Fan Mail

Although I feel totally immodest about doing this, I have to pass on this text of a email today from a reader of this blog in Tasmania, Australia. Whenever I question how worthwhile this effort is, a statement like this really warms me up:

Just a quick appreciation: I love your blog. I don’t know how you do it but just about every day there’s something that I really want to read. You appear to write a blog that is bang on some of my interests, in particular, building the full - crazy, intelligent, imaginative, smart, musical, superstitious, religious, even - human from biology. We appear to be living in a very exciting time where a lot of stuff that was in what I’d call the realm of superstition – is being dusted off and actually inspected. Maybe it’ll go on like this forever, but I can’t imagine that we won’t run out of things pretty soon at the current rate.

Psychology of the electorate

I point to two interesting articles in the New York Times. Dewan and Brown discuss how the work of psychologist Drew Westen (mentioned in three - previous - posts) has shaped the message delivery of democratic candidates so thoroughly that the rhetorical dominance enjoyed by republican for years has been completely reversed. Kristof deals again with the issue of unconscious bias in voters, and links in his article direct you to online tests for your own unconscious biases.

Emergent properties of human groups

Just as ants interact to form elaborate colonies and neurons interact to create structured thought, groups of people interact to create emergent organizations that the individuals may not understand or even perceive. I recently went to an interesting seminar on this topic in the Psychology Department at Univ. Wisc. given by Robert Goldstone at Indiana Univ. He has set up an interesting web based experiment to test agent based models of emergent properties of human groups. You can read about and also become a subject in the experiments here.

Religion: Bound to believe?

I pass on clips from an article by Pascal Boyer that explains why a slew of cognitive traits shared by humans will always make atheism a hard sell.

In the past ten years, the evolutionary and cognitive study of religion has begun to mature. It does not try to identify the gene or genes for religious thinking. Nor does it simply dream up evolutionary scenarios that might have led to religion as we know it. It does much better than that. It puts forward new hypotheses and testable predictions. It asks what in the human make-up renders religion possible and successful. Religious thought and behaviour can be considered part of the natural human capacities, such as music, political systems, family relations or ethnic coalitions. Findings from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, cultural anthropology and archaeology promise to change our view of religion.

Unlike other social animals, humans are very good at establishing and maintaining relations with agents beyond their physical presence; social hierarchies and coalitions, for instance, include temporarily absent members. This goes even further. From childhood, humans form enduring, stable and important social relationships with fictional characters, imaginary friends, deceased relatives, unseen heroes and fantasized mates. Indeed, the extraordinary social skills of humans, compared with other primates, may be honed by constant practice with imagined or absent partners.

It is a small step from having this capacity to bond with non-physical agents to conceptualizing spirits, dead ancestors and gods, who are neither visible nor tangible, yet are socially involved. This may explain why, in most cultures, at least some of the superhuman agents that people believe in have moral concerns.

In addition, the neurophysiology of compulsive behaviour in humans and other animals is beginning to shed light on religious rituals. These behaviours include stereotyped, highly repetitive actions that participants feel they must do, even though most have no clear, observable results, such as striking the chest three times while repeating a set formula. Ritualized behaviour is also seen in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorders and in the routines of young children. In these contexts, rituals are generally associated with thoughts about pollution and purification, danger and protection, the required use of particular colours or numbers or the need to construct a safe and ordered environment.

So is religion an adaptation or a by-product of our evolution? Perhaps one day we will find compelling evidence that a capacity for religious thoughts, rather than 'religion' in the modern form of socio-political institutions, contributed to fitness in ancestral times. For the time being, the data support a more modest conclusion: religious thoughts seem to be an emergent property of our standard cognitive capacities.

Religious concepts and activities hijack our cognitive resources, as do music, visual art, cuisine, politics, economic institutions and fashion. This hijacking occurs simply because religion provides some form of what psychologists would call super stimuli. Just as visual art is more symmetrical and its colours more saturated than what is generally found in nature, religious agents are highly simplified versions of absent human agents, and religious rituals are highly stylized versions of precautionary procedures. Hijacking also occurs because religions facilitate the expression of certain behaviours. This is the case for commitment to a group, which is made all the more credible when it is phrased as the acceptance of bizarre or non-obvious beliefs.

Some form of religious thinking seems to be the path of least resistance for our cognitive systems. By contrast, disbelief is generally the result of deliberate, effortful work against our natural cognitive dispositions — hardly the easiest ideology to propagate.

