Vagus Nerve as Modulator of the Brain-Gut Axis in Psychiatric and Inflammatory Disorders.

The vagus nerve represents the main component of the parasympathetic nervous system, which oversees a vast array of crucial bodily functions, including control of mood, immune response, digestion, and heart rate. It establishes one of the connections between the brain and the gastrointestinal tract and sends information about the state of the inner organs to the brain via afferent fibers. In this review article, we discuss various functions of the vagus nerve which make it an attractive target in treating psychiatric and gastrointestinal disorders. There is preliminary evidence that vagus nerve stimulation is a promising add-on treatment for treatment-refractory depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and inflammatory bowel disease. Treatments that target the vagus nerve increase the vagal tone and inhibit cytokine production. Both are important mechanism of resiliency. The stimulation of vagal afferent fibers in the gut influences monoaminergic brain systems in the brain stem that play crucial roles in major psychiatric conditions, such as mood and anxiety disorders. In line, there is preliminary evidence for gut bacteria to have beneficial effect on mood and anxiety, partly by affecting the activity of the vagus nerve. Since, the vagal tone is correlated with capacity to regulate stress responses and can be influenced by breathing, its increase through meditation and yoga likely contribute to resilience and the mitigation of mood and anxiety symptoms.

Fronto-parietal coding of goal-directed actions performed by artificial agents.

With advances in technology, artificial agents such as humanoid robots will soon become a part of our daily lives. For safe and intuitive collaboration, it is important to understand the goals behind their motor actions. In humans, this process is mediated by changes in activity in fronto-parietal brain areas. The extent to which these areas are activated when observing artificial agents indicates the naturalness and easiness of interaction. Previous studies indicated that fronto-parietal activity does not depend on whether the agent is human or artificial. However, it is unknown whether this activity is modulated by observing grasping (self-related action) and pointing actions (other-related action) performed by an artificial agent depending on the action goal. Therefore, we designed an experiment in which subjects observed human and artificial agents perform pointing and grasping actions aimed at two different object categories suggesting different goals. We found a signal increase in the bilateral inferior parietal lobule and the premotor cortex when tool versus food items were pointed to or grasped by both agents, probably reflecting the association of hand actions with the functional use of tools. Our results show that goal attribution engages the fronto-parietal network not only for observing a human but also a robotic agent for both self-related and social actions. The debriefing after the experiment has shown that actions of human-like artificial agents can be perceived as being goal-directed. Therefore, humans will be able to interact with service robots intuitively in various domains such as education, healthcare, public service, and entertainment.

Testing the social competition hypothesis of depression using a simple economic game.

BACKGROUND: Price's social competition hypothesis interprets the depressive state as an unconscious, involuntary losing strategy, which enables individuals to yield and accept defeat in competitive situations. AIMS: We investigated whether patients who suffer from major depressive disorder (MDD) would avoid competition more often than either patients suffering from borderline personality disorder (BPD) or healthy controls. METHOD: In a simple paper-folding task healthy participants and patiens with MDD and BPD were matched with two opponents, one with an unknown diagnosis and one who shared their clinical diagnosis, and they had to choose either a competitive or cooperative payment scheme for task completion. RESULTS: When playing against an unknown opponent, but not the opponent with the same diagnosis, the patients with depression chose the competitive payment scheme statistically less often than healthy controls and patients diagnosed with BPD. CONCLUSION: The competition avoidance against the unknown opponent is consistent with Price's social competition hypothesis. DECLARATION OF INTEREST: G.H. received research support, consulting fees and speaker honoraria from Lundbeck, AstraZeneca, Servier, Eli Lilly, Roche and Novartis. COPYRIGHT AND USAGE: © The Royal College of Psychiatrists 2016. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Non-Commercial, No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

Social functioning in major depressive disorder.

Depression is associated with social risk factors, social impairments and poor social functioning. This paper gives an overview of these social aspects using the NIMH Research and Domain Criteria 'Systems for Social Processes' as a framework. In particular, it describes the bio-psycho-social interplay regarding impaired affiliation and attachment (social anhedonia, hyper-sensitivity to social rejection, competition avoidance, increased altruistic punishment), impaired social communication (impaired emotion recognition, diminished cooperativeness), impaired social perception (reduced empathy, theory-of-mind deficits) and their impact on social networks and the use of social media. It describes these dysfunctional social processes at the behavioural, neuroanatomical, neurochemical and genetic levels, and with respect to animal models of social stress. We discuss the diagnostic specificity of these social deficit constructs for depression and in relation to depression severity. Since social factors are importantly involved in the pathogenesis and the consequences of depression, such research will likely contribute to better diagnostic assessments and concepts, treatments and preventative strategies both at the diagnostic and transdiagnostic level.

Spatiotemporal movement planning and rapid adaptation for manual interaction.

