Topic 11: Social Behavior

Question 1

What is delay gratification?

Answer 1

withholding from an immediate reward for the purpose of achieving a longer-term goal

measures related to this taken at a young age seems to predict many measures of success later in life (e.g., stronger delay gratification behavior correlated with higher SAT scores, lower rates of obesity and substance use, etc.)

related to PFC development

Question 2

What are intertemporal choice tasks?

Answer 2

are one way to operationalize the ability to delay gratification

Question 3

What is delay discounting?

Answer 3

refers to the diminishing value associated with an outcome that is temporally distant (e.g. in the future)

observed in both human and non-human animals alike

can be used to measure impulsivity (which is mediated by the frontostriatal system, and also thought to be an important factor in ADHD)

Question 4

What were the methods of the Michaelson et al. (2013) study on social influences on decision making?

Answer 4

3 vignettes (scenes) depicting a person who was depicted as: trustworthy, neutral, untrustworthy

manipulated trustworthiness in an intertemporal choice task

Question 5

What were the results of the Michaelson et al. (2013) study on social influences on decision making?

Answer 5

found decisions varied as a function of trustworthiness, showing effects of trustworthiness manipulation on delay discounting

it was a within-subject manipulation, meaning we can’t attribute this to any one biological factor (e.g. frontal lobe function)

rather, the participants seemed to be flexibly adapting their decision making on the basis of socially-relevant information

Question 6

How does the case of Phineas Gage show the importance of frontal regions in social behavior?

Answer 6

Phineas Gage’s frontal lobe was severely damaged after an accident in which an explosion propelled a railroad spike directly through his skull

he lived for an additional 12 years without any obvious major cognitive deficits (e.g. intellectual, perceptual, etc.)

however, a dramatic change in his personally did seem to result from the accident

among other changes, Gage began acting in ways that were considered socially inappropriate (e.g. rude)

provided a hugely important case study that was among the first to emphasize the critical importance of the frontal lobes and their contribution to cognition and behavior

parallel with H.M. (in terms of the scope of impact from a single case study)

Question 7

What parts of the frontal cortex is involved in social behavior?

Answer 7

frontal cortex can be divided up into three major regions: motor/premotor, paralimbic, heteromodal

the paralimbic portion more closely associated with social behavior, and includes the anterior cingulate and caudal orbitofrontal regions (which corresponds roughly with the vmPFC)

Question 8

What is vmPFC damage associated with?

Answer 8

vmPFC damage is associated with what is termed “psudopsycopathy” or “acquired sociopathy”

Question 9

What were the methods of the Motzkin et al. (2012) study on prison inmates?

Answer 9

ran some experiments with a sample of prison inmates

psychopathy estimated to be a diagnosis that applies to 25% of the US Adult inmate population, so they should be overrepresented in their sample

used tasks that assess degree to which behavior can deviate from rationality (involving offers that may seem more or less “fair”, somewhat independent of whether it makes sense to accept them)

one common experimental paradigm for assessing various aspects of decision making is the ultimatum game: you and a player are dividing a stack of coins; if the other player rejects your proposal, you both get nothing, how much will you offer?

Question 10

What were the results of the Motzkin et al. (2012) study on prison inmates?

Answer 10

found behavioral evidence for a greater sensitivity to unfair offers in their sample (as compared to the general population)

for example, the average person might reject a hugely unfair split (99/1) but accept a somewhat unfair split (60/40), whereas the threshold for accepting offers in this sample was skewed towards more fair offers

Question 11

Why might someone show a greater sensitivity to unfair offers in the ultimatum game?

Answer 11

one possibility is spite

in other words, someone may be willing to take a loss of sorts (e.g. they end up with less money) if they consider that course of action to be more rewarding that the prospect of what they’re giving up, and/or are motivated to “get back” at someone

Question 12

What were the results of the Motzkin et al. (2012) imaging study?

Answer 12

used DTI to assess connectivity between various regions ad the vmPFC (including the amygdala and precuneus)

compared prisoners with and without and psychopathy diagnosis

found some evidence for reduced connectivity

Question 13

What are the two essential steps in theory of mind?

Answer 13

1. must represent another person as an individual
2. must represent that person’s mental state

the second step, sometimes referred to as “mentalizing” involves representations associated with thoughts, motivations, emotions, knowledge, etc. of another

theory of mind sometimes tested using the false belief test

Question 14

What are the developmental trajectories of theory of mind?

Answer 14

theory of mind seems to emerge in typically developing individuals around age 4

sometimes taken as a developmental milestone

abnormal theory of mind has been hypothesized to play a role in autism

Question 15

What were the results of the Gallagher and Frith (2003) study on the anterior paracingulate cortex?

