Toshikazu Kawagoe

Background: Early identification of older adults with lower cognitive screening performance may facilitate appropriate clinical evaluation and intervention to delay the progress of cognitive decline and onset of dementia. Because facial information can be acquired noninvasively and unobtrusively during everyday life, it has attracted increasing attention as a potential digital biomarker. However, it remains unclear which facial regions are associated with cognitive decline under a neutral facial condition. Furthermore, it is unknown whether these facial characteristics primarily reflect static facial appearance or facial movements. Objective: This study aimed to identify facial action unit (AU) patterns associated with lower cognitive screening performance during a fixation-cross viewing condition that is less susceptible to the influence of language and emotional elicitation. Methods: Older adults were classified into either a lower cognitive screening performance group (Montreal Cognitive Assessment Japanese version [MoCA-J] score ≤25; n=31) or a healthy control group (MoCA-J score ≥26; n=14). Facial videos were recorded while participants viewed a fixation cross for 1 minute. OpenFace 2.0 was used to extract the intensities of 17 AUs and the presence of 18 AUs. Video analyses were first performed to identify AU characteristics associated with cognitive screening performance. For AU intensity, frame-level mixed-effects models with participant-specific random intercepts and a first-order autoregressive (AR(1)) correlation structure were used, adjusting for age, Geriatric Depression Scale score, and sex, and participant-level sensitivity analyses were conducted to assess the consistency of the frame-level findings. For AU presence, participant-level analyses were performed because the frame-level models did not yield reliable parameter estimates. Subsequently, single-frame analyses were performed to examine whether the AU characteristics identified in the video analyses could be explained solely by static facial appearance. As this study was exploratory and hypothesis-generating, P values were not adjusted for multiple comparisons. Results: For AU intensity, frame-level video analyses showed that the lower cognitive screening performance group had a higher probability of zero intensity for AU10 (upper lip raiser), with participant-level analysis based on the proportion of zero-intensity frames yielding consistent results. In contrast, single-frame analyses of AU intensity showed no significant group difference for AU10, suggesting that the observed difference may reflect facial movements rather than static facial appearance. For AU presence, video analyses showed no significant group differences. Conclusions: Older adults with lower cognitive screening performance exhibited distinct AU patterns related to AU10 (upper lip raiser) during fixation-cross viewing, which may reflect subtle differences in facial movements around the mouth. These exploratory findings identify candidate facial biomarkers associated with lower cognitive screening performance and warrant validation in larger, balanced, independent samples.

Mind blanking (MB) describes a state in which a person reports an absence of thought, sensation, or awareness. Although thought sampling methods (TSMs) are

Background: Apathy is a common symptom in degenerative diseases such as dementia. In this study, we developed the Japanese version of the brief Dimensional Apathy Scale (b‐J‐DAS), which requires caregivers to rate patient apathy using three apathy sub‐scales: executive, emotional and initiation. Methods: Study 1 recruited 429 non‐clinical participants, and Study 2 recruited 52 patients with dementia and their caregivers. Confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to identify the factor structure of the b‐J‐DAS. Reliability and convergent/discriminant validity were assessed based on correlations between the b‐J‐DAS and apathy, depression, and executive function measures. The association between the caregiver‐rated b‐J‐DAS and care burden was also examined. Results: The b‐J‐DAS had the same factor structure as the Japanese version of the self‐rated DAS. Except for self‐rated scores in patients with dementia, the b‐J‐DAS demonstrated acceptable reliability. Significant positive correlations with apathy and executive function measures were observed, as were negative and no correlations with depression measures. Executive and initiation apathy were correlated with care burden. Conclusions: The present findings suggest that the b‐J‐DAS, which requires caregivers to assess patient apathy, is a suitable multidimensional apathy scale with acceptable reliability and validity. However, further studies on the influence of caregiver‐related factors are required.

Using the “Don’t look” (DL) paradigm, wherein participants are asked not to look at a specific feature (i.e., eye, nose, and mouth), we previously documented that Easterners struggled to completely avoid fixating on the eyes and nose. Their underlying mechanisms for attractiveness may differ because the fixations on the eyes were triggered only reflexively, whereas fixations on the nose were consistently elicited. In this study, we predominantly focused on the nose, where the center-of-gravity (CoG) effect, which refers to a person’s tendency to look near an object’s CoG, could be confounded. Full-frontal and mid-profile faces were used because the latter’s CoG did not correspond to the nose location. Although we hypothesized that these two effects are independent, the results indicated that, in addition to the successful tracing of previous studies, the CoG effect explains the nose-attracting effect. This study not only reveals this explanation but also raises a question regarding the CoG effect on Eastern participants.

Mind blanking is a mental state in which attention does not bring any perceptual input into conscious awareness. As this state is still largely unexplored, we suggest that a comprehensive understanding of mind blanking can be achieved through a multifaceted approach combining self‐assessment methods, neuroimaging and neuromodulation. In this article, we explain how electroencephalography and transcranial magnetic stimulation could be combined to help determine whether mind blanking is associated with a lack of mental content or a lack of linguistically or conceptually determinable mental content. We also question whether mind blanking occurs spontaneously or intentionally and whether these two forms are instantiated by the same or different neural correlates.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, wearing a face mask became a global daily practice. Japanese people were already accustomed to wearing masks due to their collectivistic culture, which prioritizes conformity and group harmony. In such a culture, where individuals are concerned about how others perceive them and their actions, wearing masks can be a self-protective action to prevent, escape, or reduce the severity of perceived negative feelings. Previous studies indicate that people experiencing anxiety tend to have negative biases when evaluating emotional expressions on faces. Therefore, we hypothesized that wearing a mask can reduce the negative feelings caused by social pressure, emotion processing, especially intensity perception. While our findings confirmed that wearing a mask reduced negative feelings caused by social pressure, there was no significant change in emotion intensity recognition performance. This null result might be attributed to the small effect size of the association between negative bias in emotion processing and an individual's state. In future studies, it would be valuable to include participants from non-collectivistic cultures to gain a broader understanding of the impact of wearing masks on emotion processing.

To understand why people avoid mental effort, it is crucial to reveal the mechanisms by which we learn and decide about mental effort costs. This study investigated whether mental effort cost learning aligns with temporal-difference (TD) learning or alternative mechanisms. Model-based fMRI analyses showed no correlation between cost prediction errors (CPEs) and activity in the dorsomedial frontal cortex/dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dmFC/dACC) or striatum at the time of a fully informative effort cue about upcoming effort demands, contradicting the TD hypothesis. Instead, CPEs correlate with dmFC/dACC (positively) and caudate (negatively) activity at effort completion. Furthermore, only activity patterns at effort completion predict subsequent choices. These results show that decision policies are updated retrospectively at effort completion, updating expected costs with prediction error between experienced effort and prior expectations, demonstrating mental effort cost learning is retrospective, and imply that adaptive learning of mental effort cost does not follow canonical TD learning. Significance Statement: Understanding how people learn about mental effort costs is essential for advancing theories of motivation and cognitive control. However, the algorithms supporting such learning remain unclear. This study addressed this gap and found that temporal-difference learning, commonly used to explain reward learning, could not account for how people learn about effort. Instead, decision policies were updated retrospectively at effort completion, based on a prediction error between experienced effort and prior expectations. These findings reveal that mental effort cost learning is fundamentally retrospective and imply that it relies on mechanisms distinct from canonical temporal-difference learning.