Questions make learning easier

It is a well proven fact that answering questions related to the study material you have just learned makes learning easier and more durable. Although I know that readers of this blog are already very learned, without offense to anyone I would like to introduce new feature of this blog: the weekly question. This question will be visible on the left sidebar (at the top) and is actually implemented using the poll feature of the google blogger. This question would be related to the area that I cover in my blog posts for that week.

I encourage all of you to take the poll/answer the question. The correct answer with explanation would be posted , every Friday. This week's question is related to Altruism as I have already covered two studies on that topic.I also encourage readers to contribute questions, that I can put on my blog. My mail id is sandygautamATyahooDOTcom.

Tags: learning

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The Altruistic Mice: how they help a conspecific in a trap.

According to latest research by Claudia Rutte and Michael Taborsky , of the Univ of Berne, Switzerland, rats are capable of generalized reciprocity. The excellent paper is published in the freely available journal PLOS biology, so go have a look.

As per what is know about the evolution of Altruism, it is surmised that co-operation in groups emerges based on four types of reciprocity- direct, indirect, strong and generalized.

In direct reciprocity, one helps another person/animal because the other animal has helped oneself in the past. This requires cognitive capacities to recognize different individuals and require social memory as to which member of the group had helped and which had defected or free loafed. While some animals like the Elephant have good social memories and the ability to remember and recognize different individuals, most animals fall short on these traits.

In indirect reciprocity, one helps another because one has observed the other guy to have helped someone else. This again requires cognitive capacities to recognize and also to remember This is more so based ona reputation system, wherein you start trusting someone more if you observe him doing good deeds. In return you are likely to help the do-gooder , when he is in time of need.

In strong reciprocity, people punish the defectors or free-loafers or non-cooperators. This requires sophisticated cognitive abilities to recognize the defectors and a willingness to undergo cost to oneself while punishing the defector. this too, along with the above two, has rarely been observed in animals apart from humans.

Finally, generalized reciprocity happens when one indulges in good deeds towards a stranger juts based on the fact that one has in the near future received such help from other strangers. con specifics. There are variations on this theme, whereby if people have been put in a good mood (which is a substitute for having received a good deed) they are more likely to indulge in altruistic acts like picking up books dropped by a confederate. This type pf reciprocity does not make very strong cognitive demands as one just has to remember the summary of whether the environment is cooperative or not, to produce the right kind of behavior.

The authors, using some clever experiments demonstrate that rats are capable of generalized reciprocity.

In a nutshell (I'm simplifying a lot here, for details go read the paper), they put two rats in a cage, separated by a transparent partition, such that if one of the rats pulls a string, food would be delivered to the other rat. They ensure that rats learn how to pull the strings and are able to see that their action leads to food for the other rat.



In the experiment, they pair rats such that one rat, who can receive the food but cannot pull the string, is paired with a number of rats who have learned to pull the string. As a aresulkt the rat gets to get a lot of food over consecutive days because of the fact that her partner rat had pulled the string. Thse partner rats ar eall different. In the experimental test condition, the roles are reversed and the focal mice, who had received food due to some stranger rats pulling the strings, is now given an opportunity to pull the string and help a never-before-encountered rat. The result: the mice does pull the string a lot of the times to help the new partner.

In the other experimental condition, the same rat is put in the cage, wherein he can get the food if the second rat pulls the sting. this time too all the rats are new: but sadly for the focal rat, these stranger rats were never trained to pull a string. The result: they never pull the string, so the rat does not receive any food. This is also repeated for a number of days and then the roles are reversed. Now, a new stranger rat is placed in the cage with the focal rat, such that if the focal rat pulls the string, the new stranger rat would get the food. Alas, the lack of pulling of strings by the previous stranger rats makes the focal rat apathetic and she pulls the string less frequently and less enthusiastically. The difference is as huge as 20 % greater pulling when one had received help, compared to when one had not received help.

This seals the argument as per authors, that the rats are indeed capable of generalized reciprocity. They interaction between rats as as between strangers and hence the only reason that explains the difference in string pulling, in received-help versus not-received help is the fact that in former they were in a o-operative environment, while in the latter they were not. thus, their actions were based on generalized help they received from conspecifics and not based on any memories of who helped whom. this to me appears to be breakthrough paper and would lead to a reassessment of how altruism evolved.

The authors also discuss a lot of other possible explanations , and I come satisfied that the generalized reciprocity is the best one.

