Varieties of denial...

Benedict Carey writes a nice piece in the Nov. 20 New York Times about the utility of - and evolutionary rationale for - mild forms of denial, which can take the form of inattention, passive acknowledgment, reframing or willful blindness. Ignoring the "elephant in the living room" is sometimes the best strategy for getting along! A few clips from the article, which you can read in whole here:

...recent studies from fields as diverse as psychology and anthropology suggest that the ability to look the other way, while potentially destructive, is also critically important to forming and nourishing close relationships. The psychological tricks that people use to ignore a festering problem in their own households are the same ones that they need to live with everyday human dishonesty and betrayal, their own and others’. And it is these highly evolved abilities, research suggests, that provide the foundation for that most disarming of all human invitations, forgiveness...“The closer you look, the more clearly you see that denial is part of the uneasy bargain we strike to be social creatures,” said Michael McCullough, a psychologist at the University of Miami and the author of the coming book “Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct.” “We really do want to be moral people, but the fact is that we cut corners to get individual advantage, and we rely on the room that denial gives us to get by, to wiggle out of speeding tickets, and to forgive others for doing the same.”...The capacity for denial appears to have evolved in part to offset early humans’ hypersensitivity to violations of trust. In small kin groups, identifying liars and two-faced cheats was a matter of survival. A few bad rumors could mean a loss of status or even expulsion from the group, a death sentence.

Do you really want to know your own genome?

Nicholas Wade offer a brief essay in the Nov. 16 New York Times which notes several companies, such as DeCode Genetics, 23andMe, and Navigenics that are now offering to give you an analysis of your own individual genome for $1000 or less. While knowing that you have a gene that predisposes you to a given disease might reinforce life style choices that make that disease less likely (in the case of potential heart disease, for example, converting from red meat and potatoes to complex carbohydrates) such information could also cause needless alarm, for many factors other than genotype contribute to actual outcomes in each of us.

A gradient of representational hierarchy in the prefrontal cortex.

Badre and D'Esposito have designed a set of tasks requiring increasingly abstract representations, each level requiring the classing of representations at the next subordinate level. They find a systematic posterior to anterior gradient of activity with the prefrontal cortex depending on the manipulated level of representation. Here is their abstract and a figure from the paper:

The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is central to flexible and organized action. Recent theoretical and empirical results suggest that the rostro-caudal (head to tail) axis of the frontal lobes may reflect a hierarchical organization of control. Here, we test whether the rostro-caudal axis of the PFC is organized hierarchically, based on the level of abstraction at which multiple representations compete to guide selection of action. Four functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments parametrically manipulated the set of task-relevant (a) competing responses, (b) competing features, (c) competing dimensions, and (d) overlapping cue-to-dimension mappings. A systematic posterior to anterior gradient was evident within the PFC depending on the manipulated level of representation. Furthermore, across four fMRI experiments, activation in PFC subregions was consistent with the sub- and superordinate relationships that define an abstract representational hierarchy. In addition to providing further support for a representational hierarchy account of the rostro-caudal gradient in the PFC, these data provide important empirical constraints on current theorizing about control hierarchies and the PFC.

Figure (click to enlarge) - Whole-brain analysis of parametric effect across the four experiments. A rostro-caudal gradient was evident as the level of abstraction increased. Specifically, response competition activated the PMd (A), feature competition activated the pre-PMd (B), dimension competition activated the IFS (C), and context competition activated the FPC (D). Graphs from ROI analyses for the PMd, pre-PMd, and IFS depict the integrated peak signal, whereas analysis of the frontal pole depicts the mean percent signal change over the entire block. Graphs from ROI analyses for PMd, pre-PMd, and IFS depict the integrated peak signal for each parametric level in each experiment (C = Context, D = Dimension, F = Feature, and R = Response). Bars for FPC depict the mean percent signal change over the entire block.

Memories play back on fast forward during sleep

It is know that correlations of nerve activity that are observed during learning sequence tasks replay during sleep, presumably to enhance learning and retention of the sequence. (I always find that I can play a difficult piano passage better when I wake up in the morning than when I was practicing it the day before). McNaughton and his collaborators now show that the replay during sleep occurs much faster than during actual awake behaviors. Here is their abstract:

As previously shown in the hippocampus and other brain areas, patterns of firing-rate correlations between neurons in the rat medial prefrontal cortex during a repetitive sequence task were preserved during subsequent sleep, suggesting that waking patterns are reactivated. We found that, during sleep, reactivation of spatiotemporal patterns was coherent across the network and compressed in time by a factor of 6 to 7. Thus, when behavioral constraints are removed, the brain's intrinsic processing speed may be much faster than it is in real time. Given recent evidence implicating the medial prefrontal cortex in retrieval of long-term memories, the observed replay may play a role in the process of memory consolidation.

