ne202 exam 3

3 components of emotions

• behavior

• physiology

• feeling

all interact to create EMOTION and have different neural substrates

Facial Expressions & Emotion, including 7 cross-cultural common facial expressions

• Facial expressions are thought to have evolved as non-vocal communication

  • Adaptive advantage

    • Infant/Caregiver interaction

    • Long-term cooperative interaction

    • Speech

    • Competitive interaction

• 7 “universal“ facial expressions

  • anger

  • contempt

  • disgust

  • enjoyment

  • fear

  • sadness

  • surprise

2 dimensional theories of emotion: Vector & Circumplex Models

• Vector model

  • describes emotions by 2 components:

    • Valence

      • positive or negative emotion

    • Arousal

      • strength of an emotion

  • self-report but also physiology

• Circumplex model

  • also has Valence and Arousal

  • DIFFERENCE: mapped to a circle, approximately

    • more suggestive of a continuum of emotional states

  • think: top left is Pooh bear, top right is Tigger, bottom left is Eeyore, bottom right is i forgot the name but stressed-out yellow rabbit

Skin Conductance Response (psychophysiology)

• Activity of sweat glands during emotional arousal

• Increases electrical conduction of skin surface

• Widely used in Polygraph Tests

• has SLOW signal; better for measuring Arousal than Valence

Startle Response (psychophysiology)

• EMG measurements of eye muscles

• Measures Musculo-Skeletal Reflex

• has FAST, brief signal; better for measuring Valence than Arousal

Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) → Sympathetic vs. Parasympathetic divisions

• ANS

  • Hypothalamus = key controlling structure of ANS

  • Influences functioning of internal organs

  • Largely unconscious

• Sympathetic = fight or flight

• Parasympathetic = rest and digest

Periaqueductal gray (PAG)

• located in tegmentum of midbrain

• plays key role in autonomic function and responses to threats

• coordinates emotions in animals; also pain modulation

Key brain structures for Emotion, Motivation, and Cognition

• amygdala = learning and fear, involved in recognition of facial expressions esp. fear

• cingulate cortex = rationale

• cortical areas like OFC = rationale too

  • vmPFC

• hippocampus, subiculum and entorhinal cortex = learning and memory

• hypothalamus = homeostasis and drive

• thalamic nuclei = sensory relay

• nucleus accumbens = reward and drive

James-Lange Theory of Emotion

• feedback loop

• states physiological response drives emotional response

• William James and Carl Lange (19th century) argued that the autonomic response = emotion itself

• BUT, “Somatic theories” lost favor because…

  • Perceive fear before the symptoms occur

  • Generating response does not generate emotion

  • Cognitive appraisal of the situation is key to emotion

  • External response can be the same for different emotions

Cannon-Bard Diencephalon theory & sham rage

• Cannon-Bard Diencephalon theory

  • physiological changes and subjective feeling of emotion are INDEPENDENT

  • emotional expression results from hypothalamus

  • emotional feeling results from thalamus and cortex

• sham rage

  • = violent movements induced by removal of cerebral cortex; no experience of rage

  • cutting at level of Diencephalon abolishes fear/anger; stimulating Hypothalamus elicits fear/anger response

LeDoux Model

• high road…

  • slow cognition → emotional feeling

  • learned, conscious via cortex

  • a mental state

• …and low road model

  • fast cognition → activates flight or fight response

  • hardwired, unconscious, defensive circuit

  • NOT a mental state

Anderson & Adolphs Model

• perceive stimuli → activates Central emotion state → all at once: observed behavior, physiological response, emotional feeling, cognition

Patient S.M. “The Woman with No Fear“

• had rare genetic disorder: Urbach-Wiethe Disease

• Bilateral Amygdala destruction

• impaired in recognizing negative social cues

  • couldn’t draw the face of fear

PTSD and Extinction (of conditioning)

• PTSD patients are impaired at Extinction

• even when stimulus no longer predicts a shock, STILL yields a response…

  • in skin, amygdala, and vmPFC

• People w/ smaller hippocampus have less protection, more vulnerable to PTSD

Fear conditioning paradigm

• fear conditioning = a primary paradigm used to investigate the amygdala’s role in emotional learning

  • a form of classical conditioning in which the unconditioned stimulus is aversive

• main idea: fear conditioning depends on Amygdala

Extinction (of conditioning)

