Neuroscientific Evidence Research Articles

The impact of out-of-home care on brain development: a brief review of the neuroscientific evidence informing our understanding of children's attachment outcomes.

Researchers interested in the effects of early experiences of caregiving adversity have employed neuroscientific methods to illuminate whether and how such environmental input impacts on brain development, and whether and how such impacts underpin poor socioemotional outcomes in this population. Evidence is compelling in documenting negative effects on the individual's neurodevelopment following exposure to adverse or disadvantaged environments such as institutionalization or maltreatment. Neuroimaging research focused specifically on attachment-relevant processing of socioemotional stimuli and attachment outcomes among children looked-after is scarcer, but largely consistent. This review begins by summarizing the key general brain structural and functional alterations associated with caregiving deprivation. Then, neuroscientific evidence that is more directly relevant for understanding these children's attachment outcomes, both by employing social stimuli and by correlating children's neural markers with their attachment profiles, is reviewed. Brief interpretations of findings are suggested, and key limitations and gaps in the literature identified.

Changes in the Networks of Attention across the Lifespan: A Graphical Meta-Analysis.

Three Posnerian networks of attention (alerting, orienting, and executive control) have been distinguished on the bases of behavioural, neuropsychological, and neuroscientific evidence. Here, we examined the trajectories of these networks throughout the human lifespan using the various Attention Network Tests (ANTs), which were specifically developed to measure the efficacy of these networks. The ANT Database was used to identify relevant research, resulting in the inclusion of 36 publications. We conducted a graphical meta-analysis using network scores from each study, based on reaction time plotted as a function of age group. Evaluation of attentional networks from childhood to early adulthood suggests that the alerting network develops relatively quickly, and reaches near-adult level by the age of 12. The developmental pattern of the orienting network seems to depend on the information value of the spatial cues. Executive control network scores show a consistent decrease (improvement) with age in childhood. During adulthood (ages 19-75), changes in alerting depend on the modality of the warning signal, while a moderate increase in orienting scores was seen with increasing age. Whereas executive control scores, as measured in reaction time, increase (deterioration) from young adulthood into later adulthood an opposite trend is seen when scores are based on error rates.

Is providing choices always a good thing? the backfire effect of providing choices on competence restoration

Grounded in self-determination theory (SDT), the purpose of this research is to investigate the influence of providing choices following competence frustration on one’s intrinsic motivation in a follow-up task. Study 1 conducted a between-group EEG experiment with 50 participants and used a component of event-related potentials (ERPs) to represent intrinsic motivation. Study 2 was a behavioural experiment with 149 participants, adopting the self-report method to measure intrinsic motivation. The stimuli and procedure in Study 1 are identical to Study 2. All participants were asked to complete a high-difficult time-estimation (TE) task during sessions 1–2, and a moderate-difficult stopwatch (SW) task during session 3 (no choices in the control group vs. providing choices in the experimental group). In Study 1, we observed a smaller reward positivity (RewP) difference wave in the experimental (vs. control) group during session 3. In Study 2, participants’ intrinsic motivation in the experimental (vs. control) group is significantly lower. The results suggest that providing choices impairs the competence-frustrated participants’ intrinsic motivation in the follow-up task and hinders competence restoration. Thus, the current research contributes original neuroscientific and subjective evidences for the adverse influence of providing choices on the competence-frustrated individual’s intrinsic motivation, and suggests important practical implications.

Disrupting the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex Attenuates the Difference in Decision-Making for Altruistic Punishment Between the Gain and Loss Contexts.

Altruistic punishment is a primary response to social norms violations; its neural mechanism has also attracted extensive research attention. In the present studies, we applied a low-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to the bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) while participants engaged in a modified Ultimatum Game (Study 1) and third-party punishment game (Study 2) to explore how the bilateral DLPFC disruption affects people's perception of violation of fairness norms and altruistic punishment decision in the gain and loss contexts. Typically, punishers intervene more often against and show more social outrage towards Dictators/Proposers who unfairly distribute losses than those who unfairly share gains. We found that disrupting the function of the left DLPFC in the second-party punishment and the bilateral DLPFC in the third-party punishment with rTMS effectively obliterated this difference, making participants punish unfairly shared gains as often as they usually would punish unfairly shared losses. In the altruistic punishment of maintaining the social fairness norms, the inhibition of the right DLPFC function will affect the deviation of individual information integration ability; the inhibition of the left DLPFC function will affect the assessment of the degree of violation of fairness norms and weaken impulse control, leading to attenuate the moderating effect of gain and loss contexts on altruistic punishment. Our findings emphasize that DLPFC is closely related to altruistic punishment and provide causal neuroscientific evidence.

