Adam S. Cohen

Acting Intentionally and the Side-Effect Effect Theory of Mind and Moral Judgment

The concept of acting intentionally is an important nexus where theory of mind and moral judgment meet. Preschool childrens judgments of intentional action show a valence-driven asymmetry. Children say that a foreseen but disavowed side effect is brought about “on purpose” when the side effect itself is morally bad, but not when it is morally good. This is the first demonstration in preschoolers that moral judgment influences judgments of whether something was done on purpose (as opposed to judgments of purpose influencing moral judgment). Judgments of intentionality are usually assumed to be purely factual. That these judgments are sometimes partly normative—even in preschoolers—challenges current understanding. Young childrens judgments regarding foreseen side effects depend on whether the children process the idea that the character does not care about the side effect. As soon as preschoolers effectively process the theory-of-mind concept “not care that P,” children show the side-effect effect.

Functional neuroimaging of word priming in males with chronic schizophrenia.

Word-priming studies have suggested that the associative disturbance of schizophrenia may reflect aberrant spread of activation through the lexicon of the brain. To explore this, we examined lexical activation using a semantic word-priming paradigm coupled with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We also wanted to determine whether brain activation to this paradigm correlated with relevant clinical symptom measures. In addition to completing clinical symptom measures, twelve chronic patients and twelve demographically matched control subjects completed a lexical-decision semantic-priming paradigm developed as an event-related BOLD fMRI task. This paradigm consisted of words that differed in connectivity. Words with many connections between shared semantic associates are considered high in connectivity and produce the largest behavioral semantic priming effects in control subjects, while words with few connections between shared semantic associates are considered low in connectivity and produce a relatively smaller amount of semantic priming. In fMRI, a respective step-wise increase in activation from high connectivity to low connectivity to unrelated word pairs was expected for normal subjects. Controls showed the expected pattern of activation to word connectivity; however, patients showed a less robust pattern of activation to word connectivity. Furthermore, this aberrant response correlated with measures of Auditory Hallucinations, Distractive Speech, Illogicality, and Incoherence. The patients did not display left frontal and temporal activation as a function of the degree of word connectivity as seen in healthy controls. This may reflect a disease-related disturbance in functional connectivity of lexical activation, which in turn may be associated with clinical symptomatology.

Prior exposure to superantigen can inhibit or exacerbate autoimmune encephalomyelitis: T-cell repertoire engaged by the autoantigen determines clinical outcome.

Experimental allergic encephalomyelitis (EAE) is inducible in experimental animals immunized with myelin basic protein (MBP), proteolipid protein (PLP) or their peptides. We compared T-cell responses to encephalitogenic epitopes of PLP(43-64) and MBP(Ac1-11) in a single mouse strain, (PL/J x SJL)F1. MBP(1-11)-specific T-cell hybridomas expressed predominantly TCR V beta 8 or V beta 4, while PLP(43-64)-specific hybridomas expressed a diverse TCR repertoire. To analyze the biologic significance of the TCR repertoire (limited vs. diverse) to disease susceptibility, we pretreated mice with a superantigen (SEB), and then induced disease with these autoantigens. Mice injected with SEB and immunized with MBP(Ac1-11) showed significant inhibition of EAE, whereas SEB-pretreated mice immunized with PLP(43-64) had an increased severity of EAE and developed a chronic disease. These data demonstrate that prior exposure to microbial superantigens can significantly alter the autoimmune disease course depending upon the TCR repertoire used by the autoantigen.

Automatic Mechanisms for Social Attention Are Culturally Penetrable

Are mechanisms for social attention influenced by culture? Evidence that social attention is triggered automatically by bottom-up gaze cues and is uninfluenced by top-down verbal instructions may suggest it operates in the same way everywhere. Yet considerations from evolutionary and cultural psychology suggest that specific aspects of ones cultural background may have consequence for the way mechanisms for social attention develop and operate. In more interdependent cultures, the scope of social attention may be broader, focusing on more individuals and relations between those individuals. We administered a multi-gaze cueing task requiring participants to fixate a foreground face flanked by background faces and measured shifts in attention using eye tracking. For European Americans, gaze cueing did not depend on the direction of background gaze cues, suggesting foreground gaze alone drives automatic attention shifting; for East Asians, cueing patterns differed depending on whether the foreground cue matched or mismatched background cues, suggesting foreground and background gaze information were integrated. These results demonstrate that cultural background influences the social attention system by shifting it into a narrow or broad mode of operation and, importantly, provides evidence challenging the assumption that mechanisms underlying automatic social attention are necessarily rigid and impenetrable to culture.

Specialized mechanisms for theory of mind: are mental representations special because they are mental or because they are representations?

Does theory of mind depend on a capacity to reason about representations generally or on mechanisms selective for the processing of mental state representations? In four experiments, participants reasoned about beliefs (mental representations) and notes (non-mental, linguistic representations), which according to two prominent theories are closely matched representations because both are represented propositionally. Reaction times were faster and accuracies higher when participants endorsed or rejected statements about false beliefs than about false notes (Experiment 1), even when statements emphasized representational format (Experiment 2), which should have favored the activation of representation concepts. Experiments 3 and 4 ruled out a counterhypothesis that differences in task demands were responsible for the advantage in belief processing. These results demonstrate for the first time that understanding of mental and linguistic representations can be dissociated even though both may carry propositional content, supporting the theory that mechanisms governing theory of mind reasoning are narrowly specialized to process mental states, not representations more broadly. Extending this theory, we discuss whether less efficient processing of non-mental representations may be a by-product of mechanisms specialized for processing mental states.

Explaining agency detection within a domain-specific, culturally attuned model

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