• disappearance of previously learned behavior when the behavior’s NOT reinforced

• involves amygdala UNlearning AND ventral medial PFC (vmPFC) learning

• but NOT SO SIMPLE because after initial extinction & passage of time, condition responses may return

• vmPFC activation level is linked to the expression of conditioned responses (CR) during retention of extinction

• damage to vmPFC impairs retention/recall of extinction in rats

Human brain regions related to Extinction

• Amygdala is central for fear responses

• vmPFC suppresses fear responses

• hippocampus

  • context-dependent recovery of fear conditioning after extinction

Conditioned and unconditioned responses

• unconditioned response (UR) = natural/automatic response to stimuli (US)

• Conditioned response (CR) = anticipatory response learned from conditioned stimuli (CS)

Amygdala role in fear and emotion

Amygdala is known to mainly control the emotion of fear; important for detecting and avoiding danger

Flashbulb memories

• flashbulb memory = very vivid, detailed EPISODIC memory of powerful event, can be an event in the public memory or personal to you (family tragedy, etc.)

  • examples: 9/11 terrorist attack, Boston Marathon bombing

• more likely to occur when

  • important, surprising, and has EMOTIONAL impact

• evidence that emotional content is important for memory

• COULD BE INACCURATE from repeated retrieval and re-encoding

Medial Temporal Lobe (MTL) role in emotion & memory

• MTL crucial to episodic memory

  • if bilateral damage to the MTL, unable to remember specific past episodes or to learn new ones, but implicit memory may be spared

• (MTL) contains several structures related to important cognitive and emotional functions

  • hippocampus and its adjacent parahippocampal cortex, entorhinal cortex, and perirhinal cortex are primary regions responsible for memory formation and spatial cognition

Chomsky’s views on Language

• language is standard equipment for humans

  • full-blown language is unique to people

• Language and mental grammar exists independent of any cultural construct

• Language is universal

  • every tribe of people has complex language, so there’s no grammatically primitive tribes

Mental grammar

• brain must contain program that can build an unlimited set of sentences out of a finite list of words

  • Virtually every sentence that a person utters or understands is a brand new combination of words. Language cannot be a repertoire of responses

• innate, universal grammar

  • Children develop complex grammars rapidly and

    without any formal instruction, so they must be innately equipped with a plan common to the grammars of all languages

  • ^ means language is a genetically determined brain module

Language acquisition stages

1. cooing = all possible phones (distinct speech sound) are produced and discriminated

2. babbling = distinct phonemes of primary language

3. 1-word utterances

4. 2-word utterances; telegraphic speech

   1. speech during the two-word stage of language acquisition in children, which is laconic and efficient

   2. ex: “ball up,“ “more doll,“ “shoe wet“

5. basic adult sentence structure

   1. around age 4

• similar progression for speech perception

• from day 1, infants appear programmed to tune into their linguistic environments with goal of learning language

Wug study

• asks: Do children understand the rules of grammar? Or have they just learned associations?

  • Children know the rule for generating plural nouns

    • Similar results with verb past tense, etc

• involves children 4-7 years old who are shown a new (novel), weird animal

  • “This is a Wug” (novel word)

  • then shown two of the animal → “There are two Wugs!”

Critical Periods in Language Acquisition

• language is innate, but difficult to learn a 2nd one in adulthood

• Critical Periods:

  • time windows of rapid development

  • a particular ability must develop within time window or it’ll never be adequately developed

  • even decades of adult experience usually fails to overcome a missed critical period window

FOXP2 gene - role in language

• Missing one copy is linked to developmental

  verbal dyspraxia (motor speech disorder, know what you want to say but have problems with articulation)

• Identified from KE family

  • ~50% of extended family has severe forms of Specific Language Impairment

    • Fine motor control deficits for lower half of face

    • Speech is difficult

    • Morphology & Verbal/Cognitive Deficits

FOXP2 and Procedural vocal learning

• FOXP2 supports Procedural vocal learning

• FOXP2 expressed in Striatum of Basal Ganglia

  • knockdown of this gene in BG of songbirds disrupts song learning

  • substitution of human FPXP2 in mice increases dendrite length and synaptic plasticity in dl-Striatum AND faster procedural learning

Language-genesis: Pidgin vs. Creole

• Pidgin

  • develops when mixing peoples who don’t share a common language

  • A makeshift jargon; not a real language

  • Very little grammar, highly variable in order

• Pidgin can be transmuted into a full complex language in one fell swoop. A single generation

