Autism / Psychosis: Agency and Joint Attention

A recent study by Tomosello's group indicates that children with autism, can help a stranger pick a pen (and thus can apparently infer goal and intentional states of others), but cannot indulge in co-operative behavior that may involve shared goals and shared attention.

As per Translating Autism blog:

This fresh-off-the-press article comes to us from Dr. Michael Tomasello’s group at the Max Planck institute in Germany. The authors present the results of two studies looking at helping and cooperation in children with autism. The first study compared 15 children with ASD (14 with Autism and 1 with PDD-NOS) with 15 children with other non-ASD developmental delays (40 months of age average). During this study the children were place in situations that either called for helping behaviors (such as picking up a pen that the researcher dropped and could not reach) or a similar situation that did not necessarily call for helping behaviors (such as when the researcher threw the pen on purpose and did not attempt to pick it up). Both groups (children with Autism and children with other developmental delays) showed more helping behaviors when placed in the situation that called for such behaviors. That is, when the experimenter was “trying” to reach an out-of-reach object, both groups were more likely to help than when the experimenter was not trying to reach for the object. The authors concluded that these behaviors showed that both groups understood the adult’s goals and were motivated to help her. In the second study, the same children were placed in situations that called for “cooperative” behaviors, such as a task requiring them to work with the researcher by simultaneously pulling at two cylinders to reach a toy. The results showed that children with autism were less likely than kids with other developmental delays to successfully complete the cooperation tasks. Furthermore, the children with autism were less likely to initiate additional attempts to complete the task when the task was interrupted. The authors concluded that, at least at this developmental period, children with autism seem to understand the social components of situations that call for “helping” behaviors and engage in helping behaviors, but only when such help does not require interpersonal cooperation. However, when cooperation is required to complete the task, these children are less likely to correctly engage with another partner, possibly because the unique “shared” component of cooperation. That is, cooperation requires shared goals, shared attention, and a shared plan of action, processes that seem to be affected in children with autism.

Here is the abstract of the Tomosello paper:

Helping and cooperation are central to human social life. Here, we report two studies investigating these social behaviors in children with autism and children with developmental delay. In the first study, both groups of children helped the experimenter attain her goals. In the second study, both groups of children cooperated with an adult, but fewer children with autism performed the tasks successfully. When the adult stopped interacting at a certain moment, children with autism produced fewer attempts to re-engage her, possibly indicating that they had not formed a shared goal/shared intentions with her. These results are discussed in terms of the prerequisite cognitive and motivational skills and propensities underlying social behavior

From the above it is clear that children with Autism lack shared attention: a pre-requisite for language and their language impediments may also be due to this fact. If we contrast this with Schizophrenia/ Psychosis ( and assuming they are at opposite ends) it is not hard to see that with too much shared goals/ intentions/ attention, one may likely confuse between one's own goals and those of others and in a joint scenario be more susceptible to delusions of control/ though insertion, wherein the shared space has become so vast that one seems to be controlled by the other or intruded by the other. thus , I propose that children susceptible to psychosis should show enhanced cooperating behavior indicating an overactive shared goals/ attention module.

Another interesting study I would like to discuss is the recent reporting of a dysfunctional 'self' module/model in a Trust game as compared to the 'other' module/ model. Here is how the Science Daily describes the Trust game that was used in the game.

In the trust game, one player receives an amount of money and then sends whatever amount he or she wants to the other player via computer message. The amount sent is tripled and the player at the other end then decides how much of the tripled amount to send back. The game has several rounds.

The 'self' module was identified as the brain areas (cingulate cortex) involved when making the decision to share the initial amount of money with another person. The 'other' module was defined as network region activated when the decision of the other player was revealed to them.

It was found that autistics showed lowered activity in the 'self' module. The authors construe this as evidence that they have a defective self concept.

"To have a good self concept, you have to be able to decide if the shared outcome is due to the other person or due to you," said Montague. "If people can't see themselves as a distinct entities at deeper levels, there is a disconnect."

I beg to differ. In my view the findings can be explained using the joint attention / goal/ outcome defect outlined above. Although I believe that their explanation that people with autism may have a diminished sense of self or Agency also makes intuitive sense and I have argued the same previously. I contrast that with the Psychotic case where one attributes too much agency- even to inanimate objects or animals for example. However, in this case a more parsimonious explanation can be that the autistics were not able to model the others goal as their own (the familiar simulation argument) and could not indulged in joint goal intention and thus failed to optimally use the 'self' module i/e failed to take whatever actions were needed for a co-operative and trustful behavior .