Fair and Balanced - measuring media bias

One hears charges from both left and right about media bias, with FOX News frequently cited as the most extreme case. Tim Groeling has done interesting work to objectively measure the bias shown by television media, in a paper (PDF here) to be published in the December issue of Presidential Studies Quarterly. He simply collected the in-house presidential approval polling by ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX News and compared these with the actual broadcasts of such polls on evening news shows from 1997 to early 2008. As an example, CBS was 35 percent less likely to report a five-point drop in approval for Bill Clinton than a similar rise in approval and was 33 percent more likely to report a five-point drop than a rise for George W. Bush. FOX News was 67 percent less likely to report a rise in approval for Clinton than a decrease and 36 percent more likely to report an increase rather than a decrease for Bush.

Watching the amygdala signal the good and the bad

An interesting piece in Jour. of Neuoscience by Belova et al., in which recordings from single cells in the monkey amygdala indicate their division into those that track either positive state or negative states:

As an organism interacts with the world, how good or bad things are at the moment, the value of the current state of the organism, is an important parameter that is likely to be encoded in the brain. As the environment changes and new stimuli appear, estimates of state value must be updated to support appropriate responses and learning. Indeed, many models of reinforcement learning posit representations of state value. We examined how the brain mediates this process by recording amygdala neural activity while monkeys performed a trace-conditioning task requiring fixation. The presentation of different stimuli induced state transitions; these stimuli included unconditioned stimuli (USs) (liquid rewards and aversive air puffs), newly learned reinforcement-predictive visual stimuli [conditioned stimuli (CSs)], and familiar stimuli long associated with reinforcement [fixation point (FP)]. The FP had a positive value to monkeys, because they chose to foveate it to initiate trials. Different populations of amygdala neurons tracked the positive or negative value of the current state, regardless of whether state transitions were caused by the FP, CSs, or USs. Positive value-coding neurons increased their firing during the fixation interval and fired more strongly after rewarded CSs and rewards than after punished CSs and air puffs. Negative value-coding neurons did the opposite, decreasing their firing during the fixation interval and firing more strongly after punished CSs and air puffs than after rewarded CSs and rewards. This representation of state value could underlie how the amygdala helps coordinate cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses depending on the value of one's state.

Happiness and the 'prosperoscope'

The random samples section of Science Magazine discusses the latest prosperity or 'happiness index' report of the Legatum Institute:

The results are in: Australia is the most prosperous country in the world; Yemen drags at the bottom of the list. But it's not just wealth that makes a country prosperous, according to the 2008 prosperity index, also known as the "happiness index," published last week by the Legatum Institute (LI) in Dubai (see www.prosperity.com). The institute based its rankings on surveys of economic competitiveness and comparative livability from 140 countries, including factors such as capital investment and the degree of social equality.

This year, for the first time, countries' environmental efforts counted toward their scores, says LI Senior Vice President William Inboden. The institute selected an objective measurement--the ratio of developed land to land remaining in its natural state in each country--and added questions about how respondents felt about their country's environmental policies. Depending on a country's wealth, the environmental measures could count for as much as 4% of a country's prosperity score. Although Australia was the most prosperous country overall, New Zealand topped the environmental measures. The most environmentally unhappy people were Ukrainians, who particularly dislike their air quality.

You might enjoy playing with the 'prosperiscope' on the site.

"The Legatum Prosperiscope™ is a powerful interactive online tool that allows users to customise analyses across 104 countries using 22 different factors. Users can also compare countries against each other to identify their relative strengths and weaknesses. Follow the simple steps on the right to start using the Prosperiscope."

Instinctual math

Natalie Angier does an interesting article on our instinctual intuitive math versus our more analytical learned number crunching, and the relationship between them. Apparently our evolutionarily endowed sense of approximation is related to how good we are at formal math. The article contains a neat interactive demonstration of our non verbal intuitive math abilities.

Brain imaging studies have traced the approximate number sense to a specific neural structure called the intraparietal sulcus, which also helps assess features like an object’s magnitude and distance. Symbolic math, by contrast, operates along a more widely distributed circuitry, activating many of the prefrontal regions of the brain that we associate with being human. Somewhere, local and global must be hooked up to a party line.

...open questions include how malleable our inborn number sense may be, whether it can be improved with training, and whether those improvements would pay off in a greater appetite and aptitude for math. If children start training with the flashing dot game at age 4, will they be supernumerate by middle school?