  • IF a group of children is exposed to pidgin at the age when they acquire their mother tongue

• Creole

  • The language that results when children make pidgin their native tongue

    • in other words, it’s a mother tongue formed from the contact of two languages through an earlier pidgin stage (aka simplifying and mixing into a new form)

  • ex: Hawaiian Creole (China, Japan, Korea, Portugal, Phillipines, and Puerto Rico), Portuguese-based Creole

Sign language

• sign languages like American Sign Language (ASL) and British SL are true languages

  • complex grammar, abstract symbols

• deaf children who aren’t exposed to SL at an early age never master to the degree they would’ve with early exposure

• Nicaraguan Sign Language (ISN: Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua) = a form of SL developed by deaf children in many schools in Nicaragua in the 1980s

Fluency vs. comprehension

• Fluency = ability to easily speak or write with normal prosody and grammar

  • lesions: insula, arcuate fasciculus

• Comprehension = ability to understand

  spoken/written language

  • lesions: middle temporal gyrus, dorsolateral PFC

Voxel-based lesion symptom mapping (VLSM)

• identifies key brain regions underlying neuropsychological deficit

• combines:

  • structural images of brain lesions

  • neuropsych tests to categorically diagnose

• result: percentage of voxels showing damage in patient group

• can be used to show fluency/comprehension deficits and lesions

  • primary lesions detected are near, but not in Broca’s and Wenicke’s Areas aka VLSM got the location wrong

Structural vs. Metabolic deficits

• a lesion in one location might impair processing at other locations

  • CT and structural MRI not enough to know extent of processing damage

  • often function will return in reduced metabolism region without lesion

Broca’s, Wernicke’s Aphasias and related brain structures

• Broca’s Aphasia

  • non-fluent aphasia

  • speech PRODUCTION problem → patients know what they want to say, but can’t articulate it

  • common symptoms:

    • word finding difficulties (anomia)

    • agrammatism (production and perception)

    • speech apraxia (saying words accurately, smoothly)

  • related brain structures:

    • left interior frontal gryus

    • pars opercularis (BA44), pars triangularis (BA45)

• Wernicke’s Aphasia

  • fluent aphasia

  • speech COMPREHENSION problem → core deficit comes from not finding the right relationship between words and their meanings (lexical-semantic = study of word meanings)

  • common symptoms:

  • related brain structures:

    • posterior superior temporal gyrus (STG) (generally involves large temporal lobe lesions)

    • part of BA22

    • planum temporale

    • much larger on Left Hemisphere

Broca’s aphasia with recurring utterances

• Broca’s most famous patient, Leborgne, called “Patient Tan“ due to his recurring utterance “tan tan“

• insula = responsible for speech production → recurring utterances

Signing Aphasias

• left hemisphere damage:

  • frontal - expressive aphasia

  • temporal - receptive aphasia

Fluency Deficits & Lesions

• fluency = production

  • expressive encoding and production of language output

• lesions:

  • insula

  • arcuate fasciculus

Comprehension Deficits and Lesions

• comprehension = perception

  • receptive comprehension and decoding of language input

• lesions:

  • middle temporal gyrus

  • dorsolateral pre-frontal cortex

Hemispheric Dominance in Language

• language dominance in Left Hemisphere for about 97% of people

• RH can still process language, but mute, little grammar, little awareness

Speech Segmentation Challenges

• easily observed for non-native languages

• problems:

  • how to determine where one phoneme ends and the next begins?

    • silence is not reliable indicator for word breaks

  • phonemes change depending on:

    • speaker

    • context in words

Coarticulation

• normal speech uses coarticlation

  • without this, speech sounds weird/artificial

• phoneme differs with context

  • ex: lip vs. put, ten vs. tenth

• phonemes are produced in a way that overlaps in time

  • speakers shape vocal tracts to produce end of one phoneme and start of the next

  • auditory spectrum of spoken phonemes depends on context of neighboring phonemes

• no coarticulation = explains why computer speech sounds funny

  • means each phoneme (or morpheme nowadays) presented independently

  • same issues for speech recognition → must break up words

Neural substrates of speech phonology processing

• phonology = sounds of speech

  • Phonological processing is the use of the sounds of one's language (i.e., phonemes) to process spoken and written language

• phonology-specific processing along Superior Temporal Sulcus (RH and LH)

• NOT Wernicke’s, which is posterior of STG

• words > non-words: LH middle Temporal Gyrus, Angular gyrus, and Temporal Pole

McGurk Effect

• Visual signals combine with Auditory Signals to produce speech perception

• McGurk & MacDonald ‘76:

  • dubbed audio onto a video

  • “bah“ “kah” “gah” “pah”

  • visual signal (aka different mouth movements) determined speech perception

• Visual & Auditory can combine to yield speech percepts that match either one!

