Decoding Guilty Minds

A central tenet of Anglo-American penal law is that in order for an actor to be found criminally liable, a proscribed act must be accompanied by a guilty mind. While it is easy to understand the importance of this principle in theory, in practice it requires jurors and judges to decide what a person was thinking months or years earlier at the time of the alleged offense, either about the results of his conduct or about some elemental fact (such as whether the briefcase he is carrying contains drugs). Despite the central importance of this task in the administration of criminal justice, there has been very little research investigating how people go about making these decisions, and how these decisions relate to their intuitions about culpability. Understanding the cognitive mechanisms that govern this task is important for the law, not only to explore the possibility of systemic biases and errors in attributions of culpability but also to probe the intuitions that underlie them. In a set of six exploratory studies reported here, we examine the way in which individuals infer others’ legally relevant mental states about elemental facts, using the framework established over fifty years ago by the Model Penal Code (“MPC”). The widely adopted MPC framework delineates and defines the four now-familiar culpable mental states: purpose, knowledge, recklessness, and negligence. Our studies reveal that with little to no training, jury-eligible Americans can apply the MPC framework in a manner that is largely congruent with the basic assumptions of the MPC’s mental state hierarchy. However, our results also indicate that subjects’ intuitions about the level of culpability warranting criminal punishment diverge significantly from prevailing legal practice; subjects tend to regard recklessness as a sufficient basis for punishment under circumstances where the legislatures and courts tend to require knowledge

Parsing the Behavioral and Brain Mechanisms of Third-Party Punishment

The evolved capacity for third-party punishment is considered crucial to the emergence and maintenance of elaborate human social organization and is central to the modern provision of fairness and justice within society. Although it is well established that the mental state of the offender and the severity of the harm he caused are the two primary predictors of punishment decisions, the precise cognitive and brain mechanisms by which these distinct components are evaluated and integrated into a punishment decision are poorly understood. Using a brain-scanning technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we implemented a novel experimental design to functionally dissociate the mechanisms underlying evaluation, integration, and decision. This work revealed that multiple parts of the brain – some analytic, some subconscious or emotional – work in a systematic pattern to decide blameworthiness, assess harms, integrate those two decisions, and then ultimately select how a person should be punished. Specifically, harm and mental state evaluations are conducted in two different brain networks and then combined in the medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate areas of the brain, while the amygdala acts as a pivotal hub of the interaction between harm and mental state. This integrated information is then used by the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex when the brain is making a decision on punishment amount. These findings provide a blueprint of the brain mechanisms by which neutral third parties make punishment decisions

Parsing the Behavioral and Brain Mechanisms of Third-Party Punishment.

UnlabelledThe evolved capacity for third-party punishment is considered crucial to the emergence and maintenance of elaborate human social organization and is central to the modern provision of fairness and justice within society. Although it is well established that the mental state of the offender and the severity of the harm he caused are the two primary predictors of punishment decisions, the precise cognitive and brain mechanisms by which these distinct components are evaluated and integrated into a punishment decision are poorly understood. Using fMRI, here we implement a novel experimental design to functionally dissociate the mechanisms underlying evaluation, integration, and decision that were conflated in previous studies of third-party punishment. Behaviorally, the punishment decision is primarily defined by a superadditive interaction between harm and mental state, with subjects weighing the interaction factor more than the single factors of harm and mental state. On a neural level, evaluation of harms engaged brain areas associated with affective and somatosensory processing, whereas mental state evaluation primarily recruited circuitry involved in mentalization. Harm and mental state evaluations are integrated in medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate structures, with the amygdala acting as a pivotal hub of the interaction between harm and mental state. This integrated information is used by the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex at the time of the decision to assign an appropriate punishment through a distributed coding system. Together, these findings provide a blueprint of the brain mechanisms by which neutral third parties render punishment decisions.Significance statementPunishment undergirds large-scale cooperation and helps dispense criminal justice. Yet it is currently unknown precisely how people assess the mental states of offenders, evaluate the harms they caused, and integrate those two components into a single punishment decision. Using a new design, we isolated these three processes, identifying the distinct brain systems and activities that enable each. Additional findings suggest that the amygdala plays a crucial role in mediating the interaction of mental state and harm information, whereas the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex plays a crucial, final-stage role, both in integrating mental state and harm information and in selecting a suitable punishment amount. These findings deepen our understanding of how punishment decisions are made, which may someday help to improve them

A preliminary study on the induction of dioestrous ovulation in the mare – a possible method for inducing prolonged luteal phase