Experience of regret is unaffected by concurrent working memory load

Background When facing the consequences of decisions, people often experience evaluative emotions such as regret. The experience of regret is the result of the comparison between the actual outcome of one’s actions and a better counterfactual outcome that could have occurred had one acted differently in the past. Despite increasing interest in counterfactual thinking and regret, little is known about the type of cognitive processes involved with regret –whether it is underpinned by reflective or intuitive processes. The extant literature provides contradictory evidence: theoretical assertions and developmental work point towards reflective processes, requiring access to capacity-limited cognitive resources whereas, some experimental and neuroscientific evidence point towards intuitive processes. Methods In the current study, adults (N = 20) completed a commonly used gambling task known to elicit regret under high or low working memory load. Results Ratings of regret were not affected by concurrent working memory load (Bayes Factors provided strong evidence for the null hypothesis). Conclusions We conclude that the experience of regret in a commonly used gambling task is unaffected by concurrent working memory load. This suggests that, in adults, regret is not always reliant on reflective cognitive processes and does not require access to central cognitive resources.

Enhanced activations in the dorsal inferior frontal gyrus specifying the who, when, and what for successful building of sentence structures in a new language

It has been argued that the principles constraining first language acquisition also constrain second language acquisition; however, neuroscientific evidence for this is scant, and even less for third and subsequent languages. We conducted fMRI experiments to evaluate this claim by focusing on the building of complex sentence structures in Kazakh, a new language for participants having acquired at least two languages. The participants performed grammaticality judgment and subject-verb matching tasks with spoken sentences. We divided the participants into two groups based on the performance levels attained in one of the experimental tasks: High in Group I and Low in Group II. A direct comparison of the two groups, which examined those participants who parsed the structures, indicated significantly stronger activations for Group I in the dorsal left inferior frontal gyrus (L. IFG). Focusing on Group I, we tested the contrast between the initial and final phases in our testing, which examined when the structures were parsed, as well as the contrast which examined what structures were parsed. These analyses further demonstrated focal activations in the dorsal L. IFG alone. Among the individual participants, stronger activation in the dorsal L. IFG, measured during the sentence presentations, predicted higher accuracy rates and shorter response times for executing the tasks that followed. These results cannot be explained by task difficulty or memory loads, and they, instead, indicate a critical and consistent role of the dorsal L. IFG during the initial to intermediate stages of grammar acquisition in a new target language. Such functional specificity of the dorsal L. IFG provides neuroscientific evidence consistent with the claims made by the Cumulative-Enhancement model in investigating language acquisition beyond target second and third languages.

Neuroscientific Evidence in Italian Criminal Proceedings

The author asks whether and to what extent neuroscientific evidentiary techniques can be considered admissible in Italian criminal procedure to assess the mental state of the accused or to verify the truthfulness of a statement, analyzing the national jurisprudence on the subject. First, the author asks whether neuroscientific techniques can be used to determine whether the defendant was totally or partially insane at the time of the crime charged and to determine whether the defendant is a socially dangerous person. The answer is yes, although great caution must be exercised. The main risk is to theorize the existence of a real biological basis for antisocial behavior, which could even justify the adoption of restrictive measures praeter delictum against the biologically vulnerable person. Secondly, the author asks whether the techniques called A-IAT (Autobiographical Implicit Association Test) and TARA (Temporal Antagonistic Response Aletiometer), used in Italy in some criminal proceedings to verify the truthfulness of a statement, are compatible with the Italian law of evidence, which prohibits the use, even with the consent of the person concerned, of methods and techniques that are likely to impair his freedom of self-determination and his ability to recall and evaluate facts. The answer is certainly no if it is believed that these techniques can function as "memory detection" techniques, i.e. they are capable of detecting in the mind of the person concerned even memories that he or she has erased. More controversial is whether a-IAT and TARA are to be considered admissible if they are believed to be simple “lie-detection” techniques, aimed at revealing whether or not the declarant is truthful in reporting his or her memories.