Views of the presidential candidates on science

Here is the PDF from Science Magazine.

Poulenc Novelette in C major for a Monday morning

Recorded 10/25/08 on the Steinway B in my home on Twin Valley Road in Middleton, Wisconsin.

Experiencing physical warmth promotes interpersonal warmth

Here is the abstract of the article by Williams and Bargh which has the title of this post:

"Warmth" is the most powerful personality trait in social judgment, and attachment theorists have stressed the importance of warm physical contact with caregivers during infancy for healthy relationships in adulthood. Intriguingly, recent research in humans points to the involvement of the insula in the processing of both physical temperature and interpersonal warmth (trust) information. Accordingly, we hypothesized that experiences of physical warmth (or coldness) would increase feelings of interpersonal warmth (or coldness), without the person's awareness of this influence. In study 1, participants who briefly held a cup of hot (versus iced) coffee judged a target person as having a "warmer" personality (generous, caring); in study 2, participants holding a hot (versus cold) therapeutic pad were more likely to choose a gift for a friend instead of for themselves.

Embodied cognition, a cold stare makes you feel cold.

I show below the abstract from Zhong and Leonardelli, followed by more explanation from an article by Benedict Carey.

Metaphors such as icy stare depict social exclusion using cold-related concepts; they are not to be taken literally and certainly do not imply reduced temperature. Two experiments, however, revealed that social exclusion literally feels cold. Experiment 1 found that participants who recalled a social exclusion experience gave lower estimates of room temperature than did participants who recalled an inclusion experience. In Experiment 2, social exclusion was directly induced through an on-line virtual interaction, and participants who were excluded reported greater desire for warm food and drink than did participants who were included. These findings are consistent with the embodied view of cognition and support the notion that social perception involves physical and perceptual content. The psychological experience of coldness not only aids understanding of social interaction, but also is an integral part of the experience of social exclusion.

More detail on the two experiments:

In one, they split 65 students into two groups, instructing those in one to recall a time when they felt socially rejected, and those in the other to summon a memory of social acceptance.

Many of the students were recent immigrants and had fresh memories of being isolated in the dorms, left behind while roommates went out, Dr. Zhong said.

The researchers then had each of the participants estimate the temperature in the lab room. The students who had recalled being excluded estimated the temperature to be, on average, 5 degrees Fahrenheit lower than the others.

In the second experiment, the researchers had 52 students come into the lab and play a computer game, one at a time. The students “threw” a ball back and forth with three other figures on the computer screen that — so the participants thought — represented other students playing from remote locations.

In fact a computer program was running the game, and it excluded half the study participants, throwing them the virtual ball a couple of times in the beginning, then ignoring them altogether. The other group of students in the study were included in the virtual game of catch.

After playing the game, the participants in this study then rated their preferences for a variety of foods and drinks, including hot soup, coffee, an apple and crackers. Those who had been isolated in the computer game showed a strong preference for the soup and coffee over the other items; the included students had no such preference.

Drinking alone, with "friends" on Facebook

I'm struck by how very little I know about the ~10,000 visitors that Quantcast tells me come to Deric's MindBlog each month. Thus this essay in the "Lives" section of today's New York Times Magazine struck a chord with me.

Distortion of science by headline-grabbing

I'm always being concerned in scanning journals for possible postings in this blog that my eye is too readily caught by the flashy marketing phrase or popularizing twist, thus neglecting more boring, but possibly much more significant, work. An article in The Economist reinforces my concern by pointing to work of Young Ioannidis, and Al-Ubaydli in PLos Medicine. that uses economic commodity theory to show how the current scientific publishing system is biased towards favoring trumpeted results that are also more likely to be false.

In economic theory the winner’s curse refers to the idea that someone who places the winning bid in an auction may have paid too much. Consider, for example, bids to develop an oil field. Most of the offers are likely to cluster around the true value of the resource, so the highest bidder probably paid too much.

The same thing may be happening in scientific publishing, according to a new analysis. With so many scientific papers chasing so few pages in the most prestigious journals, the winners could be the ones most likely to oversell themselves—to trumpet dramatic or important results that later turn out to be false. This would produce a distorted picture of scientific knowledge, with less dramatic (but more accurate) results either relegated to obscure journals or left unpublished.

