Learning from errors - genetic differences between humans

From Holden's brief summary of the work:

"Once burned, twice shy" works for most people. But some people are slow to learn from bad experiences.

This work shows that:

...people with a particular gene variant have more difficulty learning via negative reinforcement.
...demonstrates that a single-base-pair difference in the genome is associated with a remarkably different ability to learn from past mistakes is quite an accomplishment
...combines brain imaging with a task in which participants chose between symbols on a computer screen,
...centers on the A1 variant, or allele, of the gene encoding the D2 receptor, a protein on the surface of brain cells activated by the neurotransmitter dopamine. Earlier studies have hinted that this variant alters the brain's reward pathways and thereby makes people more vulnerable to addictions.

Brain activity was monitored (color) as a subject chose between two symbols (inset) and was rewarded with a smiley or frowny face. In the left panel the lower colors are hippocampus, the upper one the posterior medial frontal cortex.

Here is the abstract from Klein et al.

The role of dopamine in monitoring negative action outcomes and feedback-based learning was tested in a neuroimaging study in humans grouped according to the dopamine D2 receptor gene polymorphism DRD2-TAQ-IA. In a probabilistic learning task, A1-allele carriers with reduced dopamine D2 receptor densities learned to avoid actions with negative consequences less efficiently. Their posterior medial frontal cortex (pMFC), involved in feedback monitoring, responded less to negative feedback than others' did. Dynamically changing interactions between pMFC and hippocampus found to underlie feedback-based learning were reduced in A1-allele carriers. This demonstrates that learning from errors requires dopaminergic signaling. Dopamine D2 receptor reduction seems to decrease sensitivity to negative action consequences, which may explain an increased risk of developing addictive behaviors in A1-allele carriers.

Another difference in the brains of musicians...

Being a performing musician myself (cf. the YouTube video below), I'm always fascinated by work of the sort recently done by Chen et al. They show that musicians use the prefrontal cortex to a greater degree than nonmusicians to deconstruct and organize a rhythm's temporal structure. Here is their abstract (I will spare you the MRI images this time), followed by a bit of free music...

Much is known about the motor system and its role in simple movement execution. However, little is understood about the neural systems underlying auditory–motor integration in the context of musical rhythm, or the enhanced ability of musicians to execute precisely timed sequences. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated how performance and neural activity were modulated as musicians and nonmusicians tapped in synchrony with progressively more complex and less metrically structured auditory rhythms. A functionally connected network was implicated in extracting higher-order features of a rhythm's temporal structure, with the dorsal premotor cortex mediating these auditory–motor interactions. In contrast to past studies, musicians recruited the prefrontal cortex to a greater degree than nonmusicians, whereas secondary motor regions were recruited to the same extent. We argue that the superior ability of musicians to deconstruct and organize a rhythm's temporal structure relates to the greater involvement of the prefrontal cortex mediating working memory.

Haydn Fantasia:

J. S. Bach - Christmas Oratorio - Schlafe, mein Liebster

John Eliot Gardiner leads the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists, with Bernarda Fink in "Schlafe, mein Liebster," from Bach's Christmas Oratorio (BWV 248).

Schlafe, mein Liebster, genieße der Ruh,
Wache nach diesem vor aller Gedeihen!
Labe die Brust,
Empfinde die Lust,
Wo wir unser Herz erfreuen!

Sleep now, my dearest, enjoy now thy rest,
Wake on the morrow to flourish in splendor!
Lighten thy breast,
With joy be thou blest,
Where we hold our heart's great pleasure!

Neural correlates of trust

Krueger et al. offer an MRI study of brain changes that occur during a reciprocal trust game. They:

.used hyperfunctional magnetic resonance imaging, in which two strangers interacted online with one another in a sequential reciprocal trust game while their brains were simultaneously scanned. By designing a nonanonymous, alternating multiround game, trust became bidirectional, and we were able to quantify partnership building and maintenance...We show that the paracingulate cortex is critically involved in building a trust relationship by inferring another person's intentions to predict subsequent behavior. This more recently evolved brain region can be differently engaged to interact with more primitive neural systems in maintaining conditional and unconditional trust in a partnership. Conditional trust selectively activated the ventral tegmental area, a region linked to the evaluation of expected and realized reward, whereas unconditional trust selectively activated the septal area, a region linked to social attachment behavior. The interplay of these neural systems supports reciprocal exchange that operates beyond the immediate spheres of kinship, one of the distinguishing features of the human species.