The Friths adequately sum that up:

In a preview in the journal Neuron, Chris and Uta Frith wrote, "This is an exciting result because it suggests that some mechanisms of social interaction are intact in these high-functioning cases. What is the critical difference between the self phase and the other phase? We believe that the simple distinction of self versus other is not adequate. "It involves higher-order mentalizing: you care what another person thinks of you, and even further, you care that the other person trusts you. You would not do this when playing against a computer. In autism there is no difference," wrote the Friths, who are at University College London.

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Russsinas have a richer discriminative experience of light and dark blue qualia

I have blogged extensively earlier regarding language, color and the sapir -whorf hypothesis. My position in the above is clear, I lean towards the sapir-whorf hypothesis and a mild form of linguistic determinism. Now a new study (which I had missed earlier) by Lera Boroditsky presents further corroborating evidence that language influences even such basic functions as color perception. As per their 2007 PNAS paper, Russians are better (more speedily) able to distinguish between the light blue and dark blue color in an objective color perception task, thanks to the fact that Russian has a different color term for dark blue and a different one for the light blue. It is an excellent paper and I present some excerpts from the introduction:

Different languages divide color space differently. For example,the English term ‘‘blue’’ can be used to describe all of the colors in Fig. 1. Unlike English, Russian makes an obligatory distinction between lighter blues (‘‘goluboy’’) and darker blues (‘‘siniy’’). Like other basic color words, ‘‘siniy’’ and ‘‘goluboy’’ tend to be learned early by Russian children (1) and share many of the usage and behavioral properties of other basic color words (2). There is no single generic word for ‘‘blue’’ in Russian that can be used to describe all of the colors in Fig. 1 (nor to adequately translate the title of this work from English to Russian). Does this difference between languages lead to differences in how people discriminate colors?

The question of cross-linguistic differences in color perception has a long and venerable history (e.g., refs. 3–14) and has been a cornerstone issue in the debate on whether and how much language shapes thinking (15). Previous studies have found cross-linguistic differences in subjective color similarity judgments and color confusability in memory (4, 5, 10, 12, 16). For example, if two colors are called by the same name in a language, speakers of that language will judge the two colors to be more similar and will be more likely to confuse them in memory compared with people whose language assigns different names to the two colors. These cross-linguistic differences develop early in children, and their emergence has been shown to coincide with the acquisition of color terms (17). Further, cross-linguistic differences in similarity judgments and recognition memory can be disrupted by direct verbal interference (13, 18) or by indirectly preventing subjects from using their normal naming strategies (10), suggesting that linguistic representations are involved online in these kinds of color judgments.

Because previous cross-linguistic comparisons have relied on memory procedures or subjective judgments, the question of whether language affects objective color discrimination performance has remained. Studies testing only color memory leave open the possibility that, when subjects make perceptual discriminations among stimuli that can all be viewed at the same time, language may have no influence. In studies measuring subjective similarity, it is possible that any language-congruent bias results from a conscious, strategic decision on the part of the subject (19). Thus, such methods leave open the question of whether subjects’ normal ability to discriminate colors in an objective procedure is altered by language.

Here we measure color discrimination performance in two language groups in a simple, objective, perceptual task. Subjects were simultaneously shown three color squares arranged in a triad (see Fig. 1) and were asked to say which of the bottom two color squares was perceptually identical to the square on top.

This design combined the advantages of previous tasks in a way that allowed us to test for the effects of language on color perception in an objective task, with an implicit measure and minimal memory demands.

First, the task was objective in that subjects were asked to provide the correct answer to an unambiguous question, which they did with high accuracy. This feature of the design addressed the possibility that subjects rely only on linguistic representations when faced with an ambiguous task that requires a subjective judgment. If linguistic representations are only used to make subjective judgments in ambiguous tasks, then effects of language should not show up in an objective unambiguous task with a clear correct answer.

Second, all stimuli involved in a perceptual decision (in this case, the three color squares) were present on the screen simultaneously and remained in full view until the subjects responded. This allowed subjects to make their decisions in the presence of the perceptual stimulus and with minimal memory demands.