  • “speech perception is an illusion”

3 language ERPs: N400, LAN, P600

• none of these ERP signals is specific to language

• N400 = ERP signal for semantic anomalies (aka semantic errors)

  • perception of anomalous (deviating from expected/normal) words yields a negative response 400ms after words beings

    • central, parietal sites

  • semantic rather than grammar effect

    • observed for both spoken and written words

• Left Anterior Negativity (LAN) = ERP response to syntactic violations (aka syntax errors = wrong part of speech)

  • LAN also can occur rapidly (100-300ms)

  • for phase structure violations (like “the cat is the in bag“)

• Synaptic Positive Shift (P600) = ERP response for syntactic anomalies (syntactic agreement or garden-path sentence errors)

  • detected at parietal recording sites

    • possibly posterior temporal lobe (posterior to Wernicke’s areas)

    • agreement errors = number of subject and verb: he swim; she eat

Dual Route Model of Reading

• according to this model, reading can be achieved by either the lexical route or the sublexical route

• orthographic or lexical or direct route

  • written word is recognized as visual word form

• non-lexical or indirect route

  • graphemes (letters) converted to phonemes

  • recognized as auditory word form

2 Forms of Dyslexia (acquired)

• surface dyslexia

  • over-regularize pronunciation

    • ex: “heed“ for head; pretty and bowl (rhyme with jetty and howl)

  • rely exclusively on non-lexical or indirect route

  • visual processing problem

• deep or phonological dyslexia

  • unable to read pseudowords, no problem with complex words

  • rely exclusively on orthographic or direct route

Anomia

difficulty finding words

Alexia without Agraphia

can write, CAN’T READ

Visual word form area

• located in LH

• superior and posterior to Fusiform Face Area (FFA)

Great Ape language abilities and limitations

• Apes lack complex grammar capabilities

• Chimps, gorillas lack the vocal cords to produce human speech, but they can learn Sign Language

• Washoe, Nim Chimpsky (chimp)

  • 132 ASL signs

  • grammar: 2-word utterance level

Kanzi the Bonobo

• used computer keyboard and lexigrams to communicate, also knew some ASL

• 200 productive, 500 perceptive words

• communication between 2, but pidgeons trained to do the same task

• had 2.5 year old level language abilities

Expansion of Pre-frontal Cortex

• figure 12.1: comparison of PFC in different species

• purple region indicates the PFC in six mammalian species. Although the brains are not drawn to scale, the figure makes clear that the PFC spans a much larger percentage of the overall cortex in the chimpanzee and human

• expansion of PFC in human brain is more pronounced in the white matter (axonal tracts) than in gray matter (cell bodies) → suggests that the cognitive capabilities that are uniquely human may be due to how our brains are connected rather than an increase in the number of neurons

• Because the development of functional capabilities parallels phylogenetic trends, the frontal lobe’s expansion is related to the emergence of the complex cognitive capabilities that are especially pronounced in humans

Dual system model of cognition

• system 1: “hot“

  • fast, parallel, automatic and context-dependent

  • linked to emotionally guided decisions

    • e.g. immediately available reward

  • “limbic“ circuitry

    • ventral striatum, OFC, vmPFC

  • OFC and vmPFC reflects value

• system 2: “cool”

  • slow, serial, controlled and evidence-based

  • linked to more rational and deliberate decision processes

  • “executive function” circuitry [latPFC, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), posterior parietal

    cortex (PPC)]

  • LPFC reflects self-control

• see Dan Kahneman’s “Thinking fast and slow“

  • 2011 popular science book by psychologist Daniel Kahneman. The book's main thesis is a differentiation between two modes of thought: "System 1" is fast, instinctive and emotional; "System 2" is slower, more deliberative, and more logical

