Bad mothering, good fathering..

Two interesting pieces of work on the chemistry underlying parental care of children:

Lerch-Haner et al. find in mice that serotonergic function is required for the nurturing and survival of offspring. Mothers with a specific disruption in serotonin neuron development built poor-quality nests and did not keep their offspring huddled together, leaving the litter exposed to the cold. Their litters died within a few days of birth despite adequate nursing. When these mothers' young were fostered by normal mothers immediately after birth, their odds of living rose to normal.

Prudom et al. find in Marmosets (a bi-parental primate) that fathers exposed to isolated scents of their infant displayed a significant drop in serum testosterone levels within 20 min after exposure, enhancing their positive infant care.

YouTube for test tubes...

Something I have been unaware of: A YouTube for scientists called The Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE). It is now now being indexed in the popular US National Library of Medicine repositories MEDLINE and PubMed. Many of my experimental successes (more than 15 years ago) were based on extremely subtle manual manipulations of visual receptor cells and their parts. They would have been SO much easier to communicate in this new format.

Our brains try multiple meanings before a word is finished.

Here are fascinating observations from Revill et al.. Their imaging data provides evidence of activation of relevant perceptual brain regions in response to the semantics (meaning) of a word while lexical competition is in process and before the word is fully recognized:

As a spoken word unfolds over time, it is temporarily consistent with the acoustic forms of multiple words. Previous behavioral research has shown that, in the face of temporary ambiguity about how a word will end, multiple candidate words are briefly activated. Here, we provide neural imaging evidence that lexical candidates only temporarily consistent with the input activate perceptually based semantic representations. An artificial lexicon and novel visual environment were used to target human MT/V5 and an area anterior to it which have been shown to be recruited during the reading of motion words. Participants learned words that referred to novel objects and to motion or color/texture changes that the objects underwent. The lexical items corresponding to the change events were organized into phonologically similar pairs differing only in the final syllable. Upon hearing spoken scene descriptions in a posttraining verification task, participants showed greater activation in the left hemisphere anterior extent of MT/V5 when motion words were heard than when nonmotion words were heard. Importantly, when a nonmotion word was heard, the level of activation in the anterior extent of MT/V5 was modulated by whether there was a phonologically related competitor that was a motion word rather than another nonmotion word. These results provide evidence of activation of a perceptual brain region in response to the semantics of a word while lexical competition is in process and before the word is fully recognized.

Development of sharing in human children.

Unlike chimpanzees, young children develop a particular form of other-regarding behaviour, called inequality aversion, between the ages of three and eight. On average, three- and four- year-olds behave selfishly whereas seven- and eight-year-olds prefer situations that remove inequality - within their group, that is. Here is the abstract from Fehr et al, who carried out studies with 229 Swiss boys and girls between 3 and 8 years of age to note changes in other-regarding behavior with age:

Human social interaction is strongly shaped by other-regarding preferences, that is, a concern for the welfare of others. These preferences are important for a unique aspect of human sociality—large scale cooperation with genetic strangers—but little is known about their developmental roots. Here we show that young children's other-regarding preferences assume a particular form, inequality aversion that develops strongly between the ages of 3 and 8. At age 3–4, the overwhelming majority of children behave selfishly, whereas most children at age 7–8 prefer resource allocations that remove advantageous or disadvantageous inequality. Moreover, inequality aversion is strongly shaped by parochialism, a preference for favoring the members of one's own social group. These results indicate that human egalitarianism and parochialism have deep developmental roots, and the simultaneous emergence of altruistic sharing and parochialism during childhood is intriguing in view of recent evolutionary theories which predict that the same evolutionary process jointly drives both human altruism and parochialism.

Symmetrical bodies are the sexiest...an underlying reason

Why do we find someone attractive? The observations of Brown et al. support the idea that we find symmetrical human bodies most attractive, and that this signals underlying genotypic or phenotypic quality. (Across many species and taxa, higher body assymetry is associated with increased morbidity and mortality, decreased fecundity, and other variables linked to natural and sexual selection.) Here is their abstract:

Body size and shape seem to have been sexually selected in a variety of species, including humans, but little is known about what attractive bodies signal about underlying genotypic or phenotypic quality. A widely used indicator of phenotypic quality in evolutionary analyses is degree of symmetry (i.e., fluctuating asymmetry, FA) because it is a marker of developmental stability, which is defined as an organism's ability to develop toward an adaptive end-point despite perturbations during its ontogeny. Here we sought to establish whether attractive bodies signal low FA to observers, and, if so, which aspects of attractive bodies are most predictive of lower FA. We used a 3D optical body scanner to measure FA and to isolate size and shape characteristics in a sample of 77 individuals (40 males and 37 females). From the 3D body scan data, 360° videos were created that separated body shape from other aspects of visual appearance (e.g., skin color and facial features). These videos then were presented to 87 evaluators for attractiveness ratings. We found strong negative correlations between FA and bodily attractiveness in both sexes. Further, sex-typical body size and shape characteristics were rated as attractive and correlated negatively with FA. Finally, geometric morphometric analysis of joint configurations revealed that sex-typical joint configurations were associated with both perceived attractiveness and lower FA for male but not for female bodies. In sum, body size and shape seem to show evidence of sexual selection and indicate important information about the phenotypic quality of individuals.

Stress during pregnancy hard on males

Mueller and Bale offer more information on what stress in female mice during pregnancy can do, particularly to male offspring:

Prenatal stress is associated with an increased vulnerability to neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism and schizophrenia. To determine the critical time window when fetal antecedents may induce a disease predisposition, we examined behavioral responses in offspring exposed to stress during early, mid, and late gestation. We found that male offspring exposed to stress early in gestation displayed maladaptive behavioral stress responsivity, anhedonia, and an increased sensitivity to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor treatment. Long-term alterations in central corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) and glucocorticoid receptor (GR) expression, as well as increased hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis responsivity, were present in these mice and likely contributed to an elevated stress sensitivity. Changes in CRF and GR gene methylation correlated with altered gene expression, providing important evidence of epigenetic programming during early prenatal stress. In addition, we found the core mechanism underlying male vulnerability may involve sex-specific placenta responsivity... in male placentas but not females. Examination of placental epigenetic machinery revealed basal sex differences, providing further evidence that sex-specific programming begins very early in pregnancy, and may contribute to the timing and vulnerability of the developing fetus to maternal perturbations. Overall, these results indicate that stress experience early in pregnancy may contribute to male neurodevelopmental disorders through impacts on placental function and fetal development.

More on digitial intimacy - MindBlog followers and demographics

No sooner have I done yesterday's posting on the 'ambient intimacy' generated by services like Facebook and Twitter than I find on logging in to my Blogger.com dashboard (menu) page a new icon indicating a feature I have been unaware of, 'followers' of the blog. I added the 'gadget' to the left column of this blog (I'll try anything once), and on reading a bit further discover that it appears to deal only with followers who have blogger accounts. They can choose to have the fact that they are following the blog be either private or have their name listed in the box.

I try not to pay attention to the myriad ways one can monitor a blog's traffic, but when the Scientific American people asked me to join their 'Partner's Network' (see the icon in the left column) they asked me to sign on to the quantcast.com analysis site. If you go to quantcast.com and simply enter mindblog.dericbownds.net in the box, you immediately get a detailed demongraphic analysis of this blog's readers: sex, age, income, and how many addicts, regulars, and passers-by there are.

Our aging brains - impaired suppression of distracting information

This work from Gazzaley et al. strikes WAY to close to home for me, as a description of my own aging (66 year old) brain, and why I get frustrated with the n-back memory exercise. Their abstract:

In this study, electroencephalography (EEG) was used to examine the relationship between two leading hypotheses of cognitive aging, the inhibitory deficit and the processing speed hypothesis. We show that older adults exhibit a selective deficit in suppressing task-irrelevant information during visual working memory encoding, but only in the early stages of visual processing. Thus, the employment of suppressive mechanisms are not abolished with aging but rather delayed in time, revealing a decline in processing speed that is selective for the inhibition of irrelevant information. EEG spectral analysis of signals from frontal regions suggests that this results from excessive attention to distracting information early in the time course of viewing irrelevant stimuli. Subdividing the older population based on working memory performance revealed that impaired suppression of distracting information early in the visual processing stream is associated with poorer memory of task-relevant information. Thus, these data reconcile two cognitive aging hypotheses by revealing that an interaction of deficits in inhibition and processing speed contributes to age-related cognitive impairment.

Digital Intimacy

Several years ago I set up a facebook account, looked up the pages of the students who were taking my seminar course, and at the end of the term told them about my experiment. They were mortified to find the professor had seen their self revelations about their sexual and boozing habits - as anyone on the web could have done. Now my daughter and her friends are broadcasting their latest moods and movements via the FaceBook feed, twitter, etc. This sort of freaks me out, the last thing I want is to surrender the last vestiges of my privacy to the greater web community. But, as Clive Thompson points out in his New York Times Magazine article, this new kind of ambient intimacy makes possible a kind of awareness of others not possible before .

Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye. Facebook is no longer alone in offering this sort of interaction online. In the last year, there has been a boom in tools for “microblogging”: posting frequent tiny updates on what you’re doing. ... One of the most popular new tools is Twitter, a Web site and messaging service that allows its two-million-plus users to broadcast to their friends haiku-length updates — limited to 140 characters, as brief as a mobile-phone text message — on what they’re doing. There are other services for reporting where you’re traveling (Dopplr) or for quickly tossing online a stream of the pictures, videos or Web sites you’re looking at (Tumblr). And there are even tools that give your location. When the new iPhone, with built-in tracking, was introduced in July, one million people began using Loopt, a piece of software that automatically tells all your friends exactly where you are.

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.

You could also regard the growing popularity of online awareness as a reaction to social isolation, the modern American disconnectedness that Robert Putnam explored in his book “Bowling Alone.” The mobile workforce requires people to travel more frequently for work, leaving friends and family behind, and members of the growing army of the self-employed often spend their days in solitude. Ambient intimacy becomes a way to “feel less alone,” as more than one Facebook and Twitter user told me.

What will happen in the next ten years?

Nature magazine asked this question of ten prominent researchers and business people. A common theme emerges: the integration of the worlds of matter and information, whether it be by the blurring of boundaries between online and real environments, touchy-feely feedback from a phone or chromosomes tucked away on databases.

On a lite note - another market collapse...

Economists Warn Anti-Bush Merchandise Market Close To Collapse

Brooks on how the Republicans just don't get it....

I thought I would pass on this link to David Brook's op-ed piece in today's New York Times, on how Republican party dogma is completely clueless on basic facts about our social brains that have been clearly proven by psychologists, social scientists, cognitive neuroscientists, etc.

Watching practice change the brain cortex.

Our brain cortex is changed by different kinds of learning. These include factual knowledge that is recalled by a purposeful effort and requires the involvement of the explicit memory system (This system is involved in tasks such as spatial navigation and intensive studying). Changes also result from training implicit memory, which refers to intrinsic knowledge about how to perform an action and includes language learning, juggling, mirror reading, and musical training. Duerden and Laverdure-Dupont do a meta-analysis of six morphometric studies that have demonstrated both short- and long-term use-dependent changes caused by these different types of learning. Although structural changes are commonly found in brain regions known to be functionally involved in the particular skill under study, a meta-analytic review of these studies revealed that additional changes often occurred in associative regions including parietal and temporal cortices. studies examining explicit learning showed an overlap of increased gray matter density in the hippocampal gyrus.


Figure - Meta-analysis of voxel-based morphometric studies reporting increased gray matter density after learning in the cortex and cerebellum.

Inducing persistent false beliefs is easy.

Just look at the political scene... But, seriously, the work in question is this interest tidbit from Geraerts et al in Psychological Sciences (the latest issue of this journal is a gold mine of interesting articles. I am porting a few of those abstract to this blog...)

False beliefs and memories can affect people's attitudes, at least in the short term. But can they produce real changes in behavior? This study explored whether falsely suggesting to subjects that they had experienced a food-related event in their childhood would lead to a change in their behavior shortly after the suggestion and up to 4 months later. We falsely suggested to 180 subjects that, as children, they had gotten ill after eating egg salad. Results showed that, after this manipulation, a significant minority of subjects came to believe they had experienced this childhood event even though they had initially denied having experienced it. This newfound autobiographical belief was accompanied by the intent to avoid egg salad, and also by significantly reduced consumption of egg-salad sandwiches, both immediately and 4 months after the false suggestion. The false suggestion of a childhood event can lead to persistent false beliefs that have lasting behavioral consequences.

Listening to Resveratrol

David Kent writes a well balanced article in American Scientist on issues of human longevity. A graphic and some text on the consequences of lifespan-prolonging therapies on population growth and demographic structure:

In the past century, disease-specific medicine reduced mortality at all ages, including the economically productive years between one's 20s and 60s. Historical trends show an increasing "rectangularization" of mortality rates over the past century, meaning that most people survive to an advanced age, at which point there is a precipitous increase in the number of deaths (green curves). Such data have led some researchers to theorize that the human lifespan is reaching an "ideal" length, beyond which substantial extension is not possible. However, discoveries about the basic mechanisms of aging may permit life expectancy to extend beyond this theoretical limit (red curves).