Figure - Brain responses for decisions to trust. (a) Trust building. Decisions to trust contrasted with the control condition activated the PcC (Brodmann's areas, BA 9/32). (b) Trust maintenance. Decisions to trust contrasted with the control condition activated the SA (together with the adjoining hypothalamus)

Laws of Nature as resting on faith...

Dennis Overbye does a brief piece in the Dec. 18 NY Times that derives from the small firestorm of commentary ignited by a previous OpEd piece by Paul Davis, an Arizona State Univ. cosmologist, asserting that science, not unlike religion, rests on faith, not in God but in the idea of an orderly universe. (I almost did a post on that OpEd article, but decided not to). The not so minor difference, of course, is that the "laws" of science simply reflect that the order we perceive in nature has been explored and tested for more than 2,000 years by observation and experimentation. The methods of science are well known. What are the methods of faith? Overbye's article proceeds to describe positions held by a number of prominent philosophers, physicists, and cosmologists on the underlying nature of the universe.

I'm with the late Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman, whose famous quote is included in the article - “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.”

Children attributing causality - extension to religious and political imitation.

Blog reader Rick Thomas makes a brief comment on the previous post on children attributing causality (a comment I wish I had made), that is sufficiently pungent to bring into a post where more people will note it:

" Fascinating. I guess the effect will extend to adult religious and political imitation as well."

Even though the experiments of Lyons et al. mentioned in the previous post deal with imitation of mechanical sequences, the same tenacious and irrational attribution of causality might explain why people find it so difficult to overcome habits instilled by their early religious and political environment.

The hidden structure of over-imitation

Human children, unlike chimpanzees, will copy unnecessary or arbitrary parts of an action sequence they observe in adults, Lyons et al. term this process overimitation and suggest in an open access article with the title of this post that it reveals a hidden structure behind how children learn to attribute causality. Here is their abstract, and a graphic showing one of the three puzzle boxes used in the experiements:

Young children are surprisingly judicious imitators, but there are also times when their reproduction of others' actions appears strikingly illogical. For example, children who observe an adult inefficiently operating a novel object frequently engage in what we term overimitation, persistently reproducing the adult's unnecessary actions. Although children readily overimitate irrelevant actions that even chimpanzees ignore, this curious effect has previously attracted little interest; it has been assumed that children overimitate not for theoretically significant reasons, but rather as a purely social exercise. In this paper, however, we challenge this view, presenting evidence that overimitation reflects a more fundamental cognitive process. We show that children who observe an adult intentionally manipulating a novel object have a strong tendency to encode all of the adult's actions as causally meaningful, implicitly revising their causal understanding of the object accordingly. This automatic causal encoding process allows children to rapidly calibrate their causal beliefs about even the most opaque physical systems, but it also carries a cost. When some of the adult's purposeful actions are unnecessary—even transparently so—children are highly prone to mis-encoding them as causally significant. The resulting distortions in children's causal beliefs are the true cause of overimitation, a fact that makes the effect remarkably resistant to extinction. Despite countervailing task demands, time pressure, and even direct warnings, children are frequently unable to avoid reproducing the adult's irrelevant actions because they have already incorporated them into their representation of the target object's causal structure.

Vegansexuality

Jeff Stryker gives us more from the fringe (Dec. 9 NY Times Magazine):

Forget homo-, bi- or even metro-: the latest prefix in sexuality is vegan-, as in “vegansexual.” In a study released in May, Annie Potts, a researcher at the University of Canterbury and a director of the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies, surveyed 157 vegans and vegetarians (120 of them women) on the topic of cruelty-free living. The questions ranged from attitudes about eating meat to keeping pets to wearing possum fur to, yes, “cruelty-free sex” — that is, “rejecting meat eaters as intimate partners.”