Finally, we used the implicit measure of reaction time, a subtle aspect of behavior that subjects do not generally modulate explicitly. Although subjects may decide to bias their decisions in choosing between two options in an ambiguous task, it is unlikely that they explicitly decide to take a little longer in responding in some trials than in others.

In summary, this design allowed us to test subjects’ discrimination performance of a simple, objective perceptual task. Further, by asking subjects to perform these perceptual discriminations with and without verbal interference, we are able to ask whether any cross-linguistic differences in color discrimination depend on the online involvement of language in the course of the task.

The questions asked here are as follows. Are there crosslinguistic differences in color discrimination even for simple, objective, perceptual discrimination tasks? If so, do these differences depend on the online involvement of language? Previous studies with English speakers have demonstrated that verbal interference changes English speakers’ performance in speeded color discrimination (21) and in visual searching (22, 23) across the English blue/green boundary. If a color boundary is present in one language but not another, will the two language groups differ in their perceptual discrimination performance across that boundary? Further, will verbal interference affect only the performance of the language group that makes this linguistic distinction?

They then go on to discuss their experimental setup (which I recommend you go and read). Finally they present their findings:

We found that Russian speakers were faster to discriminate two colors if they fell into different linguistic categories in Russian (one siniy and the other goluboy) than if the two colors were from the same category (both siniy or both goluboy). This category advantage was eliminated by a verbal, but not a spatial, dual task. Further, effects of language were most pronounced on more difficult, finer discriminations. English speakers tested on the identical stimuli did not show a category advantage under any condition. These results demonstrate that categories in language can affect performance of basic perceptual color discrimination tasks. Further, they show that the effect of language is online, because it is disrupted by verbal interference. Finally, they show that color discrimination performance differs across language groups as a function of what perceptual distinctions are habitually made in a particular language.

They end on a philosophical note:

The Whorfian question is often interpreted as a question of whether language affects nonlinguistic processes. Putting the question in this way presupposes that linguistic and nonlinguistic processes are highly dissociated in normal human cognition, such that many tasks are accomplished without the involvement of language. A different approach to the Whorfian question would be to ask the extent to which linguistic processes are normally involved when people engage in all kinds of seemingly nonlinguistic tasks (e.g., simple perceptual discriminations that can be accomplished in the absence of language). Our results suggest that linguistic representations normally meddle in even surprisingly simple objective perceptual decisions.

To me this is another important paper that puts sapir-whorf hypothesis on the forefront. I would love to hear from those who do not endorse the spair-whorf hypothesis as to what they make of these results?

hat tip: Neuroanthropology blog.

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good mood= intuition + good mood = psychosis?

I recently blogged about how good mood may lead to diminishing of working memory and I have blogged in the past regarding how good mood + intuitive thinking styles may lead to Magical thinking.

Now there appears a new study that shows that good mood, in and of itself, may lead to more reliance on Intuition or conscious gut feelings while making decisions. DeVries et al use the Iowa Gambling Task to ascertain whether an experimental manipulation (watching 2.5 minutes happy or sad clips) affected the performance on the IGT, in the window (20 to 40 cards from start) when the participants were using the conscious gut feeling or intuition to form their decisions . What they found was that a good or happy mood made the people rely more on their intuitive or conscious gut feelings vis-a-vis controls and the negative mood had the opposite effect of making them more deliberative. This was reflected in respectively good and poor performance on the second block of trial in the two affect cases . I present below the abstract of the study.

The present research aimed to test the role of mood in the Iowa Gambling Task . In the IGT, participants can win or lose money by picking cards from four different decks. They have to learn by experience that two decks are overall advantageous and two decks are overall disadvantageous. Previous studies have shown that at an early stage in this card-game, players begin to display a tendency towards the advantageous decks. Subsequent research suggested that at this stage, people base their decisions on conscious gut feelings. Based on empirical evidence for the relation between mood and cognitive processing-styles, we expected and consistently found that, compared to a negative mood state, reported and induced positive mood states increased this early tendency towards advantageous decks. Our results provide support for the idea that a positive mood causes stronger reliance on affective signals in decision-making than a negative mood.

