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1.
Dev Cogn Neurosci ; 63: 101285, 2023 10.
Article in English | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-37591011

ABSTRACT

Vision is an important source of information about other minds for sighted children, especially prior to the onset of language. Visually observed actions, eye gaze, and facial expressions of others provide information about mental states, such as beliefs, desires, and emotions. Does such experience contribute causally to the development of cortical networks supporting social cognition? To address this question we compared functional development of brain regions supporting theory of mind (ToM), as well as behavioral ToM reasoning, across congenitally blind (n=17) and sighted (n=114) children and adolescents (4-17 years old). We find that blind children in this age range show slightly lower ToM behavioral performance relative to sighted children. Likewise, the functional profile of ToM brain regions is qualitatively similar, but quantitatively weaker in blind relative to sighted children. Alongside prior research, these data suggest that vision facilitates, but is not necessary for, ToM development.


Subject(s)
Theory of Mind , Adolescent , Humans , Child , Child, Preschool , Brain , Emotions , Brain Mapping , Problem Solving
2.
Neuroimage ; 209: 116497, 2020 04 01.
Article in English | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-31899285

ABSTRACT

Acute stress is often evoked during social interactions, by feelings of threat or negative evaluation by other people. We also constantly interact with others while under stress - in the workplace or in private alike. However, it is not clear how stress affects social interactions. For one, individuals could become more selfish and focused on their own goals. On the other hand, individuals might also become more focused on affiliating with potential social partners, in order to secure their support. There is, indeed, accumulating behavioral evidence that prosocial behaviors increase rather than decrease under stress. Here, we tested the underlying brain processes of such findings, by assessing the effects of stress on the neural representations of (monetary) value for self and other. Participants (N â€‹= â€‹30; male, 18-40 years) played a gambling task for themselves and for another participant while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Each participant played the gambling task twice: once immediately following acute stress induction, and once in a control session. We compared neural patterns of value representation in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and striatum using representational similarity analysis (RSA). We found that under stress, dmPFC and striatum showed higher dissimilarity between neural patterns underlying high and low value for the other. Dissimilarity of neural patterns underlying high and low value for the self was unaffected by stress. These findings suggest that participants track the magnitude of possible rewards for others more under stress, suggesting increased prosocial orientation.


Subject(s)
Brain Mapping , Cooperative Behavior , Corpus Striatum/physiology , Prefrontal Cortex/physiology , Psychomotor Performance/physiology , Reward , Stress, Psychological/physiopathology , Adolescent , Adult , Corpus Striatum/diagnostic imaging , Female , Humans , Magnetic Resonance Imaging , Male , Prefrontal Cortex/diagnostic imaging , Stress, Psychological/diagnostic imaging , Young Adult
3.
Neuroimage ; 159: 371-387, 2017 10 01.
Article in English | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-28743459

ABSTRACT

Characterizing how representations of moral violations are organized, cognitively and neurally, is central to understanding how people conceive and judge them. Past work has identified brain regions that represent morally relevant features and distinguish moral domains, but has not yet advanced a broader account of where and on what basis neural representations of moral violations are organized. With searchlight representational similarity analysis, we investigate where category membership drives similarity in neural patterns during moral judgment of violations from two key moral domains: Harm and Purity. Representations converge across domains in a network of regions resembling the mentalizing network. However, Harm and Purity violation representations respectively converge in different regions: precuneus (PC) and left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG). Examining substructure within moral domains, Harm violations converge in PC regardless of subdomain (physical harms, psychological harms), while Purity subdomains (pathogen-related violations, sex-related violations) converge in distinct sets of regions - mirroring a dissociation observed in principal-component analysis of behavioral data. Further, we find initial evidence for representation of morally relevant features within these two domain-encoding regions. The present analyses offer a case study for understanding how organization within the complex conceptual space of moral violations is reflected in the organization of neural patterns across the cortex.


