COVID-Dynamic: A large-scale longitudinal study of socioemotional and behavioral change across the pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused enormous societal upheaval globally. In the US, beyond the devastating toll on life and health, it triggered an economic shock unseen since the great depression and laid bare preexisting societal inequities. The full impacts of these personal, social, economic, and public-health challenges will not be known for years. To minimize societal costs and ensure future preparedness, it is critical to record the psychological and social experiences of individuals during such periods of high societal volatility. Here, we introduce, describe, and assess the COVID-Dynamic dataset, a within-participant longitudinal study conducted from April 2020 through January 2021, that captures the COVID-19 pandemic experiences of >1000 US residents. Each of 16 timepoints combines standard psychological assessments with novel surveys of emotion, social/political/moral attitudes, COVID-19-related behaviors, tasks assessing implicit attitudes and social decision-making, and external data to contextualize participants' responses. This dataset is a resource for researchers interested in COVID-19-specific questions and basic psychological phenomena, as well as clinicians and policy-makers looking to mitigate the effects of future calamities.

Deconstructing Theory-of-Mind Impairment in High-Functioning Adults with Autism.

Inferring the beliefs, desires, and intentions of other people ("theory of mind," ToM) requires specialized psychological processes that represent the minds of others as distinct from our own [1-3]. ToM is engaged ubiquitously in our everyday social behavior and features a specific developmental trajectory [4] that is notably delayed in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) [5, 6]. In healthy individuals, model-based analyses of social learning and decision-making have successfully elucidated specific computational components of ToM processing [7-11]. However, the use of this approach to study ToM impairment in ASD has been extremely limited [10, 12]. To better characterize specific ToM impairment in ASD, we developed a novel learning task and applied model-based analyses in high-functioning adults with ASD and matched healthy controls. After completing a charitable donation task, participants performed a "mentalizer" task in which they observed another person (the agent) complete the same charity task. The mentalizer task probed the participants' ability to acquire and use ToM representations. To accurately predict agent behavior, participants needed to dynamically track the agent's beliefs (true or false) about an experimental context that varied over time and use that information to infer the agent's intentions from their actions. ASD participants were specifically impaired at using their estimates of agent belief to learn agent intentions, though their ability to track agent belief was intact and their reasoning about belief and intentions was rational. Furthermore, model parameters correlated with aspects of social functioning, e.g., ADOS severity scores [13]. Together, these results identify novel, and more specific, targets for future research.

Getting to know you: general and specific neural computations for learning about people.

Learning about other peoples' attributes, e.g. whether an individual is generous or selfish, is central to human social cognition. It is well documented that a network of cortical regions is reliably activated when we engage social processes. However, little is known about the specific computations performed by these regions or whether such processing is specialized for the social domain. We investigated these questions using a task in which participants (N= 26) learned about four peoples' generosity by watching them choose to share money with third party partners, or not. In a non-social control condition, participants learned the win/loss rates of four lotteries. fMRI analysis revealed learning-related general (social + non-social) prediction error signals in the dorsomedial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortices (bilaterally), and in the right lateral parietal cortex. Socially specific (social > non-social) prediction error signals were found in the precuneus. Interestingly, the region that exhibited social prediction errors was a distinct subregion of the area in the precuneus and posterior cingulate cortex that exhibited a commonly reported main effect of higher overall activity for social vs non-social stimuli. These findings elucidate the domain--general and--specific computations underlying learning about other people and demonstrate the increased explanatory power of computational approaches to social cognition.

Toward a neural basis for social behavior.

Nearly 25 years ago, the shared interests of psychologists and biologists in understanding the neural basis of social behavior led to the inception of social neuroscience. In the past decade, this field has exploded, in large part due to the infusion of studies that use fMRI. At the same time, tensions have arisen about how to prioritize a diverse range of questions and about the authority of neurobiological data in answering them. The field is now poised to tackle some of the most interesting and important questions about human and animal behavior but at the same time faces uncertainty about how to achieve focus in its research and cohesion among the scientists who tackle it. The next 25 years offer the opportunity to alleviate some of these growing pains, as well as the challenge of answering large questions that encompass the nature and bounds of diverse social interactions (in humans, including interactions through the internet); how to characterize, and treat, social dysfunction in psychiatric illness; and how to compare social cognition in humans with that in other animals.

Race and reputation: perceived racial group trustworthiness influences the neural correlates of trust decisions.