The author summary is provided below:

The evolution of cooperation is based on four general mechanisms: mutualism, where an action benefits all partners directly; kin selection, where related individuals are supported; “green beard” altruism that is based on a genetic correlation between altruism genes and respective markers; and reciprocal altruism, where helpful acts are contingent upon the likelihood of getting help in return. The latter mechanism is intriguing because it is prone to exploitation. In theory, reciprocal altruism may evolve by direct, indirect, “strong,” and generalized reciprocity. Apart from direct reciprocity, where individuals base their behavior towards a partner on that partner's previous behavior towards themselves, and which works under only highly restrictive conditions, no other mechanism for reciprocity has been demonstrated among conspecifics in nonhuman animals. Here, we tested the propensity of wild-type Norway rats to help unknown conspecifics in response to help received from other unknown partners in an instrumental cooperative task. Anonymous receipt of help increased their propensity to help by more than 20%, revealing that nonhuman animals may indeed show generalized reciprocity. This mechanism causes altruistic behavior by previous social experience irrespective of partner identity. Generalized reciprocity is hence much simpler and therefore more likely to be important in nature than other reciprocity mechanisms.

The NYT also has an article on this and you may like to check that too.

Tags: evolution, moral sense

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From Morality to Biology: punishment, deterrence, fairness and testosterone

It has been hypothesized, as per Game Theoretical models, that evolution of cooperation is contingent on there being people willing to inflict punishment on the cheaters/ free loafers , even at great cost to themselves. The presence of Altruism/ co-operation in human social groups suggests that the desire to inflict punishment has been selected for and is thus a part of humans nature.
In the psychological analysis of law, it has been debated for some time as to why all human societies punish their 'criminals'. The two opposing views are that punishment is a deliberative , rational action whose purpose is to deter other potential criminals; and that punishment is an emotional action due to moral outrage and accompanied with feelings of 'just desserts' and desire for justice or fairness.

Do You Mind blog has a great post reviewing a study by Carlsmith, Darley & Robinson (2002), in which they try to find why people punish- is it to deter; or is it due to moral outrage and to get even.

The hypothesis was that if punishment is for deterrence, it would be more severe for crimes that are rarely detected (to compensate for the fact that the crime is rare, the punishment should be high); also for high publicity crimes, the punishment should be high (as the crime draws more attention, thereby punishing it severely will deter more people and from other crimes too). also if the punishment was motivated by desire for revenge/ justice, the severity of punishment should be correlated with severity of crime and publicity or detection of crime should have no effect. Also extenuating circumstances should excuse people if the desire is for justice/ fairness.

Accordingly, the authors set out to test how much of an influence deterrence really had. To do so, they designed a series of experiments using narratives of crimes where the above attributes (detection rate, publicity, magnitude of harm and extenuating circumstances) were varied. They found that manipulation of the deterrence variables had no effect, but that increasing the magnitude of harm or decreasing the extenuating circumstances greatly influenced the severity of punishment, even for those subjects who explicitly stated their preference for deterrence over "just deserts" theories of punishment.

This is an important validation of the fact that people do punish and that it is due to emotional and moral outrage and not based on coll and rational thinking based on deterrence. Thus, it seems for evolution of co-operation, we have been hard-wired to detect cheaters and to punish them and this is done without analytical deliberation but automatically.

Another article in the New Scientist , takes this one step forward and looks at motivations and mechanisms behind why we punish. The researcher, Terry Burnahm, asks the question as to why people indulge in a punishment behavior, though the punishment comes with a cost to themselves. Is it driven by a moral sense outrage, a desire for fairness or due to some other biological mechanism. The paradigm they use is the ultimatum game, wherein one person is given some money (say 10 $) and he is supposed to share it with another person. If the second person accepts the money, both get to keep the money; else both lose their money. Experimentally it is found that if low offers are made (say 1 $), they are usually rejected by the second person. This is due to the fact that the second personal wants to punish the first person for making an unfair offer.

What Terry discovered was that the propensity to refuse low offers was correlated with testosterone levels in males. Testosterone levels have also been correlated with aggression in the past and with dominance seeking behavior. The author suggests that the high testosterone connection is due to dominance seeking behavior of humans and by refusing to accept the low bet, the male saves putting himself in a subordinate position. It is presumed that this was beneficial in evolutionary times and thus has been selected for.

An alternative hypothesis can be that though the desire for revenge, just desserts or fairness is present in all humans, the ability to act on that desire is correlated with the aggression level or the level of testosterone. If this is the case, then the high levels of testosterone in males who retributed could be due to their moral outrage and their aggressiveness enabling them to act on their moral outrage. thus, in my view, the study , though finding a biological correlate, does not negate the scope for moral outrage, as increasingly it has come to be recognized that morality itself is emotional and more instinct like and not deliberative.

