Michael L. Spezio

Looking you in the mouth: abnormal gaze in autism resulting from impaired top-down modulation of visual attention

People with autism are impaired in their social behavior, including their eye contact with others, but the processes that underlie this impairment remain elusive. We combined high-resolution eye tracking with computational modeling in a group of 10 high-functioning individuals with autism to address this issue. The group fixated the location of the mouth in facial expressions more than did matched controls, even when the mouth was not shown, even in faces that were inverted and most noticeably at latencies of 200-400 ms. Comparisons with a computational model of visual saliency argue that the abnormal bias for fixating the mouth in autism is not driven by an exaggerated sensitivity to the bottom-up saliency of the features, but rather by an abnormal top-down strategy for allocating visual attention.

Amygdala Damage Impairs Eye Contact During Conversations with Real People

The role of the human amygdala in real social interactions remains essentially unknown, although studies in nonhuman primates and studies using photographs and video in humans have shown it to be critical for emotional processing and suggest its importance for social cognition. We show here that complete amygdala lesions result in a severe reduction in direct eye contact during conversations with real people, together with an abnormal increase in gaze to the mouth. These novel findings from real social interactions are consistent with an hypothesized role for the amygdala in autism and the approach taken here opens up new directions for quantifying social behavior in humans.

Role of the amygdala in processing visual social stimuli

We review the evidence implicating the amygdala as a critical component of a neural network of social cognition, drawing especially on research involving the processing of faces and other visual social stimuli. We argue that, although it is clear that social behavioral representations are not stored in the amygdala, the most parsimonious interpretation of the data is that the amygdala plays a role in guiding social behaviors on the basis of socioenvironmental context. Thus, it appears to be required for normal social cognition. We propose that the amygdala plays this role by attentionally modulating several areas of visual and somatosensory cortex that have been implicated in social cognition, and in helping to direct overt visuospatial attention in face gaze. We also hypothesize that the amygdala exerts attentional modulation of simulation in somatosensory cortices such as supramarginal gyrus and insula. Finally, we argue that the term emotion be broadened to include increased attention to bodily responses and their representation in cortex.

Primary somatosensory cortex discriminates affective significance in social touch

Another person’s caress is one of the most powerful of all emotional social signals. How much the primary somatosensory cortices (SIs) participate in processing the pleasantness of such social touch remains unclear. Although ample empirical evidence supports the role of the insula in affective processing of touch, here we argue that SI might be more involved in affective processing than previously thought by showing that the response in SI to a sensual caress is modified by the perceived sex of the caresser. In a functional MRI study, we manipulated the perceived affective quality of a caress independently of the sensory properties at the skin: heterosexual males believed they were sensually caressed by either a man or woman, although the caress was in fact invariantly delivered by a female blind to condition type. Independent analyses showed that SI encoded, and was modulated by, the visual sex of the caress, and that this effect is unlikely to originate from the insula. This suggests that current models may underestimate the role played by SI in the affective processing of social touch.

A neural basis for the effect of candidate appearance on election outcomes

Election outcomes correlate with judgments based on a candidates visual appearance, suggesting that the attributions viewers make based on appearance, so-called thin-slice judgments, influence voting. Yet, it is not known whether the effect of appearance on voting is more strongly influenced by positive or negative attributions, nor which neural mechanisms subserve this effect. We conducted two independent brain imaging studies to address this question. In Study 1, images of losing candidates elicited greater activation in the insula and ventral anterior cingulate than images of winning candidates. Winning candidates elicited no differential activation at all. This suggests that negative attributions from appearance exert greater influence on voting than do positive. We further tested this hypothesis in Study 2 by asking a separate group of participants to judge which unfamiliar candidate in a pair looked more attractive, competent, deceitful and threatening. When negative attribution processing was enhanced (specifically, under judgment of threat), images of losing candidates again elicited greater activation in the insula and ventral anterior cingulate. Together, these findings support the view that negative attributions play a critical role in mediating the effects of appearance on voter decisions, an effect that may be of special importance when other information is absent.