I tend to put this in a broader context and it is apparent to me that good mood leads to more reliance and usage of intuitive thinking styles. this may even be mediated by the fact that working memory deficits associated with good mood prevent a deliberative approach to problem solving and instead favors an affective driven or intuitive approach. Taken together this implies that good mood leads to more intuitive thinking and decision making style. However, we have seen earlier that good mood and an intuitive thinking style are a dangerous mixture and lead to Magical thinking styles. Taken together this would mean that good mood induces a positive runaway process that causes more reliance on intuitive thinking which causes more
Magical thinking style and ultimately the good mood spirals upwards from good mood to Mania to full blown psychosis. I am excited by these linkages as they may provide additional points of attack where one can address the cognitive factors behind Mania / Psychosis and lead to additional therapeutic paradigms. How about you? Does this correlation and causation form Mood to Intuition to Magical thinking excite you too?

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Psychosis and Autism as Diametrical Disorders of the Social Brain: converging evidence!!

Readers of this blog will be familiar with my model of Autism/ Schizophrenia and I recently found an online article by Crespi et al that elegantly summarizes the theory that autism and Schizophrenia are on a continuum of phenotypic variations related to cognition and the social brain.

I will be using images and text from that article heavily, so go ahead and read the original article too, which is very well-written and thought provoking.


The Authors contend that autism and schizophrenia are on a continuum where cognition is concerned with Autistics leaning towards mechanistic cognition, while schizophrenics leaning towards mentalistic cognition. This should be a familiar story to readers of this blog.



They discuss the various contrasting features of Autism and Schizophrenia. They contend that Autism is made up of three dimensions: language and communication difficulties, social reciprocity difficulties and creative or imaginative difficulties (which they term as repetitive and restricted behavior) .



They contrast this with the psychotic spectrum in which they include the three corresponding dimensions as Unipolar depression, bipolar disorder and Schizophrenia.


They then go ahead and list a variety of evidence from studies of growth, development, neuroanatomy, cognition, behavior, and epidemiology for diametric phenotypes in autism and psychosis. I reproduce below the table (click to enlarge - the tables are a must read!!) which highlights salient differences in phenotypes:





The authors have their own theory (which seems very plausible to me) regarding why Autism and Schizophrenia are diametrically opposite. This they contend is due to evolutionary arms race between the child and mother for scarce resources mediated by maternal and paternal imprinting genes.



They do a brilliant job of describing their theory so I quote from them:

Further hints that imprinted genes may have something to do with autism and psychosis come from the finding that autistics have heavier birth-weight(especially males) while schizophrenics are lighter – just as you would expect if paternal genes were more prominent in autism. Again, more paternal and/or less maternal genetic influence is sometimes implicated in cancer(another form of over-growth) and here the striking finding is that schizophrenics have less cancer than autistics despite the fact that the former smoke much more. Again, there is evidence that autistics by contrast to psychotics show early brain growth at the expense of the mother.

The article's discussion is enlightening as it also throws light on other previous researchers who have hypothesized along similar lines. Alas The Mouse Trap doesn't get a mention, But Nettle , regarding whom I have blogged before gets a mention.

Our hypothesis can be conceptualized at two interacting levels: (1) the diametric architecture of autistic and psychotic-spectrum conditions (Badcock 2004), and (2) the underpinnings of this structure in dysregulated genomic imprinting. A diametric structure to autism and schizophrenia has been considered for some traits before: thus, Abu-Akel (1999) and Abu-Akel & Bailey (2000) suggested that autism and schizophrenia represent extremes on a continuum of theory of mind skills from hypodevelopment to hyper-development, Frith (2004b) described 'under-mentalizing' in autism and 'over-mentalizing' in schizophrenia, and Nettle (2006) anticipated an autism psychosis spectrum in noting that “autistic traits are in many ways the converse of the unusual experiences component of schizotypy”. However, most previous research on autism and psychosis has considered the disorders to be etiologically unrelated (or has considered the negative symptoms of schizophrenia in terms of autism), although both disorders are believed to be underlain by dysregulated development of the social brain (Broks 1997; Emery 2000; Burns 2004, 2006). By our hypothesis, autism and psychosis represent extremes on continua of human cognitive architecture from mechanistic to mentalistic cognition, with balanced cognition at the center (Figure 4). Each set of conditions is extremely heterogeneous but also highly convergent, in that diverse genetic, epigenetic and environmental effects can generate similar cognitive phenotypes (Happé 1994, p. 2; Keverne 1999; Seeman et al. 2005; Badcock & Crespi 2006; Happé et al.2006). These striking convergences are mediated, in our view, by the dynamics of social brain development, with under-development in autistic conditions and hyperdevelopment in psychotic conditions (Badcock 2004), Further tests of this hypothesis should focus on assessing the breadth and depth of diametric phenotypic structure to autistic and psychotic spectrum conditions, and testing for tradeoffs between mentalistic and mechanistic thought and ability.