Some of the survey respondents volunteered their reluctance to kiss meat eaters. “I couldn’t think of kissing lips that allow dead animal pieces to pass between them,” a 49-year-old vegan woman from Auckland said. For some, the resistance is the squeamishness factor. “Nonvegetarian bodies smell different to me,” a 41-year-old Christchurch vegan woman said. “They are, after all, literally sustained through carcasses — the murdered flesh of others.” For some, it is a question of finding a like-minded life partner. An Auckland ovo-vegetarian had tried a relationship with a carnivore, but reported that despite the sexual attraction, the gulf in “shared values and moral codes” was just too wide.

Potts, who coined the term vegansexuality, says the “negative response of omnivores” to her study has surprised her. Even some fellow animal lovers question the wisdom of vegansexuality. A blog for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals noted that sleeping with only fellow vegans means forgoing the opportunity to turn carnivores into vegans by the most powerful recruiting tool available — sex.

PETA’s founder and president, Ingrid Newkirk, agrees that vegans smell fresher. (“There’s science to prove it,” she says.) But Newkirk is all about the recruiting, even if it means one convert at a time. “When my staff members come to me and say: ‘Guess what? My boyfriend, now he’s a vegan,’ I say, half-jokingly: ‘Well, it is time to ditch him and get another. You’ve done your work; move on.’ ”

Selling brain science... Neurorealism

Matthew Hutson makes some good points in his brief comments on all those pretty brain imaging graphics you see in this MindBlog as well the daily press:

You’ve seen the headlines: This Is Your Brain on Politics. Or God. Or Super Bowl Ads. And they’re always accompanied by pictures of brains dotted with seemingly significant splotches of color. Now some scientists have seen enough. We’re like moths, they say, lured by the flickering lights of neuroimaging — and uncritically accepting of conclusions drawn from it.

A paper published online in September by the journal Cognition shows that assertions about psychology — even implausible ones like “watching television improved math skills” — seem much more believable to laypeople when accompanied by images from brain scans. And a paper accepted for publication by The Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience demonstrates that adding even an extraneous reference to the brain to a bad explanation of human behavior makes the explanation seem much more satisfying to nonexperts.

Eric Racine, a bioethicist at the Montreal Clinical Research Institute, coined the word neurorealism to describe this form of credulousness. In an article called “fMRI in the Public Eye,” he and two colleagues cited a Boston Globe article about how high-fat foods activate reward centers in the brain. The Globe headline: “Fat Really Does Bring Pleasure.” Couldn’t we have proved that with a slice of pie and a piece of paper with a check box on it?

The way conclusions from cognitive neuroscience studies are reported in the popular press, “they don’t necessarily tell us anything we couldn’t have found out without using a brain scanner,” says Deena Weisberg, an author of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience paper. “It just looks more believable now that we have the pretty pictures.”

Racine says he is particularly troubled by the thought of crude or unscrupulous applications of this young science to the diagnosis of psychiatric conditions, the evaluation of educational programs and the assessment of defendants in criminal trials. Drawing inferences from the data requires several degrees of analysis and interpretation, he says, and treating neuroimaging as a mind-reading technique “would be adding extra scientific credibility that is not necessarily warranted.”

Race and IQ - a few crisp facts

The debate over race and IQ seems endless and mind-numbing, usually generating more heat than light. A recent Op-Ed piece by Richard Nisbett, brief and to the point, collects several facts:

About 25 percent of the genes in the American black population are European, meaning that the genes of any individual can range from 100 percent African to mostly European. If European intelligence genes are superior, then blacks who have relatively more European genes ought to have higher I.Q.’s than those who have more African genes. But it turns out that skin color and “negroidness” of features — both measures of the degree of a black person’s European ancestry — are only weakly associated with I.Q. (even though we might well expect a moderately high association due to the social advantages of such features).

During World War II, both black and white American soldiers fathered children with German women. Thus some of these children had 100 percent European heritage and some had substantial African heritage. Tested in later childhood, the German children of the white fathers were found to have an average I.Q. of 97, and those of the black fathers had an average of 96.5, a trivial difference.

If European genes conferred an advantage, we would expect that the smartest blacks would have substantial European heritage. But when a group of investigators sought out the very brightest black children in the Chicago school system and asked them about the race of their parents and grandparents, these children were found to have no greater degree of European ancestry than blacks in the population at large.

