The faculty of Imagination: Neural substrates and mechanisms

Imagination refers to holding in mind a representation that may not be (yet) 'true' and does not necessarily reflect the facts about the external world or the Reality as of now. The act of imagination may use previous memories and a general knowledge of the world to recreate past memories or to imagine novel future events.

An article by Simon Baron Cohen, discusses the biology of imagination. Simon distinguishes between the contents of imagination , which are culturally determined; and the capacity for imagination, which is biologically grounded. He also focuses on imagination as a false or distorted representation of Reality as opposed to mere imagery, which though itself also being a mental representation, may more-or-less represent the world accurately.

Imagery may be necessary for human imagination. It has been suggested that all the products of the imagination are derived from imagery, following some transformation of the basic imagery. For example, Rutgers’ psychologist Alan Leslie, when he worked in London in the 1980s, proposed that imagination essentially involves three steps: Take what he called a ‘primary’ representation (which, as we have already established, is an image that has truth relations to the outside world). Then make a copy of this primary representation (Leslie calls this copy a ‘second-order’ representation). Finally, one can then introduce some change to this second-order representation, playing with its truth relationships to the outside world without jeopardising the important truth relationships that the original, primary representation needs to preserve. For Leslie, when you use your imagination, you leave your primary representation untouched (for important evolutionary reasons that we will come onto), but once you have a photocopy of this (as it were), you can do pretty much anything you like with it.

Thus, what Leslie contends is that the faculty of imagination involves a mechanism for making a second -order representation in the mind of a past stimulus (the imagery), in the absence of the stimulus in the here and now. Crucially, the faculty of imagination also involves the ability to modify the stimulus in such a way so that it no longer represents the original stimuli accurately. One , either creatively or mundanely , transforms some aspects of the original stimulus. to come up with something imaginary (like the concept of a unicorn). Thus, it seems there are three faculties involved- one for maintaining a second order representation of an object in absence of stimulus, another for distorting or manipulating that representation to come up with novel objects and the last for keeping this novel representation as different from the original representation to avoid confusion and loss with reality.

Leslie calls the abilities to form second-order representations and the ability to change or distort these representations as Meta-representation capacity and links this to the ability to indulge in pretend play in 9-15 months old infants and the ability for mind reading or false-belief or Theory of Mind (ToM) ability in older children (4 yr olds). The contention is that pretend play enables one to keep two copies (one primary and the second a false second-order representation) of an external object in mind simultaneously while at the same time enabling one to know that one is true and the other false or a pretense. Also pretend play involves treating one object (say a banana ) as another object (say a telephone) and thus develops the capacity to distort the second order representation of an object. This meta-representation ability in turn is the pre-requisite for imagining future outcomes and thus for successful planning in older adults.

Before I continue, let me pause and define imagination faculty in more rigorous terms for forthcoming discussions. We would be primarily concerned with the ability to shift focus from now and here to then and there and also from self to others. We would be concerned with imagination as depicted in scenarios involving people or objects with agency. Also please refer to this document by Buckner and Carrol.

Thus, the following kinds of imaginations are under preview:

1. Remembering the autobiographical past (reconstructing past memories or imagining what it felt like 'then' in the past vis-a-vis 'now').
2. Simulating the autobiographical future or Prospecting (constructing plausible future scenrie that would happen 'then' as compared to 'now')
3. Navigating (constructing a scene that is 'here' (first person perspective) to 'there' (third person perspective)) Changes in spatial perspective - seeing things/ scenes from someone else's point of view . Please keep in mind the distinction between two types of spatial point-of-view taking - one involving line tracing and the other perspective taking). It is my contention that while normal kids would rely more on perspective taking, the autistic children rely on line tracing for navigation.
4. Theory Of Mind : (constructing a representation of 'another' as opposed to self) . Thus this too involves a shifting of focus from one agent to another with the concurrent risk that the new representation may not be true.

Note that all of the above involve or are about persons or entities with agencies and their beliefs/ memories / imaginations and how they are distinct from the actual reality. This is important as the neural evidence would pertain to only this class of imaginations and would not generalize to imagining events not involving agency, for example imagining a unicorn.

