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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences

Moral Dilemma Judgment Revisited: A Loreta Analysis, Armando F. Rocha, Fábiot T. Rocha, Eduardo Massad Oct 2013

Moral Dilemma Judgment Revisited: A Loreta Analysis, Armando F. Rocha, Fábiot T. Rocha, Eduardo Massad

Armando F Rocha

Recent neuroscience investigations on moral judgment have provided useful information about how brain processes such complex decision making. All these studies so were fMRI investigations and therefore constrained by the poor resolution of this technique. Recent advances in electroencephalography (EEG) analysis provided by Low Resolution Tomogray (Loreta), Principal Component (PCA), Correlation and Regression Analysis improved EEG spatial resolution and make EEG a very useful technique in decision-making studies. Here, we reinvestigate previously fMRI study of personal (PD) and impersonal (ID) moral dilemma judgment, taking profit of these new EEG analysis improvements. Compared to the previous fMRI results, Loreta and PCA …


Brain Activity And Medical Diagnosis: An Eeg Study, Laila M. Ribas, Fábio T. Rocha, Neli R. Ortega, Armando F. Rocha, Eduardo Massad Sep 2013

Brain Activity And Medical Diagnosis: An Eeg Study, Laila M. Ribas, Fábio T. Rocha, Neli R. Ortega, Armando F. Rocha, Eduardo Massad

Armando F Rocha

Despite new brain imaging techniques that have improved the study of the underlying processes of human decision-making, to the best of our knowledge, there have been very few studies that have attempted to investigate brain activity during medical diagnostic processing.The main purpose of this paper was to investigate brain electroencephalography (EEG) activity associated with diagnostic decision-making in the realm of veterinary medicine using X-rays as a fundamental auxiliary test. The principal component analysis revealed four patterns that accounted for 85% of the total variance in the EEG activity recorded while veterinary doctors read a clinical history, examined an X-ray image …


What We Learn About Global Systemic Risk With Neurosciences, Armando F. Rocha Jan 2013

What We Learn About Global Systemic Risk With Neurosciences, Armando F. Rocha

Armando F Rocha

Financial market crises are frequent events that trigger large financial losses and represent important global systemic risk (GSR). GSR forecasting is, therefore, a necessity to avoid the collapse of the global financial market. Understanding GSR dynamics is imperative if GSR is to be forecasted and controlled. Traditional finance theories have developed many tools for risk management that proved to be unreliable in the case of the 2008 Crisis. Recent results on financial decision-making provided by Neurosciences have being used to model the stock market dynamics. This approach is used, here, to model stock price evolution in 20 bourses during the …


A Neuromarketing Study Of Consumer Satisfaction, Armando F. Rocha, Fábio T. Rocha, Lucia H. Arruda Jan 2013

A Neuromarketing Study Of Consumer Satisfaction, Armando F. Rocha, Fábio T. Rocha, Lucia H. Arruda

Armando F Rocha

The interest of marketing science in using neuroscience techniques to understand the consumer’s thought processes, dates back to the 1970s, when EEG data were recorded while subjects were watching TV commercials. Recently, fMRI was used to study the neural correlates of culturally based brands and neural predictors of purchases. These studies have discovered important properties of the neural circuits that are associated with consumer decision-making process and satisfaction. Here, EEG brain mapping was used to study the dynamics of the brain activity associated with these processes. The present study validated the EEG technology as an adequate neuromarketing tool and shows …


Gun Control: What Goes On In Your Brain, Armando F. Rocha, Fabio T. Rocha, Eduardo Massad Jan 2013

Gun Control: What Goes On In Your Brain, Armando F. Rocha, Fabio T. Rocha, Eduardo Massad

Armando F Rocha

Arguments for and against gun control are polarized at two opposite ends of a broad spectrum: personal liberties and social benefits. Brazil has introduced a referendum regarding the prohibition of firearm commerce and propaganda arguments, similar to the present ongoing discussion in the U.S. It has invoked socially and personally driven issues in the promotion of voting in favor of and against firearm control, respectively. Here, we used electroencephalography (EEG) technology to study the brain activity associated with a voter’s perception one week prior to Election Day, of the truthfulness of these arguments and their influence on voting decisions. The …


