scholarly journals Complementary hemispheric lateralization of language and social processing in the human brain

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reza Rajimehr ◽  
Arsalan Firoozi ◽  
Hossein Rafipoor ◽  
Nooshin Abbasi ◽  
John Duncan
Keyword(s):  
Human Subjects ◽  
Hemispheric Lateralization ◽  
Striking Similarity ◽  
Neural Architecture ◽  
Social Processing ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Tasks ◽  
Core Language ◽  
Language Areas ◽  
The Brain

Abstract Humans have a unique ability to use language for social communication. The neural architecture for language comprehension and production may have emerged in the brain areas that were originally involved in social cognition. Here we directly tested the fundamental link between language and social processing using functional MRI data from over 1000 human subjects. Cortical activations in language and social tasks showed a striking similarity with a complementary hemispheric lateralization; within core language areas, the activations were left-lateralized in the language task and right-lateralized in the social task. Outside these areas, the activations were left-lateralized in both tasks, perhaps indicating multimodal integration of social and communicative information. Our findings could have important implications in understanding neurocognitive mechanisms of social disorders such as autism.

Putting the brain in Jeopardy: a novel comprehensive and expressive language task?

2006 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Magnus Berntsen ◽  
Inge-Andre Rasmussen ◽  
Petter Samuelsen ◽  
Jian Xu ◽  
Olav Haraldseth ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Expressive Language ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Hemispheric Lateralization ◽  
Healthy Men ◽  
Non Invasive ◽  
Language Areas ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Written Informed Consent ◽  
Hemispheric Language Dominance

Objective:To develop and test a novel fMRI compatible comprehensive and expressive language task that reliably and predictably activates both Wernicke's and Broca's cortical brain regions, respectively, and has utility for the determination of hemispheric language dominance.Methods:Ten healthy men (seven) and women (three) were administered a task based on the television game Jeopardy that was adapted for fMRI presentation. The task was programmed using E-PRIME software and designed to run as an event-related experiment. The study was conducted on 3 T MRI Phillips Intera scanner, and data was anlysed using Brain Voyager QX. All subjects provided written informed consent.Results:The Jeopardy task produced robust left hemisphere activation in regions corresponding to Wernicke's and Broca's areas.Conclusion:This novel fMRI compatible task (Jeopardy) reliably maps both Broca's and Wernicke's areas with robust hemispheric lateralization. It is potentially useful in language localization studies as it offers advantages over conventional procedures and other fMRI tasks by virtue of being non-invasive and mapping both language areas in one experiment.

Designing and Evaluating Survey Instruments for Research in Human Issues in Horticulture

HortScience ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 554c-554
Author(s):  
Sonja M. Skelly ◽  
Jennifer Campbell Bradley
Keyword(s):  
Survey Research ◽  
Survey Methodology ◽  
Human Subjects ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Reliability And Validity ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Survey Instrument ◽  
Measurement Tool ◽  
The Social ◽  
Survey Instruments

Survey research has a long precedence of use in the social sciences. With a growing interest in the area of social science research in horticulture, survey methodology needs to be explored. In order to conduct proper and accurate survey research, a valid and reliable instrument must be used. In many cases, however, an existing measurement tool that is designed for specific research variables is unavailable thus, an understanding of how to design and evaluate a survey instrument is necessary. Currently, there are no guidelines in horticulture research for developing survey instruments for use with human subjects. This presents a problem when attempting to compare and reference similar research. This workshop will explore the methodology involved in preparing a survey instrument; topics covered will include defining objectives for the survey, constructing questions, pilot testing the survey, and obtaining reliability and validity information. In addition to these topics some examples will be provided which will illustrate how to complete these steps. At the conclusion of this session a discussion will be initiated for others to share information and experiences dealing with creating survey instruments.

scholarly journals In the nose or on the tongue? Contrasting motivational effects of oral and intranasal oxytocin on arousal and reward during social processing

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Kou ◽  
Chunmei Lan ◽  
Yingying Zhang ◽  
Qianqian Wang ◽  
Feng Zhou ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Brain Function ◽  
Intranasal Administration ◽  
Emotional Cues ◽  
Beneficial Effects ◽  
Social Processing ◽  
Concentration Changes ◽  
Brain Reward ◽  
Male Subjects ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Potential Therapeutic Intervention

AbstractIntranasal oxytocin exerts wide-ranging effects on socioemotional behavior and is proposed as a potential therapeutic intervention in psychiatric disorders. However, following intranasal administration, oxytocin could penetrate directly into the brain or influence its activity via increased peripheral concentrations crossing the blood–brain barrier or influencing vagal projections. In the current randomized, placebo-controlled, pharmaco-imaging clinical trial we investigated effects of 24IU oral (lingual) oxytocin spray, restricting it to peripherally mediated blood-borne and vagal effects, on responses to face emotions in 80 male subjects and compared them with 138 subjects treated intranasally with 24IU. Oral, but not intranasal oxytocin administration increased both arousal ratings for faces and associated brain reward responses, the latter being partially mediated by blood concentration changes. Furthermore, while oral oxytocin increased amygdala and arousal responses to face emotions, after intranasal administration they were decreased. Thus, oxytocin can produce markedly contrasting motivational effects in relation to socioemotional cues when it influences brain function via different routes. These findings have important implications for future therapeutic use since administering oxytocin orally may be both easier and have potentially stronger beneficial effects by enhancing responses to emotional cues and increasing their associated reward.

scholarly journals Perceiving actions before they happen: psychological dimensions scaffold neural action prediction

