Psychology Commons^™

Cephalopods Are Best Candidates For Invertebrate Consciousness, Jennifer A. Mather, Claudio Carere

Jennifer Mather, PhD

Insects might have been the first invertebrates to evolve sentience, but cephalopods were the first invertebrates to gain scientific recognition for it.

An Invertebrate Perspective On Pain, Jennifer A. Mather

Jennifer Mather, PhD

Although Key (2016) argues that mammals feel pain and fish do not, from an invertebrate perspective, it is obvious that the pain experience is shared by animals from a number of different animal groups.

Rumination Is Associated With Diminished Performance Monitoring, Ema Tanovic, Greg Hajack, Charles A. Sanislow

Charles A. Sanislow, Ph.D.

Why Animal Welfarism Continues To Fail, Lori Marino

Lori Marino, PhD

Welfarism prioritizes human interests over the needs of nonhuman animals. Despite decades of welfare efforts other animals are mostly worse off than ever before, being subjected to increasingly invasive and harmful treatments, especially in the factory farming and biomedical research areas. A legal rights-based approach is essential in order for other animals to be protected from the varying ethical whims of our species.

Animal Suffering In China, Peter J. Li

Peter J. Li, PhD

Chinese policy has been aimed at maximizing GDP; it is time to focus also on minimizing animal suffering.

Fish Pain: An Inconvenient Truth, Culum Brown

Culum Brown, PhD

Whether fish feel pain is a hot political topic. The consequences of our denial are huge given the billions of fish that are slaughtered annually for human consumption. The economic costs of changing our commercial fishery harvest practices are also likely to be great. Key outlines a structure-function analogy of pain in humans, tries to force that template on the rest of the vertebrate kingdom, and fails. His target article has so far elicited 34 commentaries from scientific experts from a broad range of disciplines; only three of these support his position. The broad consensus from the scientific community is …

Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Damage Is Associated With Decreased Ventral Striatum Volume And Response To Reward, Maia S. Pujara, Carissa L. Philippi, Julian C. Motzkin, Mustafa K. Baskaya, Michael Koenigs

Carissa Philippi

Cognitive Evidence Of Fish Sentience, Jonathan Balcombe

Jonathan Balcombe, PhD

I present a little-known example of flexible, opportunistic behavior by a species of fish to undermine Key’s (2016) thesis that fish are unconscious and unable to feel. Lack of a cortex is flimsy grounds for denying pain to fish, for on that criterion we must also then deny it to all non-mammals, including birds, which goes against scientific consensus. Notwithstanding science’s fundamental inability to prove anything, the precautionary principal dictates that we should give the benefit of the doubt to fish, and the state of the oceans dictates that we act on it now.

The Concept Of Qailulah (Midday Napping) From Neuroscientific And Islamic Perspectives, Mohd Amzari Tumiran

Mohd Amzari Tumiran

Napping/siesta during the day is a phenomenon which is widely practised in the world. However, the timing, frequency and duration may vary. The basis of napping is also diverse, but it is mainly done for improvement of alertness and general well-being. Neuroscience reveals that midday napping improves memory, enhances alertness, boosts wakefulness and performance, and recovers certain qualities of lost night sleep. Interestingly, Islam, the religion of the Muslims, advocates midday napping primarily because it was a practice preferred by Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). The objectives of this review are to investigate and compare identical key points on focused topic from …

Senile Dementia From Neuroscientific And Islamic Perspectives, Mohd Amzari Tumiran

Mohd Amzari Tumiran

Diseases involving the nervous system drastically change lives of victims and commonly increase dependency on others. This paper focuses on Senile Dementia (SD) from both the neuroscientific and Islamic perspectives, with special emphasis on the integration of ideas between the two different disciplines. This would enable effective implementation of strategies to address issues involving this disease across different cultures, especially among the world-wide Muslim communities. In addition, certain incongruence ideas on similar issues can be understood better. The former perspective is molded according to conventional modern science while the latter on the analysis of various texts including the holy Qur’an, …

Face, Eye, And Body Selective Responses In Fusiform Gyrus And Adjacent Cortex: An Intracranial Eeg Study., Andrew D. Engell, Gregory Mccarthy

Andrew D. Engell

unctional MRI (fMRI) studies have investigated the degree to which processing of whole faces, face-parts, and bodies are differentially localized within the fusiform gyrus and adjacent ventral occipitotemporal cortex. While some studies have emphasized the spatial differentiation of processing into discrete areas, others have emphasized the overlap of processing and the importance of distributed patterns of activity. Intracranial EEG (iEEG) recorded from subdural electrodes provides excellent temporal and spatial resolution of local neural activity, and thus provides an alternative method to fMRI for studying differences and commonalities in face and body processing. In this study we recorded iEEG from 12 …

Similarities Between Human And Animal Spatial Memory: Item And Order Information, Robert H.I. Dale

Robert H. I. Dale

Human subjects, sitting at the center of a circle of eight lights, were tested on analogues of radial-maze item-recognition (Roberts & Smythe, 1979) and order-recognition (Kesner & Novak, 1982) tasks. Subjects in the item-recognition condition saw a list of seven lights, and then the nonlist (eighth) light was tested against the first, fourth, or seventh light from the list. The sub- jects were required to point toward the non list light. Subjects in the order-recognition condition saw a series of eight lights, followed by a test of the first and second, fourth and fifth, or seventh and eighth serial positions. …

