A new perspective on culture-specific behavior

Yamagishi et al. demonstrate that the East Asian "preference" for conformity is actually a default strategy to avoid accrual of negative reputation. When the possibility for negative evaluations in a given situation was clearly defined, cultural differences in the tendency for uniqueness disappeared. The framework for analyzing the motivations for choices made by Japanese and Americans in a simple task is described in a summary in Science.

When offered a single colored pen from a group of five pens as a token payment for filling out a survey, Hokkaido students were less likely than Wolverines (Michigan students) to take a particular pen if it were the only one of that color available--that is, they would avoid reducing the scope of choice for subsequent people and thus, by incurring the cost of passing up the uniquely colored pen, not run the risk of making a negative impression on others. In contrast, a cultural psychological assessment would explain this outcome as revealing the preference (higher valuation) that East Asians place on conformity as opposed to the affinity of Westerners for individualism. When the choice task was expanded to include situations where the student was told explicitly that he was the first or the last of the five students to receive pens, the East-West difference disappeared; both Japanese and Americans were less likely to take the uniquely colored if they were the first and more likely (equally so) if they were the last to choose.

Yamagishi et al. suggest that:

... while cultural psychological perspectives are commendable for bringing culture into the mainstream of psychology, they have tended to be oversimplistic in attributing the cause of culture-specific behaviors to internalized cultural norms and values.

Their approach to the issue of the culturally grounded nature of human behavior is:

... from a game-theoretic perspective, and proposes an institutional approach as an alternative to the cultural psychology approach. The institutional approach to cultural differences views culture-specific behavior as strategies adapted to a set of collectively created social incentives. In this framework, no psychological concepts such as self-construals are required to interpret cultural differences, and thus the institutional approach can provide a more parsimonious explanation of cultural differences that can extend toward social science disciplines outside of psychology.

Do chimpanzees have a theory of mind? 30 years later

Call and Tomasello offer a review in the May issue of Trends in Neuroscience on the controversial question of how much our nearest relatives understand about the minds of others:

On the 30th anniversary of Premack and Woodruff's seminal paper asking whether chimpanzees have a theory of mind, we review recent evidence that suggests in many respects they do, whereas in other respects they might not. Specifically, there is solid evidence from several different experimental paradigms that chimpanzees understand the goals and intentions of others, as well as the perception and knowledge of others. Nevertheless, despite several seemingly valid attempts, there is currently no evidence that chimpanzees understand false beliefs. Our conclusion for the moment is, thus, that chimpanzees understand others in terms of a perception–goal psychology, as opposed to a full-fledged, human-like belief–desire psychology.

Here is one description of an experimen showing that Chimpanzees infer a human's intentions:

Buttelmann et al. [Dev. Sci. 10 (2007 pp. F31–F38]...tested six human-raised chimpanzees in the so-called rational-imitation paradigm. The chimpanzees were shown how to operate an apparatus to produce an interesting result (e.g. lights or sounds), and then they were given a turn. The most natural behavior for them in all cases was to operate it with their hands. But this obvious behavior was never demonstrated for them; they always saw a human manipulate the apparatus in a novel way with some other body part. The idea was that in some cases the physical constraints of the situation dictated that the human (referred to as ‘E’ in the figure) had to use that unusual body part; for example, he had to turn on a light with his head because his hands were occupied holding a blanket or he had to operate a light with his foot because his hands were occupied with a heavy bucket (see Figure I). When the chimpanzees saw this forced use of the unusual body part, they mostly discounted it and used their hands as they normally would (because the constraints were not present for them). However, when they saw the human use the unusual body part when there was no physical constraint dictating this, they quite often copied the unusual behavioral means themselves. If we interpret this experiment the way it is interpreted for human infants, the conclusion is that the chimpanzees understood not only what the experimenter was trying to do (his goal) but also why he was doing it in the way he was doing it – the rationality behind the choice of the plan of action toward the goal. According to Tomasello et al. [Behav. Brain Sci. 28 (2005), pp. 675–691], an understanding of the action plan chosen toward a goal constitutes an understanding of the intention.

