S2W9Altru Flashcards
Fugue states
Self-relevant knowledge is temporarily unavailable to consciousness, following epileptic seizures
Dissociative identity disorder
multiple identities following trauma
Medial prefrontal cortex in self-referential processing
Greater activity when participants make judgments about themselves (trait judgments) than friends or words
TMS blocks the retrieval of self-relevant knowledge.
Autobiographical memory retrieval:
Successful recollection of photos taken themselves associated with activity in anterior mPFC.
Default mode network (DMN)
Focused on thinking about self, future and past.
Posterior Cingulate Cortex Precuneus
Medial Prefrontal Cortex
Angular Gyrus
Increase activity when we aren’t focus on a particular task.
Interoception primates
Awareness of own bodily sensations
Primates have cortical image of homeostatic afferent activity.
Associated with autonomic motor control.
Distinct from the exteroceptive system for somatic motor activity (eating etc.).
Primary representation in dorsal posterior insula causes feelings e.g. pain.
Embodiment
The sense of being localized within one’s own body.
Referred as ecological self because the physical abilities of the body constrain how we interact with environment.
The extrastriate body area (visual cortex) adopts a third-person perspective for visualizing own body.
Temporoparietal junction is involved in out-of-body experiences.
homeostatic afferent activity
how we maintain energy level, temperature etc.
Interoception humans
Representation of primary interoceptive activity caused by the right anterior insula.
Providing basis for subjective image of the material self as feeling entity (emotion awareness)
Brain regions implicated in body perception and imagery tasks
Regions of visual cortex sensitive to visual features of body parts and are active during body imagery.
Temporo-parietal junction involved in mental transformation of body and out-of-body experiences.
TMS applied over right temporoparietal junction produces slower RTs in making judgments of hand location but rotated letters.
TMS applied over the intraperietal sulcus impairs performances in letters but not in body rotation.
Note double dissociation.
Embodied cognition
Cognition depends on the experience that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities.
Individual sensorimotor capacities are embedded in more encompassing biological, psychological and cultural context.
face processing in the temporal lobe
Visual information flows along inferior temporal-hippocampal route for facial identity, person recognition and name retrieval.
Superior temporal-amygdala route processes dynamic features for facial information, including analysis gaze and emotional expression.
Single neurons in monkey temporal lobe that code for expression and identity.
Social referencing
Use of body gestures and facial/ vocal expressions of others to see how to deal with ambiguous situation
E.g. visual cliff in 10-12 months children).
Joint attention:
Allocation of processing resources toward an object cued by another individual
Primates can exploit joint attention through deception.
Modulation of attentional orienting by gaze cuing
RTs are faster for valid trials (gaze on screen towards target).
ERP amplitudes enhanced for early-latency potentials (P1 & N1).
Indicates attentional enhancements in extrastriate cortex.
Non verbal cues from face and body
Provide insight into emotional state.
Guide interpersonal behaviour through social referencing and joint attention.
Stronger responses elicited in Superior Temporal Sulcus when perceiving actions that violate expectations.
Social Categorisation
Serves important survival functions in defending territories from invading groups and selecting mates.
Amygdala activity and racial bias
Amygdala activity in response to African faces correlates with implicit measures of racial bias in Caucasians.
ERP: effects attributed to racial categorisation appear within 200 milliseconds of stimulus onset and are characterised by larger frontocentral N1 and P2 amplitudes for racial outgroup than ingroup faces.
A mirror neuron in the premotor cortex of a monkey
Rizzolatti et al. (1996)
Experimenter places and removes food while monkey watches.
Neuron (inferior frontal gyrus) activates when the monkey watches and when it retrieves the food.
When a mechanical plier picked up food there was no activation.
Humans mirroring
Observation of goal-directed motor-acts activates:
Inferior parietal lobule (IPL)
Premotor cortex:
Mostly ventral
Caudal of inferior frontal gyrus corresponding to Broca’s area
Regions form human parieto-frontal mirror system.
Mirror neuron is probably in this area.
Points to consider about mirroring
Most human evidence comes from brain imaging that can’t determine whether the executed and observed actions are signalised by the same neurons or by adjacent ones.
Linkages in brain areas could simply be established by experience through general associative learning processes and not represent a unique function.
Viewing actions relevant to particular behavioural goals influences the activity of some frontoparietal neurons in the same ways as performing them does.
Perspective taking
Egocentric default mode of information processing.
Adopting other people’s perspectives and inferring their beliefs requires a disengagement from self-directed thoughts, a redirection of attention.
Elicits activity in:
Medial prefrontal cortex
Temporal cortex
Right inferior parietal cortex Temporoparietal junction Superior temporal sulcus
Mentalizing ability in chimpanzees: false belief test
Subordinate chimps prefer to move toward the food that is out of the view of the dominant chimp
Shows that they are able to see things from dominant chimp’s perspective (theory of mind).
Empathy
Capacity to comprehend another’s emotional experience.
Eliciting empathy is critical for advertising.
Understanding other’s emotional states recruits brain regions that are not used for making inference about other mental states.
Sympathy
A person who is sympathetic may feel concerned for another but does not feel the actual emotion felt by them.
Jean Decety : Emotion sharing
Based on perception-action coupling and somatic-emotional representations.
Somatosensory cortex
Insula
Anterior cingulate cortex
Jean Decety: self and other awareness
Parietal lobes
Prefrontal cortex
Insula
Jean Decety: Emotion regulation
Anterior cingulate
Lateral and ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
Jean Decety: a full empathetic response
Depends on brain regions used for sharing somatic and emotional responses, self-awareness, perspective taking and emotion regulation.