Answer 15

argued the anterior paracingulate cortex is involved with taking “an intentional stance”, which is to treat a system as an agent, attributing to it beliefs and goals

damage to this region can result in a variant of frontotemporal dementia involving a decline over control over social behavior, decision making, and emotion

this region (anterior paracingulate cortex) roughly corresponds with mPFC

Question 16

What is the underlying neurology of theory of mind proposed by Saxe and Kanwisher (2003)?

Answer 16

hypothesized the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) is the critical piece of supporting neurology

they believed the results obtained by Gallagher and Frith (2003) were the product of how they assessed ToM processing, reflecting a confound

Question 17

What were the results of the Saxe and Kanwisher (2003) study to distinguish effects related to theory of mind from those merely involved in mental-state concepts?

Answer 17

they found evidence that the TPJ is recruited for ToM judgements, while the anterior paracigulate cortex may get recruited for more general judgments involving mental state concepts

Question 18

What is the alternative account of the TPJ in theory of mind proposed by Mitchell (2008)?

Answer 18

hypothesized that the TPJ activity noted by others could be more generally explained as a result of a task requirement to shift their attention, or in other words when “perceivers must break their current attentional set to reorient to task relevant stimuli”

consistent with this proposition, damage to the TPJ often results in hemi-spatial neglect

hemi neglect can be characterized as a failure to attend to objects/information on one side of your visual field

using the Posner cueing paradigm, found robust TPJ activity throughout

also found particularly large increases in activation on invalidly cued trials

Question 19

What are teslas (T)?

Answer 19

MRI scanners have magnetic fields that vary in strength: stronger magnetic fields allow for higher spatial resolution

strength of magnet fields are measured in the tesla (T) unit

this is a detail that is often glossed over but can be an important factor, particularly when imaging relatively small structures

Question 20

What was the goal of the Scholz et al. (2009) study?

Answer 20

attempted to replicate the results of Mitchell (2008) using a 3 tesla scanner (Mitchell and Saxe et al. both used a 1.5 t)

they replicated Mitchell’s result, also finding that the Posner cueing paradigm activates the TPJ

however, not all of their results agreed with the interpretation put forth by Mitchell

Question 21

What were the results of Scholz et al. (2009)?

Answer 21

only a small amount of overlap between voxels identified by the ToM mentalizing task and the Posner cueing paradigm (~10%)

little (overall) evidence for correlation of voxel activity across tasks

a difference in where peak activation occurred across tasks

in summary, although generally replicating the results by Mitchell (2008), these data provide a rather different sort of interpretation as to what’s happening

Question 22

How does test-retest reliability relate to fMRI methodology?

Answer 22

there are concerns about the test-retest reliability of fMRI

Feredoes and Postle (2007) estimated that only 6.5% - 15.2% of voxels achieved statistical significance across multiple sessions performing the same task with the same participants

what does this say about the potential for any given statistically significant fMRI result to represent a type 1 error

Question 23

What were the methods of the Young et al. (2010) study on the causal inferences with repetitive TMS?

Answer 23

investigated the effects of rTMS on moral judgments

participants heard a story and were asked to rate the actions of the protagonist on a continuum ranging from “permissible-to-forbidden”

manipulated three independent variables

intention: malicious or neutral
outcome suffered: harm or no harm
TMS location: right TPJ or control

Question 24

What is the method of using stimulation in a control area as a control for TMS?

Answer 24

deliver actual stimulation to another region

Question 25

What is a pro of using stimulation in a control area as a control for TMS studies?

Answer 25

actually controls for more generalized effects that might result from that kind of stimulation

Question 26

What is a con of using stimulation in a control area as a control for TMS studies?

Answer 26

choice of where to stimulate is not always straightforward

Question 27

What is a sham stimulation and how is it used as a control for TMS studies?

Answer 27

create an illusion of delivering stimulation (e.g., simulate with sound, etc.)

Question 28

What is a pro of using a sham stimulation as a control for TMS studies?

Answer 28

do not risk introducing a confound related to stimulating a different region

Question 29

What is a con of using a sham stimulation as a control for TMS studies?

Answer 29

does not control for the possibility of more generalized effects that might result from any (non-specific) electrical stimulation of the cortex

Question 30

What were the results of the Young et al. (2010) study on trials where there was malicious intent but no harm?

Answer 30

for trials in which there was malicious intent but no harm occurred, applying TMS to the TPJ resulted in judgments that endorsed the notion that the protagonist was acting more permissibly in other words, the intention of the protagonist no longer seemed to be factored in as heavily, while the outcome seemed to be more influential

Question 31

What were the results of the Young et al. (2010) study on trials where there was malicious intent and harm?

Answer 31

applying TMS did not affect judgments made when there was malicious intent and harm occurred why no effect of TMS in that situation? One important difference could be that this is a less ambiguous situation (because there is no mismatch between intention and outcome)

Question 32

What do the results of the Young et al. (2010) study suggest?