It starts with the nuts and bolts of scientific publishing. Hundreds of thousands of scientific researchers are hired, promoted and funded according not only to how much work they produce, but also to where it gets published. For many, the ultimate accolade is to appear in a journal like Nature or Science. Such publications boast that they are very selective, turning down the vast majority of papers that are submitted to them.

The assumption is that, as a result, such journals publish only the best scientific work. But Dr Ioannidis and his colleagues argue that the reputations of the journals are pumped up by an artificial scarcity of the kind that keeps diamonds expensive. And such a scarcity, they suggest, can make it more likely that the leading journals will publish dramatic, but what may ultimately turn out to be incorrect, research.

How we know our own minds...

For those of you who might be more heavily into philosophy of mind and introspective psychology, I want to pass along this PDF of a draft article that is to appear in Brain and Behavioral Sciences, "How we know our own minds: the relationship between mindreading and metacognition." Carruthers defends the idea that our knowledge of our own attitudes results from turning our mindreading capacities upon ourselves, not from introspection for propositional attitudes. Here is his abstract, showing the organization of his arguments:

Four different accounts of the relationship between third-person mindreading and first-person metacognition are compared and evaluated. While three of them endorse the existence of introspection for propositional attitudes, the fourth (defended here) claims that our knowledge of our own attitudes results from turning our mindreading capacities upon ourselves. Section 1 introduces the four accounts. Section 2 develops the “mindreading is prior” model in more detail, showing how it predicts introspection for perceptual and quasi-perceptual (e.g. imagistic) mental events while claiming that metacognitive access to our own attitudes always results from swift unconscious self-interpretation. It also considers the model’s relationship to the expression of attitudes in speech. Section 3 argues that the commonsense belief in the existence of introspection should be given no weight. Section 4 argues briefly that data from childhood development are of no help in resolving this debate. Section 5 considers the evolutionary claims to which the different accounts are committed, and argues that the three introspective views make predictions that aren’t borne out by the data. Section 6 examines the extensive evidence that people often confabulate when self-attributing attitudes. Section 7 considers “two systems” accounts of human thinking and reasoning, arguing that although there are inrospectable events within System 2, there are no introspectable attitudes. Section 8 examines alleged evidence of “unsymbolized thinking”. Section 9 considers the claim that schizophrenia exhibits a dissociation between mindreading and metacognition. Finally, Section 10 evaluates the claim that autism presents a dissociation in the opposite direction, of metacognition without mindreading.

Different aspects of human intelligence correlate with cortical thickness versus neural activation.

Choi et al. report an interesting study in the Journal of Neuroscience. I'm passing on the abstract and a bit of explanation of crystallized versus fluid intelligence, but not the usual flashy fMRI graphics:

We hypothesized that individual differences in intelligence (Spearman's g) are supported by multiple brain regions, and in particular that fluid (gF) and crystallized (gC) components of intelligence are related to brain function and structure with a distinct profile of association across brain regions. In 225 healthy young adults scanned with structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging sequences, regions of interest (ROIs) were defined on the basis of a correlation between g and either brain structure or brain function. In these ROIs, gC was more strongly related to structure (cortical thickness) than function, whereas gF was more strongly related to function (blood oxygenation level-dependent signal during reasoning) than structure. We further validated this finding by generating a neurometric prediction model of intelligence quotient (IQ) that explained 50% of variance in IQ in an independent sample. The data compel a nuanced view of the neurobiology of intelligence, providing the most persuasive evidence to date for theories emphasizing multiple distributed brain regions differing in function.

As background:

gC, sometimes described as verbal ability, is more dependent on accumulated knowledge in long-term storage, including semantic memory. gF refers to reasoning ability, and is known to depend on working memory. Although gC and gF are typically correlated and can be considered subfactors of g (Jensen), they are conceptually and empirically separable. For instance, gC continues to increase over the lifespan, but gF peaks in early adulthood and then declines . Furthermore, at the neural level, lesion studies demonstrated that patients with anterior temporal damages perform poorly on tests of semantic knowledge, whereas prefrontal patients typically show profound deficits in solving diverse reasoning tasks.

Sleep accelerates improvement in working memory.