The Neural Buddhists

Check out the David Brooks OpEd piece with the title of this post. You really have to respect Brooks for putting so much energy into understanding contemporary mind science.

...the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is...In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism...In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. I’m not qualified to take sides, believe me. I’m just trying to anticipate which way the debate is headed. We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.

An integrated view of our subjective energies.

I recently attended the Wisconsin Symposium on Emotion (Now in its 14th year). Its topic was "Emotion, Consciousness and Psychopathology." I want to mention the talk given by A.D.(Bud) Craig, which was a real tour de force, the kind of science I feel I can integrate with my own personal experience. Its title was "How do you feel? The neurobiological basis for human awareness of feelings from the body." I have referenced Craig's work in previous posts, also check here. Here are PDFs of his two recent review articles in Trends in Cognitive Science (2005) and Nature Reviews Neuroscience (2002) which I recommend.

His view is that in our nervous systems, there is a fundamental bilateral partitioning or separation, from basic spinal cord and brain stem homeostatic systems to our highest prefrontal lobe functions, in which the right side spends energy and the left side brings it in. This reflects the relative activities of the sympathetic versus parasympathetic nervous systems. (enter 'parasympathetic' in the google search box in the left column to see some previous mindblog posts on autonomic regulation of chilling out versus getting excited).

The right and left insula appear to be central in processing feelings, all the way from basic (interoceptive) body sensing (posterior insula) up through subjective feelings, disgust, trust, anger, social hurt, empathic happiness, lust, pain, etc. All of these are homeostatic emotional currency that help regular body balance all the way from from blood pressure, glucose, heart rate, salt regulation, up through social self image. Here is a graphic from his 2005 article that shows the central role of the left and right anterior insula (which act as the sensory cortex of limbic system) in receiving information about body state and feeling from sympathetic and parasympathetic input and then interacting with anterior cingulate (the motor cortex of the limbic system) and frontal cortex. (click to enlarge):


Positive emotions (pleasant music, maternal emotions) correlate with enhanced left parasympathic, left anterior insula, left anterior cingulate and left frontal activation, while negative emotions (anger, fear, etc.) enhance activation of the corresponding structures on the right side.

Some very simple manipulations can stroke the relative activation of these two systems. Slowing one's breathing, as usually happens during meditation dials up the left anterior insula system, while breathing more rapidly increases anxiety and right anterior insula activity. In fact, giving instruction to a subject to breathe more slowly or more rapidly can change their emotional reaction to stimuli. In one experiment mentioned by Craig, a picture of a baby seal elicited warm nuturing emotions when breathing was slowed, but when breathing was increased, subjects were more likely to suspect the seal might attack or bite them! Experiments are now being attempted to measure whether oxytocin (the affiliative, trusting hormone) correlate with left insular activation while right insula activation correlates with cortisone (the stress hormone) release.

This sort of global description fascinates me, because it instructs us in how integrated a package we are, and how attention to some of the basement details of our daily life (such as breathing) can fundamentally alter our mood and temperament.

Neuroimaging shows use of self thoughts to infer others' mental states

Jenkins et al. offer a fascinating study of how we infer the mental states of others (mentalize), making use of a phenomenon (repetition suppression) that I had not been aware of before. Here I've done a cut/paste/edit from the abstract and article to try to outline the basic idea, and also show the central figure:

One useful strategy for inferring others' mental states (i.e., mentalizing) may be to use one's own thoughts, feelings, and desires as a proxy for those of other people (This approach to social cognition is alternately described as "simulationist," "projectionist," or "self-referential".) A dorsal aspect of the medial prefrontal cortex has been associated with mentalizing about people perceived to be dissimilar from oneself, whereas a more ventral aspect of medial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC) has been linked to mentalizing about those perceived to be similar. Critically, this vMPFC region also has been observed repeatedly during tasks that require participants to introspect about their own mental experiences, suggesting a connection between tasks that require self-referential thought and those that require inferences about the mental states of similar others.

Because such techniques integrate neural activity across hundreds of thousands of neurons, activation of the same brain voxel by different tasks might occur because each activates distinct, but neighboring or interdigitated, neuronal populations. In this way, two tasks could possibly coactivate the same brain voxel despite engaging different sets of neurons that subserve disparate cognitive processes.