Tags: moral sense

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Swarm intelligence

The National Geographic has a fascinating article on swarm intelligence or the ability of colonies/herds of animals/ robots to exhibit greater intelligence and decision making abilities as a whole as compared to the relatively dumb intelligence exhibited at the individual level. While the article lists various ways in which the swarms solve problems, the one explanation that caught my eye was how ant colonies decide how many ants to send on a foraging trip the next day. To me an individual ant in a colony seemed like a neuron, which aggregates inputs from other neurons (the equivalent here is comes in contact with other ants- the early patrollers) and if the neuron gets a threshold amount of spikes in a close duration of time, then it fires (the equivalent here being if an ant comes in contact with many early forager ants , which are 'fired' or have the scent associated with foraging, then it decides to go out for foraging) . Read on for yourself and see if the analogy makes any sense.

Ants communicate by touch and smell. When one ant bumps into another, it sniffs with its antennae to find out if the other belongs to the same nest and where it has been working. (Ants that work outside the nest smell different from those that stay inside.) Before they leave the nest each day, foragers normally wait for early morning patrollers to return. As patrollers enter the nest, they touch antennae briefly with foragers.

"When a forager has contact with a patroller, it's a stimulus for the forager to go out," Gordon says. "But the forager needs several contacts no more than ten seconds apart before it will go out."

To see how this works, Gordon and her collaborator Michael Greene of the University of Colorado at Denver captured patroller ants as they left a nest one morning. After waiting half an hour, they simulated the ants' return by dropping glass beads into the nest entrance at regular intervals—some coated with patroller scent, some with maintenance worker scent, some with no scent. Only the beads coated with patroller scent stimulated foragers to leave the nest. Their conclusion: Foragers use the rate of their encounters with patrollers to tell if it's safe to go out. (If you bump into patrollers at the right rate, it's time to go foraging. If not, better wait. It might be too windy, or there might be a hungry lizard waiting out there.) Once the ants start foraging and bringing back food, other ants join the effort, depending on the rate at which they encounter returning foragers.

The idea of ants making a yes or no decision of going out on foraging, based on the inputs they receive from other ants (the contact with others who have returned from foraging) and also based on the rate of that contact, seems very much akin to how a neuron behaves. No wonder the colonies are able to solve complex problems. Now that we know that they use scents to identify different types of ants, maybe we can also look up any data that may suggest that the ants smell differently in different locations of the nest/colony. If that is so, then we can also have ants specialized to perform some special function based on where in space (relative to the colony), they are. This may be akin to different regions of the brain having different localized functions.

Hat Tip: Mind Hacks

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The Anniversary edition of Encephalon

The Anniversary edition of Encephalon has just been published on the Neurophilosophy blog. Incidentally, Neurophilosophy blog has now joined rank with the other Science bloggers at the Scienceblogs.com site, so those who used to visit Neurophilosophy better update their bookmarks / feed URLs.

Tags: blogs, carnival

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Music is mapped onto Space

We all know that as per the conceptual metaphor theory, music (especially melody and tones) is mapped onto space. Thus, we speak of high notes and low notes and thus use spatial terms to conceptualize the musical scale.

A new study by New Zealand researchers indicates that this mapping may not be just metaphorical and conceptual, but there might be neural basis and mechanisms that indicate that same mental abilities, and possibly brain areas, are involved in music and spatial represnetations.

The study found that people who have amusia, or are tone deaf, are also poor at mental spatial rotation tasks. The fact that tone deafness and spatial abilities are correlated is a strong indicator that same mental abilities may be underlying the representations of space and tones .

In a second experiment, they found that doing a mental rotation task and a tone related task simultaneously caused poorer performance in normal controls , than in amusics. This is indicative of the fact that spatial and melodic representations are related and cause greater interference in normal controls, than in amusics who have both capacities in diminished form originally and so preform relatively better than the normal controls.

If it is true that the same brain areas/networks, mechanisms are involved in spatial and melodic representations than there seems to be a strong case for embodiment and also for conceptual metaphor theory which posits that abstract concepts like melodies and tones are mapped onto concrete entities like space.

Tags: music, conceptual metaphors

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Eight random facts about me

Orli at Neurontic tagged me, so here I go:

1. I was once very keen on Occult and used to do tarot readings for my friends (mostly telling them what they wanted to hear) using playing cards while at IIT. Once , in my first job, I used a company conference room to educate the rest of my coworkers about tarot. I still have a tarot deck, though I've disavowed everything occult as of now!!

