Human or Alien?

To find out, now you too can take the latest Implicit Association Test (IAT)!

Human or Alien?

Mixing Memory has posted a hilarious summary of a satirical IAT paper, I See Dead People (Taking the Implicit Association Test). The paper bemoans the shocking decline in participants available to take the IAT. After describing the results of Study 1, the IAT in unborn babies,

...Bones and Johnson found another untapped population to study with the IAT: dead people. They point out that the work of people like M. Night Shyamalan has called into question the validity of people's self-report about whether they're alive or dead. An implicit measure of life or death is therefore important for both methodological and practical reasons.

For a good laugh, read the rest of the summary and the original paper by "Bones & Johnson" 2007.

Reference

Bones, A.K., & Johnson, N.R. (2007). Measuring the immeasurable: Or "Could Abraham Lincoln Take the Implicit Association Test?" Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2(4), 406-411.

With the Association for Psychological Science's new ethical standards requiring that all research studies include an Implicit Association Test (IAT), forecasters predict that the population of new participants available to take IATs will expire by the year 2023. Shrill, doomsday proposals from IAT experts involve rationing the precious pool of remaining IAT novices or other naive strategies. These solutions demonstrate rigid, scientific thinking, with a distinct lack of the creative flair that makes psychology stand apart from the real sciences. Building on our prior experience of adapting the IAT for measuring infant cognition and rooting out aliens among us, we demonstrate that new pools of participant resources—the unborn and passed on—are available, if we take the time to develop the methods to exploit them. Two studies illustrate some of the methodological challenges and opportunities that must be met in order to make better use of the new populations to keep the IAT juggernaut on its path of global (and interstellar) domination.

Human Rights Day

Human Rights Day 2007 marks the start of a year-long commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: 1948-2008

It is our duty to ensure that these rights are a living reality -- that they are known, understood and enjoyed by everyone, everywhere. It is often those who most need their human rights protected, who also need to be informed that the Declaration exists -- and that it exists for them.

-- Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

It is especially hideous today to note the following article in the Washington Post:

[Four U.S. Congress Members] Briefed on Waterboarding in 2002

In Meetings, Spy Panels' Chiefs Did Not Protest, Officials Say

By Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, December 9, 2007

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

. . .

With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods during the two years in which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter. The lawmakers who held oversight roles during the period included Pelosi and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Sens. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as well as Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan).

Individual lawmakers' recollections of the early briefings varied dramatically, but officials present during the meetings described the reaction as mostly quiet acquiescence, if not outright support. "Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing," said Goss, who chaired the House intelligence committee from 1997 to 2004 and then served as CIA director from 2004 to 2006. "And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement."

However, in 2004, a quiet hero emerged from a most unlikely place -- from within the Bush Administration -- as described in this recent report by Amy Goodman:

In a remarkable demonstration of commitment to his job, former acting Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin, according to ABC News, underwent waterboarding when tasked by the White House to rework its official position on torture in 2004. Concluding that waterboarding is torture, he was forced out of his job.

But here we have A Proclamation by the President of the United States of America:

Americans value deeply our ability to speak, assemble, and worship freely. As a Nation, we can help freedom-loving people everywhere build a world in which these rights are honored and respected. During Human Rights Day, Bill of Rights Day, and Human Rights Week, we celebrate the freedoms guaranteed to all Americans and protected in our Constitution's Bill of Rights.

. . .

NOW, THEREFORE, I , GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim December 10, 2007, as Human Rights Day; December 15, 2007, as Bill of Rights Day; and the week beginning December 10, 2007, as Human Rights Week. I call upon the people of the United States to mark these observances with appropriate ceremonies and activities.

Oh the Hypocrisy of It All!

The Trouble With Bodies

You think you're yourself, but there are other persons in you.

In the funhouse mirror-room you can't see yourself go on forever, because no matter how you stand, your head gets in the way.

-- John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse

Individuals with body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) have a distorted body image that reaches criteria for a DSM IV psychiatric disorder. They are extremely critical of their physical appearance, despite the fact that there may be no noticeable disfigurement or defect.

