class #6 Flashcards
Describe experiment studying unfairness in ultimatum games
Participants were then placed inside the MRI scanner and began playing the Ultimatum Game with their partners via a computer interface.
Social condition: In these trials, before each offer, participants (the responders)
saw a photograph of their partner on that trial.
Non-social condition: In these trials, participants were told they were playing with a
computer partner.
Unfair offers of $2 and $1 made by human partners were rejected at a significantly higher rate than those made by a computer, suggesting that participants had a stronger emotional reaction to unfair offers from humans than to the same offers from the computer.
Key brain regions representing the demands of the Ultimatum Game task are:
* the anterior Insula: which supports the emotional goal of resisting unfairness
* the DLPFC: which supports the cognitive goal of accumulating money
Describe the salience network in detail.
The anterior Insula: receives convergent multisensory inputs, affective and motivational signals, and visceral afferents, reflecting biological saliency and cognitive/emotional demands.
ACC: dominant role in response-selection, guiding overt behavior, and modulating autonomic reactivity.
The Salience Network (SN) plays a crucial role in the dynamic switching between:
(i) the Central Executive, and (ii) Default-Mode Networks
The Central Executive Network encompasses the DLPFC and the Posterior Parietal Cortex (PPC)
- ‘No-Go’ pathway: maintenance and manipulation of information, and decision-making in the context of goal-directed behaviors.
The Default Mode Network encompasses the VMPFC and the Posterior Cingulate Cortex (PCC)
- ‘Go’ pathway. This network is concerned with the internally-oriented aspects of cognition.
Describe experiment to disentangle general concern for others vs concern for one’s payoff in the UG
In this experiment, while in the MRI scanner, participants are asked to accept or reject outcome distributions that are randomly established by a device (Random Number Generator - RNG).
There are two conditions:
* the participant (B) and another person (A) – this is called the MySelf condition (MS)
* (D) and (E), two uninvolved third parties – this is called the ThirdParty condition (TP)
Brain regions associated with the Default-Mode-Network – and involved in self referential mental activity (i.e., the MPFC) – are preferentially active when experiencing unfairness in the MySelf condition.
The anterior Insula – within the Salience Network – seems to play a critical, and previously unappreciated role, in detecting social norm violations (ThirdParty condition).
Describe the conflict in the strategic choices when dealing with moral dilemmas.
STRATEGIC CHOICES IN MORAL DILEMMAS: would you push a lever to to save 5 people instead of one? Yes! What about pushing a man onto the tracks? NO!
The thought of pushing someone to his death is more emotionally salient than the thought of hitting a switch that will cause a trolley to produce similar consequences.
The medial portions of the Prefrontal Cortex (MPFC) and the Posterior Cingulate Cortex (PCC) were significantly more active in the moral-personal condition than in the moral-impersonal and the non-moral conditions. Self-referential and emotional processing/valance regions: Greater activity during the moral-personal condition.
The lateral, dorsal aspect of the Prefrontal Cortex (DLPFC) and the Posterior Parietal Cortex (PPC) were significantly less active in the moral-personal condition than in the other two conditions. Cognitive mental computations: Less activity during the moral-personal condition
Describe an experiment concerning reaction times in moral vs immoral dilemmas.
In the (relatively rare) cases where individuals judge this action as appropriate, they may be doing so against a countervailing emotional response. Under this logic, we can expect that they will exhibit longer reaction times in these trials, as a result of an emotional interference.
This hypothesis predicts longer reaction times for trials in which the participant’s response is incongruent with the emotional response (e.g., saying “appropriate” to the ‘footbridge’-type dilemmas).
Results:
MORAL personal: As predicted, responses for the “appropriate” options (emotionally incongruent) were significantly slower than responses for the “inappropriate” options (emotionally congruent) in the moral-personal condition.
- Medial areas are more active when people attempt to avoid harming others.
- Lateral areas are more active when people attempt to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people.
Describe some characteristics and neural correlates of face perception
Face perception: It is easier to notice and remember differences across members within a familiar group than it is to notify differences across members of a different (or unfamiliar) group.
The Fusiform Face Area (FFA) in the ventral visual stream is a key-brain region for face-recognition
The amygdala and the anterior Insula are key brain-regions for quickly recognizing social- emotional cues on faces
As children, we ‘perceptually-tune’ to, first, recognize the member of our inner circle (e.g., mom, dad).