In what sense might a meta-representational capacity be essential for mind-reading? Let’s define mind-reading as the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, to imagine the other person’s thoughts and feelings.iv Leslie’s deeply interesting argument is that when you mind-read, you again need to quarantine your primary representations. Here’s how his argument goes. Just as your mental picture of a fish has ‘truth relations’ to a real fish in the outside world, so a belief, or a sentence, has truth relations to real events in the outside world. Thus, ‘John is having an affair with his colleague’ is a primary representation of a state of affairs, and is true if John is indeed having an affair with his colleague. But when we mind-read, we again take the primary representation (step one), copy it so that it becomes a second-order representation (step two), and can then add a prefix (step three) that completely changes its truth relations with the outside world.

Thus, we can take the primary representation ‘John is having an affair with his colleague’ (step one). We can copy it to produce an identical version ‘John is having an affair with his colleague’, except this version is tagged as being a copy or a second-order representation (step two). Finally, we can add a prefix such as ‘Mary believes that’ to the second-order representation to end up with ‘Mary believes that “John is having an affair with his colleague” ’ (step three).

Such second-order representations have unique logical properties, an insight that Leslie borrowed from the standard views in philosophy of mind. They have, to use the jargon, referential opacity. ‘I pretend that “this tea-cup is hot” ’ is true if I pretend this, irrespective of whether the tea-cup really is hot. ‘Mary believes that “John is having an affair with his colleague” ’ is true if Mary believes it, irrespective of whether John really is having an affair. According to Leslie, and I think he is right, when we mind-read (just as when we use imagination), we employ such second-order representations. I can maintain my own knowledge base (John is not having an affair) whilst representing someone else’s different (possibly false) belief (Mary believes he is).

Thus, ToM has also been placed squarely in the category of tasks requiring Imagination, as we have defined it. Simon than contends that in Autism children lack this Imagination circuit or network and have deficts with ToM in particular and Imagination in general. Thus, as per this hypothesis they must also have problems imagining future autobiographical events, problems with episodic memory and problems with perspective taking approach to spatial navigation. All this still needs to be tested.

Let me now digress a little and point to data that suggests that the module we are talking about is specific to Imagination involving Agency and not for all second-order representations. When confronted with questions that do not require an agency , the autistic people perform as well on control tasks that require false representations in the mind.

To determine whether the poor performance of autistic children is due to a specific impairment in theory of mind, Leslie constructed a control task that very closely resembles the Sally-Ann task but does not rely on theory of mind. In the control task, the children watch an actor photograph a cat that is sitting on a chair. The cat then moves to a bed, and the subject is asked to predict what the photo will show. The control task is formally similar to the Sally-Ann task in that both tasks require children to infer the contents of a representation that does not reflect the current state of affairs. The photograph task and a standard FB task were given to normal 3 and 4-year-olds and mental-age-matched autistic adolescents. The autistic children performed slightly better than the normal 4-year-olds on the photograph task but worse than normal children on the standard FB task. The normal 3-year-olds failed both the FB task and the control task. The autistic children also outperformed normal children on another control task. In the second control task, the position of a cat was marked on a map. The cat then moved, and children were asked to predict the location of the mark on the map. The results indicate that autistic kids can meet the general problem solving demands of false belief tasks, but normally developing 3-year-olds cannot.

Leslie concludes that the three year olds have a difficulty with suppressing or inhibiting their own beliefs and desires (the primary representations) and selecting the second-order representations or beliefs of Sally. Thus his hypothesis is that their performance reflects a failure of inhibition or selection processing. this is clearly tied to the third ability we have identified of keeping two representations operate. They confuse between the two, and it is my contention that this is due to their inability to hold two representations of same objects in memory at the same time. Thus, three year olds also do not have episodic memory or the capacity to hold in memory the same object representations, but with different time coordinates.
Leslie also demonstrates that this deficit in inhibition, that is age dependent, is different from the deficit in Autistic children. I suspect the deficits in Autistic people are due to their propensity to view entities with agency too as objects and thus not having any beliefs , desires or emotions.