Subject(s)
Brain/physiology , Judgment/physiology , Morals , Adult , Brain Mapping , Female , Humans , Image Processing, Computer-Assisted , Magnetic Resonance Imaging , Male
4.
J Exp Soc Psychol ; 55: 110-125, 2014 Nov 01.
Article in English | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-25082998

ABSTRACT

Despite its early origins and adaptive functions, empathy is not inevitable; people routinely fail to empathize with others, especially members of different social or cultural groups. In five experiments, we systematically explore how social identity, functional relations between groups, competitive threat, and perceived entitativity contribute to intergroup empathy bias: the tendency not only to empathize less with out-group relative to in-group members, but also feel pleasure in response to their pain (and pain in response to their pleasure). When teams are set in direct competition, affective responses to competition-irrelevant events are characterized not only by less empathy toward out-group relative to in-group members, but also by increased counter-empathic responses: Schadenfreude and Glückschmerz (Experiment 1). Comparing responses to in-group and out-group targets against responses to unaffiliated targets in this competitive context suggests that intergroup empathy bias may be better characterized by out-group antipathy rather than extraordinary in-group empathy (Experiment 2). We find also that intergroup empathy bias is robust to changes in relative group standing-feedback indicating that the out-group has fallen behind (Experiment 3a) or is no longer a competitive threat (Experiment 3b) does not reduce the bias. However, reducing perceived in-group and out-group entitativity can significantly attenuate intergroup empathy bias (Experiment 4). This research establishes the boundary conditions of intergroup empathy bias and provides initial support for a more integrative framework of group-based empathy.

5.
Neuroimage ; 96: 36-43, 2014 Aug 01.
Article in English | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-24726338

ABSTRACT

Why do interactions become more hostile when social relations shift from "me versus you" to "us versus them"? One possibility is that acting with a group can reduce spontaneous self-referential processing in the moral domain and, in turn, facilitate competitor harm. We tested this hypothesis in an fMRI experiment in which (i) participants performed a competitive task once alone and once with a group; (ii) spontaneous self-referential processing during competition was indexed unobtrusively by activation in an independently localized region of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) associated with self-reference; and (iii) we assessed participants' willingness to harm competitors versus teammates. As predicted, participants who showed reduced mPFC activation in response to descriptions of their own moral behaviors while competing in a group were more willing to harm competitors. These results suggest that intergroup competition (above and beyond inter-personal competition) can reduce self-referential processing of moral information, enabling harmful behaviors towards members of a competitive group.


Subject(s)
Brain/physiology , Competitive Behavior/physiology , Judgment/physiology , Moral Obligations , Morals , Self Concept , Social Behavior , Brain Mapping , Female , Harm Reduction , Hate , Humans , Male , Social Control, Informal , Young Adult
6.
Cereb Cortex ; 22(2): 286-93, 2012 Feb.
Article in English | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-21653285

ABSTRACT

Many empiricist theories hold that concepts are composed of sensory-motor primitives. For example, the meaning of the word "run" is in part a visual image of running. If action concepts are partly visual, then the concepts of congenitally blind individuals should be altered in that they lack these visual features. We compared semantic judgments and neural activity during action verb comprehension in congenitally blind and sighted individuals. Participants made similarity judgments about pairs of nouns and verbs that varied in the visual motion they conveyed. Blind adults showed the same pattern of similarity judgments as sighted adults. We identified the left middle temporal gyrus (lMTG) brain region that putatively stores visual-motion features relevant to action verbs. The functional profile and location of this region was identical in sighted and congenitally blind individuals. Furthermore, the lMTG was more active for all verbs than nouns, irrespective of visual-motion features. We conclude that the lMTG contains abstract representations of verb meanings rather than visual-motion images. Our data suggest that conceptual brain regions are not altered by the sensory modality of learning.


Subject(s)
Brain Mapping , Brain/physiology , Comprehension/physiology , Semantics , Vision, Ocular , Adult , Analysis of Variance , Brain/blood supply , Female , Humans , Image Processing, Computer-Assisted , Magnetic Resonance Imaging , Male , Middle Aged , Oxygen/blood , Reaction Time
7.
Psychol Sci ; 16(12): 995-1001, 2005 Dec.
Article in English | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-16313665

ABSTRACT

Considerable evidence indicates that preverbal infants expect that only physical contact can cause an inanimate object to move. However, very few studies have investigated infants' expectations about the source of causal power. In three experiments, we found that (a) 10- and 12-month-old infants expect a human hand, and not an inanimate object, to be the primary cause of an inanimate object's motion; (b) infants' expectations can lead them to infer a hidden causal agent without any direct perceptual evidence; and (c) infants do not infer a hidden causal agent if the moving object was previously shown to be capable of self-generated motion.