Kewl Bio-inspired Robotics...

The Nov. 16 issue of Science has a special section on Robotics. I thought this graphic from the article by Pfeifer et al. - "Self-Organization, Embodiment, and Biologically Inspired Robotics" - was fascinating. It describes several biologically inspired robots.


Figure: Self-organization, dynamics, and materials in bio-inspired robotics. (A) Smooth transition between swimming and walking. This amphibious salamanderlike robot (~80 cm long) embeds a spinal cord model that explains the ability of salamanders to switch between swimming and walking. The locomotion model is built by extending a primitive neural circuit for swimming by phylogenetically more recent limb oscillatory centers. (B) Rich sensory stimulation through proper sensor morphology. This robot (~7 cm in diameter) owes its sophisticated sensory capacities to the specific arrangement, shape, and material characteristics of its whiskers. Natural whiskers from rodents (such as the ones used on this robot) are far superior to whiskers built from other materials in terms of richness of the signals relayed to the neural system. (C) Self-stabilizing rapid hexapod locomotion. This robot (~15 cm long) moves with a bouncing gait, achieving rapid (over 4 body lengths per second) locomotion. Its legs are built with compliant pneumatic actuators, which yield self-stabilization through mechanical feedback. (D) Passive dynamics–based walking. Designed to work on a slope as a dynamic walker, this robot (~45 cm tall) exploits dynamics and morphology (in particular, the shape and length of the body and feet) to achieve stable walking. The robot's natural dynamics serves as the target dynamics for a reinforcement learning mechanism, enabling the robot to quickly learn to walk on flat ground. (E) Self-stabilizing vertical takeoff through materials and morphology. Inspired by flies, this ultralight (60 mg, 3-cm wingspan) ornithopter (a device that flies by flapping its wings) generates sufficient lift to take off vertically (power is supplied externally). A large part of the control is delegated to the morphological and material properties of the robot. Compliant structures are driven into resonance to produce a large wing stroke, and flexible material is used in the wing hinges to allow for passive rotations of the wings. (F) Agile wall-climbing through materials. The bio-inspiration for this palm-sized robot is provided by the gecko and its uncanny climbing talents. The robot's tri-foot (three-footed wheel) is equipped with a polymer dry adhesive material, which to some extent has contact properties comparable to those of its biological analog. The robot can flexibly navigate on smooth vertical and even inverted surfaces. (G) Morphing through localized self-reconfiguration. This self-reconfigurable robot is composed of active (actuated, black) and passive (nonactuated, white) cubic modules (~400 g, ~60 to 65 mm side length). The modules connect to each other through hooks, which enables the robot to change its morphology in a large number of ways. The picture shows the metamorphosis from a four-legged (quadruped) structure to a linear (snakelike) structure. (H) Global movement through local interaction dynamics. The individual wheel-like modules (~10 cm in diameter) constituting this robot are equipped with spokelike parts driven by linear actuators. The wheels lie horizontally on the ground and attach to neighboring modules by Velcro. Although no module can move on its own, by using neural oscillators as drivers for the actuators and through the physical coupling between the units, a coordinated global wave of activation can be induced in clusters of more than 30 modules, which leads to forward movement, even though there is no global control.

Want to reduce risky behavior? Just pass a tiny current across your forehead.

Another brave new world item (from Fecteau et al.) - just what you need for your juvenile delinquent teenager! All you have to do is hook up a battery to two saline-soaked surface sponge electrodes to deliver anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS - two milliamps) to the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) to slightly up-regulate its activity, coupled with cathodal tDCS to the left DLPFC (current flows from anode to cathode). Here is the whole abstract and one figure:

