scholarly journals Guilty by association: How group-based (collective) guilt arises in the brain

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhiai Li ◽  
Hongbo Yu ◽  
Yongdi Zhou ◽  
Tobias Kalenscher ◽  
Xiaolin Zhou

AbstractPeople do not only feel guilty for transgressions of social norms/expectations that they are causally responsible for, but they also feel guilty for transgressions committed by those they identify as in-group (i.e., collective or group-based guilt). However, the neurocognitive basis of group-based guilt and its relation to personal guilt are unknown. To address these questions, we combined functional MRI with an interaction-based minimal group paradigm in which participants either directly caused harm to victims (i.e., personal guilt), or observed in-group members cause harm to the victims (i.e., group-based guilt). In three experiments (N = 90), we demonstrated that perceived shared responsibility with in-group members in the transgression predicted behavioral and neural manifestations of group-based guilt. Multivariate pattern analysis of the functional MRI data showed that group-based guilt recruited a similar brain representation in anterior middle cingulate cortex as personal guilt. These results have broaden our understanding of how group membership is integrated into social emotions.

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fernando M. Ramírez

AbstractThe use of multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) methods has enjoyed this past decade a rapid increase in popularity among neuroscientists. More recently, similarity-based multivariate methods aiming not only to extract information regarding the class membership of stimuli from their associated brain patterns, say, decode a face from a potato, but to understand the form of the underlying representational structure associated with stimulus dimensions of interest, say, 2D grating or 3D face orientation, have flourished under the name of Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA). However, data-preprocessing steps implemented prior to RSA can significantly change the covariance (and correlation) structure of the data, hence possibly leading to representational confusion—i.e., a researcher inferring that brain area A encodes information according to representational scheme X, and not Y, when the opposite is true. Here, I demonstrate with simulations that time-series demeaning (including z-scoring) can plausibly lead to representational confusion. Further, I expose potential interactions between the effects of data demeaning and how the brain happens to encode information. Finally, I emphasize the importance in the context of similarity analyses of at least occasionally explicitly considering the direction of pattern vectors in multivariate space, rather than focusing exclusively on the relative location of their endpoints. Overall, I expect this article will promote awareness of the impact of data demeaning on inferences regarding representational structure and neural coding.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Brendan Ritchie ◽  
David Michael Kaplan ◽  
Colin Klein

AbstractSince its introduction, multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA), or “neural decoding”, has transformed the field of cognitive neuroscience. Underlying its influence is a crucial inference, which we call the Decoder’s Dictum: if information can be decoded from patterns of neural activity, then this provides strong evidence about what information those patterns represent. Although the Dictum is a widely held and well-motivated principle in decoding research, it has received scant philosophical attention. We critically evaluate the Dictum, arguing that it is false: decodability is a poor guide for revealing the content of neural representations. However, we also suggest how the Dictum can be improved on, in order to better justify inferences about neural representation using MVPA.


2016 ◽  
Vol 116 (6) ◽  
pp. 2469-2472
Author(s):  
Michelle Marneweck ◽  
Véronique H. Flamand

In an attempt to elucidate the neural circuitry of planning of internally guided voluntary action, Ariani et al. (2015) used a delayed-movement design and multivariate pattern analysis of functional MRI data and found areas decoding internally elicited action plans, stimulus-elicited action plans, and both types of plans. In interpreting their results in the context of a heuristic decision model of voluntary action, encompassing “what” action to perform, “when” to perform it, and “whether” to perform it at all, we highlight at least some neural dissociation of these components. More to that, we note that the exact neural circuitry of each component might vary depending on the performed action type, and finally, we underscore the importance of understanding the temporal specifics of such circuitries to further elucidate how they are involved and interact during voluntary action planning.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew A. Chen ◽  
Joanne C. Beer ◽  
Nicholas J. Tustison ◽  
Philip A. Cook ◽  
Russell T. Shinohara ◽  
...  

AbstractTo acquire larger samples for answering complex questions in neuroscience, researchers have increasingly turned to multi-site neuroimaging studies. However, these studies are hindered by differences in images acquired across multiple scanners. These effects have been shown to bias comparison between scanners, mask biologically meaningful associations, and even introduce spurious associations. To address this, the field has focused on harmonizing data by removing scanner-related effects in the mean and variance of measurements. Contemporaneously with the increase in popularity of multi-center imaging, the use of multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) has also become commonplace. These approaches have been shown to provide improved sensitivity, specificity, and power due to their modeling the joint relationship across measurements in the brain. In this work, we demonstrate that methods for removing scanner effects in mean and variance may not be sufficient for MVPA. This stems from the fact that such methods fail to address how correlations between measurements can vary across scanners. Data from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative is used to show that considerable differences in covariance exist across scanners and that popular harmonization techniques do not address this issue. We also propose a novel methodology that harmonizes covariance of multivariate image measurements across scanners and demonstrate its improved performance in data harmonization.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sirui Liu ◽  
Qing Yu ◽  
Peter U. Tse ◽  
Patrick Cavanagh

SummaryWhen perception differs from the physical stimulus, as it does for visual illusions and binocular rivalry, the opportunity arises to localize where perception emerges in the visual processing hierarchy. Representations prior to that stage differ from the eventual conscious percept even though they provide input to it. Here we investigate where and how a remarkable misperception of position emerges in the brain. This “double-drift” illusion causes a dramatic mismatch between retinal and perceived location, producing a perceived path that can differ from its physical path by 45° or more [1]. The deviations in the perceived trajectory can accumulate over at least a second [1] whereas other motion-induced position shifts accumulate over only 80 to 100 ms before saturating [2]. Using fMRI and multivariate pattern analysis, we find that the illusory path does not share activity patterns with a matched physical path in any early visual areas. In contrast, a whole-brain searchlight analysis reveals a shared representation in more anterior regions of the brain. These higher-order areas would have the longer time constants required to accumulate the small moment-to-moment position offsets that presumably originate in early visual cortices, and then transform these sensory inputs into a final conscious percept. The dissociation between perception and the activity in early sensory cortex suggests that perceived position does not emerge in what is traditionally regarded as the visual system but emerges instead at a much higher level.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Javier Ortiz-Tudela ◽  
Johanna Bergmann ◽  
Matthew Bennett ◽  
Isabelle Ehrlich ◽  
Lars Muckli ◽  
...  

Efficient processing of visual environment necessitates the integration of incoming sensory evidence with concurrent contextual inputs and mnemonic content from our past experiences. To delineate how this integration takes place in the brain, we studied modulations of feedback neural patterns in non-stimulated areas of the early visual cortex in humans (i.e., V1 and V2). Using functional magnetic resonance imaging and multivariate pattern analysis, we show that both, concurrent contextual and time-distant mnemonic information, coexist in V1/V2 as feedback signals. The extent to which mnemonic information is reinstated in V1/V2 depends on whether the information is retrieved episodically or semantically. These results demonstrate that our stream of visual experience contains not just information from the visual surrounding, but also memory-based predictions internally generated in the brain.


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