What is self-reflexive thought? How is this related to the default mode of brain activity?

Self-reflexive thought is the ability to think about yourself as an object like recognizing yourself in the mirror. Involves shifting focus from (external) sensory events towards internal thought, memories, feelings, and visceral (body) sensations.

Default mode is theorized to represent an ongoing internal stream of conscience 

mPFC,

posterior cingulate cortex,

parietal cortices.

DM activity decreases during extrapersonal attention.

What area of the brain is related to self-relevant thinking? Provide one piece of evidence in favour of this assertion.

The medialPFC. When performing a self-endorsement task, activity in the mPFC predicts whether self-relevant words will be remembered later. There is no effect for words that AREN’T self-relevant.

Ex. Comparing trait judgments of ‘self’ vs. judgments of a friend (case = upper vs. lower case judgment)

What are fugue states?

“transient states of confusion in which self-relevant knowledge is temporarily unavailable to consciousness”

What is embodiment? What areas of the brain are related to feelings of embodiment? Provide two pieces of evidence in favour of your answer.

Embodiment: sense of being localized within the body.

• INSULA signals awareness of bodily sensations related to arousal (heart rate and respiration changes).

• ANTERIOR CINGULATE GYRUS interprets some unpleasant aspects of painful stimuli.

• EXTRASTRIATE BODY AREA is activated when perceiving bodies or body parts, imaging changes in the positioning of body parts, or visualized one’s own body parts from a 3^rd person perspective.

• TEMPOROPARIETAL JUNCTION is associated with feelings of embodiment (electrical stimulation of the area produces feelings of disembodiment, involved in neglect and related conditions).

Double dissociation: stimulation of the RIGHT TEMPOROPARIETAL JUNCTION impairs body orientation perception, but doesn’t affect letter orientation perception. The reverse is true for the INTRAPARIETAL SULCUS.

When you see a caricature, you can still recognize the face; is this an early or a late eigenvector influencing your perception?

Caricatures are recognizable because most of the variability (the earlier eigenvectors) still remains constant; it is the later details that are exaggerated”

What are two pathways related to face perception?

Identity: “Person recognition pathway”, links facial presentations with semantic knowledge about individuals and their names, involves the LATERAL TEMPORAL CORTEX, TEMPORAL POLE, and HIPPOCAMPUS.  damage to hippocampus severely impairs face-name learning.

Emotion: “Dynamic pathway” involved in processing dynamic (changing) facial features: emotional expression, gaze direction, mouth movements. Involves the SUPERIOR TEMPORAL SULCUS, AMYGDALA, and LIMBIC FOREBRAIN.

*Both pathways feed back into the extrastriate to focus attention on characteristics that require more processing (e.g., unclear expressions).

Do we have neurons that fire for specific patterns of eye gaze?

Yes. Cells in the SUPERIOR TEMPORAL SULCUS fire when head movements and eye gaze match.

How does amygdala damage influence our ability to encode emotional faces? What about autism?

Amygdala damage: results in abnormal processing of fear, patients no longer attend to the correct emotional facial geometry.

Autism: show similar face processing deficits, also show amygdala activation in response to neutral faces, show less fusiform activity than average

Why can humans, but not non-human primates, easily pick up gaze information?

Because humans have evolved white sclera, which allows eye movements to be perceived and tracked more easily.

Can the direction of another person’s gaze influence you attentional systems?

Yes, larger amygdala responses are recorded in response to a threatening face looking towards you, than one looking elsewhere.

What is the difference between self-referencing and joint attention? And no, it is not about paying attention to joints.

Social referencing: ability of a person (usually child) to interpret the body gestures and vocal and facial expressions of others to guide behavior.

Joint attention: refers to the allocation of processing resources toward an object cued by another individual, via gaze direction, head orientation, and body & trunk position. (ex. one person in a room starts to look upwards, everyone else starts to look at the same spot

What brain areas uniquely respond during the perception of body language? Which brain areas respond to both emotional faces and bodies?

Body language only: extrastriate body area

Emotional faces and bodies: STS, which then outputs to the frontoparietal cortices (attentional modulation and action planning), and limbic areas (interpretation of emotional and motivational significance of motion patterns)

What effects occur when you perceive a mismatch between someone’s emotional expression and body language?

Superior Temporal Sulcus and INFERIOR FRONTAL GYRUS activity is stronger when expectations are violated, than when they are fulfilled.

What brain areas are related to the perception of biological motion? Describe two studies that support this view.

The STS and adjacent cortical surface. 1) A human ERP study found that the STS shows activation in response to mouth movements and shifts in gaze direction. 2) fMRI study showing participants videos of an animated character whose eyes moved in response to a peripheral target, STS shows higher activation in response to eye movements that don’t match up to target (incongruent).

Do social categories such as race influence only late stages of perception? Provide support for your answer.

No, they influence stages of perception as early as 100 msec. ERP study participants being shown photos of faces of different races show larger P200 (and sometimes N100) waveforms in the central frontal areas for Asian and African American faces. Males elicit larger P200s than women do (because women are usually less threatening?). Although, a few msec later larger frontocentral N200 responses for Caucasian and female faces.

What is the Implicit Association Test? How is performance on this test related to brain activity?

The IAT is used to detect subtle prejudice (unconscious associations with a target group). Participants are asked to make fast responses to good or bad words and to different images, then reaction times are used to judge your implicit attitudes towards different groups.

What are the different patterns of brain activity related to subliminal and supralimal perception of African-American faces?

Sublimal: automatic amygdala response*

Supraliminal: consciously controlled response in the ACC, vlPFC, and dlPFC

*amygdala responses decrease if: faces are familiar, task focuses on individuated rather than categorical processing, faces are shown for a long time, faces are explicitly labelled according to race.