Maturity is explicit: Self-importance of traits in humanitarian moral identity

Development of humanitarian moral identity may correspond with the growing self-importance of moral traits. This study considered the extent to which moral traits become explicit in novice and expert humanitarian moral identity narratives. Eighty humanitarian caregivers from L’Arche communities were given self-understanding interview prompts to assess temporal (i.e., past, present, and future) and relational expectations. Humanitarian responses were compared to four paragraphs comprised of moral traits (i.e., just, brave, caring, and religious) using a computational knowledge representation model known as latent semantic analysis (Landauer, T., McNamara, D., Dennis, S., & Kintsch, W. (Eds.). (2007). Handbook of latent semantic analysis (University of Colorado Institute of Cognitive Science). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum). Consistent with predictions, humanitarian experts displayed more explicitly self-important moral traits than novices on future and romantic partner expectations. Findings suggest that humanitarian development is associated with simulation related to future goal achievement and moral action modeled by close intimates.

The Rationality of Ultimate Concern: Moral Exemplars, Theological Ethics, and the Science of Moral Cognition

Abstract This paper argues that consideration of moral exemplars may provide a means for integrating insights across philosophical ethics, theological ethics, and the scientific study of moral cognition. Key to this endeavor is an understanding of the relation of cognition and emotion in ethical decision-making, a relation that is usually understood to be oppositional but which in proper circumstances may be understood to be quite the opposite. Indeed, a distinctive feature of moral exemplarity may consist in the ability to properly integrate the emotions into the moral life, and reference to and imitation of exemplars may involve a referencing and imitating of the emotions of the exemplar.

Congruence of Inherent and Acquired Values Facilitates Reward-Based Decision-Making

Most real-life cues exhibit certain inherent values that may interfere with or facilitate the acquisition of new expected values during associative learning. In particular, when inherent and acquired values are congruent, learning may progress more rapidly. Here we investigated such an influence through a 2 × 2 factorial design, using attractiveness (high/low) of the facial picture as a proxy for the inherent value of the cue and its reward probability (high/low) as a surrogate for the acquired value. Each picture was paired with a monetary win or loss either congruently or incongruently. Behavioral results from 32 human participants indicated both faster response time and faster learning rate for value-congruent cue–outcome pairings. Model-based fMRI analysis revealed a fractionation of reinforcement learning (RL) signals in the ventral striatum, including a strong and novel correlation between the cue-specific decaying learning rate and BOLD activity in the ventral caudate. Additionally, we detected a functional link between neural signals of both learning rate and reward prediction error in the ventral striatum, and the signal of expected value in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, showing a novel confirmation of the mathematical RL model via functional connectivity. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Most real-world decisions require the integration of inherent value and sensitivity to outcomes to facilitate adaptive learning. Inherent value is drawing increasing interest from decision scientists because it influences decisions in contexts ranging from advertising to investing. This study provides novel insight into how inherent value influences the acquisition of new expected value during associative learning. Specifically, we find that the congruence between the inherent value and the acquired reward influences the neural coding of learning rate. We also show for the first time that neuroimaging signals coding the learning rate, prediction error, and acquired value follow the multiplicative Rescorla–Wagner learning rule, a finding predicted by reinforcement learning theory.

What are “The Hilbert Problems” in the Study of Religion?

What are “The Hilbert Problems” in the Study of Religion? Joseph Bulbulia, Wesley J. Wildman, Richard Sosis & Michael L. Spezio To cite this article: Joseph Bulbulia, Wesley J. Wildman, Richard Sosis & Michael L. Spezio (2015) What are “The Hilbert Problems” in the Study of Religion?, Religion, Brain & Behavior, 5:4, 263-265, DOI: 10.1080/2153599X.2015.1084470 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2015.1084470

Religion, SCAN, and developing standards of inquiry

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