A recent neuroimaging study examined possible neural correlates of this distorted self-image (Feusner et al., 2007). The participants were 12 people with BDD (10 women, 2 men¹) and a set of well-matched controls. For this particular experiment, the focus was on faces, not bodies. The authors note that supposed defects in the face and head are among the most common preoccupations in BDD (Phillips, 2005).²

Drawing on neuropsychological evidence that these individuals are abnormally focused on details when copying and recalling the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure,³ along with the obvious propensity to perceive distortions in pictures of their own face, the authors manipulated the spatial frequency information contained in the face stimuli (through filtering, shown below). Participants viewed triplets of normal, LSF, or HSF face stimuli and performed a matching task.

Figure 1 (Feusner et al., 2007). Face stimuli. HSF indicates high spatial frequency; LSF, low spatial frequency; and NSF, normal spatial frequency. (On reproduction, the HSF image in this figure lost some of the detail that was visible in the experiment.)

Previous studies have shown that global "configural" information is contained in LSF, whereas local "featural" information, such as details about the eyes, nose, and mouth, is contained in HSF (e.g., Goffaux et al., 2005). In general, the right hemisphere is thought to be better at the former, and the left hemisphere at the latter. Were there differences between the BDD and control groups in the present study?

The BDD group demonstrated more left-sided activations in lateral aspects of the prefrontal and temporal cortices for all tasks, as well as dorsal anterior cingulate activity for the LSF task. The control group demonstrated this pattern only for the HSF task, suggesting that subjects with BDD use a similar network for processing NSH and LSF faces that control subjects use only for HSF faces. These laterality patterns suggest a bias for local, or detail, processing over global processing of faces for subjects with BDD. In addition, the BDD group showed abnormal activation of the amygdalae for HSF and LSF face tasks. We did not find differences in early ventral or dorsal visual stream regions as hypothesized; rather, the differences found are in regions that may represent later stages of visual processing or top-down effects.

Basically, for HSF stimuli, the BDD group had greater activation in the left middle and inferior temporal gyri than controls. More interestingly, for LSF stimuli, they showed greater activation in left-sided temporal-parietal regions and left inferior frontal gyrus than controls. This suggests the problem is with preferential attention to local aspects of faces, rather than an issue in the visual processing stream itself. In the future, it would be interesting to examine activation to the BDD subjects' own face, as well as other body parts perceived to be defective.

When you're lost, the smartest thing to do is stay put till you're found, hollering if necessary. But to holler guarantees humiliation as well as rescue; keeping silent permits some saving of face--you can act surprised at the fuss when your rescuers find you and swear you weren't lost, if they do. What's more you might find your own way yet, however belatedly.

-- John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse

Credits: Funhouse graphics and Barth quotes are from the website of the Florida Research Ensemble (Professor Gregory L. Ulmer et al.).


Footnotes

¹ However, there may not be much of a gender discrepancy in the general BDD population, according to the Body Image Program at Butler Hospital in Rhode Island).

² Dr. Katharine Phillips et al. have compiled a list of the most commonly disliked areas in a group of over 500 BDD patients.

³ Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure.



References

Feusner JD, Townsend J, Bystritsky A, Bookheimer S (2007). Visual Information Processing of Faces in Body Dysmorphic Disorder. Arch Gen Psychiatry 64:1417-1425.

CONTEXT: Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) is a severe psychiatric condition in which individuals are preoccupied with perceived appearance defects. Clinical observation suggests that patients with BDD focus on details of their appearance at the expense of configural elements. This study examines abnormalities in visual information processing in BDD that may underlie clinical symptoms. OBJECTIVE: To determine whether patients with BDD have abnormal patterns of brain activation when visually processing others' faces with high, low, or normal spatial frequency information. DESIGN: Case-control study. SETTING: University hospital. PARTICIPANTS: Twelve right-handed, medication-free subjects with BDD and 13 control subjects matched by age, sex, and educational achievement. Intervention Functional magnetic resonance imaging while performing matching tasks of face stimuli. Stimuli were neutral-expression photographs of others' faces that were unaltered, altered to include only high spatial frequency visual information, or altered to include only low spatial frequency visual information. Main Outcome Measure Blood oxygen level-dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging signal changes in the BDD and control groups during tasks with each stimulus type. RESULTS: Subjects with BDD showed greater left hemisphere activity relative to controls, particularly in lateral prefrontal cortex and lateral temporal lobe regions for all face tasks (and dorsal anterior cingulate activity for the low spatial frequency task). Controls recruited left-sided prefrontal and dorsal anterior cingulate activity only for the high spatial frequency task. CONCLUSIONS: Subjects with BDD demonstrate fundamental differences from controls in visually processing others' faces. The predominance of left-sided activity for low spatial frequency and normal faces suggests detail encoding and analysis rather than holistic processing, a pattern evident in controls only for high spatial frequency faces. These abnormalities may be associated with apparent perceptual distortions in patients with BDD. The fact that these findings occurred while subjects viewed others' faces suggests differences in visual processing beyond distortions of their own appearance.