Describe Amodio’s ERP study of weapon perception.

In this study (Caucasian) participants were asked to complete an object recognition task, which was then time locked to EKG readings (ERP study). Before briefly being shown either a weapon or a tool to be classified, they were primed with either a Caucasian or African American face.

The results showed that…

-priming with African American faces facilitated weapon recognition, and impaired tool recognition

-priming with Caucasian faces had no effect

-the ERPs were largest when AA faces primed tools

-the ERPs were largest for people who were internally motivated to regulate prejudiced reactions than in those who were externally motivated to do so (i.e. fearing social disapproval). More monitoring = larger ERN waveform

From a neuroscientific perspective, why are white police officers more likely to shoot an African-American person than a white person?

A study had participants play a first person shooting game with 4 different types of stimuli: unarmed white, unarmed black, armed white, armed black. Then ERPs were recorded. Results showed that…

-mistakenly shooting a white person elicited largest ERN

-when the target was black, ERNs after incorrect decision to “shoot” or “not shoot” did not differ  suggests that regulatory processes were not as strong for AA targets than they were for Caucasian targets

What brain areas are related to judging if a face is trustworthy? How does amygdala damage affect this ability?

Brain areas: enhanced activity mainly in the insula for UNTRUSTWORTHY faces, enhanced activity in the mPFC, orbitofrontal cortex, and caudate nucleus for faces deemed TRUSTWORTHY. The amygdala responds to both although, it’s more sensitive to differences in untrustworthy faces.

Bilateral amygdala damage patients tend to judge untrustworthy faces as more trustworthy.

What do mirror neurons do? What brain areas contain mirror neurons?

A neuron in the frontal or parietal cortex* that shows similar electrophysiological responses to actions executed by oneself or to observation of the same actions being executed by another. The responses often track the GENERAL GOAL of the motor act (e.g. grabbing a piece of food to eat) rather than the specific features of the movement (e.g. such as the initial starting position or orientation of a hand executing the action).

*specifically premotor cortex, ventral parietal regions and their interconnections AIP, F6, IAS, IPS, IT, LIP, STS, VIP, and VPF. (P. 382)

What is mentalizing? What are three ways of testing theory of mind?

Mentalizing is the ability to infer the (unobservable) internal mental state of other individuals –attributing the actions of others to their beliefs, goals, desires, and feelings.

3 ways to test…

1. False beliefs test –a test in which the observed individual holds beliefs that the perspective-taker knows to be untrue. Will the perspective taker respond with the truth, or with the response that the observed individual would produce given their perspective?

2. Location change task: An object is placed in location A and, unbeknownst to the 3^rd party, the position is switched to an alternate location. The participant must then indicate where the third party would look for the object.

3. Unexpected contents task: an object is placed in a container and, unbeknownst to the third party, the object is replaced by another one. The participant must indicate which object the third party thinks is in the container.

4. *?? Faux-Pas Detection Test (James bought Richard a toy airplane for his bday… James broke it, Richard tells him not to worry about it because he never liked it in the first place)

What is an intentional stance?

It is the assumption that others are agents motivated to behave in a way that is consistent with their current mental state –involves building scripts (theories) of how others typically behave in particular contexts.

What primate species can and cannot perform mentalizing tasks? This difference is likely due to development in which area of the brain?

Chimpanzees, orangutans (esp. to infer states of dominant ape to avoid pissing him off) and humans can perform mentalizing tasks. This is likely due to the fact that these species have more cortex than other apes. Specific brain regions involved in mentalizing:

-frontopolar cortex

-mPFC (diverse activity –incl. representations of the self, stories/ inferences based on enduring traits & qualitites)

-temporal lobe (semantic info)

-right inferior parietal cortex

-temporoparietal junction (transient inferences based on the current context)

-STS (representations of bodies in interpersonal space)

What is the difference between empathy and sympathy? How do the neural systems involved with these two functions differ?

Sympathy: feeling concern for another person, but not feeling the actual emotion felt by that person

Empathy: the ability to comprehend and resonate with another person’s emotional experience, such that the emotion is experienced by the observer… indiciduals must distinguish their own emotional responses accordingly, requires knowing that the other person’s feelings are the source of the shared emotional state  INVOLVES MENTALIZING

Empathy has both automatic and controlled components.

What are four components of empathy?

1) Emotion sharing (somatosensory cortex, limbic system, insula, ACC)

2) Self-awareness (inferior parietal cortex, PFC, insula –distinguishing between the self and the other)

3) Mental flexibility (medial and dorsal PFC –to be able to adopt the perspective of another)

4) Emotional regulation (ACC, lateral and ventromedial PFC –executive control employed to manage induced emotional and somatic states)

How is lower socioeconomic status associated with health problems (p. 388)?

Lower SE status is associated with increased risk of cardiovascular, respiratory, rheumatoid, psychiatric diseases, as well as mortality rates, even when lifestyle factors are taken into account. So both physical and psychosocial stressors account for these problems. Surbordinates have greater physiological indices of stress relative to dominant members when dominance is asserted through psychological intimidation, though stress can be reduced if coping strategies are available (ex. some non-human primates form social coalitions through grooming and roaming to avoid encounters with dominant members).

Rank-induced stress is evident across a variety of physiological measures: hyperactive glucocorticoid secretion, hypertension, impaired reproduction, immunosuppression, inhibition of neurogenesis, reduced synaptic plasticity, and dendritic atrophy in brain regions such as the hippocampus.

What is power motivation? What neurotransmitters are related to this motivation?

Power motivation: enduring preference for having impact on other people or the world at large.

Neurotransmitters: in men, elevated levels of epinephrine and norepinephrine promote the release of testosterone, which in turn promotes the release of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens. The neuroendocrine profile of PM in women is less clear but has been related to elevated levels of estradiol.