The Self-Pleasantness Judgment Modulates the Encoding Performance and the Default Mode Network Activity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we evaluated the effect of self-relevance on cerebral activity and behavioral performance during an incidental encoding task. Recent findings suggest that pleasantness judgments reliably induce self-oriented (internal) thoughts and increase default mode network (DMN) activity. We hypothesized that this increase in DMN activity would relate to increased memory recognition for pleasantly-judged stimuli (which depend on internally-oriented attention) but decreased recognition for unpleasantly-judged items (which depend on externally-oriented attention). To test this hypothesis, brain activity was recorded from 21 healthy participants while they performed a pleasantness judgment requiring them to rate visual stimuli as pleasant or unpleasant. One hour later, participants performed a surprise memory recognition test outside of the scanner. Thus, we were able to evaluate the effects of pleasant and unpleasant judgments on cerebral activity and incidental encoding. The behavioral results showed that memory recognition was better for items rated as pleasant than items rated as unpleasant. The whole brain analysis indicated that successful encoding (SE) activates the inferior frontal and lateral temporal cortices, whereas unsuccessful encoding (UE) recruits two key medial posterior DMN regions, the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) and precuneus (PCU). A region of interest (ROI) analysis including classic DMN areas, revealed significantly greater involvement of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in pleasant compared to unpleasant judgments, suggesting this region's involvement in self-referential (i.e., internal) processing. This area may be responsible for the greater recognition performance seen for pleasant stimuli. Furthermore, a significant interaction between the encoding performance (successful vs. unsuccessful) and pleasantness was observed for the PCC, PCU and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). Overall, our results suggest the involvement of medial frontal and parietal DMN regions during the evaluation of self-referential pleasantness. We discuss these results in terms of the introspective referential of pleasantness judgments and the differential brain modulation based on internally- vs. externally-oriented attention during encoding.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".