Common and Unique Representations in pFC for Place Attractiveness

Although previous neuroimaging research has identified overlapping correlates of subjective value across different reward types in the ventromedial pFC (vmPFC), it is not clear whether this “common currency” evaluative signal extends to the aesthetic domain. To examine this issue, we scanned human participants with fMRI while they made attractiveness judgments of faces and places—two stimulus categories that are associated with different underlying rewards, have very different visual properties, and are rarely compared with each other. We found overlapping signals for face and place attractiveness in the vmPFC, consistent with the idea that this region codes a signal for value that applies across disparate reward types and across both economic and aesthetic judgments. However, we also identified a subregion of vmPFC within which activity patterns for face and place attractiveness were distinguishable, suggesting that some category-specific attractiveness information is retained in this region. Finally, we observed two separate functional regions in lateral OFC: one region that exhibited a category-unique response to face attractiveness and another region that responded strongly to faces but was insensitive to their value. Our results suggest that vmPFC supports a common mechanism for reward evaluation while also retaining a degree of category-specific information, whereas lateral OFC may be involved in basic reward processing that is specific to only some stimulus categories

Names and their meanings: A dual-process account of proper-name encoding and retrieval

The ability to pick out a unique entity with a proper name is an important component of human language. It has been a primary focus of research in the philosophy of language since the nineteenth century. Brain-based evidence has shed new light on this capacity, and an extensive literature indicates the involvement of distinct fronto-temporal and temporo-occipito-parietal association cortices in proper-name retrieval. However, comparatively few efforts have sought to explain how memory encoding processes lead to the later recruitment of these distinct regions at retrieval. Here, we provide a unified account of proper-name encoding and retrieval, reviewing evidence that socio-emotional and unitized encoding subserve the retrieval of proper names via anterior-temporal-prefrontal activations. Meanwhile, non-unitized item-item and item-context encoding support subsequent retrieval, largely dependent on the temporo-occipito-parietal cortex. We contend that this well-established divergence in encoding systems can explain how proper names are later retrieved from distinct neural structures. Furthermore, we explore how evidence reviewed here can inform a century-and-a-half-old debate about proper names and the meanings they pick out

Seven Computations of the Social Brain

The social environment presents the human brain with the most complex of information processing demands. The computations that the brain must perform occur in parallel, combine social and nonsocial cues, produce verbal and non-verbal signals, and involve multiple cognitive systems; including memory, attention, emotion, learning. This occurs dynamically and at timescales ranging from milliseconds to years. Here, we propose that during social interactions, seven core operations interact to underwrite coherent social functioning; these operations accumulate evidence efficiently – from multiple modalities – when inferring what to do next. We deconstruct the social brain and outline the key components entailed for successful human social interaction. These include (1) social perception; (2) social inferences, such as mentalizing; (3) social learning; (4) social signaling through verbal and non-verbal cues; (5) social drives (e.g., how to increase one’s status); (6) determining the social identity of agents, including oneself; and (7) minimizing uncertainty within the current social context by integrating sensory signals and inferences. We argue that while it is important to examine these distinct aspects of social inference, to understand the true nature of the human social brain, we must also explain how the brain integrates information from the social world

The Default-Mode Network Represents Aesthetic Appeal that Generalizes Across Visual Domains

Visual aesthetic evaluations, which impact decision-making and well-being, recruit the ventral visual pathway, subcortical reward circuitry, and parts of the medial prefrontal cortex overlapping with the default-mode network (DMN). However, it is unknown whether these networks represent aesthetic appeal in a domain-general fashion, independent of domain-specific representations of stimulus content (artworks versus architecture or natural landscapes). Using a classification approach, we tested whether the DMN or ventral occipitotemporal cortex (VOT) contains a domain-general representation of aesthetic appeal. Classifiers were trained on multivoxel functional MRI response patterns collected while observers made aesthetic judgments about images from one aesthetic domain. Classifier performance (high vs. low aesthetic appeal) was then tested on response patterns from held-out trials from the same domain to derive a measure of domain-specific coding, or from a different domain to derive a measure of domain-general coding. Activity patterns in category-selective VOT contained a degree of domain-specific information about aesthetic appeal, but did not generalize across domains. Activity patterns from the DMN, however, were predictive of aesthetic appeal across domains. Importantly, the ability to predict aesthetic appeal varied systematically; predictions were better for observers who gave more extreme ratings to images subsequently labeled as high or low. These findings support a model of aesthetic appreciation whereby domain-specific representations of the content of visual experiences in VOT feed in to a core domain-general representation of visual aesthetic appeal in the DMN. Whole-brain searchlight analyses identified additional prefrontal regions containing information relevant for appreciation of cultural artifacts (artwork and architecture) but not landscapes