Current Trends in the Development of Neuroscientific Research in Education

Modern neuroscience is making significant progress in the study of brain functions, which can be of great importance for the education. However, there is a gap between current neuroscientific evidence on how the brain learns and its direct application in classrooms. What can neuroscientists, psychologists, and educators do to improve the interaction between neuroscience and education? In this article, we attempt to answer this question by examining the essentials of educational neuroscience as an interdisciplinary field of research at the intersection of neuroscience, pedagogy, and cognitive science, which seeks to translate research on the neural mechanisms of learning into educational practice and understand the impact of education on the learner's brain. In the first part of the article we describe the origins and current progress of neuroscience in education, discuss terminological uncertainty in the Russian scientific literature on the relationship between neuroscience and education, as well as possible and, in our opinion, most promising ways of interaction between psychology, pedagogy and neuroscience. In the second part of the article we analyze the main directions of contemporary research in the field of neuroscience, based on the Scopus database of scientific information.

Clean air captures attention whereas pollution distracts: evidence from brain activities

Awareness of the adverse impact of air pollution on attention-related performance such as learning and driving is rapidly growing. However, there is still little known about the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms. Using an adapted dot-probe task paradigm and event-related potential (ERP) technique, we investigated how visual stimuli of air pollution influence the attentional allocation process. Participants were required to make responses to the onset of a target presented at the left or right visual field. The probable location of the target was forewarned by a cue (pollution or clean air images), appearing at either the target location (attention-holding trials) or the opposite location (attention-shifting trials). Behavioral measures showed that when cued by pollution images, subjects had higher response accuracy in attention-shifting trials. ERP analysis results revealed that after the cue onset, pollution images evoked lower N300 amplitudes, indicating less attention-capturing effects of dirty air. After the target onset, pollution cues were correlated with the higher P300 amplitudes in attention-holding trials but lower amplitudes in attention-shifting trials. It indicates that after visual exposure to air pollution, people need more neurocognitive resources to maintain attention but less effort to shift attention away. The findings provide the first neuroscientific evidence for the distracting effect of air pollution. We conclude with several practical implications and suggest the ERP technique as a promising tool to understand human responses to environmental stressors.

Social robots as effective language tutors for children: empirical evidence from neuroscience

The aim of the current study was to investigate children's brain responses to robot-assisted language learning. EEG brain signals were collected from 41 Japanese children who learned French vocabularies in two groups; half of the children learned new words from a social robot that narrated a story in French using animations on a computer screen (Robot group) and the other half watched the same animated story on the screen but only with a voiceover narration and without the robot (Display group). To examine brain activation during the learning phase, we extracted EEG functional connectivity (FC) which is defined as the rhythmic synchronization of signals recorded from different brain areas. The results indicated significantly higher global synchronization of brain signals in the theta frequency band in the Robot group during the learning phase. Closer inspection of intra-hemispheric and inter-hemispheric connections revealed that children who learned a new language from the robot experienced a stronger theta-band EEG synchronization in inter-hemispheric connections, which has been previously associated with success in second language learning in the neuroscientific literature. Additionally, using a multiple linear regression analysis, it was found that theta-band FC and group assignment were significant predictors of children's language learning with the Robot group scoring higher in the post-interaction word recognition test. These findings provide novel neuroscientific evidence for the effectiveness of social robots as second language tutors for children.

Neuroethics and neurolaw in forensic neuropsychiatry: A guide for clinicians.

As neuroscience technologies develop, ethical and legal questions arise regarding their use and societal impact. Neuroethics and neurolaw are growing interdisciplinary fields that address these questions. This review article presents the research agenda of both areas, examines the use and admissibility of neuroscience in expert testimony and legal settings, and discusses ethical issues related to forensic neuropsychiatrists claiming expertise in neuroscience, formulating medical opinions based on neuroscience, and considering its relevance to criminal responsibility. Forensic neuropsychiatrists should be aware of emerging neuroscientific evidence, its utility and limits in rendering diagnoses and explaining behavior, and, before seeking such evidence for legal purposes, its availability and admissibility. When testifying in matters involving neuroscientific evidence, ensuring truthfulness and balance, having sufficient and validated knowledge (including openness with confirming and disconfirming evidence), understanding standards of practice, and drawing relevant and appropriate conclusions remain important.

Insecure Attachment in Schizophrenia A Wider Range of Effect

Attachment serves as an important framework to understand the development, onset and recovery of schizophrenia. Categories of attachment include three organized patterns (secure, dismissing, preoccupied) and one disorganized pattern. Schizophrenia is a disorder typically recognized by delusions and hallucinations, which can significantly impair the patients normal social functioning. This article aims to summarize previous studies of attachment on schizophrenia, and provide new extensions. This paper also discusses the impact of environmental factors on schizophrenia. More importantly, dismissing and disorganized attachment serves as important predictors of positive and negative symptoms, difficult therapeutic relationship and longer course. Dismissing, preoccupied and disorganized attachment orientations also mediate childhood adversity according to previous studies. Based on analysis of cognitive and environmental factors, this article hypothesize that dismissing and preoccupied attachment also mediates schizophrenia and other environmental factors (parental age, migration and low SES). In addition, this article discusses cognitive and neuroscience evidence to prove the connections.

