A chemical test for disturbed relationship?

MindBlog has done a number of posts on behavioral effects of oxytocin and vasopressin in humans (enter the terms in the search box in the left column to see them). Taylor et al. now show, in an open access article, that they may be biomarkers of distressed relationships:

Young adults in couple (pair-bond) relationships reported on the positive and negative aspects of their relationships and had blood drawn and assayed for oxytocin and vasopressin. Elevated plasma oxytocin was associated with distress in the pair-bond relationship for women, but not for men. Vasopressin, which is closely related to oxytocin in molecular structure and significantly related to male pair-bond behavior in animal studies, was elevated in men experiencing distress in the pair-bond relationship, but not in women. Controlling for estradiol and testosterone did not alter these findings. We conclude that plasma oxytocin in women and plasma vasopressin in men may be biomarkers of distressed pair-bond relationships.

Abstract thoughts move muscles.

Movements of our muscles influence our thoughts and emotions. People given neutral bland instructions to contract the specific face muscles that make a smile find it harder to generate a feeling of anger when requested to do so, and instruction to move the muscles that make an angry frown make it harder to follow a subsequent instruction to feel friendly or happy. Havas has found that blocking a frown can actually prevent a bad mood.  Natalie Angier summarizes several studies that show the opposite: how thoughts influence our muscle movements in subtle ways.  Miles et al., for example, show that when we thing of events in the future, our bodies move slightly forward, while thinking of past events causes them to move slightly backwards. Their observations are consistent with theories of "embodied cognition," in this case mental time travel may be represented in the sensorimotor systems that regulate human movement. The metaphorical “arrow of time” may be grounded in a processing architecture that integrates temporal and spatial information in a directional manner (i.e., past = back, future = forward).

Angier also notes other work on embodied cognition that I have mentioned - Students who held a hot cup of coffee in their hand were more likely to evaluate a target person as being warm and friendly than those holding a cold cup of coffee.  She notes work (this post) showing that a warm versus cold stare causes subject to evaluate the temperature of a room as warmer.  Finally she points to work (this post) showing our bodies conflate weight with greater importance or value.  (...almost makes you think that  both Angier and Bownds scan the contents of the journal "Psychological Science.")

The 4th anniversary of Deric's MindBlog

As year five of this blog starts, I find it hard to believe that I have banged out over 2,000 postings, that the blog has ~1,500 RSS feed subscribers, and is seriously engaged by 300-400 people on an average day.

(The figure is a Feedburner report, starting in July 2006.  The green line is the number of RSS subscribers, the blue indicates significant engagement, the amplitude being the weekday (new posts) - weekend (no new posts) difference).

About this time of year I usually cycle through an identity crisis regarding what kind of thinking and writing I want to do, how much energy to put into MindBlog.  Sometimes external forces nudge my efforts.  I recently got a curious invitation to an international Cognitive Neuroscience meeting in Istanbul next May 18-20.  The request was that I both present a piano recital and also give a talk on the mind.  I'm now working on the talk ("Who wants to know? - the nature of our subjective "I"), deciding on the music, and will eventually put the talk on my website, with a podcast version on this blog.  I've done a few previous podcasts (see left column of blog), but haven't really gotten into it.  I don't listen to podcasts, they seem so much less efficient than just reading.  I started to play with Twitter (left column), but aside from a few spurts of activity, I also haven't gotten into it.

Ever since the 1999 publication of my book, The Biology of Mind, I have puttered with the idea of another book. This first book had been a 'crossover' effort, written to be useful both for college course instruction and also for the educated layperson. It was reasonably successful, got some good reviews, and by now has sold ~ 9,000 copies. For the first year or two after its publication both I and the reviewers assumed that there would be a second revised edition.

But as I began to organize an updated version over the next several years, I became tempted by the prospect of doing a pure trade book, not a textbook. I got as far as a fairly complete book outline and design. Then I toyed with the idea of a short paragraph-a-day popular book, a bit of test writing being Mindstuff: bon-bons for the curious user posted on my website in 2002. Then in 2005 I attempted a still short but more continuous text: Mindstuff: a guide for the curious user. (On re-reading, it comes off as ponderous and impenetrable.) None of these efforts got to the level of seriously writing for publication - mainly because I was observing an exponential increase in the number of popular books on the mind, and thought it very likely that my effort would be lost in the noise.

