No fruits without color: Cross-modal priming and EEG reveal different roles for different features across semantic categories

Category-specific impairments witnessed in patients with semantic deficits have broadly dissociated into natural and artificial kinds. However, how the category of food (more specifically, fruits and vegetables) fits into this distinction has been difficult to interpret, given a pattern of deficit that has inconsistently mapped onto either kind, despite its intuitive membership to the natural domain. The present study explores the effects of a manipulation of a visual sensory (i.e., color) or functional (i.e., orientation) feature on the consequential semantic processing of fruits and vegetables (and tools, by comparison), first at the behavioral and then at the neural level. The categorization of natural (i.e., fruits/vegetables) and artificial (i.e., utensils) entities was investigated via cross-modal priming. Reaction time analysis indicated a reduction in priming for color-modified natural entities and orientationmodified artificial entities. Standard event-related potentials (ERP) analysis was performed, in addition to linear classification. For natural entities, a N400 effect at central channel sites was observed for the color-modified condition compared relative to normal and orientation conditions, with this difference confirmed by classification analysis. Conversely, there was no significant difference between conditions for the artificial category in either analysis. These findings provide strong evidence that color is an integral property to the categorization of fruits/vegetables, thus substantiating the claim that feature-based processing guides as a function of semantic category

Representation of social content in dorsomedial prefrontal cortex underlies individual differences in agreeableness trait

Personality traits reflect key aspects of individual variability in different psychological domains. Understanding the mechanisms that give rise to these differences requires an exhaustive investigation of the behaviors associated with such traits, and their underlying neural sources. Here we investigated the mechanisms underlying agreeableness, one of the five major dimensions of personality, which has been linked mainly to socio-cognitive functions. In particular, we examined whether individual differences in the neural representations of social information are related to differences in agreeableness of individuals. To this end, we adopted a multivariate representational similarity approach that captured within single individuals the activation pattern similarity of social and non-social content, and tested its relation to the agreeableness trait in a hypothesis-driven manner. The main result confirmed our prediction: processing social and non-social content led to similar patterns of activation in individuals with low agreeableness, while in more agreeable individuals these patterns were more dissimilar. Critically, this association between agreeableness and encoding similarity of social and random content was significant only in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, a brain region consistently involved during attributions of mental states. The present finding reveals the link between neural mechanisms underlying social information processing and agreeableness, a personality trait highly related to socio-cognitive abilities, thereby providing a step forward in characterizing its neural determinants. Furthermore, it emphasizes the advantage of multivariate pattern analysis approaches in capturing and understanding the neural sources of individual variations

The Contribution of Personality and Intelligence Toward Cognitive Competences in Higher Education

Personality and cognition are found to be two interrelated concepts and to both have a predictive power on educational and life outcomes. With this study we aimed at evaluating the extent to which personality traits interact with cognition in acquiring cognitive competences during higher education. In a sample of university students at different stages of their career and from different fields of study, we collected Big Five traits, as a measure of personality, and Intelligent Quotient (IQ), as a proxy of cognition. A set of multiple regressions served to explore the relative contribution of IQ and personality traits on the performance on two cognitive competences tests: literacy and numeracy. Results showed that IQ highly modulated numeracy but had a moderate or no impact on literacy while, compared with IQ, personality affects literacy more. In a further explorative analysis, we observed that both the effects of personality and IQ on cognitive competences were modulated by the level of the students' career (freshmen, undergraduates, and bachelor graduates). Different traits, and particularly conscientiousness, increased or decreased their impact on achieved scores depending on the educational level, while IQ lost its effect in undergraduates suggesting that personal dispositions become more influential in advancing the academic carrier. Finally, the field of study resulted to be a predictor of numeracy, but also an important covariate altering the pattern of personality impact

Body odors (even when masked) make you more emotional: behavioral and neural insights

Morality evolved within specific social contexts that are argued to shape moral choices. In turn, moral choices are hypothesized to be affected by body odors as they powerfully convey socially-relevant information. We thus investigated the neural underpinnings of the possible body odors effect on the participants\u2019 decisions. In an fMRI study we presented to healthy individuals 64 moral dilemmas divided in incongruent (real) and congruent (fake) moral dilemmas, using different types of harm (intentional: instrumental dilemmas, or inadvertent: accidental dilemmas). Participants were required to choose deontological or utilitarian actions under the exposure to a neutral fragrance (masker) or body odors concealed by the same masker (masked body odor). Smelling the masked body odor while processing incongruent (not congruent) dilemmas activates the supramarginal gyrus, consistent with an increase in prosocial attitude. When processing accidental (not instrumental) dilemmas, smelling the masked body odor activates the angular gyrus, an area associated with the processing of people\u2019s presence, supporting the hypothesis that body odors enhance the saliency of the social context in moral scenarios. These results suggest that masked body odors can influence moral choices by increasing the emotional experience during the decision process, and further explain how sensory unconscious biases affect human behavior

The Role of Amygdala in Self-Conscious Emotions in a Patient With Acquired Bilateral Damage

Shame plays a fundamental role in the regulation of our social behavior. One intriguing question is whether amygdala might play a role in processing this emotion. In the present single-case study, we tested a patient with acquired damage of bilateral amygdalae and surrounding areas as well as healthy controls on shame processing and other social cognitive tasks. Results revealed that the patient\u2019s subjective experience of shame, but not of guilt, was more reduced than in controls, only when social standards were violated, while it was not different than controls in case of moral violations. The impairment in discriminating between normal social situations and violations also emerged. Taken together, these findings suggest that the role of the amygdala in processing shame might reflect its relevance in resolving ambiguity and uncertainty, in order to correctly detect social violations and to generate shame feelings

Low Fidelity Imitation of Atypical Biological Kinematics in Autism Spectrum Disorders Is Modulated by Self-Generated Selective Attention.

We examined whether adults with autism had difficulty imitating atypical biological kinematics. To reduce the impact that higher-order processes have on imitation we used a non-human agent model to control social attention, and removed end-state target goals in half of the trials to minimise goal-directed attention. Findings showed that only neurotypical adults imitated atypical biological kinematics. Adults with autism did, however, become significantly more accurate at imitating movement time. This confirmed they engaged in the task, and that sensorimotor adaptation was self-regulated. The attentional bias to movement time suggests the attenuation in imitating kinematics might be a compensatory strategy due to deficits in lower-level visuomotor processes associated with self-other mapping, or selective attention modulated the processes that represent biological kinematics

Food perception and categorization: From food/no-food to different types of food

The ability to categorize food and nonfood correctly and to distinguish between different foods is essential for our survival. Because of our omnivore nature and because of the food-rich environment in which we live, categorization processes involving food are particularly complex. The extent of the literature on this subject is an indication of our limited understanding of the mental processes underlying food perception, categorization, and choice. The ability to categorize food requires integration of multisensory information and semantic memory with varying contextual information and is modulated by numerous factors. On the one hand, food features (e.g., energy content, level of transformation) modulate our perceptual and categorization processes; on the other hand, categorization processes are also modulated by the perceiver's temporary states (e.g., internal states such as hunger) and more lasting characteristics (e.g., body mass index, gender). Thus, food categorization provides a very rich test-case for any model of categorization