Verwendung ökonomischer Spiele für die Diagnostik psychischer Erkrankungen

Ein zentraler Aspekt vieler psychischer Erkrankungen ist die Störung eines oder mehrerer Entscheidungsfindungsprozesse in sozialen Interaktionen. Die neuartige Kombination aus ökonomischer Spieltheorie und Neurowissenschaft ermöglicht es, aufgrund der Spieltheorie Abweichungen im Sozialverhalten psychischer Patienten „komputational“ zu untersuchen. In laufenden Studien untersuchen wir das soziale Entscheidungsverhalten von Patienten mit unipolarer Depression, Borderline Persönlichkeitsstörung und Autismus-Spektrum Störung mittels einfacher sozialer Experimente. Bei der Borderline Persönlichkeitsstörung hat sich gezeigt, dass das Vertrauensverhalten, Kooperationsverhalten und Bestrafungsverhalten der Betroffenen inkonsistent ist. Patienten mit Autismus-Spektrum Störung unterschieden sich nicht von gesunden Kontrollpersonen in Bezug auf Vertrauen und Kooperation, teilen aber deutlich weniger Belohnung mit anderen, wenn sie nicht dafür bestraft werden konnten. Die Verwendung des Wettbewerbsparadigmas hat gezeigt, dass Individuen mit Depression den Wettbewerb mehr scheuen als gesunde Kontrollpersonen. In einer aktuellen fMRI-Studie kombinieren wir das Wettbewerbsparadigma mit funktioneller Kernspintomographie, um Veränderungen der Hirnaktivität zu untersuchen, die den veränderten Wettbewerbspräferenzen bei Depression zugrunde liegen

Moving Just Like You: Motor Interference Depends on Similar Motility of Agent and Observer

Recent findings in neuroscience suggest an overlap between brain regions involved in the execution of movement and perception of another’s movement. This so-called “action-perception coupling” is supposed to serve our ability to automatically infer the goals and intentions of others by internal simulation of their actions. A consequence of this coupling is motor interference (MI), the effect of movement observation on the trajectory of one’s own movement. Previous studies emphasized that various features of the observed agent determine the degree of MI, but could not clarify how human-like an agent has to be for its movements to elicit MI and, more importantly, what ‘human-like’ means in the context of MI. Thus, we investigated in several experiments how different aspects of appearance and motility of the observed agent influence motor interference (MI). Participants performed arm movements in horizontal and vertical directions while observing videos of a human, a humanoid robot, or an industrial robot arm with either artificial (industrial) or human-like joint configurations. Our results show that, given a human-like joint configuration, MI was elicited by observing arm movements of both humanoid and industrial robots. However, if the joint configuration of the robot did not resemble that of the human arm, MI could longer be demonstrated. Our findings present evidence for the importance of human-like joint configuration rather than other human-like features for perception-action coupling when observing inanimate agents

Grand Challenges in Shape-Changing Interface Research

Shape-changing interfaces have emerged as an new method for interacting with computers, using dynamic changes in a device’s physical shape for input and output. With the advances of research into shape-changing interfaces, we see a need to synthesize the main, open research questions. The purpose of this synthesis is to formulate common challenges across the diverse fields engaged in shape-change research, to facilitate progression from single prototypes and individual design explorations to grander scientific goals, and to draw attention to challenges that come with maturity, including those concerning ethics, theory-building, and societal impact. In this article we therefore present 12 grand challenges for research on shape-changing interfaces, derived from a three-day workshop with 25 shape-changing interface experts with backgrounds in design, computer science, human-computer interaction, engineering, robotics, and material science

Vagus Nerve as Modulator of the Brain–Gut Axis in Psychiatric and Inflammatory Disorders