.. a superior adoption study...looked at black and mixed-race children adopted by middle-class families, either black or white, and found no difference in I.Q. between the black and mixed-race children....children adopted by white families had I.Q.’s 13 points higher than those of children adopted by black families. The environments that even middle-class black children grow up in are not as favorable for the development of I.Q. as those of middle-class whites.

James Flynn, a philosopher and I.Q. researcher in New Zealand, has established that in the Western world as a whole, I.Q. increased markedly from 1947 to 2002. In the United States alone, it went up by 18 points. Our genes could not have changed enough over such a brief period to account for the shift; it must have been the result of powerful social factors. And if such factors could produce changes over time for the population as a whole, they could also produce big differences between subpopulations at any given time.

...interventions at every age from infancy to college can reduce racial gaps in both I.Q. and academic achievement, sometimes by substantial amounts in surprisingly little time. This mutability is further evidence that the I.Q. difference has environmental, not genetic, causes.

Video of independent leg movement controllers

Here, as a companion to my Sept. 20 post "Walking the walk" is a video illustrating the independent controllers of our right and left legs during walking.

The God Effect

Here I pass on another bit, by Marina Krakovsky, in the NY Times Magazine's Dec. 9 "Ideas" issue. She summarizes work by Canadian psychologists Shariff and Norenzayan published in Psychological Science:

Some anthropologists argue that the idea of God first arose in larger societies, for the purpose of curbing selfishness and promoting cooperation. Outside a tightly knit group, the reasoning goes, nobody can keep an eye on everyone’s behavior, so these cultures invented a supernatural agent who could. But does thinking of an omniscient God actually promote altruism? The University of British Columbia psychologist Ara Norenzayan wanted to find out.

In a pair of studies published in Psychological Science, Norenzayan and his student Azim F. Shariff had participants play the so-called “dictator game,” a common way of measuring generosity toward strangers. The game is simple: you’re offered 10 $1 coins and told to take as many as you want and leave the rest for the player in the other room (who is, unbeknown to you, a research confederate). The fair split, of course, is 50-50, but most anonymous “dictators” play selfishly, leaving little or nothing for the other player.

In the control group of Norenzayan’s study, the vast majority of participants kept everything or nearly everything — whether or not they said they were religious. “Religious leaders always complain that people don’t internalize religion, and they’re right,” Norenzayan observes.

But is there a way to induce generosity? In the experimental condition, the researchers prompted thoughts of God using a well-established “priming” technique: participants, who again included both theists and atheists, first had to unscramble sentences containing words such as God, divine and sacred. That way, going into the dictator game, players had God on their minds without being consciously aware of it. Sure enough, the “God prime” worked like a charm, leading to fairer splits. Without the God prime, only 12 percent of the participants split the money evenly, but when primed with the religious words, 52 percent did.

When news of these findings made headlines, some atheists were appalled by the implication that altruism depends heavily on religion. Apparently, they hadn’t heard the whole story. In a second study, the researchers had participants unscramble sentences containing words like civic, contract and police — meant to evoke secular moral institutions. This prime also increased generosity. And unlike the religious prime, it did so consistently for both believers and nonbelievers. Until he conducts further research, Norenzayan can only speculate about the significance: “We need that common denominator that works for everyone.

A Mea Culpa - Pinker and his critics

I think in general that Steven Pinker goes way overboard on the nativist angle, and so recently approvingly passed on this Churchland review in the Nov. 1 issue of Nature critical of Pinker's new book, "The Language of Thought." - I hadn't actually read the book. These retorts by Marc Hauser and Pinker himself in the Dec. 6 issue make me realize that I should have. I have zapped my original post, and I'm now going to read the book......(one thing about doing a blog is that you read fewer good long books). I admit to a residual grumpyness about Pinker (a brilliant man) from his visit to Wisconsin a number of years ago as a featured speaker. He was dragged through the usual torture of serial 30 minute interviews with local "prominent persons" (I was the Zoology Chair at that time), and during our conversation I found him to be quite remote. At his talk he read from a typescript - word for word - a lecture that I had already heard twice before.