Now let me return to the Buckner and Carrol paper. It is an important paper that shows that we use the same brain areas for Remembering the past, imagining the future, ToM tasks and Navigation. Morover, the paper shows that this default network is nothing else but the default network in brain. It is to be remembered that the default network is the network active in absence of any stimulus and one feature of Agency dependent imagination we have seen earlier is that one should be able to form representations in absence of any stimuli. Also, we have already covered research that suggest that same brain areas are used for remembering the past and imagining the future.

Let me give you the abstract of the paper:

When thinking about the future or the upcoming actions of another person, we mentally project ourselves into that alternative situation. Accumulating data suggest that envisioning the future (prospection), remembering the past, conceiving the viewpoint of others (theory of mind) and possibly some forms of navigation reflect the workings of the same core brain network. These abilities emerge at a similar age and share a common functional anatomy that includes frontal and medial temporal systems that are traditionally associated with planning, episodic memory and default (passive) cognitive states. We speculate that these abilities, most often studied as distinct, rely on a common set of processes by which past experiences are used adaptively to imagine perspectives and events beyond those that emerge from the immediate environment.

I would request that the readers go back up a little and re-read the faculties required for imagination:


They involve second-order representation without stimulus (as in the activity in default network when no tasks are being carried. This spontaneous activity in the default network suggest that this is one region that can do its work without any input data.)
Distorting, changing , modifying the representation and moving them back and forth in time and space: I believe the frontal regions are involved in combining different stimuli, sequencing and planning them to archive novel combinations.
Keeping the false/ imagined/ other-people representations distinct from primary representations: I believe medial temporal lobe is crucial here. It is implicated in learning and memory and for keeping representations of past events (episodic memory). It thus has to keep the representations distinct, so that many memories may have the same constituent objects. Thus, the medial temporal lobe, I believe is mainly responsible for keeping the representations distinct.

It is interesting to note that the default network comprises of precisely these brain areas - the PFC and other frontal areas and the medial temporal lobe along with temporal-parietal junctions implicated in ToM. Also the fronto-polar region is implicated in the shifting of perspectives from self to other, from now to then etc and may be the most affected in Autism..

Functions that shift the perspective from the immediate environment to another vantage point create an interesting challenge for the brain. We must keep track of these shifts, otherwise our perceptions would blur together. Decety and Gre´zes note that ‘reality and imagination are not confused’. A computational model of how such a process might be structured is far from being defined, but it will probably require a form of regulation by which perception of the current world is suppressed while simulation of possible alternatives are constructed, followed by a return to perception of the present. Povinelli considered this issue from a developmental perspective and noted that coordination of internal perspectives ‘paves the way for the child to sustain not simply one current representation of the self but also to organize previous, current, and future representations under the temporally extended, metaconcept of ‘‘me’’’

The Fronto-polar regions are suspected behind this ability and I suspect are the most affected in Autism.

A final set of findings suggests that the frontopolar cortex contributes to theory of mind.

Thus Autism stems from the ToM deficts in the fronto-polar regions, plus the inability to keep many simultaneous representations in mind/'memory'. I would also suspect that same region is involved in agency attribution.

What does this selective generalization mean? The combined observations suggest that the core network that supports remembering, prospection, theory of mind and related tasks is not shared by all tasks that require complex problem solving or imagination. Rather, the network seems to be specialized for, and actively engaged by, mental acts that require the projection of oneself into another time, place or perspective. Prospection and related forms of self-projection might enable mental simulations that involve the interactions of people, who have intentions and autonomous mental states, by projecting our own mental states into different vantage points, in an analogous manner to how one projects oneself into the past and future.

In the end they very wisely conclude:

In this article, we have considered the speculative possibility that a core brain network supports multiple forms of self-projection. Thinking about the future, episodic remembering, conceiving the perspective of others (theory of mind) and navigation engage this network, which suggests that they share similar reliance on internal modes of cognition and on brain systems that enable perception of alternative vantage points. Perhaps these abilities, traditionally considered as distinct, are best understood as part of a larger class of function that enables flexible forms of self-projection. By this view, self-projection relies closely on memory systems because past experience serves as the foundation on which alternative perspectives and conceived futures are built.