Decisions to trust people with whom we have no personal history can be based on their social reputation-a product of what we can observe about them (their appearance, social group membership, etc.)-and our own beliefs. The striatum and amygdala have been identified as regions of the brain involved in trust decisions and trustworthiness estimation, respectively. However, it is unknown whether social reputation based on group membership modulates the involvement of these regions during trust decisions. To investigate this, we examined blood-oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) activity while participants completed a series of single-shot trust game interactions with real partners of varying races. At the time of choice, baseline BOLD responses in the striatum correlated with individuals' trust bias-that is, the overall disparity in decisions to trust Black versus White partners. BOLD signal in the striatum was higher when deciding to trust partners from the race group that the individual participant considered less trustworthy overall. In contrast, activation of the amygdala showed greater BOLD responses to Black versus White partners that scaled with the amount invested. These results suggest that the amygdala may represent emotionally relevant social group information as a subset of the general detection function it serves, whereas the striatum is involved in representing race-based reputations that shape trust decisions.

Implicit race attitudes predict trustworthiness judgments and economic trust decisions.

Trust lies at the heart of every social interaction. Each day we face decisions in which we must accurately assess another individual's trustworthiness or risk suffering very real consequences. In a global marketplace of increasing heterogeneity with respect to nationality, race, and multiple other social categories, it is of great value to understand how implicitly held attitudes about group membership may support or undermine social trust and thereby implicitly shape the decisions we make. Recent behavioral and neuroimaging work suggests that a common mechanism may underlie the expression of implicit race bias and evaluations of trustworthiness, although no direct evidence of a connection exists. In two behavioral studies, we investigated the relationship between implicit race attitude (as measured by the Implicit Association Test) and social trust. We demonstrate that race disparity in both an individual's explicit evaluations of trustworthiness and, more crucially, his or her economic decisions to trust is predicted by that person's bias in implicit race attitude. Importantly, this relationship is robust and is independent of the individual's bias in explicit race attitude. These data demonstrate that the extent to which an individual invests in and trusts others with different racial backgrounds is related to the magnitude of that individual's implicit race bias. The core dimension of social trust can be shaped, to some degree, by attitudes that reside outside conscious awareness and intention.

Cuing effects of faces are dependent on handedness and visual field.

Faces are unlike other visual objects we encounter, in that they alert us to potentially relevant social information. Both face processing and spatial attention are dominant in the right hemisphere of the human brain, with a stronger lateralization in right- than in left-handers. Here, we demonstrate behavioral evidence for an effect of handedness on performance in tasks using faces to direct attention. Nonpredictive, peripheral cues (faces or dots) directed exogenous attention to contrast-varying stimuli (Gabor patches)-a tilted target, a vertical distractor, or both; observers made orientation discriminations on the target stimuli. Whereas cuing with dots increased contrast sensitivity in both groups, cuing with faces increased contrast sensitivity in right- but not in left-handers, for whom opposite hemifield effects resulted in no net increase. Our results reveal that attention modulation by face cues critically depends on handedness and visual hemifield. These previously unreported interactions suggest that such lateralized systems may be functionally connected.

Rapid detection of salient regions: evidence from apparent motion.

Most studies that have used Kanizsa-type illusory figures to investigate perceptual completion have treated the crisp bounding illusory contours (ICs) and the enclosed region as nondissociable stimulus attributes. However, there is evidence that enclosed "salient regions" (SRs; Stanley & Rubin, 2003) are detected even in cases when bounding ICs are not perceptually completed. Here we used apparent motion (AM) to test whether SRs are detected in the absence of crisp bounding ICs. Kanizsa-type stimuli were modified in ways that eliminated the bounding ICs, but the clear impression of an enclosed region remained. SR stimuli were embedded in an array of like inducers. On successive frames, the inducers in the array rotated in a way that resulted in translation of the enclosed region. Four speeds of translation were tested. Observers performed a two-alternative forced-choice task on the direction of translation. Perceptually completed SRs produced robust AM whether they were bound by crisp ICs or not-observer performance was as good and, in certain cases, even better for SRs with no bounding ICs. We interpret these findings within a theoretical framework that makes a distinction between region-based and contour-based segmentation processes that operate in concert to achieve segmentation of the visual scene.

fMRI activation in response to illusory contours and salient regions in the human lateral occipital complex.

Regions in the human Lateral Occipital Complex (LOC) show fMRI responses to illusory surfaces. We show that the LOC activation is due to the globally completed region and occurs even when the region is not bounded by illusory contours (ICs). Kanizsa-type stimuli were modified by rounding the corners of the "pacmen" inducers and misaligning them slightly. The impression of an enclosed, salient region (SR) remained, although ICs were no longer perceived (psychophysical data). fMRI activity was elevated for both the IC and SR stimuli, compared to their control stimuli. The LOC response to salient regions may be the result of fast but crude region-based segmentation processes, which are useful for selecting parts of cluttered images for more detailed, computationally intensive processing.