Studies have shown increased risk taking in healthy individuals after low-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation, known to transiently suppress cortical excitability, over the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). It appears, therefore, plausible that differential modulation of DLPFC activity, increasing the right while decreasing the left, might lead to decreased risk taking, which could hold clinical relevance as excessively risky decision making is observed in clinical populations leading to deleterious consequences. The goal of the present study was to investigate whether risk-taking behaviors could be decreased using concurrent anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) of the right DLPFC, which allows upregulation of brain activity, with cathodal tDCS of the left DLPCF, which downregulates activity. Thirty-six healthy volunteers performed the risk task while they received either anodal over the right with cathodal over the left DLPFC, anodal over the left with cathodal over the right DLPFC, or sham stimulation. We hypothesized that right anodal/left cathodal would decrease risk-taking behavior compared with left anodal/right cathodal or sham stimulation. As predicted, during right anodal/left cathodal stimulation over the DLPFC, participants chose more often the safe prospect compared with the other groups. Moreover, these participants appeared to be insensitive to the reward associated with the prospects. These findings support the notion that the interhemispheric balance of activity across the DLPFCs is critical in decision-making behaviors. Most importantly, the observed suppression of risky behaviors suggests that populations with boundless risk-taking behaviors leading to negative real-life consequences, such as individuals with addiction, might benefit from such neuromodulation-based approaches.

Figure 1. Schematic representation of the experimental design. Each participant started to perform the risk task after receiving 5 min of stimulation. Stimulation continued throughout the task. The risk task was a decision-making task involving gambling. The task provided a measure of decision making under risk with little requirements on strategy and working memory.

Most popular consciousness articles...

For October 2007, from the ASSC archives (from which 49638 papers were downloaded from 69 countries!).

1. Rosenthal, David (2007) Consciousness and its function. In: 11th annual
meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, 22-25
June 2007, Las Vegas, USA.
http://eprints.assc.caltech.edu/293/
2. Koriat, A. (2006) Metacognition and Consciousness. In: Cambridge handbook
of consciousness. Cambridge University Press, New York, USA. http://eprints.assc.caltech.edu/175/
3. Sagiv, Noam and Ward, Jamie (2006) Crossmodal interactions: lessons from
synesthesia. In: Visual Perception, Part 2. Progress in Brain Research,
Volume 155.
http://eprints.assc.caltech.edu/224/
4. Gennaro, Rocco J. (2007) Visual Agnosia and Higher-Order Thought Theory.
In: 11th annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of
Consciousness, 22-25 Jun 2007, Las Vegas, USA. http://eprints.assc.caltech.edu/310/
5. Mashour, George A. (2007) Inverse Zombies, Anesthesia Awareness, and the
Hard Problem of Unconsciousness. In: 11th Annual Meeting of the ASSC, Las
Vegas. http://eprints.assc.caltech.edu/294/

Predicting election outcomes in 100 milliseconds!

Another example of a quick judgment turning out to be more accurate than a considered one... Ballew and Todorov showed study participants transient pictures of the winner and runner-up for recent United States gubernatorial elections. Rapid, unreflective judgments of competence based solely on facial appearance (of candidates participants did not recognize) predicted the actual outcomes of gubernatorial elections. Instructions to deliberate and make a good judgment led to less accurate predictions of the election outcomes. Here is their abstract :

Here we show that rapid judgments of competence based solely on the facial appearance of candidates predicted the outcomes of gubernatorial elections, the most important elections in the United States next to the presidential elections. In all experiments, participants were presented with the faces of the winner and the runner-up and asked to decide who is more competent. To ensure that competence judgments were based solely on facial appearance and not on prior person knowledge, judgments for races in which the participant recognized any of the faces were excluded from all analyses. Predictions were as accurate after a 100-ms exposure to the faces of the winner and the runner-up as exposure after 250 ms and unlimited time exposure. Asking participants to deliberate and make a good judgment dramatically increased the response times and reduced the predictive accuracy of judgments relative to both judgments made after 250 ms of exposure to the faces and judgments made within a response deadline of 2 s. Finally, competence judgments collected before the elections in 2006 predicted 68.6% of the gubernatorial races and 72.4% of the Senate races. These effects were independent of the incumbency status of the candidates. The findings suggest that rapid, unreflective judgments of competence from faces can affect voting decisions.

Figure - An example of an experimental trial in the 250-ms presentation condition. Participants decided who was more competent.

Socialization between toddlers and robots

How's this for a (horrific) vision of the future! The abstract from Tanaka et al., followed by one figure from the paper:

A state-of-the-art social robot was immersed in a classroom of toddlers for >5 months. The quality of the interaction between children and robots improved steadily for 27 sessions, quickly deteriorated for 15 sessions when the robot was reprogrammed to behave in a predictable manner, and improved in the last three sessions when the robot displayed again its full behavioral repertoire. Initially, the children treated the robot very differently than the way they treated each other. By the last sessions, 5 months later, they treated the robot as a peer rather than as a toy. Results indicate that current robot technology is surprisingly close to achieving autonomous bonding and socialization with human toddlers for sustained periods of time and that it could have great potential in educational settings assisting teachers and enriching the classroom environment.


