Neuroscienze sociali appunti per esame - Candidi

Evolutionary origins of culture - Meme and traditions - culture

Culture in non-human species - how to get food - culture pyramid (social information transfer, traditions, culture = cumulative culture)

Social learning vs imitation

Not all species have the same mechanism of social learning, humans have one unique technique: they can acquire via language. Only humans are capable of imitation.

Non-imitative social learning could arise from a number of different mechanisms:

1. Copying the action without understanding the goal of the action
2. Stimulus enhancement or local enhancement
3. Contagion

Experiment: infants watched an adult press the button using the forehead - Intentional stance

Material symbols: neuronal recycling and extended cognition - letters and numbers

Cultural skills: tools and technology - Modifying the brain by using tools and technology

As a result of using tools, the receptive field was no longer centered on the arm but was elongated down the length of the tool itself.

Mirror neurons, action

Understanding and imitation

Mirror neurons respond if an appropriate action is implied as well as directly observed.

Broca's area.

Why monkeys do not use tools

Monkeys who are tool-users there are extra connections between the intraparietal sulcus and the temporo-parietal junction.

Chapter 4 Emotions and motivation

Some characteristic of emotions:

• is a state associated with stimuli that rewarding or punishing
• are transient
• have a hedonic value: they are subjectively liked or disliked
• have particular feeling state in terms of an internal bodily response
• emotions elicit particular external motor outcomes in face and body (expression)

Theory of motivation (rolls)

Historical perspective on the emotions

1. Darwin's evolutionary theory of emotion

1872 The expression of the emotions in man and animals- similarities between facial expression of humans and non-humans in particular emotions. How many expressions are conserved across the species? They are innate.

2. Freud and unconscious

Emotional motivations

Emotions are an unconscious bias in our behavior.

3) The James-Lange theory

The self-perception of bodily changes produces emotional experience (one is sad because one cries).

4) The Cannon-Bard theory

The theory is based on the hypothalamus' role in emotions in which bodily responses occur after the emotion itself.

5) The papez circuit and the limbic brain

Papez argued that the feeling of emotions originated in the subcortical Papez circuit: a limbic-based circuit that was once thought to constitute a largely undifferentiated emotional brain. A second circuit, involving the cortex, amygdala, and orbitofrontal cortex, is called the limbic brain.

6) Ekman and basic emotions

For Ekman, there are six basic emotions: happy, sad, disgust, anger, fear, and surprise. Each emotion has its own specific natural basis, each emotion having evolved to deal with different survival problems and occurring automatically.

7) Plutchik

Eight basic emotions:

surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, anticipation, joy, acceptance, fear.8)
RollsDifferent type of emotion emerge from a consideration of a small set of principles including: whether a reward or punishment is applied, the intensity of the above, different combination of the above, the context in which an emotional stimulus appears.9)
The theory of barrett and colleaguesEmotions tap into a system termed CORE EFFECT that is organized along two dimensions: pleasant-unpleasant and high/low arousal.The concept of basic emotion rests on the assumption that there are separate neural foundations for different emotions. Other evidence suggests that both the amygdala and insula are involved in the processing of other emotions., that is possible if we consider the hypothesis that the processing of some emotions is more distributed across the brain than other emotions.Amygdala and fearAmygdala is believed to be important for memory, in particular for emotional content of memories. In monkeys, bilateral lesions of

Amygdala produces the Kluver-Bucy Syndrome. This syndrome includes behaviors unusual tameness, emotional blunting, a tendency to examine objects with the mouth and dietary changes.

The amygdala is important for both learning and storing the conditioned fear response. The ability to detect threat is so important, evolutionary, that it may occur rapidly and without conscious awareness, people are faster at detecting fear-related stimuli.

In addiction, it appears to have more general role in learning and storing the emotional value of stimuli, this includes both positive and negative associations to stimuli. Amygdala lesions do affect other aspects of reward-based learning, such as second-order conditioning.

The insula and the disgust. The insula is involved in various aspects of bodily perception, including important roles in pain perception and taste perception. Damasio report insula activity in response to recalling emotional memories link to emotions.

Anger is linked to ventral striatal region.

of basal ganglia. The dopamine system is linkto aggressive behavior in rats.

Motivation: rewards and punishment, pleasure and pain -Hierarchy of needs(physiological, Safety, Love, Esteem, Self-actualization)

Innate versus conditioned likes and dislikes

Primary reinforces act as rewords or punishers without any learning (smells, tastes,facial expressions), Secondary reinforces act as a rewords or punishers as a result oflearning.