This technical limit can now be circumvented by recently developed paradigms that support stronger conclusions regarding the coactivation of the same neurons by different stimuli or different tasks. These techniques rely on an effect known as "repetition suppression," the observation that neural activity in stimulus-sensitive brain regions is typically reduced when a stimulus is repeated

Suppression across two stimuli indicates that the same (or at least a largely overlapping) population of neurons is engaged by both stimuli. For example, a demonstration of repetition suppression for the number "3" when it follows "4" but not when it follows "40" might suggest that a relatively high proportion of the neurons that code for the number "3" also participate in representations of similar numerosities (such as "4"), but not in representations of more distant numerosities.

If (i) repeatedly considering one's own mental states produces repetition suppression in self-sensitive regions such as vMPFC, and (ii) one engages in self-referential processing when considering the minds of similar others, then (iii) repetition suppression also should be observed when perceivers first mentalize about a similar other and then introspect about self.

Consistent with this hypothesis this perceivers spontaneously engage in self-referential processing when mentalizing about particular individuals, vMPFC response was suppressed when self-reflections followed either an initial reflection about self or a judgment of a similar, but not a dissimilar, other. These results suggest that thinking about the mind of another person may rely importantly on reference to one's own mental characteristics.

Here is the basic figure:

Figure legend (click on figure to enlarge it). A region of vMPFC (–6, 45, 3; 47 voxels in extent) was defined from an explicit self-reference task in which judgments of one's own personality characteristics were compared with judgments of another person (i.e., self > other). On a separate task, participants completed a series of paired judgments, in which they introspected about their own preferences and opinions immediately after one of three types of judgments: (i) an initial report about self (self-after-self), (ii) a judgment of a person with the same sociopolitical attitudes as oneself (self-after-similar), or (iii) a judgment of a person with opposing attitudes (self-after-dissimilar). On an equal number of trials, participants considered the identical question for prime and self or a different question across the two phases. The bar graph depicts the BOLD response associated with these self-reports after subtracting out the response associated with the initial judgment (see Methods); values therefore represent the additional BOLD response specifically associated with subsequent judgments of self. For comparison purposes, the figure includes the response in this region to self-reports made in isolation (gray bar). Significant repetition suppression was observed for self-reports that followed either an initial self-report (blue bars) or a judgment of a similar other (red bars), but not judgments of a dissimilar other (green bars). Error bars represent the 95% confidence interval for within-subject designs.

Like many of the cognitive heuristics that typically serve us well, but periodically lead to undesirable or maladaptive behavior, the use of self-reference in mentalizing may be a double-edged sword: a useful strategy for providing rich and accurate insights into the minds of similar individuals, but rife with the potential to exclude those minds assumed at first glance to be different from our own.

The maturing architecture of the brain's default network

From Raichle and others in the St. Louis group, an interesting story on the development of the brain network we most likely use for introspective mental activity:

In recent years, the brain's "default network," a set of regions characterized by decreased neural activity during goal-oriented tasks, has generated a significant amount of interest, as well as controversy. Much of the discussion has focused on the relationship of these regions to a "default mode" of brain function. In early studies, investigators suggested that, the brain's default mode supports "self-referential" or "introspective" mental activity. Subsequently, regions of the default network have been more specifically related to the "internal narrative," the "autobiographical self," "stimulus independent thought," "mentalizing," and most recently "self-projection." However, the extant literature on the function of the default network is limited to adults, i.e., after the system has reached maturity. We hypothesized that further insight into the network's functioning could be achieved by characterizing its development. In the current study, we used resting-state functional connectivity MRI (rs-fcMRI) to characterize the development of the brain's default network. We found that the default regions are only sparsely functionally connected at early school age (7–9 years old); over development, these regions integrate into a cohesive, interconnected network.