Figure - Predicting the quality of interaction. The red line indicates an automatic assessment of the quality of interaction between children and QRIO based on haptic (i.e. touching or physical contact) sensing. Blue lines indicate human assessment (by four independent coders) of the quality of interaction by using the continuous audience response method. (A) A session begins with QRIO waking up, attracting the children's interest. (B) During the music time in the classroom, children play with the robot. (C) Children are getting tired of the music time and losing interest in the robot. (D) Children put a blanket on the robot after it has laid down on the floor preparing for the end of a session.

Observing rat brains as they look to the future

An emerging view is that the hippocampus is essential to imagining the future as well as remembering the past (which makes a lot sense, since we usually base our imagined future on our past experience). Johnson and Redich have now observed ensembles of cells in the CA3 region of the rat hippocampus whose firing transiently encodes paths forward of an animal at decision points in a maze, as if they are reflecting on possible futures and deciding what to do next. The figure, from Heyman's review of the work in Science, illustrates that as a rat looks in one direction, neurons representing that position (inset) fire over a half-second period. Here is the abstract of the work:

Neural ensembles were recorded from the CA3 region of rats running on T-based decision tasks. Examination of neural representations of space at fast time scales revealed a transient but repeatable phenomenon as rats made a decision: the location reconstructed from the neural ensemble swept forward, first down one path and then the other. Estimated representations were coherent and preferentially swept ahead of the animal rather than behind the animal, implying it represented future possibilities rather than recently traveled paths. Similar phenomena occurred at other important decisions (such as in recovery from an error). Local field potentials from these sites contained pronounced theta and gamma frequencies, but no sharp wave frequencies. Forward-shifted spatial representations were influenced by task demands and experience. These data suggest that the hippocampus does not represent space as a passive computation, but rather that hippocampal spatial processing is an active process likely regulated by cognitive mechanisms.

Japanese Gardens

This picture from a stroll yesterday in the Morikami Japanese Gardens in Boca Raton, Florida. An iguana is on the lawn to the right of the tree trunk, a heron to its right on the bank, the flat object on the grass to the right of the heron is a water turtle, and the orange spots in the water are Koi. (click on the picture to enlarge).

Our optimism bias - brain correlates

Sharot et al. examine the tendency of most of us to imagine more optimistic outcomes than can be justified by sober appraisal. A moderate amount of optimistic illusion has been related to mental and physical health, and the general idea is that it is adaptive and useful because it motivates us towards future goals. Their abstract, and a figure showing the relevant brain regions:

Humans expect positive events in the future even when there is no evidence to support such expectations. For example, people expect to live longer and be healthier than average, they underestimate their likelihood of getting a divorce, and overestimate their prospects for success on the job market. We examined how the brain generates this pervasive optimism bias. Here we report that this tendency was related specifically to enhanced activation in the amygdala and in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex when imagining positive future events relative to negative ones, suggesting a key role for areas involved in monitoring emotional salience in mediating the optimism bias. These are the same regions that show irregularities in depression, which has been related to pessimism. Across individuals, activity in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex was correlated with trait optimism. The current study highlights how the brain may generate the tendency to engage in the projection of positive future events, suggesting that the effective integration and regulation of emotional and autobiographical information supports the projection of positive future events in healthy individuals, and is related to optimism.

The authors collected functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data while participants thought of autobiographical events related to a description of a life episode (for example, 'winning an award' or 'the end of a romantic relationship'). The word 'past' or 'future' indicated if they should think of an event that occurred in the past or one that might occur in the future. Trials were classified into positive, negative and neutral according to participants' ratings. They found that future positive events were rated as more positive than past positive events, and were imagined to be closer in temporal proximity then future negative events and all past events. (Click on image to enlarge it)

Impairment of action chains in autism.

When we observe the start of an action sequence that can end in two possible ways (in the figure shown a piece of food is placed in the mouth or in a container on the shoulder) appropriate sympathetic muscle EMG signals are detected at the start of the sequence. Thus, if the sequence will end in food to the mouth, activity is observed in the mouth-opening mylohyoid (MH) muscle at the onset. Rizzolatti and collaborators find that typically developing children show an activation of their MH muscle already when they observe the experimenter's initial motor act, food reaching. This activation reflects their understanding of the final goal of the observed action. In children with autism this action-understanding motor activation is lacking. Further, when typically developing children actually perform the observed action, MH muscle activation is observed at the very beginning of the sequence, while in children with autism, the activation is not observed until immediately before the muscle is actually used.