Relational visual representations underlie human social interaction recognition

Humans effortlessly recognize social interactions from visual input. Attempts to model this ability have typically relied on generative inverse planning models, which make predictions by inverting a generative model of agents’ interactions based on their inferred goals, suggesting humans use a similar process of mental inference to recognize interactions. However, growing behavioral and neuroscience evidence suggests that recognizing social interactions is a visual process, separate from complex mental state inference. Yet despite their success in other domains, visual neural network models have been unable to reproduce human-like interaction recognition. We hypothesize that humans rely on relational visual information in particular, and develop a relational, graph neural network model, SocialGNN. Unlike prior models, SocialGNN accurately predicts human interaction judgments across both animated and natural videos. These results suggest that humans can make complex social interaction judgments without an explicit model of the social and physical world, and that structured, relational visual representations are key to this behavior.

Parental involvement affects parent-adolescents brain-to-brain synchrony when experiencing different emotions together: An EEG-based hyperscanning study

Parental involvement (PI) is a broad and multifaceted construct, which refers to the parental demonstration of interest in their child, caring, and warmth (Davis et al., 2021). Parental involvement affects parent-adolescent’s relationship and communication. However, there was little research to examine the underlying neural mechanism. The present study aimed to explore how parental involvement is associated with the brain-to-brain synchronous activation between parent-adolescent dyads when sharing emotional experience together by using the electroencephalograph (EEG) hyperscanning. EEG was recorded simultaneously in a sample of 26 parent-adolescent dyads (Mparents’age=43.312, SD=5.468; Madolescents’ age=12.077, SD=1.412) when completing the picture processing task. Phase locking values (PLVs) in beta band and gamma band were used to compare the differences in the parent-adolescent dyads’ induced brain-to-brain synchrony between the high parental involvement group (HPI) and the low parental involvement group (LPI). Results showed that greater beta brain-to-brain synchrony was observed in the HPIs than in the LPIs when experiencing positive emotions together in the central region. However, there was no significant difference between the HPIs and the LPIs in the negative and neutral condition. Moreover, greater gamma brain-to-brain synchrony was observed when viewing negative emotional stimuli together than viewing positive emotional stimuli together in the LPIs in the central region. However, there was no significant difference between different emotional conditions in the HPIs. Findings of the present study provide neuroscientific evidence that parental involvement may strengthen parent-adolescent’s emotional interaction and communication.

Altered brain functional networks in schizophrenia with persistent negative symptoms: an activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis

ObjectiveTo investigate brain structural and functional characteristics of three brain functional networks including default mode network (DMN), central executive network (CEN), and salience network (SN) in persistent negative symptoms (PNS) patients.MethodsWe performed an activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis of functional connectivity (FC) studies and voxel-based morphometry (VBM) studies to detect specific structural and functional alterations of brain networks between PNS patients and healthy controls.ResultsSeventeen VBM studies and twenty FC studies were included. In the DMN, PNS patients showed decreased gray matter in the bilateral medial frontal gyrus and left anterior cingulate gyrus and a significant reduction of FC in the right precuneus. Also, PNS patients had a decrease of gray matter in the left inferior parietal lobules and medial frontal gyrus, and a significant reduction of FC in the bilateral superior frontal gyrus in the CEN. In comparison with healthy controls, PNS patients exhibited reduced gray matter in the bilateral insula, anterior cingulate gyrus, left precentral gyrus and right claustrum and lower FC in these brain areas in the SN, including the left insula, claustrum, inferior frontal gyrus and extra-nuclear.ConclusionThis meta-analysis reveals brain structural and functional imaging alterations in the three networks and the interaction among these networks in PNS patients, which provides neuroscientific evidence for more personalized treatment.Systematic Review RegistrationThe PROSPERO (https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/PROSPERO/, registration number: CRD42022335962).

A theoretical and clinical perspective of an embodied view in psychotherapy of somatic symptoms disorders.

In this paper, we offer some ideas for the treatment of somatoform patients and related pathologies based on the concept of embodiment. Embodiment refers to the interplay between body and mind in behavior. The word refers to giving a body to something, "incarnate". Spinoza wrote extensively about the topic in the 17th century. In the 20th century, picking up on Spinoza's work, Damasio presented extensive and important neuro-scientific evidence that feelings can be direct perceptions of internal body states, substantiating the growing understanding of emotions and feelings as a core component of the embodied experience. Here, we summarize the evidence for the intersection of emotion and cognition in the body, which impinges on the effectiveness of using the body and movement in psychotherapy and the management of somatic symptoms and related disorders. We present evidence indicating that movement would be a way to reach unconscious processes dealing with body-mind interaction and body awareness.