Figure legend - (click on figure to enlarge). Voxelwise resting-state functional connectivity maps for a seed region (solid black circle) in mPFC (ventral: –3, 39, –2). (A) Qualitatively, the rs-fcMRI map for the mPFC (ventral) seed region reveals the commonly observed adult connectivity pattern of the default network. The connectivity map in children, however, significantly deviates from that of the adults. Functional connections with regions in the posterior cingulate and lateral parietal regions (highlighted with blue open circles) are present in the adults but absent in children. (B) These qualitative differences between children and adults are confirmed by the direct comparison (random effects) between adults and children. mPFC (ventral) functional connections with the posterior cingulate and lateral parietal regions are significantly stronger in adults than children.

Upset? Reduce your blood pressure by switching to 3rd person view.

How we view our own stories, immersed within them or viewing them as outside observer, can have a big effect on our ability to change (see 5/30/07 post). Negative feelings and stress are known to enhance vulnerability to cardiac disease, and a problem with ruminating over these negative feelings or events is that the effort can backfire, and instead maintain or enhance negativity. Ayduk and
Kross ask whether the outcome of self analysis depends on the type of self-perspective that is adopted, self-immersed (1st person) or self-distanced (3rd person).

Their experiments recruited 90 undergraduates who:

...were cued to recall an experience when they were angry and indicated that they had recalled an appropriate experience by pressing the space bar (i.e., recall phase); the computer recorded their recall times. Then they were told, "Go back to the time and place of the conflict and see the scene in your mind's eye." They were then randomly assigned to one of two perspective conditions (the manipulation phase). In the self-immersed condition, participants were told: "Relive the situation as if it were happening to you all over again … Reexperience the interaction as it progresses in your mind's eye."

In the self-distanced condition, participants were told: "Take a few steps back … . Move away from the situation to a point where you can now watch the conflict from a distance … . Watch the conflict unfold as if it were happening all over again to the distant you. Replay the interaction as it progresses in your mind's eye."

At the end students filled out a questionnaires (the recovery phase) rating the extent to which and the intensity with which they re-experienced their original feelings during the experiment. Blood pressure (mean arterial pressure, or MAP) was monitored throughout the three phases of the experiments.

The authors expected and found no difference between the two groups in MAP reactivity during recall. In contrast, participants in the self-distanced group showed lower MAP reactivity than those in the self-immersed group during both the manipulation and the recovery phases of the experiment. (That is, they were more chilled out, had lower blood pressure.)

Are today's young people really more narcissistic?

A comment by Trzesniewski et al. on the idea that today's young people have inflated impressions of themselves compared with previous generations. They:

..investigated secular trends in narcissism and self-enhancement over the past three decades. Despite recent claims about the impact of the "self-esteem movement" on the current generation of young people, we found no evidence that college students' scores on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory increased from the 1980s through 2007 (N = 26,867), although we did find small changes in specific facets of narcissism. Similarly, we found no evidence that high school students' level of self-enhancement, defined by the discrepancy between their perceived intelligence and their actual academic achievements, increased from 1976 to 2006 (N = 410,527). These results cast doubt on the belief that today's young people have increasingly inflated impressions of themselves compared with previous generations.

Some rambling on "Selves" and "Purpose"

The recent posts on Alwyn Scott and the Blakesless' book prompt me to this random walk....

Self conscious "Purpose" of the sort we humans experience, in the service of crafting new political movements or environments, is an evolved psychology that (sometimes) helps pass on our genes, and requires our distinctively human self reflective "I". Our behavior and that of other animals also reflects a kind of purpose that has been formed by our evolutionary and developmental history. In other animals such behaviors are acted out on the cusp of an eternal present - there is no evidence that they "know that they know" in the way that we can.

Both modern neuroscience (cf. the quote from the Blakesless' book) and Buddhist psychology inform us that the self and the purpose that each of us experiences is an illusion or confabulation of our brains - hopefully a useful one - whose utility is tested by how it enhances our energy and individual survival. This 'illusion' is a powerful instrument of downward causation, regulating our psychological, immune, neuro-endocrine robustness.

What is especially amazing is that our human body/brain can sometimes use meditative or other techniques to bootstrap to a level of metacognition that rests antecedent to - and can be the detached observer of - the generation of this illusion of a self and its purposes.