Neural Representation of Abstract Task Structure During Generalization

Cognitive models in psychology and neuroscience widely assume that the human brain maintains an abstract representation of tasks. This assumption is fundamental to theories explaining how we learn quickly, think creatively, and act flexibly. However, neural evidence for a verifiably generative abstract task representation has been lacking. Here, we report an experimental paradigm that requires forming such a representation to act adaptively in novel conditions without feedback. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we observed that abstract task structure was represented within left mid-lateral prefrontal cortex, bilateral precuneus, and inferior parietal cortex. These results provide support for the neural instantiation of the long-supposed abstract task representation in a setting where we can verify its influence. Such a representation can afford massive expansions of behavioral flexibility without additional experience, a vital characteristic of human cognition

The Perception and Evaluation of Visual Beauty

What are the perceptual and cognitive processes that underlie our experiences of beauty? In this dissertation, I describe a series of experiments where we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and behavioral methods to explore the mechanisms of perception, reward representation, and decision-making during evaluations of face and place beauty. In our first study, we used fMRI to ask whether evaluative signals in frontal cortex contain category-specific information or whether these signals are encoded as a common currency across reward types. By comparing neural activity correlated with subjective ratings of face and place beauty, we showed overlapping activity in dorsal ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), consistence with the common currency hypothesis. At the same time, our results revealed category-specific patterns of activity in ventral vmPFC and in lateral orbitofrontal cortex (latOFC), suggesting at least a partial distinction in the frontal networks recruited during the processing of different types of rewards. In a follow-up study, we used fMRI to further examine face-responsive patches of activity in latOFC by measuring response in these patches while subjects evaluated but did explicitly rate face beauty. Our results demonstrated a similar pattern of response to that observed during explicit ratings, suggesting that reward-related activity in this region is not dependent on a decision-making task. Lastly, in a series of behavioral studies, we developed a novel experimental design to measure the influence of recent trial history on current judgments of face attractiveness. We found that attractiveness judgments are simultaneously contrasted away from the attractiveness of the previous face but assimilated towards the previous numerical rating given. Our results also suggested that these influences are not specific to attractiveness judgments but may be linked to more general properties of perception and decision-making. Collectively, this work furthers our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying evaluations of face and place beauty, and illuminates some of the specific contextual influences on these evaluations

Parental brain: cerebral areas activated by infant cries and faces. A comparison between different populations of parents and not.

Literature about parenting traditionally focused on caring behaviors and parental representations. Nowadays, an innovative line of research, interested in evaluating the neural areas and hormones implicated in the nurturing and caregiving responses, has developed. The only way to permit a newborn to survive and grow up is to respond to his needs and in order to succeed it is necessary, \ufb01rst of all, that the adults around him understand what his needs are. That is why adults\u2019 capacity of taking care of infants cannot disregard from some biological mechanisms, which allow them to be more responsive to the progeny and to infants in general. Many researches have proved that exist speci\ufb01c neural basis activating in response to infant evolutionary stimuli, such as infant cries and infant emotional facial expression. There is a sort of innate predisposition in human adults to respond to infants\u2019 signals, in order to satisfy their need and allow them to survive and become young adults capable of taking care of themselves. This article focuses on research that has investigated, in the last decade, the neural circuits underlying parental behavioral responses. Moreover, the paper compares the results of those studies that investigated the neural responses to infant stimuli under different conditions: familiar versus unknown children, parents versus non-parents and normative versus clinical samples (depression, addiction, adolescence, and PTSD)

Psychological and Neural Dynamics of Trust

Trust is a key feature of social interactions and central to interpersonal cooperation. Acts of trust are not only pivotal aspects of interpersonal cooperation and group cohesion, they also have important consequences for individual health and life expectancy. However, which social qualities of others foster trust, how individuals learn whom to trust, and how the brain integrates this information for optimal behavioral updating is yet unexplored. Here, I will outline two lines of research. On one hand, I will show the psychological and neural predictors of trust in different social contexts. On the other, pharmacological modulations of the neural brain structures involved in trust will be presented. In the first two behavioral experiments, I show that honesty functions as an antecedent of trustworthiness impressions and that an honest reputation is associated with higher trust during a future social interaction. Next, I delineate the neural signatures of these honesty-based trustworthiness impressions. Notably, similar to the behavioral effects of honesty on future trust decisions, I found that honesty-encoding brain regions predicted those future trust decisions, providing evidence of honesty-related brain regions that entail neural signal predictive of trusting behavior. Furthermore, an honest reputation also modulated neural responses to feedback information. Such neural modulation likely biases information integration during social learning. Consequently, I show in a further behavioral study that an honest reputation seems to indeed impair learning due to an honesty-dependent asymmetry in information weighting. Finally, I demonstrate how the pharmacological modulation of brain dynamics impacts trusting behaviors leaving trustworthiness impressions unchanged. On the one hand, these findings shed light on how honesty not only increases trust in others but also hampers learning processes for optimal behavioral adaptation. On the other, they provide the first pharmacological evidence of how impression-based trust can be changed without impacting those very first trustworthiness impressions. I finally propose accounts that might explain the observed behavioral and neural patterns and outline potential directions for new studies