I am thrilled to see my theory also being investigated in parallel and worked on by distinguished scientists and am grateful for the scientific work going in this area. I am sure we will soon see more research supporting my thesis.

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good mood= compromised working memory?

A recent study mentions that when people are in good mood, they are likely to choose from amongst the first of the options presented, if asked to choose on the run. However, if they are asked to withhold evaluation till all the alternatives are presented, then they chose the last item presented.

A new study in the February issue of the Journal of Consumer Research people finds that consumers in a good mood are more likely than unhappy consumers to choose the first item they see, especially if all the choices are more or less the same.

The researchers also found that when happy consumers were asked to withhold judgment until all options were presented, they tended to prefer the last option they saw.

To me this appears very much like the recency and primacy effects. Their working memory is so much compromised , due to their good mood that they resort to the heuristics of recency/ primacy to determine their decisions.

The above theory may seem outrageous at first glance, but there are studies suggesting that people are bad decision makers when in good mood and that working memory compromise may be the underlying factor.

A good mood may be bad for people faced with problem-solving tasks that demand a high degree of logical thought and planning, according to a study.

Researchers say the brain may be too busy retrieving "feelgood" memories to enhance the positive mood to focus fully on the task in hand. Someone in a neutral mood can devote themself solely to problem solving, they argue.

According to Mike Oswald, when in good mood, good memories are brought into consciousness and this intrudes with the limited working memory thus temporarily incapacitating it.

Dr Oaksford, who will receive the BPS Spearman Medal today for his work on human reasoning, said that the positive mood state may be affecting the brain's capacity for "working memory" - a space devoted to thinking, planning, and problem solving - as good memories are being retrieved at the same time.

"It is like a having a blackboard to work your problems out on but your memory is writing on that blackboard at the same time," he said

This compromising of working memory due to good mood may also explain the working memory deficits found in those suffering from Mania/ psychosis. This may also underlie their jumping to conclusions sort of thinking as they pick the first alternative that comes to mind. Also this may explain their irritable and impatient mood, where they just go for decision making without withholding judgment as the first option itself seems promising and does not get critical evaluation. The direction may even be reverse- due to irritability and good mood (manic style) associations, one may choose the first alternative and this may appear like the primacy effect. However the directionality may be it seems evident that good mood comes accompanied with bad decisions. If the relation is exclusively that of working memory overrode with primacy and recency heuristics we can devise better decision making guidelines for those suffering from Mania.

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Auitsm, Valproate and Mania/Psychosis

There is a new open source journal available called Frontiers in Neuroscience , and in the first edition there is an article expounding autism as an Intense world syndrome. It is a very intriguing article that claims amongst other things that autistics have very rich local neural circuitry (perhaps in lieu of sparse global circuitry) and this may be the reason why they have rich modular cognitive abilities like memory etc. I am tempted to contrast this with Schizophrenia/ psychosis where there may be more global processing of information. But before my main thesis an abstract of the paper.

Autism is a devastating neurodevelopmental disorder with a polygenetic predisposition that seems to be triggered by multiple environmental factors during embryonic and/or early postnatal life. While significant advances have been made in identifying the neuronal structures and cells affected, a unifying theory that could explain the manifold autistic symptoms has still not emerged. Based on recent synaptic, cellular, molecular, microcircuit, and behavioral results obtained with the valproic acid (VPA) rat model of autism, we propose here a unifying hypothesis where the core pathology of the autistic brain is hyper-reactivity and hyper-plasticity of local neuronal circuits. Such excessive neuronal processing in circumscribed circuits is suggested to lead to hyper-perception, hyper-attention, and hyper-memory, which may lie at the heart of most autistic symptoms. In this view, the autistic spectrum are disorders of hyper-functionality, which turns debilitating, as opposed to disorders of hypo-functionality, as is often assumed. We discuss how excessive neuronal processing may render the world painfully intense when the neocortex is affected and even aversive when the amygdala is affected, leading to social and environmental withdrawal. Excessive neuronal learning is also hypothesized to rapidly lock down the individual into a small repertoire of secure behavioral routines that are obsessively repeated. We further discuss the key autistic neuropathologies and several of the main theories of autism and re-interpret them in the light of the hypothesized Intense World Syndrome.