I started Deric's MindBlog in early 2006, after reading a New York Times article on the blog phenomenon, and found myself reaching a larger audience than the previous writing efforts had generated, with much more feedback and interaction. Generating this blog provided a very useful excuse for doing all the reading I was doing anyway, for my own pleasure and stimulation - I could feel less self-indulgent if I was passing some of the material on. 

The problem with the blog gig, which I have mentioned before, is that it is a very episodic, present-centered, non-cumulative activity - a very different mindset from the deeper and more continuous thinking that goes into doing a book. I don't think I have the time, motivation, or energy to do both kinds of activities.

This thinking-out-loud gets me to the point of rambling further about a book title that has been popping into my head for at least the last ten years: "The 100 Millisecond Manager." (a riff on the title the popular book of the early 1980's by Blanchard and Johnson, "The One Minute Manager.") The gist of the argument would be that given in the "Guide" section of the 2005 writing I mentioned above, and actually in Chapter 12 of my book, Figure 12-7.

It might make the strident assertion that the most important thing that matters in regulating our thoughts, feelings, and actions is their first 100-200 msec in the brain, which is when the levers and pulleys are actually doing their thing. It would be a nuts and bolts approach to altering - or at least inhibiting - self limiting behaviors. It would suggest that a central trick is to avoid taking on on the ‘enormity of it all,’ and instead use a variety of techniques to get our awareness down to the normally invisible 100-200 msec time interval in which our actions are being programmed. Here we are talking mechanical, not ideological; this is where all the limbic routines that result from life script, self image, temperament, etc., actually get their start-up. The suggestion is that you can short circuit the whole process if you simply bring awareness to the level of observing the moments during which a behavior switches on, and can sometimes say “I don’t think so.”

"The 100 msec Manager" has gone through the ‘this could be a book’  cycle several times over the past ten years, the actual execution then bogging down as I actually got into description of the underlying science and techniques for expanding awareness. I keep searching for keys to making it feisty, punchy, accessible, and attractive to readers. I note the enormous number of books out there on meditation, relaxation, etc. that are all really addressing the same core processes in different ways. How attractive or effective would be an approach that didn't have the slightest whiff of 'spirituality' or 'purpose' be? (I think that spirituality and purpose are human inventions, culturally evolved psychologies, not shared with other animals, that help humans pass on their genes.)

So.... for the moment all this waffling brings me back to thinking that just doing this blog isn't such a bad deal after all.

Religiosity tied to socioeconomic status.

Gregory Paul makes an interesting comment on an article by Cullota that was the subject of my Nov. 17 post.  I think his point that belief in gods and an afterlife is unlikely to be a "strongly genetically programmed result of major selective evolutionary pressures such as social cohesion" is a good one.   But, I assume he would agree that there is genetic/development programming of things like the facial muscles that are specialized for signaling affiliative gestures that are universal across cultures. Here is his letter:

The Science News Focus story "On the origin of religion" (E. Culotta, 6 November 2009, p. 784) did not incorporate the growing body of psychosociological research that is revealing the crucial role of socioeconomics in the origin and popularity of religion, as well as in creationism (1–6). Some hunter-gatherers have minimal religion (7), and those who do not believe in the gods and an afterlife have spontaneously expanded in prosperous democracies until they are the majority in some nations, such as France, Sweden, and Denmark (1, 3, 4). Because religion is not universal, as implied in the News Focus article, serious religiosity cannot be the strongly genetically programmed result of major selective evolutionary pressures such as social cohesion (8).