As adults, it has been shown that we tend to (systematically) ‘perceptually-classify’ faces according to specific factors: of trustworthiness and dominance
Describe an experiment to test social face perception
Subjects viewed faces on the screen and assessed either their trustworthiness, or their age.
In a parametric factorial design, trustworthiness ratings were then correlated with BOLD
signal-change from the fMRI recordings.
Explicit condition: ratings were based on trustworthiness.
Implicit condition: ratings were based on the age of the faces/pictures
Amygdala activity was evident in response to untrustworthy faces regardless of whether participants were explicitly making trustworthiness judgments or not.
The anterior Insula was also activated by faces that subjects considered untrustworthy regardless of task-condition (implicitly or explicitly).
In this case, a possible role of the Insula is to act as the next ‘hierarchical-relay’ of information processing: as a consequence of amygdala’s activation,
Describe social cues and their neural correlates
SOCIAL CUES: The superior temporal sulcus (STS) is critical for detecting and interpreting these other aspects of social cues, e.g. gaze direction, posture, and vocalizations.
Similar task to rate trustworthiness while in the scanner. In a parametric factorial design, trustworthiness ratings were assessed via gaze-direction information, and then correlated with BOLD signal-change from the fMRI recordings
RESULT: The STS has been shown to be involved in perceiving social intentions (i.e., a proxy for trustworthiness) via gaze direction information
Describe the role of social knowledge, describe an experiment and its neural correlates
Experiment: Participants learned biographical details (i.e., face, name, age, marital status, occupation, city of residence, and current house) of four fictitious males.
Inside the scanner: Participants first viewed a series of stimuli that cued a particular fictitious male and then answered a question about that person.
RESULTS: The ATL (anterior temporal lobe) was shown to be sensitive (i.e., based on its functional activity) to a person’s identity, as accessed through the person’s name as well as accessed through an image of their home.
Conclusion: The ATL represents the knowledge of a person, in a highly abstract form.
Describe theory of mind and the false-belief task
ToM: our mental ability to explain and predict other people’s behavior by attributing them independent mental states.
Adult-like Theory of Mind is based on belief-desire reasoning.
Shared attention = A triadic interaction between two partners and a third object.
FALSE BELIEF TASK: A researcher introduces two puppets, Sally and Anne, to a child participant. Sally has a marble, which she puts in a basket and then leaves the room. While Sally is gone, Anne moves the marble from the basket to a box. Sally returns to the room, and the child is asked where Sally will look for the marble. Children who pass the false belief task understand that Sally will look for the marble in the basket, even though the child knows that the marble is actually in the box. Children who fail the task may say that Sally will look for the marble in the box, because that’s where the marble actually is.
The false belief task is a way to assess whether children (and sometimes adults) can understand that others can hold false beliefs that differ from their own knowledge or reality.
Describe the different types of empathy and the conditions for it to be considered empathy.
Cognitive empathy: This is the ability to infer the cognitive state of another person
Affective empathy: This is the ability to infer the emotional state of another person
Emotional contagion: This is the ability to feel the emotional state of another person
One is in an affective state;
This state is isomorphic to another person’s affective state (1:1 correspondence);
One knows that the other person is the source of one’s own affective state.
This state is elicited by the observation or imagination of another person’s affective state;
Describe motor theory of empathy and an experiment to assess it.
Motor theory of empathy (mirror neurons and mimicry): the perception of someone else moving suffices to elicit a mental simulation of the observed movement and, if not inhibited, the subsequent physical execution of that movement.
Experiment: Researchers manipulated the apparent pupil size of a person in a photograph.
RESULTS: When participants viewed sad faces with smaller pupils, their own pupils also became smaller.The neural pathways included the (TOP-DOWN through amygdala):
- Superior Temporal Sulcus (STS)
- Insula
- Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC)
Yet, we saw no Premotor cortex activation during this task.
Conclusion: empathy is not just motor imitation (if anything it is the other way around: there is a top-down influence of cortical regions in modulating pupil responses)
Could individual differences in moral judgements be driven by the extent of the involvement of the TPJ?
three conditions: control, accident and attempt (sugar/poison experiment).
In accident condition: Some people think she should deserve more blame, and other people think she should deserve less blame. Individual differences in judgement are related to activity levels in the TPJ/STS. The less activity in the TPJ/STS, the more people tended to blame Grace for her actions.