Goffaux V, Hault B, Michel C, Vuong QC, Rossion B (2005). The respective role of low and high spatial frequencies in supporting configural and featural processing of faces. Perception 34:77-86.

Phillips KA. (2005). The Broken Mirror. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Self-portrait in a Broken Mirror, is that bad luck?
by Steve Smart
Creative Commons License

This Is the Presidential Candidates' Brains On...

...an editorial in the Los Angeles Times. I guess the west coast paper felt left out of the New York Times op-ed brouhaha caused by This Is Your Brain on Politics (and the op-ed rejoinder by a group of experts -- Politics and the Brain).

From The Trouble With Oscillation, a project by artist Sally McKay.

Getting inside their heads ... really inside

Presidential candidates' health is a campaign issue. So what about their brains?

By Daniel G. Amen
December 5, 2007

What do Rudy Giuliani's messy personal life, John McCain's temper and Hillary Clinton's inability to seem authentic have in common? Maybe nothing. They may be just overblown issues in the otherwise normal lives of candidates under the political microscope.

Such symptoms, however, may mean a lot -- such as evidence of underlying brain dysfunction. Sometimes people with messy personal lives have low prefrontal cortex activity associated with poor judgment; sometimes people with temper problems have brain damage and impulse control problems; sometimes people who struggle with authenticity have trouble really seeing things from someone else's perspective.

Is the brain health of a presidential candidate a fair topic in an election year? Certainly Dick Cheney's heart condition wasn't off-limits in 2000... Should we go so far as to do brain scans? Of candidates for the Oval Office? Some people might consider discussing brain health a ridiculous idea. Not me.

As a neuropsychiatrist and brain-imaging expert, [NOTE: huh, 9 papers in mostly low-profile journals] I want our elected leaders to be some of the "brain healthiest people" in the land. How do you know about the brain health of a presidential candidate unless you look? ...

Three of the last four presidents have shown clear brain pathology. [NOTE: oh really?? we only have evidence for AD in Reagan, as much as we'd like to believe that George W. has brain damage.] President Reagan's Alzheimer's disease was evident during his second term in office. Nonelected people were covering up his forgetfulness and directing the country's business. Few people knew it, but we had a national crisis. Brain studies have been shown to predict Alzheimer's five to nine years before people have their first symptoms. [NOTE: uh...no. Published studies say 2-3 years.]

President Clinton's moral lapses and problems with bad judgment and excitement-seeking behavior -- indicative of problems in the prefrontal cortex -- eventually led to his impeachment and a poisonous political divisiveness in the U.S. The prefrontal cortex houses the brain's supervisor, involved with conscience, forethought, planning, attention span and judgment.

One could argue that our current president's struggles with language and emotional rigidity are symptoms of temporal lobe pathology. The temporal lobes, underneath your temples and behind your eyes, are involved with language, mood stability, reading social cues and emotional flexibility.

I seriously doubt that the "messy personal life" of Rudy Giuliani or Bill Clinton is evident from reading their SPECT scans (the imaging methodology used by Dr. Amen in his highly profitable clinics), or their ultra-high resolution 7T MRI scans, for that matter. However, Adrian Raine and colleagues at USC may want to take a look at Dick Cheney's brain...

In a future world with a high degree of diagnostic accuracy, perhaps

Ensuring that our president has a healthy brain may be more than an interesting topic of conversation. It can be important information to put into the election equation. A president with brain problems could wreak havoc on the U.S. and the world at large. Maybe we shouldn't leave the health of our president's brain to chance. We have the tools; shouldn't we look?

No! Not now. Not yet.

Sildenafil Improves Performance...

...cognitive performance, that is.

Sildenafil (aka Viagra) not only reduces jet lag in hamsters (Agostino et al., 2007), now it's been shown to improve object retrieval performance in monkeys (Rutten et al., 2007). Sildenafil is in the class of drugs known as phosphodiesterase inhibitors (PDEs). As indicated by the name, PDE drugs block phosphodiesterase, thereby preventing the degradation of cAMP and cGMP. Sildenafil inhibits the PDE5 subtype, whereas rolipram inhibits the PDE4 subtype.