Seasonal Affective Disorder - an evolutionary relic?

Friedman offers a succinct summary of information of seasonal affective disorder (SAD), with some interesting facts.

Epidemiological studies estimate that its prevalence in the adult population ranges from 1.4 percent (Florida) to 9.7 percent (New Hampshire).

In one study, patients with SAD

...had a longer duration of nocturnal melatonin secretion in the winter than in the summer, just as with other mammals with seasonal behavior.Why did the normal patients show no seasonal change in melatonin secretion? One possibility is exposure to industrial light, which can suppress melatonin.
...The effects of light therapy are fast, usually four to seven days, compared with antidepressants, which can take four to six weeks to work.
...People are most responsive to light therapy early in the morning, just when melatonin secretion begins to wane, about eight to nine hours after the nighttime surge begins...How can the average person figure that out without a blood test? By a simple questionnaire that assesses “morningness” or “eveningness” and that strongly correlates with plasma melatonin levels. The nonprofit Center for Environmental Therapeutics has a questionnaire on its Web site (www.cet.org).

"Mental reserves" as antidote to Alzheimer's disease

A fascinating aspect of various kinds of debilitation (back pain, heart attacks, dementia) is that degenerative changes in anatomy commonly associated with them (disk and vertebral degeneration, cardiac vessel blockage, brain lesion and beta-amyloid plaques-shown in figure) are often observed on autopsy in physically and mental robust people, who have shown no symptoms of debilitation. What is different about them? Apparently their bodies were able to do a more effective 'work around' or compensation for the damage. A relevant article by Jane Brody in the December 11 New York Times deals with evidence that cognitive reserves, the brain’s ability to develop and maintain extra neurons and connections between them may later in life help compensate for the rise in dementia-related brain pathology that accompanies normal aging. Some edited clips:

Cognitive reserve is greater in people who complete higher levels of education. The more intellectual challenges to the brain early in life, the more neurons and connections the brain is likely to develop and perhaps maintain into later years... brain stimulation does not have to stop with the diploma. Better-educated people may go on to choose more intellectually demanding occupations and pursue brain-stimulating hobbies, resulting in a form of lifelong learning...novelty is crucial to providing stimulation for the aging brain...as with muscles, it’s “use it or lose it.” The brain requires continued stresses to maintain or enhance its strength...In 2001, ... a long-term study of cognitively healthy elderly New Yorkers....found, on average, those who pursued the most leisure activities of an intellectual or social nature had a 38 percent lower risk of developing dementia. The more activities, the lower the risk...the most direct route to a fit mind is through a fit body...physical exercise “improves what scientists call ‘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.

This point about exercise and executive function was the subject of my Nov. 15 post.

Ambiguity Promotes Liking

For the seventh consecutive December, the New York Times magazine (Dec. 9 issue) has looked back on the passing year through the special lens of 'ideas'. Here is one of their brief essays, and I will pass on a few more in subsequent posts:

Ambiguity Promotes Liking

By MARINA KRAKOVSKY

Is it true that familiarity breeds contempt? A psychology study published this year concludes that the answer is yes. It seems we are inclined to interpret ambiguous information about someone optimistically, assuming we will get along. We are usually let down, however, when we learn more.

A team of researchers, led by Michael I. Norton of Harvard Business School, looked at online daters’ opinions of people they were about to meet for the first time and compared those ratings with another group’s post-date impressions. Before the date, based on what little information the daters saw online, most participants rated their prospective dates between a 6 and a 10 on a 10-point scale, with nobody giving a score below a 3. But post-date scores were lower, on average, and lots of people deemed their date a total dud.

Why? For starters, initial information is open to interpretation. “And people are so motivated to find somebody they like that they read things into the profiles,” Norton says. If a man writes that he likes the outdoors, his would-be mate imagines her perfect skiing companion, but when she learns more, she discovers “the outdoors” refers to nude beaches. And “once you see one dissimilarity, everything you learn afterward gets colored by that,” Norton says.

The letdown from getting more information isn’t true just for romance. In one experiment, the researchers showed college students different numbers of randomly selected traits and asked them to rate how much they’d like the person described. For the most part, the more traits participants saw, the less they said they would like the other person. But another group of students had overwhelmingly said they would like people more after learning more about them.