The maximum power of our self illusion, for most of us, goes with our heartfelt immersion and belief in it (i.e., our delusion). From such a immersion, it can be more difficult to discern or appreciate the different selves and purposes of other humans, and their cultures and historical eras.

Self-Referential Cognition in Autism

Individuals with autism spectrum conditions (ASC) have profound impairments in the interpersonal social domain, but it is unclear if individuals with ASC also have impairments in the intrapersonal self-referential domain. Lombardo et. al. give an interesting introductory discussion of the "absent self" model of Frith. They then evaluate performance of 30 subjects and:

"conclude that individuals with ASC have broad impairments in both self-referential cognition and empathy. These two domains are also intrinsically linked and support predictions made by simulation theory. Our results also highlight a specific dysfunction in ASC within cortical midlines structures of the brain such as the medial prefrontal cortex."

Figure:. Image showing the overlap in peaks of activation from studies of self-referential cognition, other-referential cognition, and theory of mind within the medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate/precuneus.

Boundaries are 16mm from within midline. All peaks are taken from exemplary studies in the literature. Brain is depicted on a representative sagittal slice of the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) template

Mind-Set matters: More on contruals and the placebo effect altering physiology and perfomance

I am grateful to a blog reader for pointing out an article that adds to one of the threads in this blog, how brief interventions with a small amount of information can alter performance in striking ways. Two previous posts have mentioned how such information can alter math related gender differences and racial achievement gaps. Here is more on how, by altering the stories we tell ourselves, we can fundamentally change our physiology and our performace: Crum and Langer report in Psychological Science (PDF here) that the relationship between exercise and health can be altered by offering a bit of information that changes how exercise is regarded. Here is their abstract:

In a study testing whether the relationship between exercise and health is moderated by one's mind-set, 84 female room attendants working in seven different hotels were measured on physiological health variables affected by exercise. Those in the informed condition were told that the work they do (cleaning hotel rooms) is good exercise and satisfies the Surgeon General's recommendations for an active lifestyle. Examples of how their work was exercise were provided. Subjects in the control group were not given this information. Although actual behavior did not change, 4 weeks after the intervention, the informed group perceived themselves to be getting significantly more exercise than before. As a result, compared with the control group, they showed a decrease in weight, blood pressure, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, and body mass index. These results support the hypothesis that exercise affects health in part or in whole via the placebo effect.

A study like this makes you wonder how much of the benefit of physical education regimes like yoga, pilates, etc.- versus just being active - are due to such a placebo effect.

The Blakeslees on the body's own mind...

"The Body Has a Mind of Its Own" is the title of a book being released today, September 11, by Sandra Blakeslee (N.Y.Times Science writer) and her son Matthew Blakeslee (also a science writer, making him the fourth generation of science writers in the family line!). Its subject is the maps that our brain makes of our internal and external worlds, including our feelings, emotions, and sense of self... and how plastic they can be. Much of the work they describe has been the subject of posts on this MindBlog. I enjoyed reading the book, and would highly recommend it. It crams an amazing amount of material into a small space. It is easy to read and engaging.

Here is one of the figures from the book, illustrating how our brain cells adapt to tool use, incorporating the tool into our body image.

How our brain changes when we (or monkeys, as in the figure) use a hand tool to extend our reach. Legend. a) Before learning to use a rake (left) or while passively holding the rake (right) without the intention of using it as a tool, the monkey's hand-centered visual-tacile receptive fields stay confined to the hand's immediate vicinity. But while the monkey is actively wielding the rake (center), the cells' visual receptive fields expand along its length. (Visual or tactile input to the shaded area causes a hand-centered cell in the parietal lobe to fire.) b). The visual-tacile receptive field expansion of one of the monkey's shoulder-centered neurons.

These positive points having been made, I felt during my reading like I was looking over the authors' shoulders as they were writing, and I kept wanting to suggest that the presentation be tightened up with more bottom lines brought up front. Many times I had the "Ah Ha!, why didn't they tell me THIS is where they were going" experience. With one study after another thrown onto the page I found myself loosing the thread. When I did find an interesting nugget I had not be aware of, I was frustrated by the fact that there is no bibliography or list of references provided. It would be very useful for the authors to provide such references on a website associated with the book.

