Showing papers by "Chris D. Frith published in 2014"

The cultural evolution of mind reading

Abstract: Background We use “theory of mind” or “mind reading” to understand our own thoughts and feelings and those of other agents. Mind reading has been a focus of philosophical interest for centuries and of intensive scientific inquiry for 35 years. It plays a pivotal role in human social interaction and communication. Mind reading allows us to predict, explain, mold, and manipulate each other’s behavior in ways that go well beyond the capabilities of other animals; therefore, mind reading is crucial to understanding what it means to be human. In many respects, the capacity to read minds is like the capacity to read print: It involves the derivation of meaning from signs, depends on dedicated brain mechanisms, is subject to specific developmental disorders, shows cultural variation as well as cultural commonality, and has both interpretive (reading) and regulative (writing) functions. However, recent studies of mind reading in young infants suggest that, unlike print reading, mind reading develops very early in human ontogeny. Learning to read minds is like learning to read print. The acquisition of explicit mind reading is a slow, effortful process in which a novice develops an important, culture-specific skill through expert tuition. Experts facilitate development by directing the novice’s attention to signs that the novice is on the edge of understanding, as well as by explaining in conversation how these signs relate to their meaning. Advances In nonverbal tests of mind reading, infants’ eye movements have been taken as evidence that infants expect an agent to reach toward a location where he or she believes a desirable object to be hidden, even when the agent’s belief is false. This “implicit” mind reading could indicate that humans genetically inherit the specialized neurocognitive mechanisms used for “explicit,” verbally mediated mind reading in adulthood. However, recent research with adults shows that, unlike explicit mind reading, implicit mind reading does not make demands on executive function. This indicates that, although they may be genetically inherited, the mechanisms that mediate implicit mind reading, whether specialized or general-purpose, are distinct from those controlling explicit mind reading. Furthermore, studies of twins, people with hearing impairments, and children from non-Western cultures, as well as typically developing Western children, suggest that, like print reading, explicit mind reading is culturally inherited. Rather than being constructed by simulation or theory-testing, explicit mind reading is a skill that is passed from one generation to the next by verbal instruction. Most, possibly all, human neurocognitive skills are shaped by culture and many are culturally inherited, but the parallels between mind reading and print reading are extraordinary. In contrast, whereas linguistic communities vary in the ways that they categorize colors, color perception is not culturally inherited in the same way as print reading. Unlike print reading, color perception is rooted in highly specialized, genetically inherited mechanisms that humans share with other species. Though cultural input adjusts these mechanisms, it does not make them into a whole new neurocognitive system. Outlook The cultural evolutionary account of mind reading does not imply that mental states are mere fictions, but it does suggest that any aspect of mind reading—even those relating to knowledge and primary emotions—could show substantial cultural variation. More cross-cultural studies using sensitively translated test procedures are needed to chart extant variation. Similarly, although the cultural evolutionary account suggests that humans do not genetically inherit mechanisms that are specialized for the representation of mental states, it assumes that, as in the case of print reading, many of the neurocognitive raw materials for explicit mind reading are inborn. Therefore, priorities for future research are to identify the genetic “start-up kits” for both implicit and explicit mind reading and to find out exactly how the products of the former contribute to the development of the latter. Our view suggests that, like print reading, mind reading is a culturally inherited skill that facilitates the cultural inheritance of other, more specific skills; mind reading is a cultural gift that keeps on giving.

Sociocultural patterning of neural activity during self-reflection

Abstract: Western cultures encourage self-construals independent of social contexts, whereas East Asian cultures foster interdependent self-construals that rely on how others perceive the self. How are culturally specific self-construals mediated by the human brain? Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we monitored neural responses from adults in East Asian (Chinese) and Western (Danish) cultural contexts during judgments of social, mental and physical attributes of themselves and public figures to assess cultural influences on self-referential processing of personal attributes in different dimensions. We found that judgments of self vs a public figure elicited greater activation in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in Danish than in Chinese participants regardless of attribute dimensions for judgments. However, self-judgments of social attributes induced greater activity in the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) in Chinese than in Danish participants. Moreover, the group difference in TPJ activity was mediated by a measure of a cultural value (i.e. interdependence of self-construal). Our findings suggest that individuals in different sociocultural contexts may learn and/or adopt distinct strategies for self-reflection by changing the weight of the mPFC and TPJ in the social brain network.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Impaired Sensory Prediction in Schizophrenia