The authors use the valproate model of autism for their discussion and it is a well established mouse model of autism. In this model, mother rats are given valproate during pregnancy and the children later had autistic syndromes and were developmentally retarded. There is also some literature documenting a linkage between fetal valproate syndrome and autism.

Rodier et al. have reported that, in a rat model for teratogen exposure, the administration of valproic acid in early development induces morphological brainstem pathology similar to changes sometimes observed in autism. Alterations in the distribution of serotonergic neurons in brain, suggestive of abnormal neuronal differentiation and migration, have also been observed in the animal model. Further work in rats has shown that the prenatal challenge with valproic acid induces behavioral changes, including delayed maturation, decreased social exploration, deficits in sensorimotor gating, and repetitive, stereotyped responses in an open field. In mice, exposure to valproic acid while in utero leads to behavioral retardation and regression during neonatal and juvenile development

Thus from the above discussion it is apparent that exposure to valproic acid has something to do with autism. It is to be noted that valproic acid/ sodium valproate is a well-known anti-convulsant that is also given in bipolar disorder as a mood stabilizer. Now readers of his blog will be familiar with my model of autism , whereby I stress the opposite polarity to schizophrenia/ psychosis. I believe that what we witness in Autism is the converse of what we witness in psychosis. Both are pathological states, but one with too much reality orientation (including not attributing agency to fellow humans/ animals) while other too much fantasy orientation (with tendency towards anthropomorphism). Also while autistics may be the proverbial detail-oriented missing forest for the trees sort of people, schizophrenics are more meaning-and-big-picture-obsessed people with possibly more hyper-active and hyper-plastic global neural circuitry as opposed to what is hypothesized in autistic intense world syndrome.
I also consider bipolar and schizophrenia to be closely related and am not surprised that while lack of valproic acid is used to treat the bipolar psychosis and the bipolar condition; an exposure to the same teratogen during pregnancy ( a critical developmental window ) may have the opposite effect of leading to the opposite disorder like autism. To me this valproic acid linkage proves further that autism and schizophrenia/ psychosis are opposite of each other.

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The Five Moral Foundations

Jonathan Haidt studies Morality and he , with Joseph and Graham, has discovered what he calls the five major moral foundations or ethical areas of concern. A Steven Pinker article that is doing the rounds these days introduces these as follows :

The exact number of themes depends on whether you’re a lumper or a splitter, but Haidt counts five — harm, fairness, community (or group loyalty), authority and purity — and suggests that they are the primary colors of our moral sense. Not only do they keep reappearing in cross-cultural surveys, but each one tugs on the moral intuitions of people in our own culture. Haidt asks us to consider how much money someone would have to pay us to do hypothetical acts like the following:

In a Science Magazine article Haidt originally listed these scenarios as follows and requested that we do a though experiment as to how much money someone would need to give us to perform the following acts (the first act is relatively amoral, while the second presents a moral dilemma) :

Harm/care

• Stick a pin into your palm.
• Stick a pin into the palm of a child you don't know.

Fairness/reciprocity

• Accept a plasma screen television that a friend of yours wants to give you. You know that your friend got the television a year ago when the company that made it sent it, by mistake and at no charge, to your friend.
• Accept a plasma screen television that a friend of yours wants to give you. You know that your friend bought the TV a year ago from a thief who had stolen it from a wealthy family.

Ingroup/loyalty

• Say something slightly bad about your nation (which you don't believe to be true) while calling in, anonymously, to a talk-radio show in your nation.
• Say something slightly bad about your nation (which you don't believe to be true) while calling in, anonymously, to a talk-radio show in a foreign nation.