I've mentioned the n-back task for improving working memory and intelligence in several - previous - posts. Kuriyama et al. now use this test to show that post-training sleep significantly enhances this improvement:

Working memory (WM) performance, which is an important factor for determining problem-solving and reasoning ability, has been firmly believed to be constant. However, recent findings have demonstrated that WM performance has the potential to be improved by repetitive training. Although various skills are reported to be improved by sleep, the beneficial effect of sleep on WM performance has not been clarified. Here, we show that improvement in WM performance is facilitated by posttraining naturalistic sleep. A spatial variant of the n-back WM task was performed by 29 healthy young adults who were assigned randomly to three different experimental groups that had different time schedules of repetitive n-back WM task sessions, with or without intervening sleep. Intergroup and intersession comparisons of WM performance (accuracy and response time) profiles showed that n-back accuracy after posttraining sleep was significantly improved compared with that after the same period of wakefulness, independent of sleep timing, subject's vigilance level, or circadian influences. On the other hand, response time was not influenced by sleep or repetitive training schedules. The present study indicates that improvement in n-back accuracy, which could reflect WM capacity, essentially benefits from posttraining sleep.

Cognitive therapy versus medication for depression

DeRubeis et al. offer an interesting review article in Nature Reviews Neuroscience on treatment outcomes and neural mechanisms, from which I pass on part of the abstract and some summary graphs:

Studies have shown that cognitive therapy is as efficacious as antidepressant medication at treating depression, and it seems to reduce the risk of relapse even after its discontinuation. Cognitive therapy and antidepressant medication probably engage some similar neural mechanisms, as well as mechanisms that are distinctive to each.


Cognitive therapy and antidepressant medication have comparable effects. This graph shows the response of outpatients who had moderate-to-severe depression to cognitive therapy (CT), antidepressant medication (ADM) or placebo. Patients who were assigned to ADM or to CT showed a significantly higher response rate after 8 weeks of treatment than those who were assigned to placebo. After 16 weeks of treatment the response rates of ADM and CT were almost identical.


Less relapse after cognitive therapy compared with antidepressant medication. The second phase of the parent antidepressant medication (ADM) versus cognitive therapy (CT) study followed patients who had responded to ADM or to CT3. Patients who had responded to ADM were randomly assigned to either continue ADM treatment for one year (beige and red lines) or to change to placebo treatment for 1 year (green line). Patients who responded to CT were allowed three sessions of CT during the 1-year continuation period. In the follow-up period, none of the patients received any treatment. The figure shows that prior treatment with CT protected against relapse of depression at least as well as the continued provision of ADM, and better than ADM treatment that was subsequently discontinued. Note that the patient group that was given ADM in the continuation year contained a number of patients who did not adhere to the medication regimen. The red line indicates the response of the ADM-continuation group including these non-compliant patients, whereas the beige line shows the response of the patients in this group after the non-compliant patients had been removed from the analysis.

After a graphic showing changes in blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal in response to cognitive and emotional tasks associated with cognitive therapy, the authors offer a summary hypothetical time course of the changes to amygdala and prefrontal function that are associated with antidepressant medication and cognitive therapy.


a | During acute depression, amygdala activity is increased (red) and prefrontal activity is decreased (blue) relative to activity in these regions in healthy individuals. b | Cognitive therapy (CT) effectively exercises the prefrontal cortex (PFC), yielding increased inhibitory function of this region. c | Antidepressant medication (ADM) targets amygdala function more directly, decreasing its activity. d | After ADM or CT, amygdala function is decreased and prefrontal function is increased. The double-headed arrow between the amygdala and the PFC represents the bidirectional homeostatic influences that are believed to operate in healthy individuals.

Our somatosensory cortex embodies the facial expressions of others

The Editor's choice section of science describes an interesting bit of work by Pitcher et al. showing the embodyment of our social cognition:

Humans are especially interested in faces, as a means of sending signals--witness the sizeable arc of somatosensory cortex devoted to representation of one's own face--and as a substrate for social cognition. Pitcher et al. describe results supporting theories of embodied cognition and emotion, which posit cognition and emotion as being shaped by our bodily movements and perceptions. They used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to interfere with neural activity in the face areas of the somatosensory cortex while people discriminated the emotional expressions of faces (happy, sad, surprised, fearful, angry, and disgusted) and found that accuracy dropped significantly, as it also did when the occipital face area was similarly stimulated. The temporal sequence of neural processing was then delineated using double-pulse TMS, showing that the occipital area acted in the time window from 60 to 100 ms after the face stimulus was shown, whereas the somatosensory area was active a bit later, between 100 and 170 ms.

Botnets

Here is a scary article.