Brain Activity Follow Up Of Stock Market Financial Variables, Armando F. Rocha, João Vieito, Fábio T. Rocha Jan 2013

Brain Activity Follow Up Of Stock Market Financial Variables, Armando F. Rocha, João Vieito, Fábio T. Rocha

Armando F Rocha

Efficiency Market hypothesis assume that all investors reason in the same way to make their financial decisions. In contrast, Neurosciences have provided strong evidences that cognitive diversity is the hallmark of human intelligence. Neurofinances has shown that volunteers learned different profitable financial decision-making strategies depending on the kind of market they begun to trade. Here, we decide to further explore this hypothesis by studying a possible correlation between brain activity and the financial variables in a stock market game and to test if this correlation differ between experimental groups that trade in different market conditions. Present results show that volunteers …


Free Will From The Neuroscience Point Of View, Armando F. Rocha, Fábio T. Rocha Jan 2013

Free Will From The Neuroscience Point Of View, Armando F. Rocha, Fábio T. Rocha

Armando F Rocha

There is still a controversy if human volitions and actions are governed by causal laws or obeys free will. Neurosciences start to study the neural correlates of free will by investigating how brains make decisions. Here, some of questions about free will are discussed from the neurosciences point of view taking into consideration a neuroeconomic model of decision making. This model is used here with the purpose of providing very formal definitions of key concepts raised in any free will discussion such as goals, necessity, motivation, etc., and to provide a formal background for discussing decision making. One of the …


Moral Dilemma Judgment: A Neuroeconomic Approach, Armando F. Rocha, Fábio T. Rocha, Eduardo Massad Dec 2012

Moral Dilemma Judgment: A Neuroeconomic Approach, Armando F. Rocha, Fábio T. Rocha, Eduardo Massad

Armando F Rocha

Morals and ethics are important issues in human societies. Recently, the development of new techniques for studying the human brain has brought moral and ethical discussions to the realm of neuroscience investigations. Controversies still remain regarding the results of studies about morals and ethics and the understanding of the neurodynamics of dilemma judgment, which seems to depend on the nature of the studied dilemma (e.g., personal versus impersonal). Here, we proposed to understand the differences between personal and impersonal dilemmas in the context of losses modeled by neuroeconomic theory. The results show that the dilemma solution correlates nicely with the …


Modeling Moral Dilemma Judgment, Armando F. Rocha, Fábio T. Rocha, Eduardo Massad Dec 2012

Modeling Moral Dilemma Judgment, Armando F. Rocha, Fábio T. Rocha, Eduardo Massad

Armando F Rocha

Moral dilemma judgment has been extensively studied by neurosciences and much is now known about the cerebral dynamics supporting this kind of reasoning. Neuroeconomics has provided some interesting hypothesis for modeling decision making. The present paper aims to test if dilemma judgment may be formalized by this kind of modeling. In addition, fMRI and electroencephalographic (EEG) studies have shown that dilemma judgment involves benefit and risk analysis supported by specific neural systems. Because of this, the EEG was recorded while volunteers were judging moral dilemma in order to provide additional information to test the proposed hypothesis. Present experimental and simulated …


The 2008 Crisis From The Neurofinance Perspective: Investor Humor And Market Sentiment, Armando F. Rocha Dec 2012

The 2008 Crisis From The Neurofinance Perspective: Investor Humor And Market Sentiment, Armando F. Rocha

Armando F Rocha

The world is still facing a financial crisis that started in mid 2007 and up to moment it is unsolved. Stock markets around the world reacted badly and the real time news has never played such an important role to investors as seen in previous crises. The impact of the media deepened the bear dynamics of markets around the world amplifying their volatility. Neurofinances is a new field of inquiring that has the purpose of studying decision making taking into consideration the role played by emotion. Here, we use these notions to develop a neurofinance modelling of the Brazilian stock …