That brings us to my final conclusion. I believe this is further evidence for the different cultures of Schizophrenia and Autism. If Autistic have a deficit with this ToM/ Agency default network, we also know that in schizophrenics too the default network works abnormally. I presume it acts unusually in the opposite way to that in Autism- attributing more agency, involving more imagination and self-projection.

Tags: development, autism, memory, neuroscience, play

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Art and Insanity

Mind Hacks has just linked to a great article regarding how the psychiatrists, art critics and historians have viewed the artworks produced by those who are mentally disturbed. While the psychiatrists were initially more concerned about discerning the patterns of mental disturbance from the artworks, the artistic community saw these artworks in more romantic light and as liberating and also found inspiration from them.

What concerns me here more is the themes or stylistics of the artworks produced by those who were insane (mostly psychotic patients).

For his book Lombroso collected 108 patients whom he considered to show artistic tendencies. Like Benjamin Rush he noted that insanity was able ‘to transform into painters persons who have never been accustomed to handle a brush’. Lombroso examined the work of the mad, looking for distinctive features, and concluded that there were certain recognizable characteristics of insane art. These included such features as ‘eccentricity’, ‘symbolism’, ‘minuteness of detail’, ‘obscenity’, ‘uniformity’ and ‘absurdity’.

In 1965, Leo Navratil, an Austrian psychiatrist, published Schizophrenia and Art. Navratil held that artistic expression was a symptom of schizophrenia, and that this expression could bring about a healing process. Navratil described four main features—formalization; deformation; use of symbols; and a tendency to impose facial interpretations on shapes.

Some of the distinguishing features identified for Schizophrenic art are symbolism and finding and imposing patterns (seeing faces in cloud shapes for example) on not-normally-related stimuli/ shapes. This gels nicely with my earlier accounts of schizophrenia being one extreme type of creative thinking characterized by too much use of symbols and too much discerning of patterns and agency as contrasted with the more realistic and non-agency / no-correlation-is-causation type of Autistic and scientific thinking styles. Also the formalization in schizophrenic art corroborates with the emphasis on emphasis on abstract thinking in schizophrenia. Thus it seems that Schizophrenia and Autism are just two extreme manifestations of the normally creative, but different, thinking styles used by those who are artists and those who are scientists.

Tags: schizophrenia

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TMS causes nurogenesis and LTP in the mice brain!

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) has been shown to be effective in treating depression and schizophrenia , but the exact mechanisms were unknown. TMS is nomally utilized for 'knocking off' activity of a brain region near the skull. If this brain area serves an inhibitory function, TMS would lead to more activation in some other connected areas of the brain and vice versa.

As per this blurb from the New Scientist, Battaglia and colleagues found that repeated TMS application to mice hippocampus (dentate gyrus) over a period of 5 days lead to more stem cell neurons there and also lead to strengthening of existing synaptic connection by means of Long Term Potentiation(LTP). It should be noted that hippocampus is one of the prime areas in human brain where neurogenesis happens.

I have blogged earlier regarding the depression-as-low-neurogenesis-in-hippocampus theory and this finding seems to support that theory and provides a mediating mechanism of neurogenesis via which TMS may be leading to alleviation of depression. The researchers also believe that this finding would help in making devices that could lead to alleviation of learning and memory problems like that faced in the Alzheimer's.

Tags: plasticity, depression

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Encephalon #23 is online now!

The 23rd edition of Encephalon is now available at Madam Fathom. My favorites include the Muller cell as optical fibers post by the Neurophilosopher.

