Motor empathy is a consequence of misattribution of sensory information in observers

Human behavior depends crucially on the ability to interact with others and empathy has a critical role in enabling this to occur effectively. This can be an unconscious process and based on natural instinct and inner imitation (Montag et al., 2008) responding to observed and executed actions (Newman-Norlund et al., 2007). Motor empathy relating to painful stimuli is argued to occur via the mirror system in motor areas (Rizzolatti and Luppino, 2001). Here we investigated the effects of the location of emotional information on the responses of this system. Motor evoked potential (MEP) amplitudes from the right first dorsal interosseus (FDI) muscle in the hand elicited by single pulses of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) delivered over the left motor cortex were measured while participants observed a video of a needle entering a hand over the FDI muscle, representing a painful experience for others. To maintain subjects' internal representation across different viewing distances, we used the same size of hand stimuli both in peripersonal and extrapersonal space. We found a reduced MEP response, indicative of inhibition of the corticospinal system, only for stimuli presented in peripersonal space and not in extrapersonal space. This empathy response only occurring for near space stimuli suggests that it may be a consequence of misidentification of sensory information as being directly related to the observer. A follow up experiment confirmed that the effect was not a consequence of the size of the stimuli presented, in agreement with the importance of the near space/far space boundary for misattribution of body related information. This is consistent with the idea that empathy is, at least partially, a consequence of misattribution of perceptual information relating to another to the observer and that pain perception is modulated by the nature of perception of the pain

Deep Sequence Analysis of Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer: Integrated Analysis of Gene Expression, Alternative Splicing, and Single Nucleotide Variations in Lung Adenocarcinomas with and without Oncogenic KRAS Mutations

KRAS mutations are highly prevalent in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), and tumors harboring these mutations tend to be aggressive and resistant to chemotherapy. We used next-generation sequencing technology to identify pathways that are specifically altered in lung tumors harboring a KRAS mutation. Paired-end RNA-sequencing of 15 primary lung adenocarcinoma tumors (8 harboring mutant KRAS and 7 with wild-type KRAS) were performed. Sequences were mapped to the human genome, and genomic features, including differentially expressed genes, alternate splicing isoforms and single nucleotide variants, were determined for tumors with and without KRAS mutation using a variety of computational methods. Network analysis was carried out on genes showing differential expression (374 genes), alternate splicing (259 genes), and SNV-related changes (65 genes) in NSCLC tumors harboring a KRAS mutation. Genes exhibiting two or more connections from the lung adenocarcinoma network were used to carry out integrated pathway analysis. The most significant signaling pathways identified through this analysis were the NFκB, ERK1/2, and AKT pathways. A 27 gene mutant KRAS-specific sub network was extracted based on gene–gene connections from the integrated network, and interrogated for druggable targets. Our results confirm previous evidence that mutant KRAS tumors exhibit activated NFκB, ERK1/2, and AKT pathways and may be preferentially sensitive to target therapeutics toward these pathways. In addition, our analysis indicates novel, previously unappreciated links between mutant KRAS and the TNFR and PPARγ signaling pathways, suggesting that targeted PPARγ antagonists and TNFR inhibitors may be useful therapeutic strategies for treatment of mutant KRAS lung tumors. Our study is the first to integrate genomic features from RNA-Seq data from NSCLC and to define a first draft genomic landscape model that is unique to tumors with oncogenic KRAS mutations

Characteristic visuomotor influences on eye-movement patterns to faces and other high level stimuli

Eye-movement patterns are often utilized in studies of visual perception as indices of the specific information extracted to efficiently process a given stimulus during a given task. Our prior work, however, revealed that not only the stimulus and task influence eye-movements, but that visuomotor (start position) factors also robustly and characteristically influence eye-movement patterns to faces (Arizpe, et al, 2012). Here we manipulated lateral starting side and distance from the midline of face and line-symmetrical control (butterfly) stimuli in order to further investigate the nature and generality of such visuomotor influences. First we found that increasing starting distance from midline (4, 8, 12, 16 degrees visual angle) strongly and proportionately increased the distance of the first ordinal fixation from midline. We did not find influences of starting distance on subsequent fixations, however, suggesting that eye-movement plans are not strongly affected by starting distance following an initial orienting fixation. Further, we replicated our prior effect of starting side (left, right) to induce a spatially contralateral tendency of fixations after the first ordinal fixation. However, we also established that these visuomotor influences did not depend upon the predictability of the location of the upcoming stimulus, and were present not only for face stimuli but also for our control stimulus category (butterflies). We found a correspondence in overall left-lateralized fixation tendency between faces and butterflies. Finally, for faces, we found a relationship between left starting side (right sided fixation pattern tendency) and increased recognition performance, which likely reflects a cortical right hemisphere (left visual hemifield) advantage for face perception. These results further indicate the importance of considering and controlling for visuomotor influences in the design, analysis, and interpretation of eye-movement studies