The Brain As A Distributed Intelligent Processing System: An Eeg Study., Armando F. Rocha, Fábio T. Rocha, Eduardo Massad Jan 2011

The Brain As A Distributed Intelligent Processing System: An Eeg Study., Armando F. Rocha, Fábio T. Rocha, Eduardo Massad

Armando F Rocha

arious neuroimaging studies, both structural and functional, have provided support for the proposal that a distributed brain network is likely to be the neural basis of intelligence. The theory of Distributed Intelligent Processing Systems (DIPS), first developed in the field of Artificial Intelligence, was proposed to adequately model distributed neural intelligent processing. In addition, the neural efficiency hypothesis suggests that individuals with higher intelligence display more focused cortical activation during cognitive performance, resulting in lower total brain activation when compared with individuals who have lower intelligence. This may be understood as a property of the DIPS. In our study, a …


Neurodynamics Of An Election, Armando F. Rocha, Fabio T. Rocha, Marcelo N. Burattini, Eduardo Massad Dec 2009

Neurodynamics Of An Election, Armando F. Rocha, Fabio T. Rocha, Marcelo N. Burattini, Eduardo Massad

Armando F Rocha

Variables influencing decision-making in real settings, as in the case of voting decisions, are uncontrollable and in many times even unknown to the experimenter. In this case, the experimenter has to study the intention to decide (vote) as close as possible in time to the moment of the real decision (election day). Here, we investigated the brain activity associated with the voting intention declared 1 week before the election day of the Brazilian Firearms Control Referendum about prohibiting the commerce of firearms. Two alliances arose in the Congress to run the campaigns for YES (for the prohibition of firearm commerce) …


Neurosciences And Education: One Example Of A Two-Way Cooperation, Armando F. Rocha, Fábio T. Rocha Jan 2008

Neurosciences And Education: One Example Of A Two-Way Cooperation, Armando F. Rocha, Fábio T. Rocha

Armando F Rocha

The relationship between education and cognitive neuroscience is an old issue from which the idea of the ‘neuroeducators’ was proposed 25 years ago. The premise of this idea is that the knowledge about how the brain operates our learning could help teachers in the classrootm. Despite of being an old issue, there are yet some unsolved matters. Firstly, how neuroscience and education could integrate biological understanding about learning cerebral process has not been yet clearly discussed. The present paper presents the results from Enscer– Teaching the Brain Project – that has been developed in Brazil for five years. During that …


Brain Mappings Of The Arithmetic Processing In Children And Adults., Fábio T. Rocha, Armando F. Rocha, Eduardo Massad, Renee Menezes Jan 2005

Brain Mappings Of The Arithmetic Processing In Children And Adults., Fábio T. Rocha, Armando F. Rocha, Eduardo Massad, Renee Menezes

Armando F Rocha

Despite the increasing number of experimental mapping showing that human arithmetic cognition is supported by widely spread neural circuits; the theoretical reasoning about these data remains mostly metaphorical and guided by a connectionist approach. Although neurons at distinct areas in the brain are assumed to take charge of different duties in the solution of the experimental task, the results are always discussed by hypothesizing some association between the different areas without questioning any difference of behavior at the level of the neurons at each of these areas. Here, the brain is assumed as Distributed Intelligent Processing System (DIPS) formed by …


Language Plasticity Revealed By Electroencephalogram Mapping, Armando F. Rocha, Flávia B. Foz Jan 2002

Language Plasticity Revealed By Electroencephalogram Mapping, Armando F. Rocha, Flávia B. Foz

Armando F Rocha

Reasoning is the result of the computations made by intelligent systems, for instance those in the brain. It is not an abstract concept because calculations performed by computations are very concrete transactions among the different central processing unit components. Entropy measurements are proposed here to disclose the plasticity of the cerebral processing associated with language comprehension in video game playing. It is also assumed that entropy may be evaluated from the correlation coefficients obtained for the game event-related activity calculated for the different electroencephalogram derivations in the 10/20 system. The brain mapping derived from these entropy measurements clearly demonstrates the …