Authority/respect

• Slap a friend in the face (with his/her permission) as part of a comedy skit.
• Slap your father in the face (with his permission) as part of a comedy skit.

Purity/sanctity

• Attend a performance art piece in which the actors act like idiots for 30 min, including failing to solve simple problems and falling down repeatedly on stage.
• Attend a performance art piece in which the actors act like animals for 30 min, including crawling around naked and urinating on stage.

As one can easily see from ones responses, the second of the set of questions appears to be morally reprehensible, though the category to which it belongs and the moral intuitions which guide our reaction to the underlying dilemma is different in each case. for the child-pricking-with-needle scenario we are focussed on harm avoidance and rely on empathy; while in the artists-running-naked we are more moved by our intuitions on what is aesthetically pure and sanctimonious.

Haidt also believes that these moral foundations have different evolutionary roots: while harm and fairness may rely on evolutionary mechanisms of kin selection and reciprocal altruism respectively, the other dimensions like ingroup/ loyalty may be due to group selection acting at group levels. The other foundations like respect for authority and desire for purity may have their own evolutionary mechanisms:

If I asked you to define morality, you'd probably say it has something to do with how people ought to treat each other. Nearly every research program in moral psychology has focused on one of two aspects of interpersonal treatment: (i) harm, care, and altruism (people are vulnerable and often need protection) or (ii) fairness, reciprocity, and justice (people have rights to certain resources or kinds of treatment). These two topics bear a striking match to the two evolutionary mechanisms of kin selection (which presumably made us sensitive to the suffering and needs of close kin) and reciprocal altruism (which presumably made us exquisitely sensitive to who deserves what). However, if group selection did reshape human morality, then there might be a kind of tribal overlay (—a coevolved set of cultural practices and moral intuitions—that are not about how to treat other individuals but about how to be a part of a group, especially a group that is competing with other groups.

In my cross-cultural research, I have found that the moral domain of educated Westerners is narrower—more focused on harm and fairness—than it is elsewhere. Extending a theory from cultural psychologist Richard Shweder, Jesse Graham, Craig Joseph, and I have suggested that there are five psychological foundations, each with a separate evolutionary origin, upon which human cultures construct their moral communities . In addition to the harm and fairness foundations, there are also widespread intuitions about ingroup-outgroup dynamics and the importance of loyalty; there are intuitions about authority and the importance of respect and obedience; and there are intuitions about bodily and spiritual purity and the importance of living in a sanctified rather than a carnal way. And it's not just members of traditional societies who draw on all five foundations; even within Western societies, we consistently find an ideological effect in which religious and cultural conservatives value and rely upon all five foundations, whereas liberals value and rely upon the harm and fairness foundations primarily.

To me, these five moral foundations fit beautifully with the five factor models that I have been considering. Harm being more physically rooted, fairness/ justice more subjectively rooted; ingroup/ loyalty more rooted in interactions between group members; respect/authority more socially rooted; while purity/sanctity more individualistically rooted.

Also this framework is broadly compatible with Kohlberg's moral development theory, with harm based reasoning predominating at stage I and so on. To elaborate:

1. Stage 1 thinking is marked by Obedience and Punishment Orientation. This orientation clearly relies on Harm based reasoning to discern morality of acts- whether harm is caused by the cats and whether the results (including punishment ) would be harmful.
2. Stage 2 thinking is marked by Individualism and Exchange. This exchange mentality is typical of those advocating reciprocal altruism or those who emphasize fairness and the golden rule.
3. Stage 3 thinking is marked by Good Interpersonal Relationships. this reasoning is marked by emphasis on good relationships within a ingroup and loyalty to it and all its members.
4. Stage 4 thinking is marked by Maintaining the Social Order. Here respect of authority is clearly evidenced as one wants to respect the authority inherent in the social order.
5. Stage 5 thinking is marked by Social Contract and Individual Rights . Here the purity/ sanctity dimension is more prominent and one focuses on the purity, sanctity and inalienability of human rights. These rights are sort of divine.