Cognitive neuro evidence for hierarchical cognitive control

• increasing complexity from posterior to anterior in lateral PFC

• green (ventral pre-motor): stimulus-response mapping

• yellow (latPFC): stimulus context; manipulation

• red (frontal pole): cognitive context; rules

Environmental dependency syndrome

• failure to inhibit behaviors that are contextually inappropriate

• utilization behavior: grabbing objects in view and starting an appropriate behavior at an inappropriate time

Task switching***

• Wisconsin card sorting task = test of rule learning and task switching

  • Match cards based on one of 3 rules (Color, Shape, Number), but not explicitly told which rule applies, only feedback is “correct” or “incorrect,” and the rule is changed without any warning

  • “cognitive set“ = rules and key information held in working memory that support performance of a particular task

  • observes how fast can subject switch rules and REVEALS dysexecutive symptoms

  • latPFC patients perseverate (get stuck on a topic or idea)

  • rule switching in WCST involves inferior frontal sulcus

Frontal lobe patient deficits

• Patients with frontal lobe lesions have difficulty executing a plan and may exhibit stimulus-driven behavior

• Deficits in cognitive control are found in numerous psychiatric disorders, as well as when mental health is compromised by situational factors such as stress or loneliness

Dysexecutive syndrome

• results from Frontal Lobe damage

  • lateral PFC damage

• deficits in planning, project completion, attention span

Disinhibition syndrome

• results from Frontal Lobe damage

  • medial PFC damage

• constant movements

• socially inappropriate aka “no filter“

Supervisory Attentional System

• aka Norman & Shallice Model of Response Selection

  • a psychological model of cognitive control, outlining the conditions under which the selection of an action might require the operation of a high-level control system

    • situation examples: planning/decision-making is required; responses are novel/not well-learned; situation is difficult or dangerous

• Perceptual system is able to directly activate Action Schema

• 2 types of inhibitory control

  • contention scheduling

    • inhibition between competing Action Schema to focus on one at a time

    • involves the allocation of cognitive resources to competing processes or goals. When multiple tasks or goals demand attention simultaneously, contention scheduling determines which processes receive priority

    • ex: driving and get to a red light - slam on break (priority)

  • supervisory attentional system

    • provide flexible top-down control of goals

    • override perceptual and schema biases

    • higher-level cognitive control mechanism responsible for monitoring, coordinating, and regulating routine processes. The SAS is engaged in situations that are novel, complex, or require conscious decision-making

    • ex: using your GPS in a car, choosing the route, paying attention to the road, not missing turns

Error-related Negativity (ERN)

• hypothesized to originate in anterior cingulate

• anterior cingulate responds with errors, but also activated with other forms of monitoring

• When people make an incorrect response, a large evoked response sweeps over the prefrontal cortex just after the movement is initiated. This signal, referred to as the error-related negativity (ERN) when time locked to the response, and the feedback related negativity (FRN) when time-locked to feedback, has been localized to the anterior cingulate

Rule switching and pre-frontal cortex***

Rule switching in WCST involves inferior frontal sulcus

*add more?

Inhibitory control of action

• ACC next to region with similar functions: Pre-supplementary Motor Area

  • more motor-decision process than cognitive decision

• suggests stop signal (our inhibitory control) in “Go/No Go“ task strongly activated by Right Inferior Prefrontal Cortex

• DTI tract-tracing: Inferior frontal cortex connects with Subthalamic nucleus of Basal Ganglia and Pre-supplementary Motor Area

Stroop effect

• task is to say the color of the word asap, hard and slower to complete because the letters spell out out the name of a different color - incongruent condition

• main idea: word reading is “automatic“ and can interfere (or aid) the color-naming task, which is more novel/less practiced

• interactions between medial and lateral PFC

Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) function

• major brain region that supports executive attention and control

• apart of Medial Frontal lobe

• holds contents of working memory → word meanings and visual orienting and visual features

ACC-LPFC interactions

• Stroop effects shows interactions between medial and lateral PFC

• LPFC doesn’t show diff between congruent and incongruent conditions, but ACC does show Stroop Effect

• ACC activity on one trial for Stroop effect predicts LPFC activity on next trial

Wisconsin card sorting task

• Wisconsin card sorting task = test of rule learning and task switching

  • Match cards based on one of 3 rules (Color, Shape, Number), but not explicitly told which rule applies, only feedback is “correct” or “incorrect,” and the rule is changed without any warning