Abstract: Importance Forward models predict the sensory consequences of planned actions and permit discrimination of self- and non–self-elicited sensation; their impairment in schizophrenia is implied by an abnormality in behavioral force-matching and the flawed agency judgments characteristic of positive symptoms, including auditory hallucinations and delusions of control. Objective To assess attenuation of sensory processing by self-action in individuals with schizophrenia and its relation to current symptom severity. Design, Setting, and Participants Functional magnetic resonance imaging data were acquired while medicated individuals with schizophrenia (n = 19) and matched controls (n = 19) performed a factorially designed sensorimotor task in which the occurrence and relative timing of action and sensation were manipulated. The study took place at the neuroimaging research unit at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, and the Maudsley Hospital. Results In controls, a region of secondary somatosensory cortex exhibited attenuated activation when sensation and action were synchronous compared with when the former occurred after an unexpected delay or alone. By contrast, reduced attenuation was observed in the schizophrenia group, suggesting that these individuals were unable to predict the sensory consequences of their own actions. Furthermore, failure to attenuate secondary somatosensory cortex processing was predicted by current hallucinatory severity. Conclusions and Relevance Although comparably reduced attenuation has been reported in the verbal domain, this work implies that a more general physiologic deficit underlies positive symptoms of schizophrenia.

The cognitive neuroscience of metacognition

Abstract: Metacognitive neuroscience: an introduction.- Quantifying human metacognition for the neurosciences.- Signal detection theory analysis of type 1 and type 2 data: meta-d', response-specific meta-d' and the unequal variance SDT model.- The highs and lows of theoretical interpretation in animal-metacognition research.- A computational framework for the study of confidence across species.- Shared mechanisms for confidence judgments and error detection in human decision making.- Metacognition and confidence in value-based choice.- What failure in collective decision-making tells us about metacognition.- Studying metacognitive processes at the single-neuron level.- The neural basis of metacognitive accuracy.- The cognitive neuroscience of metamemory monitoring: understanding metamemory processes, subjective levels expressed and metacognitive accuracy.- Metacognitive facilitation of spontaneous thought processes: When metacognition helps the wandering mind find its way.- What is the human sense of agency and is it metacognitive? Failures of metacognition and lack of insight in neuropsychiatric disorders.- Judgments of agency in schizophrenia: An impairment in autonoetic metacognition.- Metacognition in Alzheimer's disease.

Continuous Theta-Burst Stimulation Demonstrates a Causal Role of Premotor Homunculus in Action Understanding

Abstract: Although it is well established that regions of premotor cortex (PMC) are active during action observation, it remains controversial whether they play a causal role in action understanding. In the experiment reported here, we used off-line continuous theta-burst stimulation (cTBS) to investigate this question. Participants received cTBS over the hand and lip areas of left PMC, in separate sessions, before completing a pantomime-recognition task in which half of the trials contained pantomimed hand actions, and half contained pantomimed mouth actions. The results reveal a double dissociation: Participants were less accurate in recognizing pantomimed hand actions after receiving cTBS over the hand area than over the lip area and less accurate in recognizing pantomimed mouth actions after receiving cTBS over the lip area than over the hand area. This finding constrains theories of action understanding by showing that somatotopically organized regions of PMC contribute causally to action understanding and, thus, that the mechanisms underpinning action understanding and action performance overlap.

Activity in the nucleus accumbens and amygdala underlies individual differences in prosocial and individualistic economic choices

Abstract: Much decision-making requires balancing benefits to the self with benefits to the group. There are marked individual differences in this balance such that individualists tend to favor themselves whereas prosocials tend to favor the group. Understanding the mechanisms underlying this difference has important implications for society and its institutions. Using behavioral and fMRI data collected during the performance of the ultimatum game, we show that individual differences in social preferences for resource allocation, so-called "social value orientation," is linked with activity in the nucleus accumbens and amygdala elicited by inequity, rather than activity in insula, ACC, and dorsolateral pFC. Importantly, the presence of cognitive load made prosocials behave more prosocially and individualists more individualistically, suggesting that social value orientation is driven more by intuition than reflection. In parallel, activity in the nucleus accumbens and amygdala, in response to inequity, tracked this behavioral pattern of prosocials and individualists. In addition, we conducted an impunity game experiment with different participants where they could not punish unfair behavior and found that the inequity-correlated activity seen in prosocials during the ultimatum game disappeared. This result suggests that the accumbens and amygdala activity of prosocials encodes "outcome-oriented emotion" designed to change situations i.e., achieve equity or punish. Together, our results suggest a pivotal contribution of the nucleus accumbens and amygdala to individual differences in sociality.