I am excited to see how these five major moral foundations could still be under evolutionary selection and thus, we may not even be aware of the processes by which the later stage mechanisms work. While the evolutionary earlier kin selection and reciprocal altruism are well understood, we are still evolving the other traits and hence no clear mathematics for that yet in place- hence we are baffled by group selection or deny that other dimensions like purity/sanctity have anything to inform on moral matters. That may just be due to the fact that western morality is still not developed to higher stages of Morality as compared to other civilizations (or for that matters liberals less developed than conservatives? ). I am sure that there would be three more qualitatively different moral foundations taking the eventual number to eight moral foundations, but we must first appreciate the five moral foundations better before we move up and broaden the moral horizons.

Lastly let me briefly mention the relationship of these five major foundations to emotions. It has been found in studies that people respond with disgust (expressions) when confronted with an immoral act belonging to purity/sanctity dimension. They respond with contempt if they witness moral transgressions in respect/ ingroup dimensions and react with anger while witnessing transgressions of harm/ justice dimension. Thus, we may even relate these five moral foundations with the primary affects. But that is food for a later post!

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Dissociable areas of memory (in MTL): Two or three?

There has been some discussion in memory literature as to whether familiarity / novelty detection and recollection (contextual recognition of a stimulus or episodic recall) are independent processes or are the same processes, but only the memory strength varies.

In 2006, an fMRI study came around that showed that there were three dissociable areas in MTL that were associated with familiarity, novelty and recollection detection.

There have been indications that recollection, familiarity, and novelty involve different medial temporal lobe subregions, but available evidence is scarce and inconclusive. Within the medial temporal lobes (MTLs), they found a triple dissociation among the posterior half of the hippocampus, which was associated with recollection, the posterior parahippocampal gyrus, which was associated with familiarity, and anterior half of the hippocampus and rhinal regions, which were associated with novelty. Furthermore, multiple regression analyses based on individual trial activity showed that all three memory signals, i.e., recollection, familiarity, and novelty, make significant and independent contributions to recognition memory performance.

This appeared to be the established dogma to me, till I came across this new PNAS paper, which again strives to swing the pendulum back in favor of memory strengths and a single process for recollection and familiarity/novelty detection. The authors found that while a distinct group of neurons in hippocampus and anygdala was responsible for novelty and familiarity detection, recollection could just be ascertained by the strength of the neural firing of these groups of neurons. Here is the abstract of the study:

Episodic memories allow us to remember not only that we have seen an item before but also where and when we have seen it (context). Sometimes, we can confidently report that we have seen something (familiarity) but cannot recollect where or when it was seen. Thus, the two components of episodic recall, familiarity and recollection, can be behaviorally dissociated. It is not clear, however, whether these two components of memory are represented separately by distinct brain structures or different populations of neurons in a single anatomical structure. Here, we report that the spiking activity of single neurons in the human hippocampus and amygdala [the medial temporal lobe (MTL)] contain information about both components of memory. We analyzed a class of neurons that changed its firing rate to the second presentation of a previously novel stimulus. We found that the neuronal activity evoked by the presentation of a familiar stimulus (during retrieval) distinguishes stimuli that will be successfully recollected from stimuli that will not be recollected. Importantly, the ability to predict whether a stimulus is familiar is not influenced by whether the stimulus will later be recollected. We thus conclude that human MTL neurons contain information about both components of memory. These data support a continuous strength of memory model of MTL function: the stronger the neuronal response, the better the memory.

PNAS has made the article freely available, so go have a look. This is what they discuss:

We analyzed the spiking activity of neurons in the human MTL during retrieval of declarative memories. We found that the neural activity differentiated between stimuli that were only recognized as familiar and stimuli for which (in addition) the spatial location could be recollected. Further, we found that the same neural activity was also present during behavioral errors, but with reduced amplitude. This data are compatible with a continuous signal of memory strength: the stronger the neuronal response, the better the memory. Forgotten stimuli have the weakest memory strength and stimuli that are only recognized but not recollected have medium strength. The strongest memory (and thus neuronal response) is associated with stimuli that are both recognized and recollected.

One methodological flaw of the current study is that it didn't take the earlier studies showing triple dissociation into account and did not differentiate between MTL neurons based on their location within hippocampus/ amygdala. If they had distinguished based on the location, they might have found some neurons that were selectively coding for recollection. In absence of such observations I find it hard to concur that recollection is not an independent process from familiarity/ novelty detection. Recollection involves binding the familiarity/ novelty cues with other neuronal cues in MTL like neurons that code for time and place . It may be that the current study completely missed out on those integrator neurons.

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