情绪的脑机制研究在社会认知神经科学中的进展

社会认知神经科学是近几年国外新兴起的交叉学科,旨在阐述社会性、情绪性的体验与行为的心理和神经基础。它综合了认知神经科学与社会心理学研究的长处,对刻板印象、态度与态度改变、他人知觉、自我认知以及情绪与认知交互作用等方面进行了深入研究。主要范式是应用认知神经科学的方法来验证社会心理学在这些范畴上的各种不同理论观点,并在某些方面取得了突破性进展,但仍存在着广泛的发展空间。随着当前各种脑成像技术的革新,人们对情绪状态下大脑的神经活动的了解在原来认知的层面上有了进一步提升。本文主要阐述社会认知神经科学在情绪的脑机制研究上所取得的进展。     

社会认知神经科学的取向与研究进展

社会认知神经科学是社会心理学和认知神经科学相结合的新兴多学科研究领域,其强调在社会、认知与脑神经等三个层面的交互作用上去理解心理现象。前几年主要是对刻板印象、态度与态度改变、他人知觉、自我认知以及情绪与认知交互作用等方面进行了深入研究,其主要范式是应用认知神经科学的方法来验证社会心理学在这些范围内上的各种不同的理论观点,当前的研究主要集中在知觉和再认的社会标记、社会判断和归因、评价调节知觉和经验以及社会交互作用等传统的社会心理学方面,并取得了突破性进展。展望未来的研究,其将在系统准则研究发展的基础上,把当今的社会认知研究与认知神经科学在理论和方法论上整合起来,为揭示人类高级社会心理现象的神经基础,开辟一条崭新的研究道路。     

The social brain in adolescence

The term 'social brain' refers to the network of brain regions that are involved in understanding others. Behaviour that is related to social cognition changes dramatically during human adolescence. This is paralleled by functional changes that occur in the social brain during this time, in particular in the medial prefrontal cortex and the superior temporal sulcus, which show altered activity during the performance of social cognitive tasks, such as face recognition and mental-state attribution. Research also indicates that, in humans, these parts of the social brain undergo structural development, including synaptic reorganization, during adolescence. Bringing together two relatively new and rapidly expanding areas of neuroscience--social neuroscience and the study of brain development during adolescence--will increase our understanding of how the social brain develops during adolescence.     

Spécificité des dilemmes éthiques résultant des travaux développés en neurosciences: émergence d’une neuroéthique

As neurosciences improve our knowledge about the brain for defining behaviour, medical ethics and social policy, what are the implications of new possibilities of technical intervention on our brain? Neuroethics defines a new field of ethics where scientists and ethicists, and also journalists and politicians, are beginning to reflect on social issues resulting from applications of the work of neuroscience in areas such as moral vision, decision-making, conduct and policies. It is likely that the potential application of new knowledge to human behaviour will generate a great deal of ethical and public policy concern in many aspects of everyday life, from child care and school programs to improvements or maintenance of adult capabilities. Neuroscience will also challenge social fields as diverse as forensic psychiatry, sports, corporate hiring and the judiciary. As neurosciences advance, it is important to have a framework that might help to guide the utilization of the new knowledge.     

Meeting of minds: the medial frontal cortex and social cognition

Social interaction is a cornerstone of human life, yet the neural mechanisms underlying social cognition are poorly understood. Recently, research that integrates approaches from neuroscience and social psychology has begun to shed light on these processes, and converging evidence from neuroimaging studies suggests a unique role for the medial frontal cortex. We review the emerging literature that relates social cognition to the medial frontal cortex and, on the basis of anatomical and functional characteristics of this brain region, propose a theoretical model of medial frontal cortical function relevant to different aspects of social cognitive processing.     

For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and everything

The rapidly growing field of cognitive neuroscience holds the promise of explaining the operations of the mind in terms of the physical operations of the brain. Some suggest that our emerging understanding of the physical causes of human (mis)behaviour will have a transformative effect on the law. Others argue that new neuroscience will provide only new details and that existing legal doctrine can accommodate whatever new information neuroscience will provide. We argue that neuroscience will probably have a transformative effect on the law, despite the fact that existing legal doctrine can, in principle, accommodate whatever neuroscience will tell us. New neuroscience will change the law, not by undermining its current assumptions, but by transforming people's moral intuitions about free will and responsibility. This change in moral outlook will result not from the discovery of crucial new facts or clever new arguments, but from a new appreciation of old arguments, bolstered by vivid new illustrations provided by cognitive neuroscience. We foresee, and recommend, a shift away from punishment aimed at retribution in favour of a more progressive, consequentialist approach to the criminal law.     

