Mood

Marc Berman discusses evidence on how exposure to natural environments affects cognition, mood and wellbeing. The conversation contrasts time spent in natural settings with indoor, screen-based and urban environments, and examines the emerging field of environmental neuroscience. It considers how nature may support cognitive performance as well as psychological, physical and social wellbeing.

…the relationship between memory and mood, robustness and fragility, modelling, standardisation and iterative changes in how researchers frame the problems they study.

Emotions significantly shape behavior, with mood---a prolonged emotional state---affecting decision-making processes by biasing perceptions of future outcomes. Recent studies suggest that mood functions as an extrapolation mechanism, tracking deviations between recent experiences and expectations to predict and inform future behavior. Understanding this mechanism has important implications for both biological systems and artificial agents. In this study, we incorporate a mood-like mechanism, modeled as momentum, into the policy dynamics of a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent. Specifically, we

Compared to other brain functions (like remembering and deciding), how the brain reflects mood is much less well understood. One reason is that there is no objective right answer to the question, "How happy are you?" Consequently, mood cannot be studied by benchmarking against percent correct on behavioral tasks. While challenging, we cannot shy away from understanding mood given that ~20\% of adults will experience a mood disorder at some point, and for ~30\%, existing treatments will be ineffective. Here, we build on work that modulates, probes, and models fluctuations in subjective happines

…sleep and circadian rhythms and mood disorders; (3) describe potential of cross species studies of motor activity and related systems to inform human chronobiology research

Although analogical reasoning has been assumed to involve insight and its associated “aha!” experience, the relationship between these phenomena has never been directly probed empirically. In this study we investigated the relationship between representational change and the “aha!” experience during analogical reasoning. A novel set of verbal analogy stimuli were developed for use as an insight task. Across two experiments, participants reported significantly stronger aha moments and showed greater evidence of representational change on trials with more semantically distant analogies. Further,