Subject(s)
Motion Perception , Female , Humans , Infant , Infant Behavior , Male , Movement , Psychology, Child
8.
Neuropsychologia ; 42(11): 1435-46, 2004.
Article in English | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-15246282

ABSTRACT

Human adults and infants identify the actions of another agent based not only on its intrinsic perceptual features, but critically on the contingent relationship between its motion path and the environmental context [Trends Cogn. Sci. 7 (1995) 287; Cognition 72 (2003) 237]. Functional neuroimaging studies of the perception of agents and intentional actions, on the other hand, have mostly focussed on the perception of intrinsic cues to agency, like a face or articulated body motion (e.g. [J. Neurosci. 17 (1997) 4302; Neuroimage 8 (1998) 221; Trends Cogn. Sci. 4 (2000) 267; Nat. Neurosci. 3 (2000) 80; Neuroimage 13 (2001) 775; Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 98 (2001) 11656; Neuron 35 (2002) 1167; Neuron 34 (2002) 149, Neuroscience 15 (2003) 991; J. Neurosci. 23 (2003) 6819; Philos. Trans. R Soc. Lond. B. Biol. Sci. 358 (2003) 435]. Here we describe a region of the right posterior superior temporal sulcus that is sensitive not to articulated body motion per se, but to the relationship between the observed motion and the structure of the surrounding environment. From this and other aspects of the region's response, we hypothesize that this region is involved in the representation of observed intentional actions.


Subject(s)
Image Enhancement , Image Processing, Computer-Assisted , Intention , Magnetic Resonance Imaging , Motion Perception/physiology , Oxygen/blood , Pattern Recognition, Visual/physiology , Social Environment , Temporal Lobe/physiology , Adult , Attention/physiology , Brain Mapping , Corpus Striatum/physiology , Discrimination Learning/physiology , Female , Humans , Male , Perceptual Masking/physiology , Pursuit, Smooth/physiology , Visual Pathways/physiology
9.
Annu Rev Psychol ; 55: 87-124, 2004.
Article in English | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-14744211

ABSTRACT

Evidence from developmental psychology suggests that understanding other minds constitutes a special domain of cognition with at least two components: an early-developing system for reasoning about goals, perceptions, and emotions, and a later-developing system for representing the contents of beliefs. Neuroimaging reinforces and elaborates upon this view by providing evidence that (a) domain-specific brain regions exist for representing belief contents, (b) these regions are apparently distinct from other regions engaged in reasoning about goals and actions (suggesting that the two developmental stages reflect the emergence of two distinct systems, rather than the elaboration of a single system), and (c) these regions are distinct from brain regions engaged in inhibitory control and in syntactic processing. The clear neural distinction between these processes is evidence that belief attribution is not dependent on either inhibitory control or syntax, but is subserved by a specialized neural system for theory of mind.


Subject(s)
Brain/metabolism , Magnetic Resonance Imaging , Psychology, Child , Social Perception , Brain/anatomy & histology , Child , Child, Preschool , Culture , Decision Making , Humans , Infant , Linguistics
10.
Neuroimage ; 19(4): 1835-42, 2003 Aug.
Article in English | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-12948738

ABSTRACT

Humans powerfully and flexibly interpret the behaviour of other people based on an understanding of their minds: that is, we use a "theory of mind." In this study we distinguish theory of mind, which represents another person's mental states, from a representation of the simple presence of another person per se. The studies reported here establish for the first time that a region in the human temporo-parietal junction (here called the TPJ-M) is involved specifically in reasoning about the contents of another person's mind. First, the TPJ-M was doubly dissociated from the nearby extrastriate body area (EBA; Downing et al., 2001). Second, the TPJ-M does not respond to false representations in non-social control stories. Third, the BOLD response in the TPJ-M bilaterally was higher when subjects read stories about a character's mental states, compared with stories that described people in physical detail, which did not differ from stories about nonhuman objects. Thus, the role of the TPJ-M in understanding other people appears to be specific to reasoning about the content of mental states.


Subject(s)
Awareness/physiology , Image Enhancement , Image Processing, Computer-Assisted , Interpersonal Relations , Magnetic Resonance Imaging , Nerve Net/physiology , Oxygen/blood , Parietal Lobe/physiology , Social Perception , Temporal Lobe/physiology , Thinking/physiology , Brain Mapping , Dominance, Cerebral/physiology , Facial Expression , Humans , Pattern Recognition, Visual/physiology , Problem Solving/physiology , Speech Perception , Visual Cortex/physiology
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