Gorka Navarrete

Impact of contour on aesthetic judgments and approach-avoidance decisions in architecture

On average, we urban dwellers spend about 90% of our time indoors, and share the intuition that the physical features of the places we live and work in influence how we feel and act. However, there is surprisingly little research on how architecture impacts behavior, much less on how it influences brain function. To begin closing this gap, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging study to examine how systematic variation in contour impacts aesthetic judgments and approach-avoidance decisions, outcome measures of interest to both architects and users of spaces alike. As predicted, participants were more likely to judge spaces as beautiful if they were curvilinear than rectilinear. Neuroanatomically, when contemplating beauty, curvilinear contour activated the anterior cingulate cortex exclusively, a region strongly responsive to the reward properties and emotional salience of objects. Complementing this finding, pleasantness—the valence dimension of the affect circumplex—accounted for nearly 60% of the variance in beauty ratings. Furthermore, activation in a distributed brain network known to underlie the aesthetic evaluation of different types of visual stimuli covaried with beauty ratings. In contrast, contour did not affect approach-avoidance decisions, although curvilinear spaces activated the visual cortex. The results suggest that the well-established effect of contour on aesthetic preference can be extended to architecture. Furthermore, the combination of our behavioral and neural evidence underscores the role of emotion in our preference for curvilinear objects in this domain.

Evolutionary modules and Bayesian facilitation: The role of general cognitive resources

Although decisions based on uncertain events are critical in everyday life, people perform remarkably badly when reasoning with probabilistic information. A well-documented example is performance on Bayesian reasoning problems, where people fail to take into account the base-rate. However, framing these problems as frequencies improves performance spectacularly. Popular evolutionary theories have explained this facilitation by positing a specialised module that automatically operates on natural frequencies. Here we test the key prediction from these accounts, namely that the performance of the module functions independently from general-purpose reasoning mechanisms. In three experiments we examined the relationship between cognitive capacity and performance on Bayesian reasoning tasks in various question formats, and experimentally manipulated cognitive resources in a dual task paradigm. Results consistently indicated that performance on classical Bayesian reasoning tasks depends on participants’ available general cognitive capacity. Findings challenge the postulation of an automatically operating frequency module.

Communicating risk in prenatal screening: the consequences of Bayesian misapprehension

At some point during pregnancy women are typically encouraged to undergo a screening test in order to estimate the likelihood of fetal chromosomal aberrations. While timelines vary, the majority of pregnant women are screened within their first trimester (De Graaf et al., 2002). In the event of a positive test result, an invasive diagnostic assessment is usually recommended, namely amniocentesis or chorionic villus sampling (CVS). The combined test, widely considered to be the most feasible and effective screening procedure, involves an integrated assessment of: maternal age, fetal Nuchal Translucency (NT), maternal serum pregnancy-associated plasma protein A (PAPP-A), and free β human chorionic gonadotropin (β-hCG). This assay is most reliable when performed nearest to the 11th week of gestation (Malone et al., 2005), at which its detection rate and false positive rate for trisomy 21, in optimal conditions, are approximately 95 and 5%, respectively (Nicolaides, 2004). A variety of competing screening techniques are available in the first trimester, and though we focus on the combined test in our example below, the point raised in this article applies to each of them.

Activation of the human mirror neuron system during the observation of the manipulation of virtual tools in the absence of a visible effector limb.

This work explores the mirror neuron system activity produced by the observation of virtual tool manipulations in the absence of a visible effector limb. Functional MRI data was obtained from healthy right-handed participants who manipulated a virtual paddle in the context of a digital game and watched replays of their actions. The results show how action observation produced extended bilateral activations in the parietofrontal mirror neuron system. At the same time, three regions in the left hemisphere (in the primary motor and the primary somatosensory cortex, the supplementary motor area and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) showed a reduced BOLD, possibly related with the prevention of inappropriate motor execution. These results can be of interest for researchers and developers working in the field of action observation neurorehabilitation.

Schizotypal people stick longer to their first choices.

Many studies have reported that schizophrenic patients show a Bias Against Disconfirmatory Evidence (BADE). This cognitive bias has been related to the formation and maintenance of delusion. The aim of this paper was to study whether BADE was present in healthy people displaying psychometric schizotypy, and to compare a closure task, which has been used for schizophrenia, with a new chronometric paradigm. Results with the new paradigm showed that the high-schizotypy group maintained their initial hypotheses longer than the low-schizotypy group. This finding corroborated the similarities between schizophrenic disorder and schizotypal traits, in this case with respect to the BADE. Research of this kind could facilitate the study of cognition in the schizophrenic spectrum without the difficulties of working with schizophrenic patients for some tasks and the assessment and early intervention in at-risk populations.

