Survey on judgment and decision-making

A research team at Brown University led by Dr. Steven Sloman has asked me to help them publicize a survey they are conducting that focuses on judgment and decision making.
Please help this fellow researcher by responding to his survey. Thank you!

Brain science offers new understanding of complex emotions

NEWSWEEK has just published this very extensive article on the latest cognitive neuroscience:

Neuroscientists consider it settled that the mind arises from the cooperation of billions of interconnected cells that, individually, are no smarter than amoebae. But it’s a shocking idea to some that the human mind could arise out of such an array of mindlessness. Many express amazement that emotions, pain, sexual feelings or religious belief could be a product of brain function. They are put off by the notion that such rich experiences could be reduced to mechanical or chemical bits. Or they worry that scientific explanations may seduce people into a kind of moral laziness that provides a ready excuse for any human failing: “My brain made me do it.” Our brains indeed do make us do it, but that is nonetheless consistent with meaningful lives and moral choices. Writing for the President’s Council on Bioethics earlier this year, philosopher Daniel Dennett made the point that building knowledge about the biology of mental life may improve our decision making, even our moral decision making. And it could enhance our chances of survival as a species, too.

Your heart, lungs, kidneys and digestive tract keep you alive. But your brain is where you live. The brain is responsible for most of what you care about—language, creativity, imagination, empathy and morality. And it is the repository of all that you feel. The endeavor to discovery the biological basis for these complex human experiences has given rise to a relatively new discipline: cognitive neuroscience. It has recently exploded as a field, thanks, in part, to decades of advances in neuroimaging technology that enable us to see the brain at work. As Dr. Joel Yager, professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado, has said, “We can now watch the mind boggle!”

Can brain scans pinpoint morality and virtue? Or, Can an fMRI scan actually figure that out?

USA Today has published an article that discusses extreme claims being made by some brain imaging researchers:

Images that purport to show — in living color — the parts of the brain that generate such virtues as compassion, fairness and wisdom are invading turf that was once reserved for philosophers, theologians and psychologists.

From morality to math, a revolution in “functional” magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which observes brain blood flow, is being used by researchers to pinpoint the pieces of the brain that people rely on to think and feel…

“A lot of these claims are just crazy,” says neurophysiologist Nikos Logothetis of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. “There is a fundamental mismatch between what these images are showing and what cognitive scientists are claiming for these studies.”

‘Perfect pitch’ more common than previously thought, study finds

From Science Daily:

Researchers at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences have developed a unique test for perfect pitch, and have found surprising results.

Their research shows that perfect pitch—the ability to recognize and remember a tone without a reference—is apparently much more common in non-musicians than scientists had expected. Previous tests have overlooked these people because without extensive musical training it’s very difficult for someone to identify a pitch by name, the method traditionally used for identifying those with perfect pitch. The new test can be used on non-musicians, and is based on a technique to discern how infants recognize words in a language they’re learning.

New fMRI technology could lead to brain imaging advances

Science Daily reports on new developments in fMRI technology that may lead to higher resolution scans.

Adapting marketers’ habit formation techniques to public health

Interesting:

Dr. Curtis, now the director of the Hygiene Center at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, had spent years trying to persuade people in the developing world to wash their hands habitually with soap. Diseases and disorders caused by dirty hands — like diarrhea — kill a child somewhere in the world about every 15 seconds, and about half those deaths could be prevented with the regular use of soap, studies indicate.

But getting people into a soap habit, it turns out, is surprisingly hard.

To overcome this hurdle, Dr. Curtis called on three top consumer goods companies to find out how to sell hand-washing the same way they sell Speed Stick deodorant and Pringles potato chips.

She knew that over the past decade, many companies had perfected the art of creating automatic behaviors — habits — among consumers. These habits have helped companies earn billions of dollars when customers eat snacks, apply lotions and wipe counters almost without thinking, often in response to a carefully designed set of daily cues.

“There are fundamental public health problems, like hand washing with soap, that remain killers only because we can’t figure out how to change people’s habits,” Dr. Curtis said. “We wanted to learn from private industry how to create new behaviors that happen automatically.”

Milgram revisited

The NY Times reports on the continuing debate in psychological science over the ramifications of a famous experiement conducted nearly a half-century ago by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram.

[Milgram's] obedience studies of the early 1960s… together form one of the darkest mirrors the field has held up to the human face. In a series of about 20 experiments, hundreds of decent, well-intentioned people agreed to deliver what appeared to be increasingly painful electric shocks to another person, as part of what they thought was a learning experiment. The “learner” was in fact an actor, usually seated out of sight in an adjacent room, pretending to be zapped.

Researchers, social commentators and armchair psychologists have pored through Milgram’s data ever since, claiming psychological and cultural insights. Now, decades after the original work (Milgram died in 1984, at 51), two new papers illustrate the continuing power of the shock experiments — and the diverse interpretations they still inspire.