There are many excellent summaries and quotable passages in the book. I like the ending paragraphs, which follow a discussion of the neural correlates of our sense of self, and how distortions in our sense of ownership can occur. A few clips:

So, is the self ultimately "just" an illusion?...According to the neuroscience of body maps - and incidentally, the majority of Eastern religions - in many respects, yes...A key point is that your mind feels like a seamless whole when "all your faculties" are working. But if your body mandala were to go on the fritz in one of a hundred ways, whether through damage to one map or several, or through a severing of between-map connections, you might suddenly experience extra arms, a phantom leg...hemineglect (where half the universe winks out of your awareness), alien hand syndrome, and all manner of delusions and misperceptions. Case studies of brain damage like these are one of the biggest philosophical, not to mention logical, arguments against the idea of a uniatry psychic core. When certain parts of the brain break, certain parts of the mind break; the illusion is spoiled, and the underlying multifariousness of the psyche is exposed......The illusion of the self is that self is a kernel, rather than a distributed, emergent system....Localizations of psychic functions are better said to exist in loops of information processing, or circuits, rather than specific points...the...psychic self...is an orchestra without a conductor or a fixed score, but whose players are so good at collaborative improv that wonderful music keeps flowing out of it. Just as the orchestra has no score and no conductor, the mind has no kernel, no "little man" sitting at the center of the fray directing the action. But it is teeming with noncentral "little men," the brain's motley team of homunculi, who form the backbone of the whole production. And you, thankfully, have the irreducible illusion of being the conductor of yours life's music in all its complexity, emotional nuace, crescendo and diminuendo - the ballad that is the you-ness of you."

Perception Without a Perceiver

Rafeal Malach gave an interesting talk at the recent ASSC meeting (PDF of article here) on work from his group that he thinks:

challenges the conventional models of human perception, which assume that sensory experience involves a critical interplay between activity in sensory cortex representing the stimulus and pre-frontal cortex which serves as an “observer” system- receiving and interpreting the patterns of activity originating in posterior, sensory cortex.

In an fMRI study in which individuals were exposed to a highly engaging popular movie they find:

a surprisingly robust and wide-spread activation of most of the posterior part of the brain- which was remarkably “synchronized” across individuals watching the same movie. These results attest to the massive engagement of sensory cortex by naturalistic sensory stimuli. However, in contrast to this wide-spread activation in sensory cortex- we have found a remarkably little activation in frontal areas of the brain (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1 Brain activation during repeated movie presentation. Yellow regions show highly activated areas in posterior, sensory cortex. Note lack of activation in frontal areas and in the intriguing “intrinsic” islands in posterior cortex (arrows).

To examine this issue, and also to start mapping in more detail the functional organization of the various networks of pre-frontal cortex:

we have conducted a series of experiments in which we mapped brain activity during tasks that were explicitly targeted at eliciting “self-related” brain activity- such as introspection to visual and auditory modalities, or self-judgment evaluations. Although these were high level cognitive tasks of extreme complexity- our results show a remarkably consistent pattern of activity focused primarily on pre-frontal cortex (see yellow patches in figure 2)...The critical question was now- how do these areas behave when the task shifts to a purely perceptual one? The results were clear cut- the activity shifted now to a different set of areas- located more posteriorly in sensorymotor
cortex (green patches in fig. 2).

Fig. 2 Comparing brain activity during reflective self-related tasks and during intense perception. Prefrontal areas (yellow patches) showed significant activation during self-related introspection and self judgment tasks. However a completely different and highly segregated network of more posterior areas were active during engaging perceptual tasks (green patches). No overlap was found between the two networks, and the prefrontal cortex was actually inhibited during intense perception. The results clearly rule-out the need for an “observer” function in self-related
cortex during perception.

The results are:

... actually compatible with the strong intuitive sense we have of 'losing our selves' in a highly engaging sensory-motor act (such as watching a movie). They are intriguingly reminiscent of recurrent eastern philosophical themes which emphasize the ‘silencing' of the self during intense engagement with the outside world.