2. Like Orli, I too ran away from home, when I was a child. I ran away because of a dispute over a cup of tea. I gave up drinking tea, for many years, as a sort of penance for my bad deed. That penance is over , so I wont mind if you ask me out for tea/ coffee.

3. I liked the music of Cliff Richards so much, I have most of his records. Now however I am more of a fan of Kenny G and collect his albums instead. You are welcome to send me one.

4. As a boy, I usd to read popular detective novels/ pulp fiction in Hindi, that were normally on sale on railway counters. These were meant to be for adults. These included shady authors like Ved prakash sharma, Surendra mohan pathak etc. My Amazon wish list consist of cognitive science textbooks as of now.

5. I have a good collection of cognitive science books to whom I keep adding new stuff. The trouble is I haven't read even half of what is in my 'library', but just cant resist buying another great book if I happen to see one in a bookstore.

6. I like to dress in formals, although Jeans and T-shirt is the norm in software industry.

7. when I was a child I used to make lofty goals for myself. A sample being: " prevent the third world war" , "win three noble prizes- peace , literature and science- and in that order". Now my goals are more modest.: taking my blog back to 60000 technorati ranking it had a couple of months back:-)

8. I am a trained counselor, who took training at Snehi, a mental health NGO based in Delhi, for counseling people, but could never spare time to do some actual counseling. I did try counseling my friends though, but with mixed results.

I tagged neurobloggers earlier and got scant response, So I'm tagging with caution this time.
I tag
Archana at the "of bamboo and elephant grass"
the Kid at " Spoken like two ENFP"
Talia Mana at the "Center for Emotional Well-being"
Tarun at the "Musings of an Iconoclast"
Prerona at the "Ricercar"
Paul at the "Memoirs of a postgrad"
Anes at the "Peripersonal Space"
Kevin at the "IQ corner"

The Rules:

1. Players start with 8 random facts about themselves.
2. Those who are tagged should post these rules and their 8 random facts.
3. Players should tag 8 other people and notify them they have been
tagged.

Tags: blogs, personal

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Multiple Cognitive Maps: how they are kept distinct

Readers of this blog will remember a study that had shown that there were three dissociable systems in the human hippocampal regions as relevant to declarative memory. These were the anterior hippocampus (dentate gyrus) for detecting novelty; the Posterior hippocampus (CA3 )for recollecting (or using contextual cues for recall) and the posterior hippocamal gyrus for familiarity detection. Extending these to spatial memory , one can conjecture that dentate gyrus would be involved in detecting a novel cognitive map or spatial arrangement from the older stored cognitive maps; the CA3 region will actually store these cognitive maps that provide the context using which the mice (or men ) can orient oneself; while the posterior hippocampal gyrus might be involved in detecting familiarity or whether the spatial place has been visited earlier and is familiar.

Research has indicated that indeed the CA3 region contains ' place cells ' or cells that fire when a mice is near a spatial location. Multiple such cognitive maps of the environment that the mice encounters can be stored in the hippocampus.

However, as Madam Fathom has excellently elaborated, there persisted a mystery as to how widely similar, but subtly distinct cognitive maps , were distinguished within the hippocampus. As per the above model, dentate gyrus should have a prominent role to play here detecting if a new spatial location is a novel spatial location, despite it being similar in many ways to an earlier encountered spatial location.

This is exactly what has been experimentally observed. When mice which had NMDA receptors knocked off in the dentate gyrus were put in a novel environment or context, they were unable to distinguish it from the previously learned context. Thus, these mice though capable of learning could not distinguish between contexts, as presumably their ability to detect a novel context were hampered.

To me this bodes as further evidence for the cognitive map theory and I would stick my neck and say that the mechanisms and circuits involved in spatial navigation, episodic and declarative memory are same and serve a similar function. Thus, the dentate gyrus not only detects novel words in a word list (declarative memory) , but also detects novel spatial locations (cognitive maps) and novel autobiographical events (episodic memory). Similarly the CA3 region of hippocampus codes for distinct spatial maps and distinct words an facts and also distinct autobiographical memories. Similarly posterior hippocampul gyrus may detect familiarity for both facts, episodic memories (and trouble with this may lead to Deja Vu like feelings) and spatial locations.

These multiplexed use of the same brain regions, for different types of memories, may also explain why mnemonic methods like the method of loci work excellently- as the brain regions for declarative memory are the same as for discerning one's spatial location in an environment- hence it might be computationally easy to remember lists if a associated with spatial locations or a prominent cognitive map.

Tags: cognitive map, memory

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