The slow process: A hypothetical cognitive adaptation for distributed cognitive networks

Human cognitive evolution is characterized by two special features that are truly novel in the primate line. The first is the emergence of "mindsharing" cultures that perform cooperative cognitive work, and serve as distributed cognitive networks. The second is the emergence of a brain that is specifically adapted for functioning within those distributed networks, and cannot realize its design potential without them. This paper proposes a hypothetical neural process at the core of this brain adaptation, called the "slow process". It enables the human brain to comprehend social events of much longer duration and complexity than those that characterize primate social life. It runs in the background of human cognitive life, with the faster moving sensorimotor interface running in the foreground. Most mammals can integrate events in the shorter time zone that corresponds to working memory. However, very few can comprehend complex events that extend over several hours (for example, a game or conversation) in what may be called the "intermediate" time zone. Adult humans typically live, plan, and imagine their lives in this time range, which seems to exceed the capabilities of our closest relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees. In summary, human cognition has both an individual and a collective dimension. Individual brains and minds function within cognitive-cultural networks, or CCNs, that store and transmit knowledge. The human brain relies on cultural input even to develop the basic cognitive capacities needed to gain access to that knowledge in the first place. The postulated slow process is a top-down executive capacity that evolved specifically to manage the cultural connection, and handle the cognitive demands imposed by increasingly complex distributed systems.     

Research progress on Drosophila visual cognition in China

Visual cognition,as one of the fundamental aspects of cognitive neuroscience,is generally associated with high-order brain functions in animals and human.Drosophila,as a model organism,shares certain features of visual cognition in common with mammals at the genetic,molecular,cellular,and even higher behavioral levels.From learning and memory to decision making,Drosophila covers a broad spectrum of higher cognitive behaviors beyond what we had expected.Armed with powerful tools of genetic manipulation in Drosophila,an increasing number of studies have been conducted in order to elucidate the neural circuit mechanisms underlying these cognitive behaviors from a genes-brain-behavior perspective.The goal of this review is to integrate the most important studies on visual cognition in Drosophila carried out in mainland China during the last decade into a body of knowledge encompassing both the basic neural operations and circuitry of higher brain function in Drosophila.Here,we consider a series of the higher cognitive behaviors beyond learning and memory,such as visual pattern recognition,feature and context generalization,different feature memory traces,salience-based decision,attention-like behavior,and cross-modal leaning and memory.We discuss the possible general gain-gating mechanism implementing by dopamine-mushroom body circuit in fly's visual cognition.We hope that our brief review on this aspect will inspire further study on visual cognition in flies,or even beyond.     

Research progress on <Emphasis Type="Italic">Drosophila</Emphasis> visual cognition in China

Visual cognition,as one of the fundamental aspects of cognitive neuroscience,is generally associated with high-order brain functions in animals and human.Drosophila,as a model organism,shares certain features of visual cognition in common with mammals at the genetic,molecular,cellular,and even higher behavioral levels.From learning and memory to decision making,Drosophila covers a broad spectrum of higher cognitive behaviors beyond what we had expected.Armed with powerful tools of genetic manipulation in Dr...     

社会神经科学研究进展

社会神经科学是研究人类的社会行为及其神经机制的综合性学科.从1992年学科成立至今,社会神经科学研究取得了丰硕的成果.本文系统介绍了该领域4个主要研究方向:社会知觉、社会认知、社会调节和社会互动的研究成果,并在此基础上总结了各研究方向的核心问题,即社会知觉加工的模块化问题、人类社会认知的独特性问题和社会调节加工的跨文化一致性问题.已有研究表明,社会知觉加工至少在计算算法层面是特异化的;心智化系统是人类独有的加工模块;人类社会调节不具备跨文化的一致性;大脑间耦合可能是社会互动共有的神经机制.最后,展望了社会神经科学未来的发展方向.     

Communicative roots of complex sociality and cognition

Mammals living in more complex social groups typically have large brains for their body size and many researchers have proposed that the primary driver of the increase in brain size through primate and hominin evolution was the selection pressures associated with sociality. Many mammals, and especially primates, use flexible signals that show a high degree of voluntary control and these signals may play an important role in forming and maintaining social relationships between group members. However, the specific role that cognitive skills play in this complex communication, and how in turn this relates to sociality, is still unclear. The hypothesis for the communicative roots of complex sociality and cognition posits that cognitive demands behind the communication needed to form and maintain bonded social relationships in complex social settings drives the link between brain size and sociality. We review the evidence in support of this hypothesis and why key features of cognitively complex communication such as intentionality and referentiality should be more effective in forming and maintaining bonded relationships as compared with less cognitively complex communication. Exploring the link between cognition, communication and sociality provides insights into how increasing flexibility in communication can facilitate the emergence of social systems characterised by bonded social relationships, such as those found in non‐human primates and humans. To move the field forward and carry out both within‐ and among‐species comparisons, we advocate the use of social network analysis, which provides a novel way to describe and compare social structure. Using this approach can lead to a new, systematic way of examining social and communicative complexity across species, something that is lacking in current comparative studies of social structure.     