In modern nations, nonreligion and the acceptance of evolution become popular when the middle class majority feels sufficiently secure and safe, thanks to low income inequality, universal health care, job and retirement security, and low rates of lethal crime; this has occurred to greater and lesser degrees in most first-world countries, from Japan to Scandinavia (1–6). Religion thrives when the majority seek the aid and protection of supernatural powers because they are impoverished, as in the third- and second-world countries or, in the case of the United States (the most religious and creationist first-world country), because the majority of Americans fear losing their middle-class status as a result of limited government support, high levels of social pathology, and intense economic competition and income disparity (1–6). Prosperous modernity is proving to be the nemesis of religion.

References

* 1. G. Paul, Evol. Psychol. 7, 398 (2009); www.epjournal.net/filestore/EP07398441_c.pdf.
* 2. T. Rees, J. Relig. Soc. 11 (2009); moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2009/2009-17.html.
* 3. P. Zuckerman, Soc. Compass 3, 949 (2009). [CrossRef]
* 4. P. Norris, R. Inghelart, Sacred and Secular (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 2004).
* 5. A. Gill, E. Lundsgaarde, Rational. Soc. 16, 399 (2004). [CrossRef]
* 6. S. Verweii, P. Ester, R. Naata, J. Sci. Study Relig. 36, 309 (1997). [CrossRef] [Web of Science]
* 7. F. Marlowe, in Ethnicity, Hunter-Gatherers, and the "Other," S. Kent , Ed. (Smithsonian Institute Press, Washington, DC, 2002), pp. 247–281.
* 8. C. N. Wade, The Faith Instinct (Penguin, New York, 2009).

Our brain activity as desire collides with reason.

How do we resist impulsive desires?  Apparently our anteroventral prefrontal cortex tells our nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental  areas (involved in reward and pleasure)  to chill out. From Diekhof and Gruber:

Human decisions are guided by "desire" or "reason," which control actions oriented toward either proximal or long-term goals. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess how the human brain mediates the balance between proximal reward desiring and long-term goals, when actions promoting a superordinate goal preclude exploitation of an immediately available reward option. Consistent with the view that the reward system interacts with prefrontal circuits during action control, we found that behavior favoring the long-term goal, but counteracting immediate reward desiring, relied on a negative functional interaction of anteroventral prefrontal cortex (avPFC) with nucleus accumbens (Nacc) and ventral tegmental area. The degree of functional interaction between avPFC and Nacc further predicted behavioral success during pursuit of the distal goal, when confronted with a proximal reward option, and scaled with interindividual differences in trait impulsivity. These findings reveal how the human brain accomplishes voluntary action control guided by "reason," suggesting that inhibitory avPFC influences Nacc activity during actions requiring a restraint of immediate "desires."

Slime molds and humans - similar transport network design.

Tero et al. show that a slime mold in one day can design a network that is as efficient as one developed by humans over many years: the Tokyo rail system. Here is their abstract, followed by two figures:

Transport networks are ubiquitous in both social and biological systems. Robust network performance involves a complex trade-off involving cost, transport efficiency, and fault tolerance. Biological networks have been honed by many cycles of evolutionary selection pressure and are likely to yield reasonable solutions to such combinatorial optimization problems. Furthermore, they develop without centralized control and may represent a readily scalable solution for growing networks in general. We show that the slime mold Physarum polycephalum forms networks with comparable efficiency, fault tolerance, and cost to those of real-world infrastructure networks—in this case, the Tokyo rail system. The core mechanisms needed for adaptive network formation can be captured in a biologically inspired mathematical model that may be useful to guide network construction in other domains.

Fig. 1 Network formation in Physarum polycephalum. (A) At t = 0, a small plasmodium of Physarum was placed at the location of Tokyo in an experimental arena bounded by the Pacific coastline (white border) and supplemented with additional food sources at each of the major cities in the region (white dots). The horizontal width of each panel is 17 cm. (B to F) The plasmodium grew out from the initial food source with a contiguous margin and progressively colonized each of the food sources. Behind the growing margin, the spreading mycelium resolved into a network of tubes interconnecting the food sources.