  • “cognitive set“ = rules and key information held in working memory that support performance of a particular task

  • observes how fast can subject switch rules and REVEALS dysexecutive symptoms

  • latPFC patients perseverate (get stuck on a topic or idea)

  • rule switching in WCST involves inferior frontal sulcus

dopamine system

• provides a means for coding value

  • VTA/DA signals changes in info, not reward → signal to support learning

• in reward circuitry and dopaminergic pathways, dopamine (DA)…:

  • serves as reward signal

  • is key to how we value things

• DA neurons found in Substantia Nigra (SN), Ventral Tegmental Area (VTA)

• Key structures:

  • VTA, Nucleus Accumbens (NAc) (aka Ventral Striatum)

role of dopamine in valuation/reward

DA serves as reward signal and is key to how we value things

VTA

• VTA plays key role in reward evaluation

• projects to NAc, medial PFC (mPFC), amygdala, and hippocampus

subjective biases in value***

• factors that contribute to subjective value representation

  • payoff

  • probability

  • effort or cost

  • context

  • preference

• because of such variation, people are inconsistent in their decision-making behavior

temporal discounting

• the observation that people tend to value immediate outcomes more highly than delayed outcomes, and that the subjective value of a reward decreases as the time to its receipt increases

• increased valuation for immediately available rewards

• reflected in activation of ventral striatum, posterior cingulate cortex and mPFC

• tracks subjective value of rewards

• getting same reward sooner has greater subjective value (and greater real value)

• OFC damage impairs temporal discounting

  • so their "value over time" decays exponentially quicker than a person with a normally functioning OFC

Expected value

• describes the average reward of a probabilistic process

• = probability * utility = sum of probability-utility pairings for each possible outcome

  • utility can be positive or negative

Ventral striatum/Nucleus accumbens

one of the key structures + VTA for reward circuitry and Dopaminergic pathways

Ventral medial pre-frontal cortex and value representations

vmPFC brain activity tracks the subjective value we individually apply on items

Marshmallow experiment - original and 40 year follow-up neuroimaging

• delayed gratification experiment

• original premise:

  • kids were handed a marshmallow, told to wait for 10-15 min and they would get a bigger marshmallow

  • little kids generally showed less control and munched on the small marshmallow, older kids usually waited

• 40 year follow-up

  • neuroimaging of these children as adults

  • realized kids who delayed and won bigger marshmallow generally scored better life outcomes (better SAT scores, higher academic success)

  • ^not so simple, other factors could impact their self-control

    • ex., kids could’ve been distrustful of adult figures

  • low delayers (hot circuitry): more activity in Ventral Striatum

  • high delayers (cool circuitry): more activitiy in RH inferior Frontal Cortex

Reward prediction error

• midbrain dopaminergic neurons in response to expected and omitted rewards

  • DA release increases when unexpected reward occurs

  • no change in DA when reward matches expectations (aka baseline DA remains)

  • decrease in DA when reward is omitted

  • DA neurons don’t code reward, but rather code changes in information/value supporting learning of the changes

• DA neurons in VTA and substantia nigra (SNc) appear to mimic error function (RPE)

Frontal lobe damage and value assessments***

• 2 types of frontal lobe damage

  • dysexecutive syndrome (lateral PFC)

  • disinhibition syndrome (medial PFC)

• value-based decisions

  • ventral striatum codes motivation/value

  • vmPFC/OFC codes SUBJECTIVE value

Default Brain Network vs. Default mode network

• Default Brain Network

  • when directing attention outward, higher brain activity

  • areas activated by social cognition overlap with many regions of Default Mode Network

  • activated under different social cognition tasks

  • suggests competition of neural resources between directing attention to social factors vs. external stimuli without social components

• Default mode network

  • decreased activation when concentrated on a task

  • increased activity when daydreaming

Theory of Mind

• the cognitive abilities to represent information in minds of others, distinguishing them from what we know

  • in other words, our cognitive capacity to understand mental states of others

• term that describes psychological property, NOT A THEORY OF THE MIND

Mentalization

• broader term that encompasses Theory of Mind and includes thinking about one’s self

• thinking about minds of others and one’s own mind

• ability to perceive and interpret human behavior in terms of intentional mental states

  • like goals, desires, feelings, beliefs

• can be seen as form of imaginative mental activity

• Autism can be seen as failure to develop mentalization abilities

Mindblindness

• inability to understand social goals, intents, beliefs of others

Ethical decision making

• famous moral dilemma

  • runaway train

  • flip a switch to save 5, but one dies as a consequence

  • OR push one to death in order to save 5 other lives

False belief task

• famous example is Sally-Anne task

  • Sally places her marble in the basket → Sally exits and Anne transfers Sally’s marble to a drawer → Sally re-enters → where does Sally look for the marble?