Many everyday tasks require the ability of two or more individuals to coordinate their actions with others to increase efficiency. Such an increase in efficiency can often be observed even after only very few trials. Previous work suggests that such behavioral adaptation can be explained within a probabilistic framework that integrates sensory input and prior experience. Even though higher cognitive abilities such as intention recognition have been described as probabilistic estimation depending on an internal model of the other agent, it is not clear whether much simpler daily interaction is consistent with a probabilistic framework. Here, we investigate whether the mechanisms underlying efficient coordination during manual interactions can be understood as probabilistic optimization. For this purpose we studied in several experiments a simple manual handover task concentrating on the action of the receiver. We found that the duration until the receiver reacts to the handover decreases over trials, but strongly depends on the position of the handover. We then replaced the human deliverer by different types of robots to further investigate the influence of the delivering movement on the reaction of the receiver. Durations were found to depend on movement kinematics and the robot's joint configuration. Modeling the task was based on the assumption that the receiver's decision to act is based on the accumulated evidence for a specific handover position. The evidence for this handover position is collected from observing the hand movement of the deliverer over time and, if appropriate, by integrating this sensory likelihood with prior expectation that is updated over trials. The close match of model simulations and experimental results shows that the efficiency of handover coordination can be explained by an adaptive probabilistic fusion of a-priori expectation and online estimation.

Do robots have goals? How agent cues influence action understanding in non-human primates.

The capacity to understand goals and intentions emerges early and universally in humans and is a basic precondition for the interpretation and prediction of others' actions, be it other humans, animals, or even robots. It is unclear, however, how this goal attribution system is acquired, in particular with regard to the role of prior experience with the actor and visual characteristics that are necessary. In four preferential looking time experiments we examined how familiarity, appearance, and movement of different agents influence the capability of marmosets to perceive the behavior of these agents as goal directed. To this end we compared the monkeys' reactions to the same goal-directed actions performed by four different agents: a human actor, a conspecific, a monkey-like small robot, and a black box. The results showed that monkeys attributed goals to the human actor, the conspecific, and the robot, but not the box. Thus, the monkeys extended their capacity for goal attribution not only to familiar agents, but also to agents not previously encountered, provided that they had some conspecific-like features. Our results suggest that in non-human primates, the system for goal attribution does not require previous experience with a specific agent or agent-category, as long as it exhibits certain visual characteristics like face, body or legs. Furthermore, the results suggest that the capacity to attribute goals emerged very early during evolution and, at least in marmoset monkeys, does not necessarily require pre-learned associations in order to fulfill its function when dealing with unfamiliar agents.

Moving just like you: motor interference depends on similar motility of agent and observer.

Recent findings in neuroscience suggest an overlap between brain regions involved in the execution of movement and perception of another's movement. This so-called "action-perception coupling" is supposed to serve our ability to automatically infer the goals and intentions of others by internal simulation of their actions. A consequence of this coupling is motor interference (MI), the effect of movement observation on the trajectory of one's own movement. Previous studies emphasized that various features of the observed agent determine the degree of MI, but could not clarify how human-like an agent has to be for its movements to elicit MI and, more importantly, what 'human-like' means in the context of MI. Thus, we investigated in several experiments how different aspects of appearance and motility of the observed agent influence motor interference (MI). Participants performed arm movements in horizontal and vertical directions while observing videos of a human, a humanoid robot, or an industrial robot arm with either artificial (industrial) or human-like joint configurations. Our results show that, given a human-like joint configuration, MI was elicited by observing arm movements of both humanoid and industrial robots. However, if the joint configuration of the robot did not resemble that of the human arm, MI could longer be demonstrated. Our findings present evidence for the importance of human-like joint configuration rather than other human-like features for perception-action coupling when observing inanimate agents.

Even simple forms of social learning rely on intention attribution in marmoset monkeys (Callithrix jacchus).

Intention attribution guides the cognitively most demanding forms of social learning, such as imitation, thereby scaffolding cumulative cultural evolution. However, it is not thought to be necessary for more basic forms of social learning. Here we present evidence that in marmoset monkeys (Callithrix jacchus) even most basic forms of social learning such as enhancement depend on intention attribution. Marmosets perceived the behavior of a conspecific and a conspecific-like robot, but not that of a moving black box, as goal directed. Their subsequent choice behavior was shaped by social facilitation and stimulus enhancement, that is, by very simple forms of social learning, but only when exposed to the conspecific and robot, which they previously had perceived as intentional agents. We discuss the implications of this finding for contemporary debates about social learning, including emulation learning and ghost control studies, the necessity of goal-directed copying for cumulative cultural evolution, and the limits of current classification systems of social learning for the evolution of social and asocial learning.

Influence of uninformative visual cues on gravity perception.

The perception of the subjective direction of up (subjective visual zenith, SVZ) is influenced by various sensory cues, such as, vestibular and visual input, and by the idiotropic vector, which acts as prior information about self-orientation with respect to gravity. Here, we tested the influence of a subject-fixed visual cue, which was uninformative with respect to the direction of gravity, on SVZ settings in different pitch angles. Our results show that in most subjects the SVZ was influenced by the gravity-unrelated visual cue in a way suggesting that the cue's orientation was memorized in the first trial and used thereafter as reference.