Connectome-based predictive modeling of fluid intelligence: evidence for a global system of functionally integrated brain networks.

Cognitive neuroscience continues to advance our understanding of the neural foundations of human intelligence, with significant progress elucidating the role of the frontoparietal network in cognitive control mechanisms for flexible, intelligent behavior. Recent evidence in network neuroscience further suggests that this finding may represent the tip of the iceberg and that fluid intelligence may depend on the collective interaction of multiple brain networks. However, the global brain mechanisms underlying fluid intelligence and the nature of multi-network interactions remain to be well established. We therefore conducted a large-scale Connectome-based Predictive Modeling study, administering resting-state fMRI to 159 healthy college students and examining the contributions of seven intrinsic connectivity networks to the prediction of fluid intelligence, as measured by a state-of-the-art cognitive task (the Bochum Matrices Test). Specifically, we aimed to: (i) identify whether fluid intelligence relies on a primary brain network or instead engages multiple brain networks; and (ii) elucidate the nature of brain network interactions by assessing network allegiance (within- versus between-network connections) and network topology (strong versus weak connections) in the prediction of fluid intelligence. Our results demonstrate that whole-brain predictive models account for a large and significant proportion of variance in fluid intelligence (18%) and illustrate that the contribution of individual networks is relatively modest by comparison. In addition, we provide novel evidence that the global architecture of fluid intelligence prioritizes between-network connections and flexibility through weak ties. Our findings support a network neuroscience approach to understanding the collective role of brain networks in fluid intelligence and elucidate the system-wide network mechanisms from which flexible, adaptive behavior is constructed.

The power of (surreptitiously) mentioning your mentor’s name: Subliminal priming of mentor’s name modulates N170 responses to blurred faces

Using the event-related potentials (ERPs) technique and subliminal priming paradigm, the present study examined the influence of mentioning a mentor’s name on graduate students. Fifty-eight graduate students were subliminally primed by mentor and stranger names before making pressure judgments of a series of unrelated blurred facial photos with neutral emotion. The face-sensitive N170 components were analyzed according to the pressure judgment × name prime conditions. The results showed that relative to stranger names, subliminal priming of mentor’s name could modulate students’ N170 reactions during facial processing. Specifically, the mentor-name priming attenuated N170 amplitudes for high-pressure judgment trials on the right hemisphere but heightened the overall N170 responses on the left hemisphere. Behavioral results also showed that the mentor-name priming slowed students' reaction time during pressure judgments; in addition, students’ attitudes towards mentors were correlated with N170 amplitudes on high-pressure judgment conditions. These findings provided neuroscientific evidence demonstrating the psychological significance of mentors to graduate students. Theoretical and practical implications were also discussed.

Online Professional Development on Educational Neuroscience in Higher Education Based on Design Thinking

Higher education teaching staff members need to build a scientifically accurate and comprehensive understanding of the function of the brain in learning as neuroscience evidence can constitute a way to optimize teaching and achieve learning excellence. An international consortium developed a professional development six-module course on educational neuroscience and online community of practice by applying design thinking. A mixed methods research design was employed to investigate the attitudes of thirty-two (N = 32) participating academics using a survey comprising eleven closed and open questions. Data analysis methods included descriptive statistics, correlation, generalized additive model and grounded theory. The overall evaluation demonstrated a notable satisfaction level with regard to the quality of the course. Given the power of habits, mentoring and peer interactions are recommended to ensure the effective integration of theoretical neuroscientific evidence into teaching practice.

Future Research on Theories of Evil:
 An Insuperable Blind Spot?

This reflection explores the theories of evil in the field of genocide studies and highlights a ‘blind spot’ in understanding the motives behind mass killings. It discusses various theories of evil, ranging from individual-based to situational factors, and emphasizes the need for a nuanced understanding of diverse and complex motives. The reflection suggests that incorporating neuroscience into genocide studies may shed light on the motives behind violence by examining the impact of brain trauma and injury. However, it also raises questions about the extent to which neuroscience can provide a comprehensive explanation for motive and the implications of using neuroscientific evidence in genocide trials. The reflection concludes by discussing the limitations of attributing complete responsibility to the brain and the role of behavioral science in understanding criminal responsibility.