Answer 32

these results suggest that the TPJ might be particularly relevant when marking moral judgment in more ambiguous situations (e.g. where there is a mismatch between the outcome and the intention of an action) note that, because TMS was delivered just prior to the judgment, it would be difficult to explain the result as a confound relating to something other than the judgment itself (e.g. story comprehension) of course, these results do not rule out contributions from the TPJ to attentional orienting; in fact, other studies have found impairments to attentional orienting after applying TMS to the TPJ it may also be the case that the spatial resolution supported by TMS is coarse enough (on the order of cubic cm, not mm) that there may still be somewhat separable portions of TPJ associated with each kind of task that are difficult/impossible to distinguish experimentally

Question 33

What was the study by Koster-Hale et al. (2013)?

Answer 33

compared neural activation in individuals with high-functioning ASD to neurotypical controls

Question 34

What were the results of Koster-Hale et al. (2013)?

Answer 34

they found that both groups (ASD and controls) made similar judgments in so far as: intentional harm was considered more blameworthy than accidental harm both of these kinds of trials (involving harm) were judged to be worse than neutral acts however, the ASD participants assigned more blame for accidental harm and less blame for intentional harm (as compared to controls) this suggests their responses were less affected by (i.e., less sensitive to) information related to intention

Question 35

What were the results of group differences in Koster-Hale et al. (2013)?

Answer 35

group differences were also observed for an analysis focusing on the final 8 seconds of each trial (which was the point at which the intention of the protagonist was revealed to be either malicious or neutral) higher activation in TPJ for controls making judgments involving accidental (rather than intentional) harm, but not in the ASD group consider the parallel between this finding, and the idea that the ACC may become more active when there is more conflict, or more "difficulty" in reaching a decision (e.g., when you are choosing between two similarly good options)

Question 36

What were the MVPA analysis results of Koster-Hale et al. (2013)?

Answer 36

an MVPA analysis was also performed which was largely consistent with the univariate interpretation the MVPA analysis also found the magnitude of difference in TPJ activity across intentional/accidental harm trials (within the control group) predicted differences in the associated behavioral judgment

Question 37

What is experiential learning?

Answer 37

based on direct experience (e.g., getting reinforced for a choice you make)

Question 38

What is observational learning?

Answer 38

based on indirect experience (e.g. seeing someone else get reinforced for a choice they make) involves vicarious learning and is inherently social

Question 39

What were the methods of the Burke et al. (2010)?

Answer 39

tested participants in a probabilistic learning task involving blocks of trials in which points could either be won or lost (gain or loss blocks) each block presented pairs of stimuli (fractals) and required a choice between the two available options one of the available options were always associated with a positive outcome (winning points in the gain blocks or simply not losing points in the loss blocks), and the other one a negative outcome (losing points in the loss blocks or simply not gaining points in the gain blocks)

Question 40

What was the social factor that was manipulated in the Burke et al. (2010)?

Answer 40

shortly after arriving in the lab, a "confederate" joins the experimental participant in the waiting room the participant is told that, while they are in the fMRI scanner, they will be taking turns playing the game with the confederate (who will be taking part in the experiment from another room)

Question 41

What are the three conditions used in the Burke et al. (2010) study?

Answer 41

individual learning: the participant sees no information related to the turns the confederate is taking action only: the participant sees the choices being made by the confederate, though never the outcome of those choices action + outcome: the participant sees both the choices being made by the confederate, and the outcomes of those choices

Question 42

What were the results of the Burke et al. (2010)?

Answer 42

performance was better in both the "action only" and "action + outcome" conditions, as compared to "individual learning"

Question 43

How did the researchers in Burke et al. (2010) explain the results of the "action only" condition?

Answer 43

could be explained by a two-stage model: participants attend to the choices being made by the confederate and those decisions bias their own selections in conjunction with the direct feedback they receive themselves )on their own trials), this accelerates the development of their value-based representations of the stimuli in the action + outcome condition this process is accelerated even more, because they have more data to work with (i.e., they see the outcomes of the choices being made by both themselves and the confederate)

Question 44

What were the conclusions drawn by Burke et al. (2010)?

Answer 44

argued that their imaging data supported a model which relied on several hypothesized variants of the more standard error prediction signal we've already discussed (error related negativity) to guide decisions in this paradigm

Question 45

What is the action prediction error proposed by Burke et al. (2010)?

Answer 45

gauges degree of mismatch between what the participant expected the confederate would do and what they actually do (associated with dorsolateral PFC)

Question 46

What is the reward prediction error proposed by Burke et al. (2010)?

Answer 46

gauges degree of mismatch between the expected and delivered outcome (for the participant, associated with the ventral striatum)

Question 47

What is the observational outcome prediction error proposed by Burke et al. (2010)?

Answer 47

gauges degree of mismatch between what the participant predicted the outcome would be for the confederate, as compared to what was delivered (associated with vmPFC and the ventral striatum)