Fig. 2 Comparison of the Physarum networks with the Tokyo rail network. (A) In the absence of illumination, the Physarum network resulted from even exploration of the available space. (B) Geographical constraints were imposed on the developing Physarum network by means of an illumination mask to restrict growth to more shaded areas corresponding to low-altitude regions. The ocean and inland lakes were also given strong illumination to prevent growth. (C and D) The resulting network (C) was compared with the rail network in the Tokyo area (D). (E and F) The minimum spanning tree (MST) connecting the same set of city nodes (E) and a model network constructed by adding additional links to the MST (F).

Is there an ecological unconscious?

I wanted to pass on the link to this interesting article by Daniel Smith that discusses the psychological maladies that accompany ecological degradation. A few clips:

...Ecopsychology embraces a more revolutionary paradigm: just as Freud believed that neuroses were the consequences of dismissing our deep-rooted sexual and aggressive instincts, ecopsychologists believe that grief, despair and anxiety are the consequences of dismissing equally deep-rooted ecological instincts...a number of psychiatrically inflected coinages have sprung up to represent people’s growing unease over the state of the planet — “nature-deficit disorder,” “ecoanxiety,” “ecoparalysis.”

It was Bateson’s belief that the tendency to think of mind and nature as separate indicated a flaw at the core of human consciousness. Writing several years after Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” at a time when the budding environmental movement was focused on the practical work of curbing DDT and other chemical pollutants, Bateson argued that the essential environmental crisis of the modern age lay in the realm of ideas. Humankind suffered from an “epistemological fallacy”: we believed, wrongly, that mind and nature operated independently of each other. In fact, nature was a recursive, mindlike system; its unit of exchange wasn’t energy, as most ecologists argued, but information. The way we thought about the world could change that world, and the world could in turn change us.

So what to do? How do you go about rebooting human consciousness? Bateson’s prescription for action was vague. We needed to correct our errors of thought by achieving clarity in ourselves and encouraging it in others — reinforcing “whatever is sane in them.” In other words, to be ecological, we needed to feel ecological. It isn’t hard to see why Bateson’s ideas might appeal to ecopsychologists. His emphasis on the interdependence of the mind and nature is the foundation of ecotherapy. It is also at the root of Kahn’s notion that “rewilding” the mind could have significant psychological benefits. But it also isn’t hard to see how the seeming circularity of Bateson’s solution — in order to be more ecological, feel more ecological — continues to bedevil the field and those who share its interests.

Measuring our happiness...

Does money buy happiness? Economists empasize correlations between higher incomes and greater self-reported well-being, while psychologists argue that happiness shows little correlation with absolute material goods and is instead dictated largely by an individual's so-called set-point. Other research invokes a hedonic treadmill, whereby income matters until subsistence requirements are met, at which point comparisons with one's neighbors are what influence one's sense of life satisfaction. Oswald and Wu now establish that the subjective responses from 1 million adults (to questions like "Taking all things together, how happy are you?"), collected within health surveys conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, do indeed correlate with objective measures of quality of life.

Music training induces plasticity in our hippocampus

From Herdener et al. :

Training can change the functional and structural organization of the brain, and animal models demonstrate that the hippocampus formation is particularly susceptible to training-related neuroplasticity. In humans, however, direct evidence for functional plasticity of the adult hippocampus induced by training is still missing. Here, we used musicians' brains as a model to test for plastic capabilities of the adult human hippocampus. By using functional magnetic resonance imaging optimized for the investigation of auditory processing, we examined brain responses induced by temporal novelty in otherwise isochronous sound patterns in musicians and musical laypersons, since the hippocampus has been suggested previously to be crucially involved in various forms of novelty detection. In the first cross-sectional experiment, we identified enhanced neural responses to temporal novelty in the anterior left hippocampus of professional musicians, pointing to expertise-related differences in hippocampal processing. In the second experiment, we evaluated neural responses to acoustic temporal novelty in a longitudinal approach to disentangle training-related changes from predispositional factors. For this purpose, we examined an independent sample of music academy students before and after two semesters of intensive aural skills training. After this training period, hippocampal responses to temporal novelty in sounds were enhanced in musical students, and statistical interaction analysis of brain activity changes over time suggests training rather than predisposition effects. Thus, our results provide direct evidence for functional changes of the adult hippocampus in humans related to musical training.

