A passion of the soul: an introduction to pain for consciousness researchers

Pain is an important focus for consciousness research because it is an avenue for exploring somatic awareness, emotion, and the genesis of subjectivity. In principle, pain is awareness of tissue trauma, but pain can occur in the absence of identifiable injury, and sometimes substantive tissue injury produces no pain. The purpose of this paper is to help bridge pain research and consciousness studies. It reviews the basic sensory neurophysiology associated with tissue injury, including transduction, transmission, modulation, and central representation. In addition, it highlights the central mechanisms for the emotional aspects of pain, demonstrating the physiological link between tissue trauma and mechanisms of emotional arousal. Finally, we discuss several current issues in the field of pain research that bear on central issues in consciousness studies, such as sickness and sense of self.     

Defensive behaviors in rats following septal and septal--amygdala lesions

Rats with anterior septal lesions showed a pattern of consistent enhancement of defensive behaviors normally elicited by threatening conspecifics, with no enhancement of attack or general reactivity. Further division of this group indicated that damage to sites anterior and ventral to the septal area, sites previously implicated in the "septal syndrome," produces maximal effect on these behaviors. When amygdala lesions are combined with septal damage this enhanced defensive responding is almost completely eliminated. These results were interpreted as indicating that the septal syndrome represents hyperdefensiveness to conspecific threat stimuli rather than aggression or increased general reactivity, and that amygdaloid mechanisms are also involved in the regulation of conspecific defensive behaviors.     

The influence of Hangul learning upon laterality differences in Hangul word recognition by native Japanese subjects

Single-character Hangul words were presented tachistoscopically in the left or right visual field to 34 normal, right-handed Japanese subjects who did not know Hangul. The reaction time was measured. A significant left-field superiority for Hangul recognition was shown. When 18 out of 34 subjects learned Hangul stimuli, they showed no lateral asymmetry for Hangul recognition. However, the other 16 subjects, without Hangul learning, again exhibited a significant left-field superiority. The results show that the initial left-field superiority shifted to no laterality difference for Hangul recognition by poor Hangul learners.     

Depth separation between foreground and background on visually induced perception of self-motion

A uniformly moving visual pattern can induce observer's self-motion perception in the opposite direction (vection), and an additional static stimulus can modulate (facilitate or inhibit) the strength of it. The present study was designed to investigate the effects of stimulus depth order and the depth distances of the visual stimulus on the inhibition and facilitation of vection caused by the additional static stimulus, measuring duration and estimated magnitude of vection as indices of vection strength. Analysis of this psychophysical experiment with four participants indicated that the static foreground presented in front of the moving pattern can facilitate vection, whereas the static background inhibits it (Duration: F1,3= 12.06, p<.05; Estimation: F1,3= 13.87, p<.05). Furthermore, the depth distances from the observer or the depth separation between the foreground and the background did not affect the self-motion perception (F2,6 < 1.0 for duration and estimation).     

The role of language in memory for actions

Languages differ with respect to how aspects of motion events tend to be lexicalized. English typically conflates MOTION with MANNER, but Japanese and Spanish typically do not. We report a set of experiments that assessed the effect of this cross-linguistic difference on participants' decisions in a similarity-judgment task about scenes containing novel animations as stimuli. In Experiment 1, which required participants to encode the stimuli briefly into memory, we observed a language effect; in Experiment 2, which required participants to analyze the same stimuli, but not remember them, the language effect disappeared. Hence, these experiments reveal a task-dependent effect, which, we argue, points to working memory as the source of the language effect observed in Experiment 1 and, potentially, other experiments that have shown a linguistic relativity effect.     

Visually guided facial actions in rhesus monkeys

We trained 2 monkeys to display facial actions in response to corresponding arbitrary visual cues. Each monkey executed the task successfully, and each displayed two different facial actions corresponding to either hand-sign or color cues. More than 90% of the responses were correct for each monkey. These results provide evidence that monkeys can execute facial actions in response to conditioned visual cues in the absence of social context. These data suggest that facial actions of monkeys are flexible enough for use in further laboratory investigations—for example, in studies on the neural mechanisms underlying the execution of actions.     

Validity of Treatment Target Progress Ratings as Indicators of Youth Improvement

We examined whether clinical progress ratings on the Monthly Treatment and Progress Summary form (MTPS), an idiographic treatment progress measure, were meaningfully related to changes measured by two separate standardized instruments; the Child and Adolescent Functional Assessment Scale (CAFAS) and the Child and Adolescent Level of Care Utilization System (CALOCUS). Validity coefficients were examined at intake and three-, six-, and nine-month follow-up periods. Samples were selected for each measure and follow-up period from the population of youth receiving services through the Hawaii Child and Adolescent Mental Health Division’s (CAMHD) system of care. Significant youth improvement was evident on all three measures across all follow-up intervals. The type of changes measured by the MTPS and CAFAS were more alike over longer follow-up intervals than changes measured by the CALOCUS. The MTPS captures distinct aspects of client change that overlaps somewhat with CAFAS and CALOCUS measures. The MTPS is a brief client-tailored measure that seems to provide valid, sensitive, and nonredundant client specific treatment outcome information that can be collected on a frequent basis within a complex system of care.     

Rule following and rule use in the balance-scale task

Quinlan et al. [Quinlan, p., van der Mass, H., Jansen, B., Booij, O., & Rendell, M. (this issue). Re-thinking stages of cognitive development: An appraisal of connectionist models of the balance scale task. Cognition, doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2006.02.004] use Latent Class Analysis (LCA) to criticize a connectionist model of development on the balance-scale task, arguing that LCA shows that this model fails to capture a torque rule and exhibits rules that children do not. In this rejoinder we focus on the latter problem, noting the tendency of LCA to find small, unreliable, and difficult-to-interpret classes. This tendency is documented in network and synthetic simulations and in psychological research, and statistical reasons for finding such unreliable classes are discussed. We recommend that LCA should be used with care, and argue that its small and unreliable classes should be discounted. Further, we note that a preoccupation with diagnosing rules ignores important phenomena that rules do not account for. Finally, we conjecture that simple extensions of the network model should be able to achieve torque-rule performance.     

Rorschach Comprehensive System data for a sample of 240 adult nonpatients from Japan

This article presents Rorschach Comprehensive System (CS; Exner, 1995) results for 240 adult nonpatients living in the central area of Tokyo, Japan. Inclusion/exclusion criteria are described. Interrater reliability statistics at the response level are presented along with scores for CS variables.