Is Political Cognition Like Riding a Bicycle? How Cognitive Neuroscience Can Inform Research on Political Thinking

Our understanding of political phenomena, including political attitudes and sophistication, can be enriched by incorporating the theories and tools of cognitive neuroscience—in particular, the cognitive neuroscience of nonconscious habitual cognition (akin to bicycle riding). From this perspective, different types of informational "building blocks" can be construed from which different types of political attitudes may arise. A reflection-reflexion model is presented that describes how these blocks combine to produce a given political attitude as a function of goals, primes, expertise, and inherent conflict in considerations relevant to the attitude. The ways in which neuroimaging methods can be used to test hypotheses of political cognition are reviewed.     

Rejoinder to Harold Blum2

The author's main disagreement with Harold Blum is over Blum's contention that symptomatic improvement is directly linked to the recovery of memories. The idea that memories are laid down in childhood and preserved until the time of their later recovery flies in the face of what we now understand as the creation of memories by the neurobiological systems underpinning this aspect of mental function. No evidence directly links symptomatic improvement to reconstruction and thus to outcome; care should be taken to avoid confusing co‐occurrence with causality. While reconstruction of how things actually were in childhood can significantly contribute to therapeutic action, it is the process rather than the outcome of this reconstruction that is therapeutic, due to the opportunity thus afforded to rework current experiences in the context of other perspectives. The author clarifies his definition of transference to show some areas of agreement between his position and Blum's. He disusses contemporary neuroscientific views on memory and identifies a number of psychoanalytic writers who have used these productively.     

Assessing affective experience of in-situ environmental walk via wearable biosensors for evidence-based design

In environmental psychology research, the most commonly used methods are phenomenological interviews and psychometric scales. Recently, with the development of wearable bio-sensing devices, a new approach based on bio-sensing data is becoming possible. In this study, we examined the feasibility of using wearable biosensors to document affective experience during in-situ walk. An eight-channelled Procomp multi-bio-sensing devices (EKG, EEG, skin conductance, temperature, facial EMG, respiration) were used, in addition with a GPS tracker, to measure the in situ physiological affective responses to environmental stimuli. This pilot experiment revealed consistent results between bio-sensing measures and two traditional methods, i.e. phenomenological interviews and psychological Likert scale rating, which indicated that mobile bio-sensing could be a promising method in measuring in-situ affective responses to environmental stimuli as well as diagnosing potential environmental stressor. This new bio-sensory method, as exemplified in this paper, could help identifying negative stressful stimuli and providing evidence-based diagnosis to support design strategies.     

Finding Empathy: How Neuroscientific Measures,Evidence and Conceptualizations Interact

ABSTRACT

Questions about how empathy should be conceptualized have long been a preoccupation of the field of empathy research. There are numerous definitions of empathy that have been proposed and that often overlap with other concepts such as sympathy and compassion. This makes communication between research groups or across disciplines difficult. Many researchers seem to see the diversity of definitions as a problem rather than a form of benign pluralism. Within this debate about conceptualization, researchers sometimes suggest that more neuroscientific evidence will make the problem go away – that uncovering the processes underlying empathy will thereby also sort out conceptual difficulties. In this paper, I challenge this assumption by examining how neuroscientists studying empathy use concepts in practice – both in the development of their measures and in the interpretation of their data. I argue that this neuroscientific literature demonstrates that continuity and stability comes from the use of certain established measures, while progress comes from expansion upon those measures and the flexibility of stated concepts. We do not ‘find’ empathy through increased neuroscientific evidence but we do get closer to understanding empathic processes, flexibly understood.     

Symbioses Can Transcend Particularisms: A Memoir of Friendship with Ralph Wendell Burhoe

Ralph Burho's paradigmatic scientific innovation is the extension of the concept of symbiosis to coadapted human genotypes and "culturetypes," centered on religion. Civilization also requires a coexistent secular arena, where religion's nearness may help prevent our natural synergistic instrumentalizations of each other from degrading to losses of respect for one another as responsible free agents. The mixed messages in the Bible's diverse stories help to preserve a richness of choices in memory as we navigate history. We science-and-religion theorists should expand our cademic base to include economics, politics, literature, and other areas, while emulating Ralph's wise and good-humored ways of drawing us together and affecting our lives.     