We make this mistake, the researchers say, largely because we can all recall cases of more knowledge leading to more liking. “You forget the people in your third-grade class you didn’t like; you remember the people you’re still friends with,” Norton explains.

Most popular consciousness articles for November

From the monthly report of downloads from the eprint archives of the Assoc. for the Study of Consciousness:

1. Sagiv, Noam and Ward, Jamie (2006) Crossmodal interactions: lessons from
synesthesia. In: Visual Perception, Part 2. Progress in Brain Research,
Volume 155. 1404 downloads from 17 countries.
http://eprints.assc.caltech.edu/224/
2. David, Elodie and Laloyaux, Cédric and Devue, Christel and Cleeremans,
Axel (2007) Change blindness to gradual changes in facial expressions.
Psychologica Belgica, in press. 1299 downloads from 12 countries.
http://eprints.assc.caltech.edu/256/
3. Koriat, A. (2006) Metacognition and Consciousness. In: Cambridge handbook
of consciousness. Cambridge University Press, New York, USA. 1088 downloads
from 21 countries. http://eprints.assc.caltech.edu/175/
4. Mashour, George A. (2007) Inverse Zombies, Anesthesia Awareness, and the
Hard Problem of Unconsciousness. In: 11th Annual Meeting of the ASSC, Las
Vegas. 976 downloads from 18 countries. http://eprints.assc.caltech.edu/294/
5. 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. 971 downloads from 19 countries.
http://eprints.assc.caltech.edu/293/

Delayed maturation of the cortex in children with ADHD

From Shaw et al., a very straightforward study showing that normal thickness of the cerebral cortex develops more slowly in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. This kind of finding makes it even more disturbing that ADHD continues to be pervasively over-diagnosed in children, who are then drugged with Ritalin when they should just be left alone to let things straighten out in their own good time.

There is controversy over the nature of the disturbance in brain development that underpins attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In particular, it is unclear whether the disorder results from a delay in brain maturation or whether it represents a complete deviation from the template of typical development. Using computational neuroanatomic techniques, we estimated cortical thickness at >40,000 cerebral points from 824 magnetic resonance scans acquired prospectively on 223 children with ADHD and 223 typically developing controls. With this sample size, we could define the growth trajectory of each cortical point, delineating a phase of childhood increase followed by adolescent decrease in cortical thickness (a quadratic growth model). From these trajectories, the age of attaining peak cortical thickness was derived and used as an index of cortical maturation. We found maturation to progress in a similar manner regionally in both children with and without ADHD, with primary sensory areas attaining peak cortical thickness before polymodal, high-order association areas. However, there was a marked delay in ADHD in attaining peak thickness throughout most of the cerebrum: the median age by which 50% of the cortical points attained peak thickness for this group was 10.5 years (SE 0.01), which was significantly later than the median age of 7.5 years (SE 0.02) for typically developing controls. The delay was most prominent in prefrontal regions important for control of cognitive processes including attention and motor planning. Neuroanatomic documentation of a delay in regional cortical maturation in ADHD has not been previously reported.

Figure - The age of attaining peak cortical thickness in children with ADHD compared with typically developing children. (A) dorsal view of the cortical regions where peak thickness was attained at each age (shown, ages 7–12) in ADHD (Upper) and typically developing controls (Lower). The darker colors indicate regions where a quadratic model was not appropriate (and thus a peak age could not be calculated), or the peak age was estimated to lie outside the age range covered. Both groups showed a similar sequence of the regions that attained peak thickness, but the ADHD group showed considerable delay in reaching this developmental marker. (B) Right lateral view of the cortical regions where peak thickness was attained at each age (shown, ages 7–13) in ADHD (Upper) and typically developing controls (Lower). Again, the delay in ADHD group in attaining peak cortical thickness is apparent.

A happy ending.....

Here is a feel-good story to start the week...

Good feelings.....

A bit off the track for this blog, but it is the season for good feelings, so I pass on this alternative video for the new new Erasure single "I Could Fall In Love With You" (which I saw during happy hour yesterday at a video bar, and then found on YouTube).