Tags: carnival

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Theories of Intelligence : Entity Vs Incremental theory

I have blogged previously about Carol Dweck's work on how beliefs about intelligence affect performance outcomes. A new paper from her lab demonstrates how having a fixed or entity like belief of intelligence (talent based) leads to poorer academic achievement as compared to students who have a incremental or malleable concept of intelligence (effort and skill based). I'll let the authors themselves describe the two frameworks:

In this model , students may hold different ‘‘theories’’ about the nature of intelligence. Some believe that intelligence is more of an unchangeable, fixed ‘‘entity’’ (an entity theory). Others think of intelligence as a malleable quality that can be developed (an incremental theory). Research has shown that, even when students on both ends of the continuum show equal intellectual ability, their theories of intelligence shape their responses to academic challenge. For those endorsing more of an entity theory, the belief in a fixed, uncontrollable intelligence 'a ‘‘thing’’ they have a lot or a little of' orients them toward measuring that ability and giving up or withdrawing effort if the verdict seems negative. In contrast, the belief that ability can be developed through their effort orients those endorsing a more incremental theory toward challenging tasks that promote skill acquisition and toward using effort to overcome difficulty.

Relative to entity theorists, incremental theorists have been found (a) to focus more on learning goals (goals aimed at increasing their ability) versus performance goals (goals aimed at documenting their ability; (b) to believe in the utility of effort versus the futility of effort given difficulty or low ability (c) to make low-effort, mastery-oriented versus low-ability, helpless attributions for failure and (d) to display mastery-oriented strategies (effort escalation or strategy change) versus helpless strategies (effort withdrawal or strategy perseveration) in the face of setbacks. Thus, these two ways of thinking about intelligence are associated with two distinct frameworks, or ‘‘meaning systems’’ , that can have important consequences for students who are facing a sustained challenge at a critical point in their lives. It is important to recognize that believing intelligence to be malleable does not imply that everyone has exactly the same potential in every domain, or will learn everything with equal ease. Rather, it means that for any given individual, intellectual ability can always be further developed.

The paper presents two studies. In the first study young children entering 7th grade were measured on their theories of intelligences as well as assessed on different motivational factors. Their performance for a couple of years was monitored and the data was analysed to find the relationships between theory of intelligences and performance outcomes and also to determine the mediating motivational factors . The results are as follows :

The process model suggests multiple mediational pathways. That is, it suggests that

(a) learning goals mediate the relation between incremental theory and positive strategies,
(b) positive strategies mediate the relation between learning goals and increasing grades,
(c) effort beliefs mediate the relation between incremental theory and helpless attributions,
(d) effort beliefs mediate the relation between incremental theory and positive strategies,
(e) helpless attributions mediate the relation between effort beliefs and positive strategies,
(f) positive strategies mediate the relation between effort beliefs and increasing grades, and
(g) positive strategies mediate the relation between helpless attributions and increasing grades.

The second study involved an experimental intervention based approach. Those students who had declining grades were divided in two groups- an experimental one which got interventions that endowed them with a malleable and incremental theory of intelligence and a control group. This study found that grades improved for those in the experimental condition. Overall quite a cool research paradigm which has the tremendous potential to affect education as well as achievement outside of academics.

Tags: intelligence, learning

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Stories we tell ourselves

NYT has a pretty good article on narratives or the life stories that we tell ourselves to make some sense of our lives. Each of us conjures the disparate experiences that we have had into a coherent narrative or life story of who we are, how we have become like that and where we are headed for.

Narratives are on often ignored aspect of psychology an not much research is done on them, though they are very essential for us and are important in that they give us a framework in which we reconstruct our memories or think about the future.

The article mentions the work of Dr McAdams with narratives and having some types of narratives affect future outcomes. I'll just quote from the article:

In analyzing the texts, the researchers found strong correlations between the content of people’s current lives and the stories they tell. Those with mood problems have many good memories, but these scenes are usually tainted by some dark detail. The pride of college graduation is spoiled when a friend makes a cutting remark. The wedding party was wonderful until the best man collapsed from drink. A note of disappointment seems to close each narrative phrase.

By contrast, so-called generative adults — those who score highly on tests measuring civic-mindedness, and who are likely to be energetic and involved — tend to see many of the events in their life in the reverse order, as linked by themes of redemption. They flunked sixth grade but met a wonderful counselor and made honor roll in seventh. They were laid low by divorce, only to meet a wonderful new partner. Often, too, they say they felt singled out from very early in life — protected, even as others nearby suffered.

The article also mentions the work of Dr Adler, that links the psychotherapeutic outcomes with the life stories people tell about themselves.