Modelling individual difference in visual categorization

Recent years has seen growing interest in understanding, characterizing, and explaining individual differences in visual cognition. We focus here on individual differences in visual categorization. Categorization is the fundamental visual ability to group different objects together as the same kind of thing. Research on visual categorization and category learning has been significantly informed by computational modelling, so our review will focus both on how formal models of visual categorization have captured individual differences and how individual difference have informed the development of formal models. We first examine the potential sources of individual differences in leading models of visual categorization, providing a brief review of a range of different models. We then describe several examples of how computational models have captured individual differences in visual categorization. This review also provides a bit of an historical perspective, starting with models that predicted no individual differences, to those that captured group differences, to those that predict true individual differences, and to more recent hierarchical approaches that can simultaneously capture both group and individual differences in visual categorization. Via this selective review, we see how considerations of individual differences can lead to important theoretical insights into how people visually categorize objects in the world around them. We also consider new directions for work examining individual differences in visual categorization.     

A Computational Evaluation of Sentence Processing Deficits in Aphasia

Individuals with agrammatic Broca's aphasia experience difficulty when processing reversible non‐canonical sentences. Different accounts have been proposed to explain this phenomenon. The Trace Deletion account (Grodzinsky, 1995, 2000, 2006) attributes this deficit to an impairment in syntactic representations, whereas others (e.g., Caplan, Waters, Dede, Michaud, & Reddy, 2007; Haarmann, Just, & Carpenter, 1997) propose that the underlying structural representations are unimpaired, but sentence comprehension is affected by processing deficits, such as slow lexical activation, reduction in memory resources, slowed processing and/or intermittent deficiency, among others. We test the claims of two processing accounts, slowed processing and intermittent deficiency, and two versions of the Trace Deletion Hypothesis (TDH), in a computational framework for sentence processing (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005) implemented in ACT‐R (Anderson, Byrne, Douglass, Lebiere, & Qin, 2004). The assumption of slowed processing is operationalized as slow procedural memory, so that each processing action is performed slower than normal, and intermittent deficiency as extra noise in the procedural memory, so that the parsing steps are more noisy than normal. We operationalize the TDH as an absence of trace information in the parse tree. To test the predictions of the models implementing these theories, we use the data from a German sentence—picture matching study reported in Hanne, Sekerina, Vasishth, Burchert, and De Bleser (2011). The data consist of offline (sentence‐picture matching accuracies and response times) and online (eye fixation proportions) measures. From among the models considered, the model assuming that both slowed processing and intermittent deficiency are present emerges as the best model of sentence processing difficulty in aphasia. The modeling of individual differences suggests that, if we assume that patients have both slowed processing and intermittent deficiency, they have them in differing degrees.     

THE NEUROSCIENCE OF WESLEYAN SOTERIOLOGY: THE DYNAMIC OF BOTH INSTANTANEOUS AND GRADUAL CHANGE

In his work Rewired: Exploring Religious Conversion, dealing with Wesleyan soteriology and neuroscience, Paul Markham claims that when one incorporates biology as an epistemic restriction in theologies of conversion, doctrines of instantaneous conversion are invalidated. He asserts that conversion must always be gradual, because the mechanism by which the brain changes in response to experience does not occur instantaneously; rather change is initiated and consolidated over an often lengthy span of time. I argue, however, that doctrines of instantaneous conversion are maintained when taking neuroscience into account. First, for doctrines of conversion that hold to the imputation of Christ's righteousness, neuroscience is irrelevant, because statements of instantaneous change are in terms of a relational status and not biological. Rapid conversion is maintained as a metaphysical position. Second, an embodied and neurologically realized change is expected in theologies of conversion that hold to impartation and, contrary to Markham, immediate change is neurologically possible in a variety of ways.     

Libet-style experiments,neuroscience, and libertarian free will

People have disagreed on the significance of Libet-style experiments for discussions about free will. In what specifically concerns free will in a libertarian sense, some argue that Libet-style experiments pose a threat to its existence by providing support to the claim that decisions are determined by unconscious brain events. Others disagree by claiming that determinism, in a sense that conflicts with libertarian free will, cannot be established by sciences other than fundamental physics. This paper rejects both positions. First, it is argued that neuroscience and psychology could in principle provide support for milder deterministic claims that would also conflict with libertarian free will. Second, it is argued that Libet-style experiments—due to some of their peculiar features, ones that need not be shared by neuroscience as a whole—currently do not (but possibly could) support such less demanding deterministic claims. The general result is that neuroscience and psychology could in principle undermine libertarian free will, but that Libet-style experiments have not done that so far.