On the necessity to distinguishing judgment from subjective choice in the cognitive neuroscience of morality

Recently, cognitive neuroscience has shed new light on our understanding of the neural underpinning of humans' morality. These findings allow for a fundamental questioning and rethinking of the alleged dichotomy between reason and emotion, that has profoundly shaped both moral philosophy and moral psychology. Functional neuroimaging and neuropsychology studies have provided strong arguments favoring a dynamic and interdependent interaction between rational and emotional processes in the brain. Yet another fundamental issue remains largely unexplored: the dissociation between certain behaviours and the moral judgments that seem to precede them. The importance of this dissociation was highlighted in a study of psychopathic patients during which they preserved their moral judgments while frequently engaging in completely non moral behaviour. Such dissociation could result from the cognitive difference between an objective moral judgement with no personal consequence, and a subjective behavioural choice that has effective or potential personal consequences. Consequently, the results of moral dilemma experiments would differ widely depending whether they explore objective or subjective moral evaluations. That these evaluations involve two distinct neural processes should be taken into account when exploring the neural bases of human morality.     

Discovering the Neural Nature of Moral Cognition? Empirical,Theoretical, and Practical Challenges in Bioethical Research with Electroencephalography (EEG)

In this article we critically review the neural mechanisms of moral cognition that have recently been studied via electroencephalography (EEG). Such studies promise to shed new light on traditional moral questions by helping us to understand how effective moral cognition is embodied in the brain. It has been argued that conflicting normative ethical theories require different cognitive features and can, accordingly, in a broadly conceived naturalistic attempt, be associated with different brain processes that are rooted in different brain networks and regions. This potentially morally relevant brain activity has been empirically investigated through EEG-based studies on moral cognition. From neuroscientific evidence gathered in these studies, a variety of normative conclusions have been drawn and bioethical applications have been suggested. We discuss methodological and theoretical merits and demerits of the attempt to use EEG techniques in a morally significant way, point to legal challenges and policy implications, indicate the potential to reveal biomarkers of psychopathological conditions, and consider issues that might inform future bioethical work.     

Group Size Predicts Social but Not Nonsocial Cognition in Lemurs

The social intelligence hypothesis suggests that living in large social networks was the primary selective pressure for the evolution of complex cognition in primates. This hypothesis is supported by comparative studies demonstrating a positive relationship between social group size and relative brain size across primates. However, the relationship between brain size and cognition remains equivocal. Moreover, there have been no experimental studies directly testing the association between group size and cognition across primates. We tested the social intelligence hypothesis by comparing 6 primate species (total N = 96) characterized by different group sizes on two cognitive tasks. Here, we show that a species’ typical social group size predicts performance on cognitive measures of social cognition, but not a nonsocial measure of inhibitory control. We also show that a species’ mean brain size (in absolute or relative terms) does not predict performance on either task in these species. These data provide evidence for a relationship between group size and social cognition in primates, and reveal the potential for cognitive evolution without concomitant changes in brain size. Furthermore our results underscore the need for more empirical studies of animal cognition, which have the power to reveal species differences in cognition not detectable by proxy variables, such as brain size.     

Neural Signals Evoked by Stimuli of Increasing Social Scene Complexity Are Detectable at the Single-Trial Level and Right Lateralized

Classification of neural signals at the single-trial level and the study of their relevance in affective and cognitive neuroscience are still in their infancy. Here we investigated the neurophysiological correlates of conditions of increasing social scene complexity using 3D human models as targets of attention, which may also be important in autism research. Challenging single-trial statistical classification of EEG neural signals was attempted for detection of oddball stimuli with increasing social scene complexity. Stimuli had an oddball structure and were as follows: 1) flashed schematic eyes, 2) simple 3D faces flashed between averted and non-averted gaze (only eye position changing), 3) simple 3D faces flashed between averted and non-averted gaze (head and eye position changing), 4) animated avatar alternated its gaze direction to the left and to the right (head and eye position), 5) environment with 4 animated avatars all of which change gaze and one of which is the target of attention. We found a late (> 300 ms) neurophysiological oddball correlate for all conditions irrespective of their complexity as assessed by repeated measures ANOVA. We attempted single-trial detection of this signal with automatic classifiers and obtained a significant balanced accuracy classification of around 79%, which is noteworthy given the amount of scene complexity. Lateralization analysis showed a specific right lateralization only for more complex realistic social scenes. In sum, complex ecological animations with social content elicit neurophysiological events which can be characterized even at the single-trial level. These signals are right lateralized. These finding paves the way for neuroscientific studies in affective neuroscience based on complex social scenes, and given the detectability at the single trial level this suggests the feasibility of brain computer interfaces that can be applied to social cognition disorders such as autism.     