At some level, talk therapy has always been an exercise in replaying and reinterpreting each person’s unique life story. Yet Mr. Adler found that in fact those former patients who scored highest on measures of well-being — who had recovered, by standard measures — told very similar tales about their experiences.

They described their problem, whether depression or an eating disorder, as coming on suddenly, as if out of nowhere. They characterized their difficulty as if it were an outside enemy, often giving it a name (the black dog, the walk of shame). And eventually they conquered it.

“The story is one of victorious battle: ‘I ended therapy because I could overcome this on my own,’ ” Mr. Adler said. Those in the study who scored lower on measures of psychological well-being were more likely to see their moods and behavior problems as a part of their own character, rather than as a villain to be defeated. To them, therapy was part of a continuing adaptation, not a decisive battle.

Lastly, the article touches upon researches that show that manipulating the retrieval of memories in third person vis-a-vis in the first person leads to better outcomes as oneses oneself as better adjusted after third person recall of significant life events.

Two clear differences emerged. Those who replayed the scene in the third person rated themselves as having changed significantly since high school — much more so than the first-person group did. The third-person perspective allowed people to reflect on the meaning of their social miscues, the authors suggest, and thus to perceive more psychological growth.

The recordings showed that members of the third-person group were much more sociable than the others. “They were more likely to initiate a conversation, after having perceived themselves as more changed,” said Lisa Libby, the lead author and a psychologist at Ohio State University. She added, “We think that feeling you have changed frees you up to behave as if you have; you think, ‘Wow, I’ve really made some progress’ and it gives you some real momentum.”

I would love to hear of more literature in this area.

Tags: language

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Moral Reasoning: two competing processes for intention and outcome identified

In a recent study, by Young, Hauser et al at the Harvard University, the authors tried to experimentally determine whether there is an interaction between intention or belief regarding an action vis-a-vis the actual outcome of the action. For this they used fMRI scans in a 2x2 study involving (negative and neutral) beliefs versus (negative and neutral) outcomes wherein their could be four combination : (competent criminal) intent to harm plus actual harm; (incompetent criminal) intent to harm but no actual harm; (accidental harm) no intent to harm but actual harm and lastly (harmless act) neither intention to harm nor any actual harm. The figure below clarifies this in further detail using an example scenario that was presented to the participants and the participants asked to judge whether the conduct was proper or not and to judge the protagonist's action on a scale of 1..5 regarding whether it was morally permissible or not.




Before I proceed further I'll like to quote from the introduction :

In the common law tradition, criminal conviction depends on both a harmful consequence (actus reus) and the intent to harm (mens rea) . In violation of this foundational legal principle, however, are crimes of attempt. The incompetent criminal, for instance, who believes he has poisoned his victim but has instead administered only a harmless substance, can be convicted in a court of law. This poses a challenge to the philosophy of law: is the basis of criminality an act that causes harm, or an act undertaken with the belief that one will cause harm? We pursue a novel approach to this question based on the burgeoning research into the neurocognitive mechanisms of moral judgment, much of which has emphasized the role of multiple interacting systems . Specifically, we suggest that the apparent philosophical conflict between actus reus and crimes of attempt reflects the operation and integration of distinct mechanisms responsible for the processing of information about consequences and beliefs in the service of moral judgment.

To sum up the papers' findings:

1. They referred to earlier developmental results in children and adults that suggest that children form moral judgments on the basis of outcomes (they will condemn a negative act even if the intention was neutral or even positive) while in adults intention along with outcomes is taken into consideration to form moral judgments.

From a developmental perspective, integrating information about mental states and outcomes presents a particular challenge for young children. When moral scenarios present conflicting information about the outcome of an action and the intention of the actor, young children's moral judgments and justifications are determined by the action's outcome rather than the actor's intention . For example, a person who intends to direct a traveler to the right location but accidentally misdirects him is judged by young children to be "naughtier" than a person who intends to misdirect a passerby but accidentally directs him to the right place . As children mature, they become progressively more likely to make the opposite judgment . Although subsequent research has revealed that young children can use information about intentions to make moral distinctions when consequences are held constant between scenarios , older children have consistently shown greater sensitivity to information about intentions. What develops then is not just "theory of mind," or the ability to represent the mental states of others, but the ability to integrate this information with information about consequences in the context of moral judgment . Developmental evidence thus suggests that mature moral judgments depend crucially on the cognitive processes responsible for representing and integrating information about beliefs and outcomes.