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark A Thornton ◽  
Diana I Tamir
Keyword(s):  
Magnetic Resonance Imaging ◽  
Functional Neuroimaging ◽  
Social World ◽  
Action Space ◽  
Action Prediction ◽  
Functional Magnetic Resonance ◽  
Resonance Imaging ◽  
The Social ◽  
Psychological Dimensions ◽  
The Brain

Abstract The social world buzzes with action. People constantly walk, talk, eat, work, play, snooze and so on. To interact with others successfully, we need to both understand their current actions and predict their future actions. Here we used functional neuroimaging to test the hypothesis that people do both at the same time: when the brain perceives an action, it simultaneously encodes likely future actions. Specifically, we hypothesized that the brain represents perceived actions using a map that encodes which actions will occur next: the six-dimensional Abstraction, Creation, Tradition, Food(-relevance), Animacy and Spiritualism Taxonomy (ACT-FAST) action space. Within this space, the closer two actions are, the more likely they are to precede or follow each other. To test this hypothesis, participants watched a video featuring naturalistic sequences of actions while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning. We first use a decoding model to demonstrate that the brain uses ACT-FAST to represent current actions. We then successfully predicted as-yet unseen actions, up to three actions into the future, based on their proximity to the current action’s coordinates in ACT-FAST space. This finding suggests that the brain represents actions using a six-dimensional action space that gives people an automatic glimpse of future actions.

scholarly journals Seven Computations of the Social Brain

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanaz Molapour ◽  
Cindy C Hagan ◽  
Brian Silston ◽  
Haiyan Wu ◽  
Maxwell Ramstead ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social World ◽  
Social Brain ◽  
Verbal Cues ◽  
True Nature ◽  
Multiple Modalities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Processing Demands ◽  
Social Signaling ◽  
The Brain

ABSTRACT The social environment presents the human brain with the most complex of information processing demands. The computations that the brain must perform occur in parallel, combine social and nonsocial cues, produce verbal and non-verbal signals, and involve multiple cognitive systems; including memory, attention, emotion, learning. This occurs dynamically and at timescales ranging from milliseconds to years. Here, we propose that during social interactions, seven core operations interact to underwrite coherent social functioning; these operations accumulate evidence efficiently – from multiple modalities – when inferring what to do next. We deconstruct the social brain and outline the key components entailed for successful human social interaction. These include (1) social perception; (2) social inferences, such as mentalizing; (3) social learning; (4) social signaling through verbal and non-verbal cues; (5) social drives (e.g., how to increase one’s status); (6) determining the social identity of agents, including oneself; and (7) minimizing uncertainty within the current social context by integrating sensory signals and inferences. We argue that while it is important to examine these distinct aspects of social inference, to understand the true nature of the human social brain, we must also explain how the brain integrates information from the social world.

The Social Value of Research and Health Research Priority-Setting

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
D.M. Wenner
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Research ◽  
Priority Setting ◽  
Health Research ◽  
Human Subjects ◽  
Social Value ◽  
Research Priority ◽  
The Social ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Health Research Priority Setting

This chapter discusses the social value requirement in clinical research and its intersection with health research priority-setting. The social value requirement states that clinical research involving human subjects is only ethical if it has the potential to produce socially valuable knowledge. The chapter discusses various ways to specify both the justification for and the content of the social value requirement. It goes on to consider the implications of various accounts of the content and justification for the requirement for the ethics of health research priority-setting, showing that while some accounts of the requirement are largely silent with respect to how research questions should be prioritized, others entail robust obligations to prioritize research that might benefit particular groups. The chapter also briefly examines potential arguments for something like a social value requirement in other kinds of research, specifically social scientific research.

scholarly journals Multifaceted origins of sex differences in the brain

2016 ◽  
Vol 371 (1688) ◽  
pp. 20150106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret M. McCarthy
Keyword(s):  
Sex Differences ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Human Subjects ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Molecular Analyses ◽  
The Past ◽  
Current State ◽  
Biological Variable ◽  
Males And Females ◽  
The Brain

Studies of sex differences in the brain range from reductionistic cell and molecular analyses in animal models to functional imaging in awake human subjects, with many other levels in between. Interpretations and conclusions about the importance of particular differences often vary with differing levels of analyses and can lead to discord and dissent. In the past two decades, the range of neurobiological, psychological and psychiatric endpoints found to differ between males and females has expanded beyond reproduction into every aspect of the healthy and diseased brain, and thereby demands our attention. A greater understanding of all aspects of neural functioning will only be achieved by incorporating sex as a biological variable. The goal of this review is to highlight the current state of the art of the discipline of sex differences research with an emphasis on the brain and to contextualize the articles appearing in the accompanying special issue.

Variables That Influence the Generation of Random Sequences: An Update

1997 ◽  
Vol 84 (2) ◽  
pp. 627-661 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Brugger
Keyword(s):  
Short Term Memory ◽  
Human Subjects ◽  
Complete Suppression ◽  
Random Generation ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Random Sequences ◽  
Potential Applications ◽  
Basic Experiments ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Relevant Work

This article updates Tune's 1964 review of variables influencing human subjects' attempts at generating random sequences of alternatives. It also covers aspects not included in the original review such as randomization behavior by patients with neurological and psychiatric disorders. Relevant work from animal research (spontaneous alternation paradigm) is considered as well. It is conjectured that Tune's explanation of sequential nonrandomness in terms of a limited capacity of short-term memory can no longer be maintained. Rather, interdependence among consecutive choices is considered a consequence of an organism's natural susceptibility to interference. Random generation is thus a complex action which demands complete suppression of any rule-governed behavior. It possibly relies on functions of the frontal lobes but cannot otherwise be “localized” to restricted regions of the brain. Possible developments in the field are briefly discussed, both with respect to basic experiments regarding the nature of behavioral nonrandomness and to potential applications of random-generation tasks.

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