Figure - Schematic representation of the tasks. (Upper) The individual reaches for a piece of food located on a touch-sensitive plate, grasps it, brings it to the mouth, and finally eats it. (Lower) The individual reaches for a piece of a paper located on the same plate, grasps it, and puts into a container placed on the shoulder.

They suggest that high-functioning autistic children may understand the intentions of others cognitively but lack the mechanism for understanding them experientially because they lack the chains of action-constrained neurons that code specific motor acts (e.g., grasping) according to the final goal of the action in which the motor act is embedded.

Distinguishing true versus illusory memories with brain imaging.

Kim and Cabeza show that true versus illusory memories held with high certainty depend on different neural mechanisms. Here is their abstract and one figure from the paper:

Although memory confidence and accuracy tend to be positively correlated, people sometimes remember with high confidence events that never happened. How can confidence correlate with accuracy but apply also to illusory memories? One possible explanation is that high confidence in veridical versus illusory memories depends on different neural mechanisms. The present study investigated this possibility using functional magnetic resonance imaging and a modified version of the Deese-Roediger-McDermott false-memory paradigm. Participants read short lists of categorized words, and brain activity was measured while they performed a recognition test with confidence rating. The study yielded three main findings. First, compared with low-confidence responses, high-confidence responses were associated with medial temporal lobe (MTL) activity in the case of true recognition but with frontoparietal activity in the case of false recognition. Second, these regions showed significant confidence-by-veridicality interactions. Finally, only MTL regions showed greater activity for high-confidence true recognition than for high-confidence false recognition, and only frontoparietal regions showed greater activity for high-confidence false recognition than for high-confidence true recognition. These findings indicate that confidence in true recognition is mediated primarily by a recollection-related MTL mechanism, whereas confidence in false recognition reflects mainly a familiarity-related frontoparietal mechanism. This account is consistent with the fuzzy trace theory of false recognition. Correlation analyses revealed that MTL and frontoparietal regions play complementary roles during episodic retrieval. In sum, the present study shows that when one focuses exclusively on high-confidence responses, the neural correlates of true and false memory are clearly different.

Figure: Activity within medial temporal lobes (A) was greater for high-confidence true recognition (HC-TR) than for high-confidence false recognition (HC-FR). Activity within a frontoparietal network (B) was greater for high-confidence false recognition than for high-confidence true recognition.

The moment of recognition...

Ploran et al. use fMRI to observe brain activity leading up to recognition of a perceptual object's identity. Here is their abstract, followed by a composite graphic extracted from figures in the paper.

Decision making can be conceptualized as the culmination of an integrative process in which evidence supporting different response options accumulates gradually over time. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate brain activity leading up to and during decisions about perceptual object identity. Pictures were revealed gradually and subjects signaled the time of recognition (TR) with a button press. We examined the time course of TR-dependent activity to determine how brain regions tracked the timing of recognition. In several occipital regions, activity increased primarily as stimulus information increased, suggesting a role in lower-level sensory processing. In inferior temporal, frontal, and parietal regions, a gradual buildup in activity peaking in correspondence with TR suggested that these regions participated in the accumulation of evidence supporting object identity. In medial frontal cortex, anterior insula/frontal operculum, and thalamus, activity remained near baseline until TR, suggesting a relation to the moment of recognition or the decision itself. The findings dissociate neural processes that function in concert during perceptual recognition decisions.

Composite extracted from figures in paper (click on graphic to enlarge and see labels): From interpolation analyzes, the top row shows brain regions of interest for initial sensory processing, the second row regions active in accumulation, and the bottom row regions active when recognition of the stimulus is signalled.

Drug enhancement of athletic performance - with no drugs!