The vagus nerve represents the main component of the parasympathetic nervous system, which oversees a vast array of crucial bodily functions, including control of mood, immune response, digestion, and heart rate. It establishes one of the connections between the brain and the gastrointestinal tract and sends information about the state of the inner organs to the brain via afferent fibers. In this review article, we discuss various functions of the vagus nerve which make it an attractive target in treating psychiatric and gastrointestinal disorders. There is preliminary evidence that vagus nerve stimulation is a promising add-on treatment for treatment-refractory depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and inflammatory bowel disease. Treatments that target the vagus nerve increase the vagal tone and inhibit cytokine production. Both are important mechanism of resiliency. The stimulation of vagal afferent fibers in the gut influences monoaminergic brain systems in the brain stem that play crucial roles in major psychiatric conditions, such as mood and anxiety disorders. In line, there is preliminary evidence for gut bacteria to have beneficial effect on mood and anxiety, partly by affecting the activity of the vagus nerve. Since, the vagal tone is correlated with capacity to regulate stress responses and can be influenced by breathing, its increase through meditation and yoga likely contribute to resilience and the mitigation of mood and anxiety symptoms

Testing the social competition hypothesis of depression using a simple economic game

BACKGROUND Price's social competition hypothesis interprets the depressive state as an unconscious, involuntary losing strategy, which enables individuals to yield and accept defeat in competitive situations. AIMS We investigated whether patients who suffer from major depressive disorder (MDD) would avoid competition more often than either patients suffering from borderline personality disorder (BPD) or healthy controls. METHOD In a simple paper-folding task healthy participants and patiens with MDD and BPD were matched with two opponents, one with an unknown diagnosis and one who shared their clinical diagnosis, and they had to choose either a competitive or cooperative payment scheme for task completion. RESULTS When playing against an unknown opponent, but not the opponent with the same diagnosis, the patients with depression chose the competitive payment scheme statistically less often than healthy controls and patients diagnosed with BPD. CONCLUSION The competition avoidance against the unknown opponent is consistent with Price's social competition hypothesis. DECLARATION OF INTEREST G.H. received research support, consulting fees and speaker honoraria from Lundbeck, AstraZeneca, Servier, Eli Lilly, Roche and Novartis. COPYRIGHT AND USAGE © The Royal College of Psychiatrists 2016. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Non-Commercial, No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) licence

LAMINAR DISPERSION AND THE MONITORING OF FLOCCULATION PROCESSES

<div><p>Many everyday tasks require the ability of two or more individuals to coordinate their actions with others to increase efficiency. Such an increase in efficiency can often be observed even after only very few trials. Previous work suggests that such behavioral adaptation can be explained within a probabilistic framework that integrates sensory input and prior experience. Even though higher cognitive abilities such as intention recognition have been described as probabilistic estimation depending on an internal model of the other agent, it is not clear whether much simpler daily interaction is consistent with a probabilistic framework. Here, we investigate whether the mechanisms underlying efficient coordination during manual interactions can be understood as probabilistic optimization. For this purpose we studied in several experiments a simple manual handover task concentrating on the action of the receiver. We found that the duration until the receiver reacts to the handover decreases over trials, but strongly depends on the position of the handover. We then replaced the human deliverer by different types of robots to further investigate the influence of the delivering movement on the reaction of the receiver. Durations were found to depend on movement kinematics and the robot’s joint configuration. Modeling the task was based on the assumption that the receiver’s decision to act is based on the accumulated evidence for a specific handover position. The evidence for this handover position is collected from observing the hand movement of the deliverer over time and, if appropriate, by integrating this sensory likelihood with prior expectation that is updated over trials. The close match of model simulations and experimental results shows that the efficiency of handover coordination can be explained by an adaptive probabilistic fusion of a-priori expectation and online estimation.</p></div

Video Screenshots.

<p>Screenshots from the videos of the different agents presented to the subjects in the previous <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0039637#pone.0039637-Kupferberg1" target="_blank">[13]</a> and the current experiment. The participants were instructed to perform horizontal or vertical movements while viewing the videos and fixating on the right hand of A) a human agent (MH), B) the humanoid robot JAST <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0039637#pone.0039637-Kupferberg1" target="_blank">[13]</a>, C) the industrial robot arm JAHIR and D) JAHIR rotated, which performed congruent or incongruent movements. The experimenter shown in A has given written informed consent (as outlined in the PLoS consent form) to publication of his photograph.</p