BACKGROUND: Strong oestrous symptoms in the mare can cause problems with racing, training and handling. Since long-acting progesterone treatment is not permitted in mares at competition (e.g. according to FEI rules), there is a need for methods to suppress unwanted cyclicity. Spontaneous dioestrous ovulations in the late luteal phase may cause a prolongation of the luteal phase in mares. METHODS: In this preliminary study, in an attempt to induce ovulation during the luteal phase, human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) (3000 IU) was injected intramuscularly in four mares (experimental group) in the luteal phase when a dioestrous follicle ≥ 30 mm was detected. A fifth mare included in this group was not treated due to no detectable dioestrous follicles ≥ 30 mm. Four control mares were similarly injected with saline. The mares were followed with ultrasound for 72 hours post injection or until ovulation. Blood samples for progesterone analysis were obtained twice weekly for one month and thereafter once weekly for another two to four months. RESULTS: Three of the hCG-treated mares ovulated within 72 hours after treatment and developed prolonged luteal phases of 58, 68 and 82 days respectively. One treated mare never ovulated after the hCG injection and progesterone levels fell below 3 nmol/l nine days post treatment. Progesterone levels in the control mares were below 3 nmol/l within nine days after saline injection, except for one mare, which developed a spontaneously prolonged luteal phase of 72 days. CONCLUSION: HCG treatment may be a method to induce prolonged luteal phases in the mare provided there is a dioestrous follicle ≥ 30 mm that ovulates post-treatment. However, the method needs to be tested on a larger number of mares to be able to draw conclusions regarding its effectiveness

Cosmic ray tests of the D0 preshower detector

The D0 preshower detector consists of scintillator strips with embedded wavelength-shifting fibers, and a readout using Visible Light Photon Counters. The response to minimum ionizing particles has been tested with cosmic ray muons. We report results on the gain calibration and light-yield distributions. The spatial resolution is investigated taking into account the light sharing between strips, the effects of multiple scattering and various systematic uncertainties. The detection efficiency and noise contamination are also investigated.Comment: 27 pages, 24 figures, submitted to NIM

Evidence for Parton kT Effects in High pT Particle Production

Inclusive pizero and direct-photon cross sections in the kinematic range 3.5 < pT < 12 GeV/c with central rapidities are presented for 530 and 800 GeV/c proton beams and a 515 GeV/c pi- beam incident on beryllium targets. Current Next-to-Leading-Order perturbative QCD calculations fail to adequately describe the data for conventional choices of scales. Kinematic distributions from these hard scattering events provide evidence that the interacting partons carry significant initial-state parton transverse momentum (kT). Incorporating these kT effects phenomenologically greatly improves the agreement between calculations and the measured cross sections.Comment: 11 pages including 6 pages of figures with caption

Measurement of direct photon production at Tevatron fixed target energies

Measurements of the production of high transverse momentum direct photons by a 515 GeV/c piminus beam and 530 and 800 GeV/c proton beams in interactions with beryllium and hydrogen targets are presented. The data span the kinematic ranges of 3.5 < p_T < 12 GeV/c in transverse momentum and 1.5 units in rapidity. The inclusive direct-photon cross sections are compared with next-to-leading-order perturbative QCD calculations and expectations based on a phenomenological parton-k_T model.Comment: RevTeX4, 23 pages, 32 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.

Parsing the Behavioral and Brain Mechanisms of Third-Party Punishment

The evolved capacity for third-party punishment is considered crucial to the emergence and maintenance of elaborate human social organization and is central to the modern provision of fairness and justice within society. Although it is well established that the mental state of the offender and the severity of the harm he caused are the two primary predictors of punishment decisions, the precise cognitive and brain mechanisms by which these distinct components are evaluated and integrated into a punishment decision are poorly understood.Using a brain-scanning technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we implemented a novel experimental design to functionally dissociate the mechanisms underlying evaluation, integration, and decision. This work revealed that multiple parts of the brain – some analytic, some subconscious or emotional – work in a systematic pattern to decide blameworthiness, assess harms, integrate those two decisions, and then ultimately select how a person should be punished. Specifically, harm and mental state evaluations are conducted in two different brain networks and then combined in the medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate areas of the brain, while the amygdala acts as a pivotal hub of the interaction between harm and mental state. This integrated information is then used by the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex when the brain is making a decision on punishment amount. These findings provide a blueprint of the brain mechanisms by which neutral third parties make punishment decisions

A Quasi-Model-Independent Search for New Physics at Large Transverse Momentum

We apply a quasi-model-independent strategy ("Sleuth") to search for new high p_T physics in approximately 100 pb^-1 of ppbar collisions at sqrt(s) = 1.8 TeV collected by the DZero experiment during 1992-1996 at the Fermilab Tevatron. Over thirty-two e mu X, W+jets-like, Z+jets-like, and 3(lepton/photon)X exclusive final states are systematically analyzed for hints of physics beyond the standard model. Simultaneous sensitivity to a variety of models predicting new phenomena at the electroweak scale is demonstrated by testing the method on a particular signature in each set of final states. No evidence of new high p_T physics is observed in the course of this search, and we find that 89% of an ensemble of hypothetical similar experimental runs would have produced a final state with a candidate signal more interesting than the most interesting observed in these data.Comment: 28 pages, 17 figures. Submitted to Physical Review