Threatening the rubber hand illusion..cortical anxiety

Ehrsson et al. report an interesting extension of work on illusory feelings of body ownership:

The feeling of body ownership is a fundamental aspect of self-consciousness. The underlying neural mechanisms can be studied by using the illusion where a person is made to feel that a rubber hand is his or her own hand by brushing the person's hidden real hand and synchronously brushing the artificial hand that is in full view. Here we show that threat to the rubber hand can induce a similar level of activity in the brain areas associated with anxiety and interoceptive awareness (insula and anterior cingulate cortex) as when the person's real hand is threatened. We further show that the stronger the feeling of ownership of the artificial hand, the stronger the threat-evoked neuronal responses in the areas reflecting anxiety. Furthermore, across subjects, activity in multisensory areas reflecting ownership predicted the activity in the interoceptive system when the hand was under threat. Finally, we show that there is activity in medial wall motor areas, reflecting an urge to withdraw the artificial hand when it is under threat. These findings suggest that artificial limbs can evoke the same feelings as real limbs and provide objective neurophysiological evidence that the rubber hand is fully incorporated into the body. These findings are of fundamental importance because they suggest that the feeling of body ownership is associated with changes in the interoceptive systems.

Figure legend - Linear relationship between ownership and the anxiety responses in the bilateral anterior insula and bilateral ACC (circled). A regression analysis identified a significant relationship between the vividness ratings of the rubber-hand illusion obtained during the scans and the parameter estimates for the contrast between threat during ownership and threat during no ownership in left insula

3rd and 1st person narrative in personality change

Benedict Carey writes a piece in the Tuesday NY Times science section (PDF here) reviewing work done by a number of researchers on on how the stories people tell themselves (and others) about themselves do or don't help with making adaptive behavior changes. Third person narratives, in which subjects view themselves from a distance - as actors in their own narrative play - correlate with a higher sense of personal power and ability to make personality changes. First person narratives - in which the subject describes the experience of being immersed in their personal plays - are more likely than third person narratives to correlate with passivity and feeling powerless to effect change. This reminds me of Marc Hauser's distinction of being a moral agent or a moral patient. The third person can be a more metacognitive stance, thinking about oneself in a narrative script while the first person can be a less reflective acting out of the script.

Boundaries of Experience and Self

I've been slogging through journals that accumulated during my snow-bird phase last winter, and am going through a pile of back issues of the Journal of Consciousness Studies. I came across a review by Chris Nunn of a conference held by the consciousness and experiential psychology section of the British Psychological Association, St. Anne's College at Oxford in Sept. of 2006. on "Exploring the Boundaries of Experience and Self." Nunn notes that a more appropriate title for the conference might have been "Demonstrating Ambiguities of Language and Meaning Used in Relation to Experience and Self." I think his brief review (PDF here) is worth reading.

Integrating different theory of mind models.

Keysers and Gazzola propose a speculative model (Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Volume 11, Issue 5, May 2007, Pages 194-196. PDF here) that attempts to integrate the perspective of two polarized camps:

The simulation camp focuses on so-called shared circuits (SCs) that are involved in one's own actions, sensations and emotions and in perceiving those of others. The theory of mind (ToM) camp emphasizes the role of midline structures in mentalizing about the states of others.

Social cognitions range from the intuitive examples studied by simulationists to the reflective ones used by ToM investigators. Witnessing someone drink a glass of milk with a face contracting in an expression of disgust is an example at the intuitive extreme of this continuum. In such cases, premotor and parietal areas for actions, the insula for emotions and and SII for sensations form SCs that translate the bodily states of others into the neural language of our own states. These SCs seem to implement a pre-reflective, intuitive and empathic level of representation: neural activity in these areas does not require specific instructions that encourage conscious reflections.

Thinking about what gift would please a foreign colleague is an example at the more reflective extreme. In such cases, we must browse consciously through what we know about his country and culture to deduce what he might like. Such explicit knowledge about the inner life of others is the product of reflecting upon the states of others and is linked with activity in midline structures and the temporoparietal junction. False beliefs are prototypical examples of such reflective representations.