The orbitofrontal cortex computes the motivational value of rewards

The general function of OFC is in computing the current value of a stimulus -chocolate-emotion of regret -lowa gambling task

The anterior cingulate cortex: cognitive and affective evaluation of responses

The anterior cingulate cortex is divided in dorsal and ventral section. The ventralregion is considered an affective division. The dorsal part is regarded as beingparticularly important in the detection of errors an in the monitoring of responses inwhich errors are likely to occur (stroop test).

Anterior cingulate is involved in evaluating social and emotional stimuli.

Ventral striatum and reward

Self-stimulation- The ventral striatum is part of the basal ganglia. The caudate nucleus and putamen are collectively known as the striatum. The dorsal region of the striatum has more sensorimotor properties (habit formation). The ventral region may be more specialized for emotions, although the distinction is relative and not absolute, it is part of the ganglia that includes the nucleus accumbens, involved in a limbic circuit connecting the orbitofrontal cortex, basal ganglia and thalamus.

Thoughts, attitudes, and beliefs: emotion regulation

Emotional regulation= deliberate attempts to control feeling through reappraisal, suppression, or other strategies. Using ventromedial PFC, amygdala

Attention and perception

Attention= the process by which certain information is selected for further processing and other information is discarded. The selection can take place at multiple levels in the cognitive system.

At the top level, selection may occur due to task-relevance and goals, at the bottom level selection may occur due to perceptual salience (emotional and social stimuli). LeDoux proposed the link with the amygdala, and Menon and Uddin proposed an involvement of the insula in attention orienting and anterior cingulate.

Episodic memory= memories of specific events that occurred in a particular time and space. Connected with amygdala and hippocampus

Chapter 5 Reading faces and bodies

Cognitive model

Bruce and young – Face recognition unit (a hypothetical entity in models of face processing that responds to the face of a particular individual) – Person identity node (a hypothetical entity in models of face processing that links together semantic and perceptual information about a particular individual) – Prosopagnosia (inability to recognize previously familiar faces) De Renzi’s case, he recognizes his family members from their voices.

Neural basis of face perception

There is a

Distinction between two visual streams:

1. A ventral visual stream: is concerned with identifying objects (where they are)
2. A dorsal visual stream: is concerned with locating objects (what they are)

Occipital face area (OFA) - located in the inferior occipital gyrus -

• Relatively specialized for faces (not body or objects)
• Codes the physical aspects of facial stimuli
• Does NOT show categorical perception of faces - categorical perception (tendency to perceive ambiguous or hybrid stimuli as either one thing or the other)

Fusiform face area (FFA)

• Relatively specialized for faces (not body or objects)
• Important for computing an invariant facial identity (important for recognizing known faces)
• Responds to stable aspect of face (person identity)
• Experiment with Greebles (non-face objects) as participants become experts they move from a part-based to holistic processing and activate FFA

Superior temporal sulcus (STS)

• Responds to faces and bodies (changeable aspects of face)
• Important for action

perception and dynamic stimuli (lip movements or threat noises)-important for extracting social cues (eye gaze)-Integrates visual and auditory information

Perceiving emotion from faces

1. How does facial expression recognition relate to other aspects of facial perception?

   A distinction between recognizing familiar faces and recognizing emotional expressions in faces. This dissociation is not that absolute. Simulation theory (the theory that we come to understand others by vicariously producing their current state in ourselves). There is a good evidence that recognition of facial emotions is dissociable from facial identity recognition. The evidence suggest that brain regions involved in emotional experience and sensorimotor simulation have an important role in expression recognition but the role of STS in expression recognition remains less clear.

2. Do familiar faces have an emotional signature?

   A familiar face generates an emotional response? The emotional response has been measured in terms of

med by the superior temporal sulcus (STS) and the posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG). These regions are involved in processing dynamic body cues and integrating them with facial expressions and vocalizations. Perceiving touch - tactile perception of bodies The primary somatosensory cortex (S1) and the posterior insula are responsible for processing tactile information from the body. These regions are involved in perceiving touch and differentiating between pleasant and unpleasant sensations. Perceiving pain - nociceptive perception of bodies The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the insula play a crucial role in perceiving pain from the body. These regions are involved in processing the intensity and unpleasantness of pain stimuli. Overall, the perception of bodies involves a complex interplay between different brain regions, each specialized in processing specific aspects of body perception. From the automatic response of skin conductance to the reflex-like perception of emotional body language, our brains are finely tuned to perceive and interpret information from the bodies we encounter.