment, the intrinsic resource capacity of individuals to perform the task, the visibility of the other player’s score, and the affordances within the environment for helping. The results give novel insight into the cost-benefit analyses that people apply when providing help, and highlight the role of reciprocity in influencing helping decisions. 

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2. The Striatum Organizes 3D Behavior via Moment-to-Moment Action Selection

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2018.04.019  

   Markowitz, Jeffrey E.; Gillis, Winthrop F.; Beron, Celia C.; Neufeld, Shay Q.; Robertson, Keiramarie; Bhagat, Neha D.; Peterson, Ralph E.; Peterson, Emalee; Hyun, Minsuk; Linderman, Scott W.; et al (June 2018, Cell)
3. Edge-Based General Linear Models Capture Moment-to-Moment Fluctuations in Attention

   https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1543-23.2024  

   Jones, Henry_M; Yoo, Kwangsun; Chun, Marvin_M; Rosenberg, Monica_D (February 2024, The Journal of Neuroscience)

   Although we must prioritize the processing of task-relevant information to navigate life, our ability to do so fluctuates across time. Previous work has identified fMRI functional connectivity (FC) networks that predict an individual's ability to sustain attention and vary with attentional state from 1 min to the next. However, traditional dynamic FC approaches typically lack the temporal precision to capture moment-to-moment network fluctuations. Recently, researchers have “unfurled” traditional FC matrices in “edge cofluctuation time series” which measure timepoint-by-timepoint cofluctuations between regions. Here we apply event-based and parametric fMRI analyses to edge time series to capture moment-to-moment fluctuations in networks related to attention. In two independent fMRI datasets examining young adults of both sexes in which participants performed a sustained attention task, we identified a reliable set of edges that rapidly deflects in response to rare task events. Another set of edges varies with continuous fluctuations in attention and overlaps with a previously defined set of edges associated with individual differences in sustained attention. Demonstrating that edge-based analyses are not simply redundant with traditional regions-of-interest–based approaches, up to one-third of reliably deflected edges were not predicted from univariate activity patterns alone. These results reveal the large potential in combining traditional fMRI analyses with edge time series to identify rapid reconfigurations in networks across the brain. 

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4. Moving From Bilingual Traits to States: Understanding Cognition and Language Processing Through Moment-to-Moment Variation

   https://doi.org/10.1162/nol_a_00046  

   Salig, Lauren K.; Valdés Kroff, Jorge R.; Slevc, L. Robert; Novick, Jared M. (November 2021, Neurobiology of Language)

   Abstract The study of how bilingualism is linked to cognitive processing, including executive functioning, has historically focused on comparing bilinguals to monolinguals across a range of tasks. These group comparisons presume to capture relatively stable cognitive traits and have revealed important insights about the architecture of the language processing system that could not have been gleaned from studying monolinguals alone. However, there are drawbacks to using a group-comparison, or Traits, approach. In this theoretical review, we outline some limitations of treating executive functions as stable traits and of treating bilinguals as a uniform group when compared to monolinguals. To build on what we have learned from group comparisons, we advocate for an emerging complementary approach to the question of cognition and bilingualism. Using an approach that compares bilinguals to themselves under different linguistic or cognitive contexts allows researchers to ask questions about how language and cognitive processes interact based on dynamically fluctuating cognitive and neural states. A States approach, which has already been used by bilingualism researchers, allows for cause-and-effect hypotheses and shifts our focus from questions of group differences to questions of how varied linguistic environments influence cognitive operations in the moment and how fluctuations in cognitive engagement impact language processing. 

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5. Modeling Gold Standard Moment-to-Moment Ratings of Perception of Stress from Audio Recordings

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TAFFC.2024.3435502  

   Nirjhar, Ehsanul Haque; Chaspari, Theodora (January 2024, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing)