Social psychology:Predicting other people’s attention to understand their mind

Humans are highly social beings who are interested in what others are saying, thinking, and doing. A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that we can easily tell whether a person’s pattern of attention is natural or artificially manipulated

Chronicles of Oklahoma

Article explores the life, family, and political career of John Martin, who would eventually become the first Chief Justice of the Cherokee Supreme Court in Indian Territory. Patricia Lockwood relates the details of his travels as an Indian agent and his impact as a leader of the Cherokees

Overlap in processing advantages for minimal ingroups and the self

Acknowledgements This work was supported by a Medical Research Council Fellowship (MR/P014097/1), a Christ Church Junior Research Fellowship and a Christ Church Research Centre Grant to P. L. L. The Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging is supported by core funding from the Wellcome Trust (203139/Z/16/Z). The work was completed in partial fulfilment of a PhD funded through a DSTL studentship by the first author. We thank the late Professor Glyn Humphreys, who initially supervised the wider PhD project that this work formed a part of, for his helpful discussions and input into this research.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Transcranial magnetic stimulation over human secondary somatosensory cortex disrupts perception of pain intensity

AbstractPain is a complex sensory experience resulting from the activity of a network of brain regions. However, the functional contribution of individual regions in this network remains poorly understood. We delivered single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to the contralateral primary somatosensory cortex (S1), secondary somatosensory cortex (S2) and vertex (control site) 120 msec after selective stimulation of nociceptive afferents using neodymium:yttrium–aluminium–perovskite (Nd:YAP) laser pulses causing painful sensations. Participants were required to judge either the intensity (medium/high) or the spatial location (proximal/distal) of the stimulus in a two-alternative forced choice paradigm. When TMS pulses were delivered over S2, participants' ability to judge pain intensity was disrupted, as compared to S1 and vertex (control) stimulation. Signal-detection analysis demonstrated a loss of sensitivity to stimulation intensity, rather than a shift in perceived pain level or response bias. We did not find any effect of TMS on the ability to localise nociceptive stimuli on the skin. The novel finding that TMS over S2 can disrupt perception of pain intensity suggests a causal role for S2 in encoding of pain intensity

Neural activity tracking identity and confidence in social information

Humans learn about the environment either directly by interacting with it or indirectly by seeking information about it from social sources such as conspecifics. The degree of confidence in the information obtained through either route should determine the impact that it has on adapting and changing behaviour. We examined whether and how behavioural and neural computations differ during non-social learning as opposed to learning from social sources. Trial-wise confidence judgements about non-social and social information sources offered a window into this learning process. Despite matching exactly the statistical features of social and non-social conditions, confidence judgements were more accurate and less changeable when they were made about social as opposed to non-social information sources. In addition to subjective reports of confidence, differences were also apparent in the Bayesian estimates of participants' subjective beliefs. Univariate activity in dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and posterior temporoparietal junction more closely tracked confidence about social as opposed to non-social information sources. In addition, the multivariate patterns of activity in the same areas encoded identities of social information sources compared to non-social information sources

Modulating autophagy as a therapeutic strategy for the treatment of paediatric high‐grade glioma

Paediatric high grade glioma (pHGG) represent a therapeutically challenging group of tumours. Despite decades of research there has been a minimal improvement in treatment and the clinical prognosis remains poor. Autophagy, a highly conserved process for recycling metabolic substrates is upregulated in pHGG, promoting tumour progression and evading cell death. There is significant cross talk between autophagy and a plethora of critical cellular pathways, many of which Accepted Article This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. are dysregulated in pHGG. The following article will discuss our current understanding of autophagy signalling in pHGG and the potential modulation of this network as a therapeutic target

Reduced prosocial motivation and effort in adolescents with conduct problems and callous‐unemotional traits

Background: Prosocial behaviours – acts that benefit others – are of crucial importance for many species including humans. However, adolescents with conduct problems (CP), unlike their typically developing (TD) peers, demonstrate markedly reduced engagement in prosocial behaviours. This pattern is particularly pronounced in adolescents with CP and high levels of callous‐unemotional traits (CP/HCU) who are at increased risk of developing psychopathy in adulthood. While a substantial amount of research has investigated the cognitive‐affective mechanisms thought to underlie antisocial behaviour, much less is known about the mechanisms that could explain reduced prosocial behaviours in adolescents with CP. Methods: Here we examined the willingness to exert effort to benefit oneself (self) and another person (other, prosocial condition) in children with CP/HCU, CP and lower levels of CU traits (CP/LCU) and their TD peers. The task captured both prosocial choices, and actual effort exerted following prosocial choices, in adolescent boys aged 11–16 (27 CP/HCU; 34 CP/LCU; 33 TD). We used computational modelling to reveal the mechanistic processes involved when choosing prosocial acts. Results: We found that both CP/HCU and CP/LCU groups were more averse to initiating effortful prosocial acts than TD adolescents – both at a cognitive and at a behavioural level. Strikingly, even if they chose to initiate a prosocial act, the CP/HCU group exerted less effort following this prosocial choice than other groups. Conclusions: Our findings indicate that reduced exertion of effort to benefit others may be an important factor that differentiates adolescents with CP/HCU from their peers with CP/LCU. They offer new insights into what might drive low prosocial behaviour in adolescents with CP, including vulnerabilities that may particularly characterise those with high levels of CU traits