Given the gnashing of teeth in the sports world over role models outed for their drug use, this bit from an Italian group is fascinating. It turns out that after only a few administrations of a pain killer (morphine), a placebo or sham injection on the day of the athletic event has the same effect as taking the real drug! Does this count as illegal drug use before an athletic performance? Here is the abstract from Benedetti et al.:

The neurobiological investigation of the placebo effect has shown that placebos can activate the endogenous opioid systems in some conditions. So far, the impact of this finding has been within the context of the clinical setting. Here we present an experiment that simulates a sport competition, a situation in which opioids are considered to be illegal drugs. After repeated administrations of morphine in the precompetition training phase, its replacement with a placebo on the day of competition induced an opioid-mediated increase of pain endurance and physical performance, although no illegal drug was administered. The placebo analgesic responses were obtained after two morphine administrations that were separated as long as 1 week from each other. These long time intervals indicate that the pharmacological conditioning procedure has long-lasting effects and that opioid-mediated placebo responses may have practical implications and applications. For example, in the context of the present sport simulation, athletes can be preconditioned with morphine and then a placebo can be given just before competition, thus avoiding administration of the illegal drug on the competition day. However, these morphine-like effects of placebos raise the important question whether opioid-mediated placebo responses are ethically acceptable in sport competitions or whether they have to be considered a doping procedure in all respects.

The instinct to swarm

Groups of social animals whose individual members follow simple sets of rules do surprising things. This NY Times article by Carl Zimmer in the Nov. 13 science section quotes Ian Couzin, a mathematical biologist at Princeton: “No matter how much you look at an individual army ant...you will never get a sense that when you put 1.5 million of them together, they form these bridges and columns. You just cannot know that.” The article notes the simple models that predict swarming behavior by setting the population density that which individuals switch from going their own way to following others. It also describes experiments using human subjects to test Couzin's models.

Many take our brains to be a more massive and complex version of the "hive minds" displayed by groups of bees, ants, birds and fish. Brain modelers assign relatively simple properties to their model neurons and then watch amazing patterns emerge when their whole society of neurons is fired up to interact.

Exercise on the Brain

Aamodt and Wang contribute an Op-Ed piece with the title of this post in the Nov. 8 New York Times. Their main message is that all of the 'brain exercise' programs that are marketed to counter the cognitive decline associated with aging are more expensive, complicated, and vastly less effective than vigorous daily exercise (not to suggest that these are competing alternatives, it is certainly best to do both). They note that while activities like solving puzzles or remembering lists can induce lasting changes in these specialized areas, physical exercise improves “executive function,” the set of abilities that allows you to select behavior that’s appropriate to the situation, inhibit inappropriate behavior and focus on the job at hand in spite of distractions. Executive function includes basic functions like processing speed, response speed and working memory, the type used to remember a house number while walking from the car to a party. They also note studies showing the numerous theraputic effects of exercise, such as delaying both the onset of dementia and the shrinking of the frontal cortex that occurs with age.

A hormone boost to generosity...

Yet another bit of work on the magic hormone, oxytocin, that makes us more affiliative, gentle, and trusting...the abstract from Zak et al. :

Human beings routinely help strangers at costs to themselves. Sometimes the help offered is generous—offering more than the other expects. The proximate mechanisms supporting generosity are not well-understood, but several lines of research suggest a role for empathy. In this study, participants were infused with 40 IU oxytocin (OT) or placebo and engaged in a blinded, one-shot decision on how to split a sum of money with a stranger that could be rejected. Those on OT were 80% more generous than those given a placebo. OT had no effect on a unilateral monetary transfer task dissociating generosity from altruism. OT and altruism together predicted almost half the interpersonal variation in generosity. Notably, OT had twofold larger impact on generosity compared to altruism. This indicates that generosity is associated with both altruism as well as an emotional identification with another person.

Conductors’ Ears and Eyes Stay Equally Alert

Here is an interesting tidbit that makes perfect sense to me as a pianist, from Eric Nagourney reporting in the NY Times on the Society for Neuroscience Meetings:

To concentrate on a difficult task that involves listening, people tend to unconsciously divert their attention from what they are seeing. But music conductors, a new study reports, are not as apt to be distracted in this way....The researchers, who presented their findings at a recent conference of the Society for Neuroscience, used magnetic resonance imaging to compare how 20 conductors and 20 nonmusicians handled complex auditory tasks...The researchers were from Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. They were especially interested in learning whether their subjects would continue shifting resources as the demands of listening became more complex, said the lead author, Dr. W. David Hairston of Wake Forest...The volunteers were placed in an M.R.I. scanner and asked to listen to different notes over headphones while keeping their eyes open. As the notes were played closer and closer together, they were asked to say which they heard first...In both groups, activity in the parts of the brain involved with seeing decreased, but as the task became more difficult, only the nonmusicians turned off more of their visual processing...Part of the explanation may lie in the need for conductors to make extensive use of both their eyes and ears, to read the score and “to keep track of who’s playing what,” Dr. Hairston said.