2. They found using fMRI scans that the Right temporo-parietal Junction (RTPJ) was differentially engaged during the above four cases or combinations of intent and outcome. In particular RTPJ showed maximum activation in cases of attempted harm wherein intention to harm was present but the outcome was still positive. The participants condemned the action despite there be no actual harm and this was reflected in higher activations of RTPJ. It is instructive to note the RTPJ is responsible for belief attributions. Thus, this suggests that there are independent moral judgment functions- one dependent on actions and the other on outcomes.

At the broadest level, the results of the current study suggest that moral judgments depend on the cognitive processes mediated by the RTPJ, previously associated with belief attribution, and, to a lesser extent, the PC, LTPJ, and MPFC, which compose a network of brain regions implicated in theory of mind. Specifically, the results reveal significantly above-baseline activation of the RTPJ for all four conditions (intentional harm, attempted harm, unknowing harm, and all-neutral), highlighting the role of belief attribution during moral judgment. Importantly, however, brain regions involved in belief attribution were not recruited indiscriminately across conditions. In particular, we found a selective increase in the response for the case of attempted harm, in which the protagonist believed that he would harm someone but in fact did not. The differential neural response between experimental conditions suggests an unequal contribution of belief attribution to moral judgment depending not only on what the protagonist believes, as might be expected, but also on the consequences of the protagonist's behavior. This result offers a new perspective on the integration of information about beliefs and consequences in moral judgment, the focus of our discussion.

3. They found that accidental harm (unlucky innocents) did not recruit the same brain areas (RTPJ) to that large an extent as attempted harm (incompetent criminal). This was despite the protagonists being judged harsher in accidental harm condition vis-a-vis the neutral case (no bad intention and no actual harm). This suggests that another independent moral judgment function is active and which relies on outcome assessment.

The behavioral data suggest that, across conditions, moral judgment is determined primarily by belief information, consistent with the robust RTPJ response for all four conditions. An interesting asymmetry emerged, however, for cases in which belief and outcome information were in conflict, as in situations of attempted harm and unknowing harm. We found that subjects' moral judgments were determined solely by belief in the case of attempted harm but not unknowing harm. That is, attempted harm (e.g., putting sugar in a friend's coffee believing it to be poison) was judged fully forbidden, just as though the protagonist had successfully produced the negative outcome of the friend's death. By contrast, moral judgment of unknowing harm appeared to depend on both the outcome of the action and on the belief state of the actor. Unknowing harm (e.g., putting poison in a friend's coffee believing it to be sugar) was not judged fully permissible, as compared with the all-neutral condition, in which the protagonist held a neutral belief and produced a neutral outcome.

I find this exciting because I have blogged about this previously in my posts relating to Universal Moral Grammar. In particular I had speculated on there being an Intention predicate, an Action Predicate and a Outcome or Consequence predicate that form this moral grammar. These predicates would each be evaluated separately and independent of each other and their combination would lead to different moral judgments. It is exciting to see that two independent processes related to Intention and Outcome predicate , along with their neural correlates have already been identified. It would only be some time soon that people would also start finding that the nature of the Action undertaken also affects the Moral Judgment to a great extent. The case I can think is that instead of putting poison in the coffee, let us say that the death method was more violent and gory (cutting the throat very slowly while the person is bound). Although the outcome is same, the nature of action would differentially affect the judgments we have towards the protagonists. I would love to see further studies in this direction.

Tags: moral sense

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Mouse Trap's First Blogiversary

Due to some unavoidable business (I have to keep my day job to be able to blog to my heart's pleasure) I have not been regular in writing posts and I apologize to the regular readers of the blog for the same.

This small post is just to commemorate the first blogiversay of The Mouse Trap. I hope yopu have enjoyed the journey so far and would continue patronising this blog.

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