Spatial And Temporal Response Patterns On The Eight-Arm Radial Maze, Robert H.I. Dale

Robert H. I. Dale

Six maze-experienced hooded rats were timed during five trials on which they collected water from all arms of an eight-arm radial maze, then made five more choices. All subjects frequently exhibited a “task-completion pause:” The subjects rarely spent more than 1 sec in the center of the maze between choices until they had entered all eight arms, then stopped in the center of the maze. In contrast, the time spent in each arm gradually increased until all of the water had been obtained, then decreased slightly. Four subjects began every trial by choosing eight consecutive adjacent arms. The task-completion pause …

The Relative Attenuation Of Self-Stimulation, Eating And Drinking Produced By Dopamine-Receptor Blockade, E. T. Rolls, B. J. Rolls, P. H. Kelly, S. G. Shaw, R. J. Wood, Robert H.I. Dale

Robert H. I. Dale

Spiroperidol, which blocks dopamine (DA) receptors, attenuated self-stimulation of the nucleus accumbens, septal area, hippocampus, anterior hypothalamus and ventral tegmental area. Dopamine is thus involved in self-stimulation of many sites (in addition to the lateral hypothalamus). The attenuation was not a simple motor impairment of the speed of bar-pressing in that the nucleus accumbens and septal self-stimulation rates were lower than those in treated animals self-stimulating at other sites (Experiment 1). Feeding was partly attenuated, and drinking was much less attenuated by the spiroperidol. Since the rats bar-pressed for brain- stimulation reward, chewed pellets to eat, and licked a tube …

Limitations On Spatial Memory In Mice, Robert H.I. Dale, Martin Bedard

Robert H. I. Dale

Rats have an impressive ability to remember locations they have visited. Two experiments used an eight-arm radial maze to determine whether mice showed two important characteristics of this spatial memory: its durability, and its dependence on stimuli outside the maze (extreme stimuli). In Experiment 1, food-deprived mice were allowed to eat from four of the eight arms of the maze then, after delays of 5 sec, 1 min, or 5 min, they were permitted to choose the remaining arms. Choice accuracy declined significantly with the longer delays, but always remained above chance. In Experiment 2, the maze was rotated 180° …

Reportinfluence Of Emotional States On Inhibitory Gating: Animal Models To Clinical Neurophysiology, Howard Cromwell

Howard Casey Cromwell

tIntegrating research efforts using a cross-domain approach could redefine traditional constructs used inbehavioral and clinical neuroscience by demonstrating that behavior and mental processes arise not fromfunctional isolation but from integration. Our research group has been examining the interface betweencognitive and emotional processes by studying inhibitory gating. Inhibitory gating can be measured viachanges in behavior or neural signal processing. Sensorimotor gating of the startle response is a well-usedmeasure. To study how emotion and cognition interact during startle modulation in the animal model,we examined ultrasonic vocalization (USV) emissions during acoustic startle and prepulse inhibition. Wefound high rates of USV emission during the …

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

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 …

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

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 …

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 …

Brain Function Differences In Language Processing In Children And Adults With Autism, Diane L. Williams, Vladimir L. Cherkassky, Robert A. Mason, Timothy A. Keller, Nancy J. Minshew, Marcel Adam Just

Marcel Adam Just

No abstract provided.

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

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 …

Effect Of Unilateral Temporal-Lobe Excision On Perception And Imagery Of Songs, R.J. Zatorre, Andrea Halpern

Andrea Halpern

Auditory imagery for songs was studied in two groups of patients with left or right temporal-lobe excision for control of epilepsy, and a group of matched normal control subjects. Two tasks were used. In the perceptual task, subjects saw the text of a familiar song and simultaneously heard it sung. On each trial they judged if the second of two capitalized lyrics was higher or lower in pitch than the first. The imagery task was identical in all respects except that no song was presented, so that subjects had to generate an auditory image of the song. The results indicated …

Effect Of Nicotine On Body Composition, Laura O'Dell

Laura Elena O'Dell

No abstract provided.

Distinctive Neural Processes During Learning In Autism, Sarah Schipul, Diane Williams, Timothy Keller, Nancy Minshew, Marcel Just

Marcel Adam Just

No abstract provided.

Brain Activation For Language Dual-Tasking: Listening To Two People Speak At The Same Time And A Change In Network Timing, Augusto Buchweitz, Timothy Keller, Ann Meyler, Marcel Just

Marcel Adam Just

No abstract provided.

Autism As A Neural Systems Disorder: A Theory Of Frontal-Posterior Underconnectivity, Marcel Just, Timothy Keller, Vicente Malave, Rajesh Kana, Sashank Varma

Marcel Adam Just

No abstract provided.

An Fmri Investigation Of Analogical Mapping In Metaphor Comprehension: The Influence Of Context And Individual Cognitive Capacities On Processing Demands., Chantel Prat, Robert Mason, Marcel Just

Marcel Adam Just

No abstract provided.