• around age 4, normal kids develop this ability to understand that other minds might have different info/beliefs of their own

Social cognition and Default Network

• social cognitive functions like Theory of Mind and Ethical Decision Making activate core regions of the Brain default network

  • medial prefrontal cortex

  • posterior cingulate cortex

  • retrosplenial cortex

  • temporo-parietal junction (TPJ)/angular gyrus

  • anterior superior temporal sulcus

• this closely mirrors “default“ network that shows high activation at rest

Personality assessments

dorsomedial PFC activates when assessing a person’s personality/forming an impression

Phineas gage - damage, deficits

• damage to left OFC and medial PFC

• “Gage is no longer Gage“

  • stopped observing social conventions

  • behaves unethically

  • made poor personal decisions

• deficits result from specific brain lesion, not general reaction to accident

Role of right Temporal Parietal Junction (TPJ)

involved in self-processing and integrating multi-sensory body-related information, which plays a key role in the feeling of embodiment

Orbitofrontal damage and social cognition

• self-perception is diminished in real-time, but not in video playback

• social rules are understood, but not applied to filter own behavior

Self-referential processing

• thinking about things in relation to ourselves

• when we process info related to ourselves, we obtain a depth of processing advantage → stronger memories

Implicit bias

• unconscious attribution of particular qualities (stereotypes) to members of certain social groups

• implicit association test

  • caucasian vs. African American faces

  • positive or negative words/traits

  • logic is similar to Stroop test (Reaction Time differences)

• more explicit tests exist, but most people won’t explicitly give biased answer

Implicit Association test and brain activation

• race association: African Americans vs. European Americans

• reaction time measures reveal implicit bias among Caucasians toward African Americans

• results generalize to other in-group/out-group

• multiple variants of these tests

  • race, gender-career, age, religion, etc

• Amygdala activity correlates with IAT bias

  • fast, automatic, emotional response to out-group

• dorsolateral PFC

  • people with greater implicit bias tend to employ cognitive control over responses, engaging DLPFC

  • those who well-regulate implicit bias exhibit larger ERN

Dorsomedial PFC and social cognition

Activity in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) increases during tasks that involve self-referential mental activity or self-focused attention and decreases during tasks that involve externally focused attention

Amygdala and social cognition

• uses the face to make social judgments

• another region involved in person perception

• signaled when value expectation is violated and to form new associative perceptions that may flexibly change behavior

Mirror neurons

• activated when observing another’s action and when one is performing it oneself

Mirror neuron network

• every linked brain region that responds when mirror neurons are invoked

• premotor cortex and inferior parietal cortex

• also includes:

  • rostral inferior parietal lobule (rIPL), dorsal premotor cortex (dPMC), medial fr ontal cortex (MFC), ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC), and anterior cingulate gyrus (ACG)

Empathy and emotion sharing

• empathy = feeling others pain

• mirror neurons in premotor cortex, insula cortex, ad anterior cingulate cortex (ACG) activate for our pain

Disgust processing

insula activates from perception of disgust

Emotion sharing

• brain regions that mediate emotion sharing (pain)

  • anterior insula

  • secondary somatosensory cortex

  • STS (biological perception)

  • TPJ, MFC (theory of mind/simulations)

  • ACG

  • conflict monitoring

Neural substrates associated with: face processing, biological motion

• Superior temporal sulcus (STS) = perception of biological motion

• face processing

  • core system (visual analysis) →

    • STS = changeable aspects of faces: perception of eye gaze, expression, lip movement

    • inferior occipital gyri = early perception of facial features

    • lateral fusiform gyrus/inferotemporal cortex = invariant aspects of faces: perception of unique identity

  • → extended system (further processing in concert with other neural systems)

    • intraparietal sulcus = spatially directed attention

    • auditory complex = prelexical speech perception

    • amygdala, insula, limbic system = emotion

    • anterior temporal lobe = personal identity, name and biographical information