What failure in collective decision-making tells us about metacognition collective failure and metacognition

Abstract: © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. All rights reserved. Condorcet [2] proposed that a majority vote drawn from individual, independent and fallible (but not totally uninformed) opinions provides near-perfect accuracy if the number of voters is adequately large. Research in social psychology has since then repeatedly demonstrated that collectives can and do fail more often than expected by Condorcet. Since human collective decisions often follow from exchange of opinions, these failures provide an exquisite opportunity to understand human communication of metacognitive confidence. This question can be addressed by recasting collective decision-making as an information integration problem similar to multisensory (cross-modal) perception. Previous research in systems neuroscience shows that one brain can integrate information from multiple senses nearly optimally. Inverting the question, we ask: under what conditions can two brains integrate information about one sensory modality optimally? We review recent work that has taken this approach and report discoveries about the quantitative limits of collective perceptual decision-making, and the role of the mode of communication and feedback in collective decision-making. We propose that shared metacognitive confidence conveys the strength of an individual's opinion and its reliability inseparably. We further suggest that a functional role of shared metacognition is to provide substitute signals in situations where outcome is necessary for learning but unavailable or impossible to establish.

Serotoninergic effects on judgments and social learning of trustworthiness.

Abstract: Rationale Certain disorders, such as depression and anxiety, to which serotonin dysfunction is historically associated, are also associated with lower assessments of other people's trustworthiness. Serotonergic changes are known to alter cognitive responses to threatening stimuli. This effect may manifest socially as reduced apparent trustworthiness of others. Trustworthiness judgments can emerge from either direct observation or references provided by third parties.

Neural correlates of executive dysfunction in schizophrenia: failure to modulate brain activity with task demands.

Abstract: In schizophrenia, executive functions are impaired and are associated with altered activation of prefrontal areas. We used H2[15]O PET to examine patients with schizophrenia and matched controls on a random number generation (RNG) task and a control counting (COUNT) task. To assess the effects of increasing task demand, both tasks were performed at three different rates (intervals 1, 2 or 3 s). Both groups showed a significant increase in the nonrandomness of responses at faster rates of RNG. Despite similar performances, patients but not controls showed higher activation of the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and atypically reduced activation of the right anterior cingulate gyrus and the right medial frontal gyrus in RNG compared with COUNT, whereas only for controls, activation of the left DLPFC was increased and activation of the right superior temporal gyrus and the right superior frontal gyrus was reduced in the same comparison. Whereas for the controls several cortical areas including the bilateral superior temporal gyrus and the bilateral DLPFC, together with the right cerebellum, showed significant changes in regional cerebral blood flow with faster or slower rates, patients with schizophrenia showed rate-dependent changes only in the left cerebellum. In conclusion, the patients’ failure to modulate cortical activation with changing demands of rate, particularly in prefrontal areas and in the cerebellum, and even when performance is similar to that in healthy controls, is a characteristic of their abnormal pattern of executive processing. NeuroReport 25:1308–1315 © 2014 Wolters Kluwer Health | Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. NeuroReport 2014, 25:1308–1315

Metacognitive Neuroscience: An Introduction

Abstract: The past two decades have witnessed the birth of the cognitive neurosciences, spurred in large part by the advent of brain scanning technology. From this discipline our understanding of psychological constructs ranging from perception to memory to emotion have been enriched by knowledge of their neural underpinnings. The same is now true of metacognition. This volume represents a first attempt to take stock of the rapidly developing field of the neuroscience of metacognition in humans and non-human animals, and in turn examine the implications of neuroscience data for psychological accounts of metacognitive processes.

What Failure in Collective Decision-Making Tells Us About

Abstract: Condorcet (1785) proposed that a majority vote drawn from individual, independent and fallible (but not totally uninformed) opinions provides near-perfect accuracy if the number of voters is adequately large. Research in social psychology has since then repeatedly demonstrated that collectives can and do fail more often than expected by Condorcet. Since human collective decisions often follow from exchange of opinions, these failures provide an exquisite opportunity to understand human communication of metacognitive confidence. This question can be addressed by recasting collective decision-making as an information-integration problem similar to multisensory (cross-modal) perception. Previous research in systems neuroscience shows that one brain can integrate information from multiple senses nearly optimally. Inverting the question, we ask: under what conditions can two brains integrate information about one sensory modality optimally? We review recent work that has taken this approach and report discoveries about the quantitative limits of collective perceptual decision-making, and the role of the mode of communication and feedback in collective decision-making. We propose that shared metacognitive confidence conveys the strength of an individual's opinion and its reliability inseparably. We further suggest that a functional role of shared metacognition is to provide substitute signals in situations where outcome is necessary for learning but unavailable or impossible to establish.