The rectangularization of the mortality curve implies that life-prolonging therapies will add years only at the end of life. Unless there is a shift in the retirement age, 21st-century medical innovation will have an even more dramatic effect on the dependency ratio (a measure of the portion of a population composed of those either too old or too young to work). Maintaining retirement as a widespread option at around 65, already an economic stretch, undoubtedly will become untenable. The price of longer life will almost certainly be a longer work life.

Chinese kids are ahead even before elementary school...

More sobering data from Siegler and Mu on occidental versus oriental child development. The superior mathematical knowledge of East Asian preschoolers is not limited to skills that are taught directly by parents or in school but is more general.

Kindergartners in China showed greater numerical knowledge than their age peers in the United States, not only when tested with arithmetic problems, which Chinese parents present to their children more often than U.S. parents do, but also when tested with number-line estimation problems, which were novel to the children in both countries. The Chinese kindergartners' number-line estimates were comparable to those of U.S. children 1 to 2 years more advanced in school. Individual differences in arithmetic and number-line-estimation performance were positively correlated within each country. These results indicate that performance differences between Chinese and U.S. children on both practiced and unpracticed mathematical tasks are substantial even before the children begin elementary school.

Watching the testosterone crash in anxious men who lose a contest.

This work from Maner et al. makes a rather blunt point:

Although theory suggests a link between social anxiety and social dominance, direct empirical evidence for this link is limited. The present experiment tested the hypothesis that socially anxious individuals, particularly men, would respond to a social-dominance threat by exhibiting decrements in their testosterone levels, an endocrinological change that typically reflects pronounced social submission in humans and other animals. Participants were randomly assigned to either win or lose a rigged face-to-face competition with a confederate. Although no zero-order relationship between social anxiety and level of testosterone was observed, testosterone levels showed a pronounced drop among socially anxious men who lost the competition. No significant changes were observed in nonanxious men or in women. This research provides novel insight into the nature and consequences of social anxiety, and also illustrates the utility of integrating social psychological theory with endocrinological approaches to psychological science.


Figure: Change in testosterone level as a function of experimental condition (losers vs. winners) and social anxiety (1 SD above the mean vs. 1 SD below the mean). Results are presented separately for men and women. Change scores were standardized within each gender.

La gazza ladra passes the mirror test - a crow with a self!

The Eurasian magpie belongs to the same bird family that includes the crows, ravens, and jays. de Waal writes a fascinating review of recent work by Prior et al. that demonstrates that magpies recognize themselves in a mirror - a test that persists as the gold standard of self-identity or 'personhood.' The experiments actually had better controls than many of those done with apes and human children...

...which generally fail to include “sham” marks. A sham mark is applied in the same way as a visible mark, and supposed to feel and smell the same, but cannot be visibly detected. In the magpie study, this was done by placing a black mark onto the magpies' black throat feathers.

Placed on the same black throat feathers, the visible mark—a tiny colored sticker—stood out, but only in a mirror. Put in front of a mirror, the magpies kept scratching with their foot until the mark was gone, whereas they left the sham mark alone. They also didn't do the same amount of frantic scratching if there was no mirror to see themselves in. Evidently, their self-preening was guided by visual feedback from the mirror.

de Waal also discusses work with other species and the “co-emergence hypothesis,” according to which the capacities for mirror self recognition and perspective-taking appear in tandem during both evolution and development.

Speaking of crows, Nijhuis writes a brief piece on work showing that crows recognize individual human faces.

Neural correlates of consciousness

I just came across this succinct and informative site in Scholarpedia curated by Christof Koch and Florian Mormann at Cal. Tech. It has some useful instructional graphics.


Midline structures in the brainstem and thalamus necessary to regulate the level of brain arousal. Small, bilateral lesions in many of these nuclei cause a global loss of consciousness. (From Koch, 2004, The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach. Roberts, Denver, CO.)

When a referee sees red...

It has been shown that wearing red sports attire has a positive impact on one's outcome in combat sports such as tae kwon do or wrestling. One speculation has been that this is due to an evolutionary or cultural association of the color red with dominance and aggression, with this association triggering a psychological effects (dominance/submission) in the competitors. Hagemann et al. offer evidence that perceptual bias in the referee is the more likely explanation, by showing that when tae kwon do referees watch videos of matches in which the competitors wear either read or blue protective gear:

The competitor wearing red protective gear was awarded an average of 13% (0.94 points) more points than the competitor wearing blue protective gear. The number of points awarded increased for a blue competitor who was digitally transformed into a red competitor, and decreased for a red competitor who was digitally transformed into a blue competitor.