The precuneus and the insula in self-attributional processes

Attributions are constantly assigned in everyday life. A well-known phenomenon is the self-serving bias: that is, people’s tendency to attribute positive events to internal causes (themselves) and negative events to external causes (other persons/circumstances). Here, we investigated the neural correlates of the cognitive processes implicated in self-serving attributions using social situations that differed in their emotional saliences. We administered an attributional bias task during fMRI scanning in a large sample of healthy subjects (n = 71). Eighty sentences describing positive or negative social situations were presented, and subjects decided via buttonpress whether the situation had been caused by themselves or by the other person involved. Comparing positive with negative sentences revealed activations of the bilateral posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). Self-attribution correlated with activation of the posterior portion of the precuneus. However, self-attributed positive versus negative sentences showed activation of the anterior portion of the precuneus, and self-attributed negative versus positive sentences demonstrated activation of the bilateral insular cortex. All significant activations were reported with a statistical threshold of p ≤ .001, uncorrected. In addition, a comparison of our fMRI task with data from the Internal, Personal and Situational Attributions Questionnaire, Revised German Version, demonstrated convergent validity. Our findings suggest that the precuneus and the PCC are involved in the evaluation of social events with particular regional specificities: The PCC is activated during emotional evaluation, the posterior precuneus during attributional evaluation, and the anterior precuneus during self-serving processes. Furthermore, we assume that insula activation is a correlate of awareness of personal agency in negative situations.     

Increasing self–other integration through divergent thinking

Increasing evidence suggests that people may cognitively represent themselves and others just like any other, nonsocial event. Here, we provide evidence that the degree of self–other integration (as reflected by the joint Simon effect; JSE) is systematically affected by the control characteristics of temporally overlapping but unrelated and nonsocial creativity tasks. In particular, the JSE was found to be larger in the context of a divergent-thinking task (alternate uses task) than in the context of a convergent-thinking task (remote association task). This suggests that self–other integration and action corepresentation are controlled by domain-general cognitive-control parameters that regulate the integrativeness (strong vs. weak top-down control and a resulting narrow vs. broad attentional focus) of information processing irrespective of its social implications.     

What Carroll’s Tortoise Actually Proves

Rationality requires us to have certain propositional attitudes (beliefs, intentions, etc.) given certain other attitudes that we have. Carroll’s Tortoise repeatedly shows up in this discussion. Following up on Brunero (Ethical Theory Moral Pract 8:557–569, 2005), I ask what Carroll-style considerations actually prove. This paper rejects two existing suggestions, and defends a third.     

Attention,instruction, and response representation

A two-dimensional Simon-type task was devised to investigate the impact of task requirements and explicit instructions on spatial action coding. Subjects performed actions that were defined on two spatial dimensions: horizontal (left-right) or vertical (top-bottom). The relevant stimulus feature was nonspatial but the stimuli varied on the horizontal and the vertical dimension, so that horizontal and vertical S-R compatibility effects could be measured separately. Implicit task requirements were manipulated by having the subjects perform an unrelated task before the Simon task—a task in which only one of the two spatial dimensions was relevant. Instructions were varied by describing the responses in the unrelated priming task and/or in the Simon task in spatial terms or by referring to nonspatial features of the response keys. Priming a particular dimension increased the Simon effect on that dimension, whereas instructions had no differential effect. These findings suggest that, first, drawing attention to a particular dimension leads to a stronger contribution to event representation of those features defined on that dimension (intentional weighting) and, second, that instructions do not affect action coding if the manipulation does not change the task goal.     

Evolutionary Psychology of Facial Attractiveness

The human face communicates an impressive number of visual signals. Although adults' ratings of facial attractiveness are consistent across studies, even cross-culturally, there has been considerable controversy surrounding attempts to identify the facial features that cause faces to be judged attractive or unattractive. Studies of physical attractiveness have attempted to identify the features that contribute to attractiveness by studying the relationships between attractiveness and (a) symmetry, (b) averageness, and (c) nonaverage sexually dimorphic features (hormone markers). Evolutionary psychology proposes that these characteristics all pertain to health, suggesting that humans have evolved to view certain features as attractive because they were displayed by healthy individuals. However, the question remains how single features that are considered attractive relate to each other, and if they form a single ornament that signals mate quality. Moreover, some researchers have recently explained attractiveness preferences in terms of individual differences that are predictable. This article briefly describes what is currently known from attractiveness research, reviews some recent advances, and suggests areas for future researchers' attention.     

Responding to object files: Automatic integration of spatial information revealed by stimulus-response compatibility effects

Spatial information is assumed to play a central, organizing role in object perception and to be an important ingredient of object representations. Here, evidence is provided to show that automatically integrated spatial object information is also functional in guiding spatial action. In particular, retrieving nonspatial information about a previewed object facilitates responses that spatially correspond to this object. This is true whether the object is still in sight or has already disappeared. So, forming an object representation entails the integration and storage of action-related information concerning the action that the object affords.