The integration of social influence and reward: Computational approaches and neural evidence

Decades of research have established that decision-making is dramatically impacted by both the rewards an individual receives and the behavior of others. How do these distinct influences exert their influence on an individual’s actions, and can the resulting behavior be effectively captured in a computational model? To address this question, we employed a novel spatial foraging game in which groups of three participants sought to find the most rewarding location in an unfamiliar two-dimensional space. As the game transitioned from one block to the next, the availability of information regarding other group members was varied systematically, revealing the relative impacts of feedback from the environment and information from other group members on individual decision-making. Both reward-based and socially-based sources of information exerted a significant influence on behavior, and a computational model incorporating these effects was able to recapitulate several key trends in the behavioral data. In addition, our findings suggest how these sources were processed and combined during decision-making. Analysis of reaction time, location of gaze, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data indicated that these distinct sources of information were integrated simultaneously for each decision, rather than exerting their influence in a separate, all-or-none fashion across separate subsets of trials. These findings add to our understanding of how the separate influences of reward from the environment and information derived from other social agents are combined to produce decisions.     

Being grateful for being: Being, reverence and finitude

Atheists are rarely associated with holiness, yet they can have deeply spiritual experiences. Once such experience of the author exemplified ‘the holy’ as defined by Otto. However, the subjectivism of Otto’s Kantianism undermines Otto’s otherwise fruitful approach. While the work of Hegel overcomes this, it is too rationalistic to account for mortal life. Seeking to avoid these shortcomings, this paper places ‘holiness’ within a self-differentiating ontological unity, the Heideggerian ‘fourfold’. This unity can only be experienced by confronting groundless finite mortality, and the resulting existential disposition is characterized as ‘reverence’. Reverence is gratitude for mortal existence, and existence itself. Moreover, it is as much political as it is ontological, atheistic as it is theistic.     

A LABORATORY ANALOGUE FOR THE STUDY OF PEER SEXUAL HARASSMENT

The purpose of this study was to develop a laboratory analogue for the study of peer sexual harassment, and to examine person and situational factors associated with male on female peer sexual harassment. One hundred twenty-two male participants were given the opportunity to tell jokes to a female confederate from a joke list that included sexually offensive jokes, as well as other types of jokes. Participants were exposed to either a sexist laboratory environment or a neutral laboratory environment during the study. Eighty percent of participants told at least one sexually offensive joke to a female confederate. Higher scores on a measure of adversarial sexual beliefs were associated with telling a greater number of sexually offensive jokes. The results suggest that the joke-telling analogue may be a useful means for laboratory explorations of person and situational factors associated with peer sexual harassment.     

Object naming induces reliance on orientation-independent representations during longer-term, but not short-term, visual remembering

Naming novel objects with novel count nouns changes how the objects are drawn from memory, revealing that object categorisation induces reliance on orientation-independent visual representations during longer-term remembering, but not during short-term remembering. Serial position effects integrate this finding with a more established conceptualisation of short-term and longer-term visual remembering in which the former is identified as keeping an item in mind. Adults were shown a series of four novel objects in orientations in which they would not normally be drawn from memory. When not named ("Look at this object"), the objects were drawn in the orientations in which they had been seen. When named with a novel count noun (e.g., "Look at this dax"), the final object continued to be depicted in the orientation in which it had been seen, but all other objects were depicted in an unseen but preferred (canonical) orientation, even though participants could still remember the orientations in which they had been seen. Although orientation-dependent exemplar representations appear to be more accessible than orientation-independent generic representations during short-term remembering, the reverse is the case during longer-term remembering. How the theoretical framework emerging from these observations accommodates a broader body of evidence is discussed.     

Club Drug Use and Intentionality in Perceptions of Rape Victims

The purpose of the present study was to examine whether intentionality of alcohol or club drug use would affect observer attributions of a victim and a perpetrator after a sexual assault. Participants were 198 male and female college students sampled from a small college located in the United States. In general, participants attributed less blame to the victim, more guilt to the perpetrator, and were more likely to define the assault as rape and convict the perpetrator when the substance use was involuntary as opposed to voluntary. Participants also attributed more blame to the victim and less pleasure to the perpetrator when the sexual assault involved GHB as opposed to Everclear. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

The Judicialization of Religious Freedom: An Institutionalist Approach

Recent years have seen growing interest in the judicialization of religious freedom (JRF). In this article, I identify two distinct meanings of JRF, which are often conflated but which need to be kept separate. I then argue for a stronger institutionalist approach to JRF. An institutionalist approach focuses our attention on both the rules internal to courts, and the relationship of courts to administrative agencies, legislatures, and other governing bodies. I argue that there is room to strengthen our analyses of JRF by paying greater attention to these institutional dynamics. I demonstrate this by highlighting two overlooked features of courts—interpretive rules and access rules—that are particularly important for governing JRF; and by developing a framework that relates the courts to other institutional venues and political actors. In so doing, I identify a number of promising directions for future research into the causes and consequences of JRF.     

Do California ground squirrels (Spermophilus beecheyi) use ritualized syntactic cephalocaudal grooming as an agonistic signal?

Animal communication theory holds that many signals have evolved from nonsignal precursors. This field and laboratory study of California ground squirrels (Spermophilus beecheyi) provides evidence for the coexistence of such a precursor with its derived display. The precursor is an ancient, endogenously sequenced (syntactic) pattern of cephalocaudal grooming movements (CCGs) shared by all rodent suborders. The following evidence supports the hypothesis that a supernormal version of this pattern has been selected for signal function. Syntactic CCGs in the field (a) were more rigidly stereotyped than ordinary syntactic CCGs in the laboratory; (b) differed from laboratory syntactic CCGs in other ways that enhanced their conspicuousness, in part through exaggeration of the syntactic cephalocaudal pattern; (c) were associated with scent marking and social staring; and (d) were associated with intrasexual agonistic encounters that did not escalate to fighting.     

NEURONAL CODING OF SERIAL ORDER:

Abstract— How does the brain create rule-governed sequences of behavior? An answer to this question may come from a surprising source: the neostriatum (caudate nucleus and putamen), Traditionally, the neostriatum has been considered pun of the brain's motor system, but its contribution to the preparation or execution of movement is recognized generally to concern high-level motor functions. Recent work implicates the neostriatum in disorders of sequential action and thought, as in the repetition of thoughts or habits in human obsessive-compulsive disorder and movements or speech in Tourette's syndrome. Yet there is no direct evidence to support the idea that the neostriatum controls sequences of behavior. Using ethological and neurophysiological techniques to study neural activity in the rat neoslriatum during syntactic grooming sequences, we found that neuronal activity in the anterolateral neostriatum depended on the execution of syntactic sequences of grooming actions. The individual grooming movements themselves did not activate the neoslriatum; activation was determined by the syntactic sequence in which grooming movements were performed. These data provide the first direct evidence that the neoslriatum coordinates the control of rule-governed behavioral sequences.