They suggest a working hypothesis:

While dealing with states of the self, areas of the SCs represent pre-reflective bodily states. If asked to introspect and report these states, subjects additionally activate (v)mPFC structures. When dealing with states of other individuals, activity in SCs might represent the empathic transformation of the bodily states of others into pre-reflective neural representations of similar states of the self. These simulated pre-reflective representations correlate with empathy and might provide an intuitive understanding of what goes on in others. If asked to reflect on the states of others, the pathways that are normally used to reflect on the bodily representations of the self are now used on simulated bodily states of others, leading to simulated reflective representations. Thus, SCs and midline structures form an integrated system that applies to cases where we perceive the other as similar enough for simulation to be useful. In this view, both SCs and vmPFC reflect simulation, albeit at different levels (pre-reflective versus reflective), rather than radically different processes (SC versus ToM).

Illustration of the model (click to enlarge). The self is shown in red, the other is shown in green and candidate brain areas that are thought to implement representation are shown in blue. During our own experiences, pre-reflective representations can lead, through introspection, to reflective representations (red). While witnessing the states of others, mirroring leads to activations that simulate pre-reflective representations of our own bodily states. A process of social introspection, utilizing the mechanisms of introspection, activates representations that simulate reflective representations of our own bodily states. A more cognitive route leads to more abstract knowledge about the other that escapes from the constraints of our own experiences.

Personal space in virtual reality

Check out the fascinating video in this link, showing how rules of personal space and eye contact carry over into the Second Life virtual reality game.

Self and social cognition in the brain

Uddin et al. speculate in Trends in Cognitive Science (Volume 11, Issue 4 , April 2007, Pages 153-157) about the respective roles of cortical midline structures (CMS) and frontoparietal mirror neurons (MNS) in evaluation of self and others. Below I relay one of their summary paragraphs, and the PDF which contains images of relevant brain regions can be obtained HERE.

It has recently been proposed that internally oriented processes that focus on one's own or others’ mental states rely on cortical midline structures, whereas externally focused processes based on one's own or others’ visible features and actions rely on lateral frontoparietal networks. We suggest here a similar distinction, which might further reconcile disparate findings with regard to the various proposed functions of cortical midline structures, while incorporating what is known about the role of the human mirror-neuron system in social cognition. Whereas there is mounting evidence that the right frontoparietal system is involved in representing the physical, embodied self (in addition to its role in understanding the actions of others), the cortical midline structures that comprise the default-mode network seem to be more involved in maintaining a self-representation in evaluative terms, which requires self-referential processing and understanding of others’ mental states. We speculate that the CMS might support evaluative simulation in the same way that the MNS supports motor simulation. This distinction serves as a practical division of labor between two networks that are specialized for two related processes that are crucial to navigating the social world. The mirror-neuron system provides the essential physical other-to-self mapping that is necessary for comprehending physical actions of intentional agents, whereas cortical midline structures maintain and support processes that are related to understanding complex psychological aspects of others, such as attitudes, perhaps by simulation of one's own attitudes.

Magical Thinking

Benedict Carey writes an engaging article in the Science section of today's New York Times (1/23/07) on why otherwise very rational people think that small ritual acts (always enter a room with the right foot) or signs (8 is my lucky number) improve or protect their prospects for an activity at hand.


Credit: New York Times

Cognitive psychologists believe "the appetite for such beliefs appears to be rooted in the circuitry of the brain, and for good reason. The sense of having special powers buoys people in threatening situations, and helps soothe everyday fears and ward off mental distress. In excess, it can lead to compulsive or delusional behavior." Daniel Wegner at Harvard and collaborators have reported experiments showing how easy it is to induce magical thinking in well-educated young adults (young men and women instructed on how to use a voodoo doll suspected that they might have put a curse on a study partner who feigned a headache.)

An idea is that the brain has evolved to make snap judgments about causation, and will leap to conclusions well before logic can be applied. A relevant interpretation that connects all the dots can be preferred to a rational one. Wegner also suggests: "For people who are generally uncertain of their own abilities, or slow to act because of feelings of inadequacy, this kind of thinking can be an antidote, a needed activator."