The article raises some excellent criticisms of Milgram’s research (chief among which are the ecological validity issues inherent in any ‘lab’ experiment), but also points out other researchers’ evidence that converges with Milgram’s findings.  If you’ve never read Milgram, I recommend his work for anyone interested in judgment/decision-making, group dynamics, and the psychology of power and control.

Diffusion spectrum imaging reveals ‘roadmap’ of brain

The Public Library of Science has just published online a study by Hagmann et. al. which describes the authors’ use of diffusion spectrum imaging to map the ’structural core’ of cerebral cortex.  The study’s abstract reads as follows:

Structurally segregated and functionally specialized regions of the human cerebral cortex are interconnected by a dense network of cortico-cortical axonal pathways. By using diffusion spectrum imaging, we noninvasively mapped these pathways within and across cortical hemispheres in individual human participants. An analysis of the resulting large-scale structural brain networks reveals a structural core within posterior medial and parietal cerebral cortex, as well as several distinct temporal and frontal modules. Brain regions within the structural core share high degree, strength, and betweenness centrality, and they constitute connector hubs that link all major structural modules. The structural core contains brain regions that form the posterior components of the human default network. Looking both within and outside of core regions, we observed a substantial correspondence between structural connectivity and resting-state functional connectivity measured in the same participants. The spatial and topological centrality of the core within cortex suggests an important role in functional integration.

Brain differences between homosexuals and heterosexuals?

The Washington Post reports on the continuing debate among brain researchers regarding alleged differences in brain structure that are a function of sexual orientation.

Is there such a thing as a “gay brain”? And, if so, are some people born with brains that make them more likely to be homosexual? Or do the brains of gay people develop differently in response to experiences?

Those are some of the thorny questions that have been raised by a provocative new study that found striking differences between the brains of homosexuals and heterosexuals in both men and women.

Some scientists say the new findings are part of an increasingly convincing body of evidence that suggests sexual orientation results from fundamental developmental differences that are probably caused by hormonal exposures in the womb.

“This research is pointing to basic differences in the brain between homosexual and heterosexual people that are likely there right from the beginning,” said Sandra F. Witelson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences at McMaster University in Ontario. “These could be reflecting some genetic or hormonal factors that predetermine your sexual orientation.”

Others, however, argue that such research is far from conclusive.

“I remain skeptical,” said William Byne, a professor of psychiatry at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. “There’s been a history of jumping to conclusions and overinterpreting findings in this field.”

To paraphrase Glenn Reynolds:  “Indeed.”

Most seldom venture far from home, study finds

Nature has published this study (subcription required) by researchers at Northeastern U:

Despite their importance for urban planning, traffic forecasting and the spread of biological and mobile viruses, our understanding of the basic laws governing human motion remains limited owing to the lack of tools to monitor the time-resolved location of individuals. Here we study the trajectory of 100,000 anonymized mobile phone users whose position is tracked for a six-month period. We find that, in contrast with the random trajectories predicted by the prevailing Lévy flight and random walk models, human trajectories show a high degree of temporal and spatial regularity, each individual being characterized by a time-independent characteristic travel distance and a significant probability to return to a few highly frequented locations. After correcting for differences in travel distances and the inherent anisotropy of each trajectory, the individual travel patterns collapse into a single spatial probability distribution, indicating that, despite the diversity of their travel history, humans follow simple reproducible patterns. This inherent similarity in travel patterns could impact all phenomena driven by human mobility, from epidemic prevention to emergency response, urban planning and agent-based modelling.

 

In addition to its findings, this study is remarkable in that it would be illegal if conducted in the US, as Wired News notes here:

Researchers secretly tracked the locations of 100,000 people outside the United States through their cell phone use and concluded that most people rarely stray more than a few miles from home.

The first-of-its-kind study by Northeastern University raises privacy and ethical questions for its monitoring methods, which would be illegal in the United States.

It also yielded somewhat surprising results that reveal how little people move around in their daily lives. Nearly three-quarters of those studied mainly stayed within a 20-mile-wide circle for half a year.

The scientists would not say where the study was done, only describing the location as an industrialized nation.

Researchers used cell phone towers to track individuals’ locations whenever they made or received phone calls and text messages over six months. In a second set of records, researchers took another 206 cell phones that had tracking devices in them and got records for their locations every two hours over a week’s time period.

The study was based on cell phone records from a private company, whose name also was not disclosed.

Study co-author Cesar Hidalgo, a physics researcher at Northeastern, said he and his colleagues didn’t know the individual phone numbers because they were disguised into “ugly” 26-digit-and-letter codes.

That type of nonconsensual tracking would be illegal in the United States, according to Rob Kenny, a spokesman for the Federal Communications Commission. Consensual tracking, however, is legal and even marketed as a special feature by some U.S. cell phone providers.