Moral Violations and the Experience of Disgust and Anger.

Disgust is a natural defensive emotion that has evolved to protect against potential sources of contamination and has been recently linked to moral judgements in many studies. However, that people often report feelings of disgust when thinking about feces or moral transgressions alike does not necessarily mean that the same mechanisms mediate these reactions. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (n = 22) to investigate whether core and moral disgusts entrain common neural systems. We provide evidence that: (i) activation of overlapping brain regions between core and moral disgust is the result of content overlap in the vignettes-core disgust elicitors-across conditions, and not from moral violations per se, and (ii) moral residue (i.e., the remaining or "residual" activation after the influence of core disgust elicitors have been taken into account) produced a pattern of activation that is more consistent with moral anger, than one of "residual disgust." These findings run contrary to the premise that our "moral center" is connected to the area of the brain in which physical revulsion is located.

Representing the location of manipulable objects in shape-selective occipitotemporal cortex: Beyond retinotopic reference frames?

When interacting with objects, we have to represent their location relative to our bodies. To facilitate bodily reactions, location may be encoded in the brain not just with respect to the retina (retinotopic reference frame), but also in relation to the head, trunk or arm (collectively spatiotopic reference frames). While spatiotopic reference frames for location encoding can be found in brain areas for action planning, such as parietal areas, there is debate about the existence of spatiotopic reference frames in higher-level occipitotemporal visual areas. In an extensive multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) fMRI study using faces, headless bodies and scenes stimuli, Golomb and Kanwisher (2012) did not find evidence for spatiotopic reference frames in shape-selective occipitotemporal cortex. This finding is important for theories of how stimulus location is encoded in the brain. It is possible, however, that their failure to find spatiotopic reference frames is related to their stimuli: we typically do not manipulate faces, headless bodies or scenes. It is plausible that we only represent body-centred location when viewing objects that are typically manipulated. Here, we tested for object location encoding in shape-selective occipitotemporal cortex using manipulable object stimuli (balls and cups) in a MVPA fMRI study. We employed Bayesian analyses to determine sample size and evaluate the sensitivity of our data to test the hypothesis that location can be encoded in a spatiotopic reference frame in shape-selective occipitotemporal cortex over the null hypothesis of no spatiotopic location encoding. We found strong evidence for retinotopic location encoding consistent with previous findings that retinotopic reference frames are common neural representations of object location. In contrast, when testing for spatiotopic encoding, we found evidence that object location information for small manipulable objects is not decodable in relation to the body in shape-selective occipitotemporal cortex. Post-hoc exploratory analyses suggested that spatiotopic aspects might modulate retinotopic location encoding. Overall, our findings provide evidence that there is no spatiotopic encoding that is independent of retinotopic location in shape-selective occipitotemporal cortex.

Multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) reveals abnormal fMRI activity in both the "core" and "extended" face network in congenital prosopagnosia.

The ability to identify faces is mediated by a network of cortical and subcortical brain regions in humans. It is still a matter of debate which regions represent the functional substrate of congenital prosopagnosia (CP), a condition characterized by a lifelong impairment in face recognition, and affecting around 2.5% of the general population. Here, we used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to measure neural responses to faces, objects, bodies, and body-parts in a group of seven CPs and ten healthy control participants. Using multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) of the fMRI data we demonstrate that neural activity within the "core" (i.e., occipital face area and fusiform face area) and "extended" (i.e., anterior temporal cortex) face regions in CPs showed reduced discriminability between faces and objects. Reduced differentiation between faces and objects in CP was also seen in the right parahippocampal cortex. In contrast, discriminability between faces and bodies/body-parts and objects and bodies/body-parts across the ventral visual system was typical in CPs. In addition to MVPA analysis, we also ran traditional mass-univariate analysis, which failed to show any group differences in face and object discriminability. In sum, these findings demonstrate (i) face-object representations impairments in CP which encompass both the "core" and "extended" face regions, and (ii) superior power of MVPA in detecting group differences.