The temporal representation of experience in subjective mood
- National Institutes of Health / National Institute of Mental Health, United States
- University College London, United Kingdom
Abstract
Humans refer to their mood state regularly in day-to-day as well as clinical interactions. Theoretical accounts suggest that when reporting on our mood we integrate over the history of our experiences; yet, the temporal structure of this integration remains unexamined. Here we use a computational approach to quantitatively answer this question and show that early events exert a stronger influence on reported mood compared to recent events. We show that a Primacy model accounts better for mood reports compared to a range of alternative temporal representations across random, consistent or dynamic reward environments, different age groups and in both healthy and depressed participants. Moreover, we find evidence for neural encoding of the Primacy, but not the Recency, model in frontal brain regions related to mood regulation. These findings hold implications for the timing of events in experimental or clinical settings and suggest new directions for individualized mood interventions.
Data availability
To enable the reproducibility of this study we made scripts and datasets available online at: https://osf.io/vw7sz/?view_only=e8cb4ef6782e4735815867203971994a.This repository includes: Mood modeling code; Source-data of Figure 2 (tasks trial-wise values and mood ratings values of all participants); Neural analyses code; Files of the whole-brain neural images presented in Figure 4.The link to this repository is provided in the Methods (section 7. Availability of code and datasets), and figure captions as well as other sections of the Methods refer to it.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institute of Mental Health (Intramural Research Program,ZIAMH002957-01)
- Hanna Keren
Brain and Behavior Research Foundation
- Robb B Rutledge
National Institute of Mental Health (Intramural Research Program)
- Charles Zheng
National Institute of Mental Health (Intramural Research Program)
- David C Jangraw
National Institute of Mental Health (Intramural Research Program,ZIAMH002957-01)
- Katharine Chang
National Institute of Mental Health (Intramural Research Program,ZIAMH002957-01)
- Aria Vitale
National Institute of Mental Health (Intramural Research Program,ZIAMH002957-01)
- Dylan Nielson
National Institute of Mental Health (Intramural Research Program)
- Francisco Pereira
National Institute of Mental Health (Intramural Research Program,ZIAMH002957-01)
- Argyris Stringaris
Wellcome Trust
- Robb B Rutledge
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: All participants signed informed consent to a protocol approved by the NIH Institutional Review Board. The protocol is registered under the clinical trial no. NCT03388606.
Copyright
This is an open-access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.
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The temporal representation of experience in subjective mood
eLife 10:e62051.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.62051
Further reading
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- Neuroscience
When navigating environments with changing rules, human brain circuits flexibly adapt how and where we retain information to help us achieve our immediate goals.
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- Neuroscience
When holding visual information temporarily in working memory (WM), the neural representation of the memorandum is distributed across various cortical regions, including visual and frontal cortices. However, the role of stimulus representation in visual and frontal cortices during WM has been controversial. Here, we tested the hypothesis that stimulus representation persists in the frontal cortex to facilitate flexible control demands in WM. During functional MRI, participants flexibly switched between simple WM maintenance of visual stimulus or more complex rule-based categorization of maintained stimulus on a trial-by-trial basis. Our results demonstrated enhanced stimulus representation in the frontal cortex that tracked demands for active WM control and enhanced stimulus representation in the visual cortex that tracked demands for precise WM maintenance. This differential frontal stimulus representation traded off with the newly-generated category representation with varying control demands. Simulation using multi-module recurrent neural networks replicated human neural patterns when stimulus information was preserved for network readout. Altogether, these findings help reconcile the long-standing debate in WM research, and provide empirical and computational evidence that flexible stimulus representation in the frontal cortex during WM serves as a potential neural coding scheme to accommodate the ever-changing environment.