Exercise keeps your cells young, and a tip on running.

Two random items on exercise.  Work by Lieberman et al. on running has caused quite a stir in the press (and two MindBlog readers have pointed it out to me). I've tried taking off my running shoes for a few days now, and wow.... this is good stuff. (This should not have surprised me of course...I ran around barefoot for years as a kid growing up in Austin, Texas.)  Here's the abstract:

Humans have engaged in endurance running for millions of years, but the modern running shoe was not invented until the 1970s. For most of human evolutionary history, runners were either barefoot or wore minimal footwear such as sandals or moccasins with smaller heels and little cushioning relative to modern running shoes. We wondered how runners coped with the impact caused by the foot colliding with the ground before the invention of the modern shoe. Here we show that habitually barefoot endurance runners often land on the fore-foot (fore-foot strike) before bringing down the heel, but they sometimes land with a flat foot (mid-foot strike) or, less often, on the heel (rear-foot strike). In contrast, habitually shod runners mostly rear-foot strike, facilitated by the elevated and cushioned heel of the modern running shoe. Kinematic and kinetic analyses show that even on hard surfaces, barefoot runners who fore-foot strike generate smaller collision forces than shod rear-foot strikers. This difference results primarily from a more plantarflexed foot at landing and more ankle compliance during impact, decreasing the effective mass of the body that collides with the ground. Fore-foot- and mid-foot-strike gaits were probably more common when humans ran barefoot or in minimal shoes, and may protect the feet and lower limbs from some of the impact-related injuries now experienced by a high percentage of runners. 

A second item concerns exercise and longevity. Larocca et al. show that exercise delays the normal shortening of telomeres that occurs on aging. (Telomeres are tiny caps on the end of DNA strands, long strands of DNA that are snipped when cells divide, a process that is believed to protect the rest of the DNA but leaves an increasingly abbreviated telomere. Eventually, if a cell’s telomeres become too short, the cell either dies or enters a kind of suspended state.)

Genetic contributions to financial risk taking

Having just done a post on brain changes on aging that increase financial risk taking I thought it appropriate to follow up with another article I came across from Crişan et al. who link genetic changes in a serotonin transporter to social learning of fear and economic decision making. Their abstract:

Serotonin (5-HT) modulates emotional and cognitive functions such as fear conditioning (FC) and decision making. This study investigated the effects of a functional polymorphism in the regulatory region (5-HTTLPR) of the human 5-HT transporter (5-HTT) gene on observational FC, risk taking and susceptibility to framing in decision making under uncertainty, as well as multidimensional anxiety and autonomic control of the heart in healthy volunteers. The present results indicate that in comparison to the homozygotes for the long (l) version of 5-HTTLPR, the carriers of the short (s) version display enhanced observational FC, reduced financial risk taking and increased susceptibility to framing in economic decision making. We also found that s-carriers have increased trait anxiety due to threat in social evaluation, and ambiguous threat perception. In addition, s-carriers also show reduced autonomic control over the heart, and a pattern of reduced vagal tone and increased sympathetic activity in comparison to l-homozygotes. This is the first genetic study that identifies the association of a functional polymorphism in a key neurotransmitter-related gene with complex social–emotional and cognitive processes. The present set of results suggests an endophenotype of anxiety disorders, characterized by enhanced social learning of fear, impaired decision making and dysfunctional autonomic activity.

Financial risk taking in the elderly - brain correlates

As I look at the current stock market swoon and decide to hang in there, I learn something I'd rather not know about my aging brain.....