Both drugs were equally effective in improving the monkeys' ability to correctly reach a food treat in a transparent box with one open side, which was billed as a prefrontal "executive function" task.

During vehicle sessions, monkeys readily reached for the food treats, successfully acquiring the treat on the first reach 100 ± 0% during easy trials and 52 ± 3% during difficult trials. Over the course of the experiment (2 months), there were no changes in vehicle performance.

The PDE4 inhibitor rolipram (0.003–0.1 mg/kg, i.m.) dose-dependently increased correct first reaches during difficult trials, reaching significance at 0.01 mg/kg. At the highest dose tested without side effects (0.03 mg/kg), the percentage correct first reaches were increased approximately 20 to 71 ± 3%.

The PDE5 inhibitor sildenafil (0.3–3 mg/kg, i.m.) dose-dependently increased correct first reaches during difficult trials, reaching significance at 1 mg/kg. At the highest dose tested (3 mg/kg), correct reaches were increased approximately 20 to 73 ± 3%. No side effects were observed.

Neither rolipram nor sildenafil altered performance during the easy trials, with the exception of the high dose of rolipram (0.1 mg/kg), in which monkeys failed to perform the task (data not shown) because of emetic side effects.

The mechanism(s) by which these PDE drugs might improve functioning of the prefrontal cortex are not well-elucidated at this point.

References

Agostino PV, Plano SA, Golombek DA. (2007). Sildenafil accelerates reentrainment of circadian rhythms after advancing light schedules. PNAS 104: 9834–9839.

Rutten K, Basile JL, Prickaerts J, Blokland A, Vivian JA. (2007).
Selective PDE inhibitors rolipram and sildenafil improve object retrieval performance in adult cynomolgus macaques. Psychopharmacology, Nov 23; [Epub ahead of print].

Mirror Neurons in Primary Motor Cortex?

The mirror neurons, it would seem, dissolve the barrier between self and others. I call them "empathy neurons" or "Dalai Llama neurons".

-- MIRROR NEURONS AND THE BRAIN IN THE VAT
by V.S. Ramachandran

Everyone knows what mirror neurons are, those darlings of the pop neuroscience world. First observed in the ventral premotor area F5 of macaque monkeys, mirror neurons increase their rate of firing when the animal performs an action, and when the animal watches someone else perform the action (Rizzolati et al, 1996). These "monkey see, monkey do" neurons have taken on a life far beyond their originally postulated role in imitation. However, not everyone believes that mirror neurons can account for all aspects of human language, culture, and social cognition -- from empathy to altruism to autism to aesthetics to

certain listeners' misattribution of anger in the music of avant garde jazz saxophonists (Gridley & Hoff, 2006)

-- as explained by Alison Gopnik [see also The Neurocritic, Mixing Memory, Neurofuture, et al.]:

The idea that these particular cells might underlie a fundamental human impulse [altruism] reflects the emergence of a new scientific myth. Like a traditional myth, it captures intuitions about the human condition through vivid metaphors.

An intriguing new study in the Journal of Neuroscience (Tkach et al., 2007) describes neuronal activity in the primary motor cortex (MI, also called M1) and dorsal premotor cortex of monkeys that looks an awful lot like that of mirror neurons, heretofore confined to ventral premotor cortex and the inferior parietal lobe. The authors conclude that

congruence between observation and action is a general feature of the motor system, even outside of canonical "mirror" areas.

Why is this so interesting? Primarily because of what's going on in M1. If [some] cells there show similar activity during both the execution and observation of actions, what's preventing the arm from moving in the latter case?

