Pia Rotshtein

Intergroup bias persists despite repeated interactions that should enable belief updating. In this study, we combined a behavioral reinforcement-learning framework with fMRI to examine how group membership shapes trial-by-trial learning and value-based decisions about others. Using a multi-player game with ingroup and outgroup actors, we modeled participants’ evolving beliefs about others’ likelihoods of inflicting or avoiding harm. We assessed how these belief-updating processes are implemented at the neural level. Behaviorally, participants were more likely to inflict harm on out-group players, regardless of the out-group players' actions. The imaging data focused on regions within the social-learning and decision-making networks. Learning-related activity in the right supramarginal gyrus (rSMG) and the precuneus tracked participants’ trial-by-trial beliefs about others’ intentions. The rSMG encoded group-dependent prediction errors, showing heightened responses to unexpected prosocial acts by outgroup members and unexpected antisocial acts by ingroup members. The precuneus tracked the predictability of harmful outcomes independent of group membership. Ventral-medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) activity was modulated by decision factors (distance from the star and players, perceived aggressiveness), and this modulation depended on group association. Together, these findings show group identity biases neural learning signals and value computations, sustaining intergroup bias despite opportunities to update beliefs.

The current study aimed at identifying neural mechanisms involved in the monitoring of familiar ADL sequence and in the detection of different types of sequence error (i.e. omission, repetition and order violation). In addition, we explored the effect of steps predictability in sequence monitoring.

Background Ischemic stroke with cognitive impairment is a considerable risk factor for developing dementia. Identifying imaging markers of cognitive impairment following ischemic stroke will help to develop prevention strategies against post-stroke dementia. Methods Here, we investigated the hippocampal functional connectivity (FC) pattern following ischemic stroke, using resting-state fMRI (rs-fMRI). Thirty-three cognitively impaired patients after ischemic stroke and sixteen age-matched controls with no known history of neurological disorder, were recruited for the study. Importantly, no patient had a direct ischaemic insult to hippocampus on examination of brain imaging. Seven subfields of hippocampus were used as a seed region for FC analyses. Results Across all hippocampal subfields, FC with the inferior parietal lobe in patients was reduced as compared with healthy controls. This decreased FC included both supramarginal gyrus and angular gyrus. The FC of hippocampal subfields with cerebellum was increased. Importantly, the degree of the altered FC between hippocampal subfields and IPL was associated with their impaired memory function. Conclusion Our results demonstrated that decreased hippocampal-IPL connectivity was associated with cognitive impairment in patients with ischemic stroke. These findings provide novel insights into the role of hippocampus in cognitive impairment following ischemic stroke.

Psychopathy is characteristically associated with impairments in recognizing others' facial expressions of emotion, and there is some evidence that these difficulties are specific to the callousness features of the disorder. However, it remains unclear whether these difficulties are accompanied by reductions in autonomic reactivity when viewing others' emotional expressions, and whether these impairments are particular to expressions showing another's distress or are more pervasive across different emotional expressions. In this study, 73 adult male prisoners with histories of serious sexual or violent offenses-who ranged across the psychopathy continuum-completed a facial emotion recognition task. For the first time in a convicted offender sample, we used pupillometry techniques to measure changes in the pupil dilation response, a measure of sympathetic autonomic arousal to affective stimuli. We found that the callousness features of psychopathy were related to impaired recognition of fearful faces. Strikingly, we also showed that increasing callousness was associated with a reduction in the pupil dilation response and that this was pervasive across different emotional expressions. Our results highlight a potential role of the locus coeruleus-noradrenaline system in the pathophysiology of psychopathy and demonstrate the potential of the pupillary response as a technique for understanding attention-emotion interactions in psychopathy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

The proportional recovery rule asserts that most stroke survivors recover a fixed proportion of lost function. To the extent that this is true, recovery from stroke can be predicted accurately from baseline measures of acute post-stroke impairment alone. Reports that baseline scores explain more than 80%, and sometimes more than 90%, of the variance in the patients’ recoveries, are rapidly accumulating. Here, we show that these headline effect sizes are likely inflated. The key effects in this literature are typically expressed as, or reducible to, correlation coefficients between baseline scores and recovery (outcome scores minus baseline scores). Using formal analyses and simulations, we show that these correlations will be extreme when outcomes are significantly less variable than baselines, which they often will be in practice regardless of the real relationship between outcomes and baselines. We show that these effect sizes are likely to be over-optimistic in every empirical study that we found that reported enough information for us to make the judgement, and argue that the same is likely to be true in other studies as well. The implication is that recovery after stroke may not be as proportional as recent studies suggest.

Cooperation and competition are vital for human survival and for social progress. In this study we examine the impact of external (environmental) and internal (individual differences) factors on the tendency to cooperate or compete in social conflicts. To this end, 53 young adults played blocks of the repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma Game with each other or with a computer. The environmental context was manipulated across blocks, by introducing uncertainty, randomly losing or gaining money. Individual differences were assessed by participants’ attachment style. We found that participants cooperated more when randomly losing money compared to when randomly winning or in the neutral condition. Moreover, in a negative uncertain environment, individuals with higher anxious and avoidant attachment styles cooperated less. The above effects were only observed when playing against a human and not a computer. Overall, the findings highlight the dependency of cooperative behavior on the context as driven by external and internal factors.

Differing from basic emotions such as happiness, gratitude and elevation are important other-praising emotions. Previous behavioral studies have established that these complex emotions differ from each other; however, it remains under-investigated whether proneness to these emotions have common or distinct neuroanatomical correlates. Here we used voxel-based morphometry to identify the common and distinct neuroanatomical correlates of trait (i.e. proneness to) gratitude and elevation. We used the Gratitude Questionnaire-6 and the trait elevation scale to measure these affective traits. We demonstrated that trait gratitude was positively correlated with gray matter volume (GMV) in the left cerebellum extending to fusiform gyrus, and also the right middle occipital gyrus (MOG) extending to posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) and temporoparietal junction (TPJ), while trait elevation was negatively correlated with GMV in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. While controlling each other, all the regions still held significant, except the right MOG and pSTS/TPJ. The results indicate that there are distinct neuroanatomical correlates for proneness to gratitude and elevation, while the evidence is mixed that pSTS/TPJ may be the common correlates for them. The implications of these findings are discussed.