Samanez-Larkin et al. first note research that shows that older adults make more errors when making risky decisions (In the domain of finance, healthy older investors have been shown to continue to invest in risky assets even after suffering losses in the stock market large enough to necessitate postponing retirement.) Then, using an investment task, the authors confirm that older adults make more risk-seeking mistakes, and find that these mistakes are mediated by increased temporal variability in the Nucleus Accumbens. Their findings  indicate an age-related subcortical deficit that may promote risky decision-making mistakes. Here is their abstract:

As human life expectancy continues to rise, financial decisions of aging investors may have an increasing impact on the global economy. In this study, we examined age differences in financial decisions across the adult life span by combining functional neuroimaging with a dynamic financial investment task. During the task, older adults made more suboptimal choices than younger adults when choosing risky assets. This age-related effect was mediated by a neural measure of temporal variability in nucleus accumbens activity. These findings reveal a novel neural mechanism by which aging may disrupt rational financial choice.

The populist addiction

I thought this Op-Ed piece by David Brooks was worth passing on.  He notes that populism and elitism are really mirror images of one another, both manichean simplifications of complex multidimensional issues into stark good and evil extremes.

A clever treatment for tinnitus

Okamoto et al. find that they can reduce brain activity related to tinnitus by exposing chronic tinnitus patients to self-chosen, enjoyable music, which has been modified (“notched”) to contain no energy in the frequency range surrounding the individual tinnitus frequency:

Maladaptive auditory cortex reorganization may contribute to the generation and maintenance of tinnitus. Because cortical organization can be modified by behavioral training, we attempted to reduce tinnitus loudness by exposing chronic tinnitus patients to self-chosen, enjoyable music, which was modified (“notched”) to contain no energy in the frequency range surrounding the individual tinnitus frequency. After 12 months of regular listening, the target patient group (n = 8) showed significantly reduced subjective tinnitus loudness and concomitantly exhibited reduced evoked activity in auditory cortex areas corresponding to the tinnitus frequency compared to patients who had received an analogous placebo notched music treatment (n = 8). These findings indicate that tinnitus loudness can be significantly diminished by an enjoyable, low-cost, custom-tailored notched music treatment, potentially via reversing maladaptive auditory cortex reorganization.

Social structure influences language structure.

Lupyan and Dale do a statistical analysis of over 2,000 languages to show that

...languages spoken by large groups have simpler inflectional morphology than languages spoken by smaller groups, as measured on a variety of factors such as case systems and complexity of conjugations. Additionally, languages spoken by large groups are much more likely to use lexical strategies in place of inflectional morphology to encode evidentiality, negation, aspect, and possession.

This suggests that

...just as biological organisms are shaped by ecological niches, language structures appear to adapt to the environment (niche) in which they are being learned and used.

Resting brain default mode activity under genetic control

From Glahn et al:

The default-mode network, a coherent resting-state brain network, is thought to characterize basal neural activity. Aberrant default-mode connectivity has been reported in a host of neurological and psychiatric illnesses and in persons at genetic risk for such illnesses. Whereas the neurophysiologic mechanisms that regulate default-mode connectivity are unclear, there is growing evidence that genetic factors play a role. In this report, we estimate the importance of genetic effects on the default-mode network by examining covariation patterns in functional connectivity among 333 individuals from 29 randomly selected extended pedigrees. Heritability for default-mode functional connectivity was 0.424 ± 0.17 (P = 0.0046). Although neuroanatomic variation in this network was also heritable, the genetic factors that influence default-mode functional connectivity and gray-matter density seem to be distinct, suggesting that unique genes influence the structure and function of the network. In contrast, significant genetic correlations between regions within the network provide evidence that the same genetic factors contribute to variation in functional connectivity throughout the default mode. Specifically, the left parahippocampal region was genetically correlated with all other network regions. In addition, the posterior cingulate/precuneus region, medial prefrontal cortex, and right cerebellum seem to form a subnetwork. Default-mode functional connectivity is influenced by genetic factors that cannot be attributed to anatomic variation or a single region within the network. By establishing the heritability of default-mode functional connectivity, this experiment provides the obligatory evidence required before these measures can be considered as endophenotypes for psychiatric or neurological illnesses or to identify genes influencing intrinsic brain function.