If our interpretation of this phenomenon is correct and the monkeys are generating covert motor commands during observation that are congruent with the commands generated during the behavior itself, a natural question is how the dissociation between motor cortical modulation and action occurs. One possibility is that the motor cortical activity we observe is being actively gated by other cortical areas. Results from human EEG studies along with our LFP results suggest that an increase in power in the beta range is associated with inhibition of the excitatory state of the motor cortex (Gilbertson et al., 2005). There is some clinical evidence regarding the origin of this inhibition in patients with frontal lobe damage that exhibit "unwilled" automatic movements (Archibald et al., 2001). These clinical studies suggest that the prefrontal, anterior cingulate, and supplementary motor cortices may contribute the necessary inhibition to prevent triggering of movement commands realized in activated motor and premotor cortical areas. Another possibility is that the motor cortex is part of a more distributed network responsible for movement. Therefore, motor cortical activity alone may not be sufficient to elicit action. Without knowing more about the functional roles of the cells from which we are recording, it is difficult to say anything further about the mechanisms intervening between stimulus and response during the observation phase of the experiment.

In the end, we return to the question, "What's so special about mirror neurons?" We know virtually nothing about the morphological properties of these magical cells (unlike their media cousins, the spindle neurons), so the answer awaits another day (and results from some highly impractical experiments).

References

Gridley MC, Hoff R. (2006). Do mirror neurons explain misattribution of emotions in music? Percept Mot Skills 102:600-2.

Rizzolatti G, Fadiga L, Gallese V, Fogassi L. (1996). Premotor cortex and the recognition of motor actions. Cog Brain Res. 3:131-41.

Tkach D, Reimer J, Hatsopoulos NG. (2007). Congruent activity during action and action observation in motor cortex. J Neurosci. 27:13241-50.

A variety of studies have shown that motor cortical areas can be activated by observation of familiar actions. Here, we describe single-neuron responses in monkey primary motor (MI) and dorsal premotor (PMd) cortices during passive observation and execution of a familiar task. We show that the spiking modulation, preferred directions, and encoded information of cells in MI and PMd remain consistent during both observation and movement. Furthermore, we find that the presence of a visual target is necessary to elicit this congruent neural activity during observation. These findings along with results from our analysis of the oscillatory power in the beta frequency of the local field potential are consistent with previous imaging and EEG studies that have suggested that congruence between observation and action is a general feature of the motor system, even outside of canonical "mirror" areas. Such congruent activity has proposed relevance to motor learning, mimicry, and communication and has practical applications for the development of motor-cortical neuroprostheses in paralyzed patients.

D1 Receptor Knock-Out Mice Say, "No Cocaine for Us!"

"However, we'll still take plenty of food and opioid agonists!"

Unlike mice with the dopamine D2 receptor "knocked out," D1 receptor-deficient mice will no longer self-administer cocaine:

Caine SB, Thomsen M, Gabriel KI, Berkowitz JS, Gold LH, Koob GF, Tonegawa S, Zhang J, Xu M. (2007). Lack of Self-Administration of Cocaine in Dopamine D1 Receptor Knock-Out Mice. J. Neurosci. 27:13140-13150.

Evidence suggests a critical role for dopamine in the reinforcing effects of cocaine in rats and primates. However, self-administration has been less often studied in the mouse species, and, to date, "knock-out" of individual dopamine-related genes in mice has not been reported to reduce the reinforcing effects of cocaine. We studied the dopamine D1 receptor and cocaine self-administration in mice using a combination of gene-targeted mutation and pharmacological tools. Two cohorts with varied breeding and experimental histories were tested, and, in both cohorts, there was a significant decrease in the number of D1 receptor knock-out mice that met criteria for acquisition of cocaine self-administration (2 of 23) relative to wild-type mice (27 of 32). After extinction of responding with saline self-administration, dose–response studies showed that cocaine reliably and dose dependently maintained responding greater than saline in all wild-type mice but in none of the D1 receptor knock-out mice. The D1-like agonist SKF 82958 (2,3,4,5,-tetrahydro-6-chloro-7,8-dihydroxy-1-phenyl-1H-3-benzazepine hydrobromide) and the D2-like agonist quinelorane both functioned as positive reinforcers in wild-type mice but not in D1 receptor mutant mice, whereas food and intravenous injections of the opioid agonist remifentanil functioned as positive reinforcers in both genotypes. Finally, pretreatment with the D1-like antagonist SCH 23390 [R-(+)-8-chloro-2,3,4,5-tetrahydro-3-methyl-5-phenyl-1H-3-benzazepine-7-01] produced surmountable antagonism of the reinforcing effects of cocaine in the commonly used strain C57BL/6J. We conclude that D1 receptor knock-out mice do not reliably self-administer cocaine and that the D1 receptor is critical for the reinforcing effects of cocaine and other dopamine agonists, but not food or opioids, in mice.