Why Do You Believe in God? Relationships between Religious Belief,Analytic Thinking,Mentalizing and Moral Concern

Prior work has established that analytic thinking is associated with disbelief in God, whereas religious and spiritual beliefs have been positively linked to social and emotional cognition. However, social and emotional cognition can be subdivided into a number of distinct dimensions, and some work suggests that analytic thinking is in tension with some aspects of social-emotional cognition. This leaves open two questions. First, is belief linked to social and emotional cognition in general, or a specific dimension in particular? Second, does the negative relationship between belief and analytic thinking still hold after relationships with social and emotional cognition are taken into account? We report eight hypothesis-driven studies which examine these questions. These studies are guided by a theoretical model which focuses on the distinct social and emotional processing deficits associated with autism spectrum disorders (mentalizing) and psychopathy (moral concern). To our knowledge no other study has investigated both of these dimensions of social and emotion cognition alongside analytic thinking. We find that religious belief is robustly positively associated with moral concern (4 measures), and that at least part of the negative association between belief and analytic thinking (2 measures) can be explained by a negative correlation between moral concern and analytic thinking. Using nine different measures of mentalizing, we found no evidence of a relationship between mentalizing and religious or spiritual belief. These findings challenge the theoretical view that religious and spiritual beliefs are linked to the perception of agency, and suggest that gender differences in religious belief can be explained by differences in moral concern. These findings are consistent with the opposing domains hypothesis, according to which brain areas associated with moral concern and analytic thinking are in tension.     

Exercise, brain, and cognition across the life span

This is a brief review of current evidence for the relationships between physical activity and exercise and the brain and cognition throughout the life span in non-pathological populations. We focus on the effects of both aerobic and resistance training and provide a brief overview of potential neurobiological mechanisms derived from non-human animal models. Whereas research has focused primarily on the benefits of aerobic exercise in youth and young adult populations, there is growing evidence that both aerobic and resistance training are important for maintaining cognitive and brain health in old age. Finally, in these contexts, we point out gaps in the literature and future directions that will help advance the field of exercise neuroscience, including more studies that explicitly examine the effect of exercise type and intensity on cognition, the brain, and clinically significant outcomes. There is also a need for human neuroimaging studies to adopt a more unified multi-modal framework and for greater interaction between human and animal models of exercise effects on brain and cognition across the life span.     

功能性脑成像的多维模式分析方法

利用非侵入式的功能性脑成像记录大脑活动极大地提升了我们对人类认知功能的理解.与此同时,分析成像数据的手段也逐渐从传统的一元方式向更加有效的多元分析转变.在本综述中,特别针对在认知神经科学领域占主导地位的功能性磁共振成像技术,介绍其多元数据分析方法的发展以及这种分析方法的生理学基础和未来发展方向.     

Cracking the code of oscillatory activity

Neural oscillations are ubiquitous measurements of cognitive processes and dynamic routing and gating of information. The fundamental and so far unresolved problem for neuroscience remains to understand how oscillatory activity in the brain codes information for human cognition. In a biologically relevant cognitive task, we instructed six human observers to categorize facial expressions of emotion while we measured the observers' EEG. We combined state-of-the-art stimulus control with statistical information theory analysis to quantify how the three parameters of oscillations (i.e., power, phase, and frequency) code the visual information relevant for behavior in a cognitive task. We make three points: First, we demonstrate that phase codes considerably more information (2.4 times) relating to the cognitive task than power. Second, we show that the conjunction of power and phase coding reflects detailed visual features relevant for behavioral response--that is, features of facial expressions predicted by behavior. Third, we demonstrate, in analogy to communication technology, that oscillatory frequencies in the brain multiplex the coding of visual features, increasing coding capacity. Together, our findings about the fundamental coding properties of neural oscillations will redirect the research agenda in neuroscience by establishing the differential role of frequency, phase, and amplitude in coding behaviorally relevant information in the brain.