Fig. 1 (A) Group-ICA map of the default-mode network derived from resting state scans of 333 individuals from large extended pedigrees. (B) Significant genetic correlations for functional connectivity between heritable regions in the default-mode network. The left parahippocampal gyrus (green) was genetically correlated with the posterior cingulate/precuneus (yellow), medial prefrontal (blue), right cerebellar (red), and right temporal-parietal (pink) regions. In addition, the posterior cingulate/precuneus, medial prefrontal, and right cerebellar regions form a circuit influenced by the same genetic factors. (C) Significant environmental correlations between these same regions.

The pattern of significant environmental correlations differed dramatically from those of the genetic correlations (Fig. 1C). Environmental correlations typically result from unmeasured aspects of the environment or correlated measurement errors. The right temporal–parietal region was significantly correlated with the posterior cingulate/precuneus and medial prefrontal cortex. Neither of these regions showed significant genetic correlations. In addition, the right cerebellum and medial prefrontal cortex had a significant environmental correlation.

Distinguish Democrats and Republicans from their faces.

Here is a quirky item... it turns out that we can guess the political affiliation of someone, more accurately than by chance, by looking at their photograph. Faces perceived to be more powerful are more likely to be perceived as Republicans. Faces perceived as warmer are more likely to also be perceived as Democrats!

The secret life of chaos.

The BBC has produced a beautiful program on Chaos theory. The mathematics of chaos can explain how and why the universe creates exquisite order and pattern, transforming simplicity into complexity. A YouTube version can be viewed here, the BBC web version plays only in the UK. The clip below is the first installment in the six part series.

Thinking of God moves attention

Here is an interesting tidbit:

The concepts of God and Devil are well known across many cultures and religions, and often involve spatial metaphors, but it is not well known if our mental representations of these concepts affect visual cognition. To examine if exposure to divine concepts produces shifts of attention, participants completed a target detection task in which they were first presented with God- and Devil-related words. We found faster RTs when targets appeared at compatible locations with the concepts of God (up/right locations) or Devil (down/left locations), and also found that these results do not vary by participants’ religiosity. These results indicate that metaphors associated with the divine have strong spatial components that can produce shifts of attention, and add to the growing evidence for an extremely robust connection between internal spatial representations and where attention is allocated in the external environment.

Speech perception requires motor system activation.

Yuen et al. find that specific articulatory commands are activated automatically and involuntarily during speech perception, and suggest, in a broader framework, that perception of action entails activation of the motor system. Their behavioral evidence backs up functional MRI studies that have demonstrated that the brain regions involved in the perception of speech overlap with those involved in the production of speech. They reasoned that if articulatory information is activated in speech perception, then this information should interfere with articulation in a scenario in which participants are asked to produce a target syllable while listening to a different auditory distractor. Their approach was to investigate how an auditory distractor impacts upon the actual articulation of a different target. The thought was that if articulatory information is activated in speech perception, then that information might interfere with speech production by introducing particular distortions of the target syllable that reflect the articulatory properties of the distractor. Here is their abstract:

Emerging neurophysiologic evidence indicates that motor systems are activated during the perception of speech, but whether this activity reflects basic processes underlying speech perception remains a matter of considerable debate. Our contribution to this debate is to report direct behavioral evidence that specific articulatory commands are activated automatically and involuntarily during speech perception. We used electropalatography to measure whether motor information activated from spoken distractors would yield specific distortions on the articulation of printed target syllables. Participants produced target syllables beginning with /k/ or /s/ while listening to the same syllables or to incongruent rhyming syllables beginning with /t/. Tongue–palate contact for target productions was measured during the articulatory closure of /k/ and during the frication of /s/. Results revealed “traces” of the incongruent distractors on target productions, with the incongruent /t/-initial distractors inducing greater alveolar contact in the articulation of /k/ and /s/ than the congruent distractors. Two further experiments established that (i) the nature of this interference effect is dependent specifically on the articulatory properties of the spoken distractors; and (ii) this interference effect is unique to spoken distractors and does not arise when distractors are presented in printed form. Results are discussed in terms of a broader emerging framework concerning the relationship between perception and action, whereby the perception of action entails activation of the motor system.