The Neural Bases of Directed and Spontaneous Mental State Attributions to Group Agents

In daily life, perceivers often need to predict and interpret the behavior of group agents, such as corporations and governments. Although research has investigated how perceivers reason about individual members of particular groups, less is known about how perceivers reason about group agents themselves. The present studies investigate how perceivers understand group agents by investigating the extent to which understanding the ‘mind’ of the group as a whole shares important properties and processes with understanding the minds of individuals. Experiment 1 demonstrates that perceivers are sometimes willing to attribute a mental state to a group as a whole even when they are not willing to attribute that mental state to any of the individual members of the group, suggesting that perceivers can reason about the beliefs and desires of group agents over and above those of their individual members. Experiment 2 demonstrates that the degree of activation in brain regions associated with attributing mental states to individuals—i.e., brain regions associated with mentalizing or theory-of-mind, including the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), and precuneus—does not distinguish individual from group targets, either when reading statements about those targets' mental states (directed) or when attributing mental states implicitly in order to predict their behavior (spontaneous). Together, these results help to illuminate the processes that support understanding group agents themselves

Algebraic Theory of Promise Constraint Satisfaction Problems, First Steps

What makes a computational problem easy (e.g., in P, that is, solvable in polynomial time) or hard (e.g., NP-hard)? This fundamental question now has a satisfactory answer for a quite broad class of computational problems, so called fixed-template constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) -- it has turned out that their complexity is captured by a certain specific form of symmetry. This paper explains an extension of this theory to a much broader class of computational problems, the promise CSPs, which includes relaxed versions of CSPs such as the problem of finding a 137-coloring of a 3-colorable graph

Natural Selection Affects Multiple Aspects of Genetic Variation at Putatively Neutral Sites across the Human Genome

A major question in evolutionary biology is how natural selection has shaped patterns of genetic variation across the human genome. Previous work has documented a reduction in genetic diversity in regions of the genome with low recombination rates. However, it is unclear whether other summaries of genetic variation, like allele frequencies, are also correlated with recombination rate and whether these correlations can be explained solely by negative selection against deleterious mutations or whether positive selection acting on favorable alleles is also required. Here we attempt to address these questions by analyzing three different genome-wide resequencing datasets from European individuals. We document several significant correlations between different genomic features. In particular, we find that average minor allele frequency and diversity are reduced in regions of low recombination and that human diversity, human-chimp divergence, and average minor allele frequency are reduced near genes. Population genetic simulations show that either positive natural selection acting on favorable mutations or negative natural selection acting against deleterious mutations can explain these correlations. However, models with strong positive selection on nonsynonymous mutations and little negative selection predict a stronger negative correlation between neutral diversity and nonsynonymous divergence than observed in the actual data, supporting the importance of negative, rather than positive, selection throughout the genome. Further, we show that the widespread presence of weakly deleterious alleles, rather than a small number of strongly positively selected mutations, is responsible for the correlation between neutral genetic diversity and recombination rate. This work suggests that natural selection has affected multiple aspects of linked neutral variation throughout the human genome and that positive selection is not required to explain these observations

BUILDING A RESEARCH-COMMUNITY COLLABORATIVE TO IMPROVE COMMUNITY CARE FOR INFANTS AND TODDLERS AT-RISK FOR AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDERS.

This article describes the formation and initial outcomes of a research-community collaborative group that was developed based on community-based participatory research principles. The group includes a transdisciplinary team of practitioners, funding agency representatives, researchers, and families of children with autism spectrum disorders, who partnered to improve community-based care for infants and toddlers at risk for autism through the implementation of evidence-based practices. Data from this group provide support for the feasibility of developing and sustaining a highly synergistic and productive research-community collaborative group who shares common goals to improve community care

Mean agreement with mental state ascriptions by condition for the Members-Only and Group-Only vignettes.

<p>Error bars show SE mean. Dotted black line indicates neutral midpoint; points above indicate agreement and points below indicate disagreement.</p

Regions identified by the theory-of-mind localizer.

<p>Top: Brain regions emerging from the theory-of-mind localizer (belief > photo; <i>p</i> < .001, uncorrected, <i>k</i> > 10). Activations are displayed on a canonical brain image. Bottom: Percent signal change (PSC) in BOLD response during the individual, group, and control conditions of the directed theory-of-mind task in regions identified by the independent theory-of-mind localizer.</p

Regions emerging from whole brain analyses.

<p>Average peak voxels for regions identified in whole-brain random effects analysis (<i>p</i> < .001, <i>k</i> > 10 voxels; * =  <i>p</i> < .005, k > 10 voxels) of the localizer and directed individual vs. group theory-of-mind task in Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) coordinates. TPJ  =  temporal parietal junction; PC  =  precuneus; MPFC  =  medial prefrontal cortex; STS  =  superior temporal sulcus.</p

Regions emerging from the conjunction analysis.

<p>Average peak voxels for regions identified in whole-brain conjunction analysis of the individual > control and group > control contrasts (<i>p</i> < .01 for each) in Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) coordinates. TPJ  =  temporal parietal junction; PC  =  precuneus; MPFC  =  medial prefrontal cortex.</p