A low cost fMRI-compatible tracking system using the Nintendo Wii remote

It is sometimes necessary during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments to capture different movements made by the subjects, e.g. to enable them to control an item or to analyze its kinematics. The aim of this work is to present an inexpensive hand tracking system suitable for use in a high field MRI environment. It works by introducing only one light-emitting diode (LED) in the magnet room, and by receiving its signal with a Nintendo Wii remote (the primary controller for the Nintendo Wii console) placed outside in the control room. Thus, it is possible to take high spatial and temporal resolution registers of a moving point that, in this case, is held by the hand. We tested it using a ball and racket virtual game inside a 3 Tesla MRI scanner to demonstrate the usefulness of the system. The results show the involvement of a number of areas (mainly occipital and frontal, but also parietal and temporal) when subjects are trying to stop an object that is approaching from a first person perspective, matching previous studies performed with related visuomotor tasks. The system presented here is easy to implement, easy to operate and does not produce important head movements or artifacts in the acquired images. Given its low cost and ready availability, the method described here is ideal for use in basic and clinical fMRI research to track one or more moving points that can correspond to limbs, fingers or any other object whose position needs to be known.

Adding possibilities can reduce the Gambler's Fallacy: A naïve-probability paradox

This paper reports a novel paradox of intuitive probabilistic reasoning detected in naïve reasoners’ responses in two separate experiments where we manipulated the number of sets (or possibilities) of the problem keeping constant the probability of the critical set. Experiment 1 showed that the incidence of the Gamblers Fallacy (GF) was reduced when the number of sets was increased. In Experiment 2, a reduction of the GF also occurred but, more importantly, the percentage of correct responses of the participants increased when three sets of possibilities instead of two were used. Therefore, both Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that an increase in the extensional complexity of a problem can, under certain circumstances, lead to facilitation. These results support the importance of the extensional features in solving chance problems and are consistent with the model theory of reasoning.

Ecological Rationality and Evolution: The Mind Really Works that Way?

There is a profound and ongoing debate in psychology on how humans face a complex task as probabilistic reasoning. The birth of an idea that is still prevalent and is one of the cornerstones of this debate could be placed at the time of the Enlightenment, in the early eighteenth century. By then, reason was considered a tool with admirable precision that, when properly trained, was capable of giving (objective) access to the marvels of the universe. The value given to the reason of those that mastered his secrets reached the point where, when discrepancies arose between probability theory and the judgment of the wise men, the theories were changed (Hacking, 1975; Daston, 1980).

Editorial: Improving Bayesian Reasoning: What Works and Why?

This edited collection was motivated by an interest in understanding how to improve Bayesian reasoning. In that sense, the book before you is pragmatically and prescriptively oriented. Several of the papers address that challenge and some pick up on the important question of why certain factors work as well as they do. However, Improving Bayesian Reasoning: What Works and Why offers more than its editors had bargained for or its title suggests. Many papers offer methodological and conceptual insights that should help readers understand the psychology of Bayesian reasoning as practiced in cognitive science. The book is comprised of 23 papers by 48 authors. The contributions are ordered by type: 10 original research articles first, followed by three reviews and 10 shorter essays. Foregoing an attempt to summarize each contribution in sufficient detail, let us simply draw out some observations about the collection.

Editorial: The Reasoning Brain: The Interplay between Cognitive Neuroscience and Theories of Reasoning

The ability to reach logical conclusions on the basis of prior information is central to human cognition. Yet, it is generally agreed that the state of our knowledge regarding the mechanisms underlying logical reasoning remains incomplete and highly fragmented (e.g., Khemlani and Johnson-Laird, 2012). The emergence of functional neuroimaging over the past 20 years—and its ability to examine reasoning at the level of recruitment of cortical systems—provides an additional source of data to, not only better understand reasoning as a phenomenon, but to test different theoretical approaches. This has the potential to both prune the number of theoretical explanations of reasoning, but also to expand the space of possibilities in directions unanticipated by behavioral data. This Research Topic explores the extent to which neuroimaging and brain-lesion studies have informed cognitive theories of reasoning. It includes a selection of 20 empirical and theoretical papers from 69 authors. Below we briefly review these papers by breaking them down into two types of contribution, (i) original research articles, and (ii) review and methodological articles.