How similar are the changes in neural activity resulting from mindfulness practice in contrast to spiritual practice?

Meditation and spiritual practices are conceptually similar, eliciting similar subjective experiences, and both appear to provide similar benefits to the practicing individuals. However, no research has examined whether the mechanism of action leading to the beneficial effects is similar in both practices. This review examines the neuroimaging research that has focused on groups of meditating individuals, groups who engage in religious/spiritual practices, and research that has examined groups who perform both practices together, in an attempt to assess whether this may be the case. Differences in the balance of activity between the parietal and prefrontal cortical activation were found between the three groups. A relative prefrontal increase was reflective of mindfulness, which related to decreased anxiety and improved well-being. A relative decrease in activation of the parietal cortex, specifically the inferior parietal cortex, appears to be reflective of spiritual belief, whether within the context of meditation or not. Because mindful and spiritual practices differ in focus regarding the ‘self’ or ‘other’ (higher being), these observations about neurological components that reflect spirituality may continue work towards understanding how the definition of ‘self’ and ‘other’ is represented in the brain, and how this may be reflected in behaviour. Future research can begin to use cohorts of participants in mindfulness studies which are controlled for using the variable of spirituality to explicitly examine how functional and structural similarities and differences may arise.     

Eye movements of monkey observers viewing vocalizing conspecifics

Primates, including humans, communicate using facial expressions, vocalizations and often a combination of the two modalities. For humans, such bimodal integration is best exemplified by speech-reading - humans readily use facial cues to enhance speech comprehension, particularly in noisy environments. Studies of the eye movement patterns of human speech-readers have revealed, unexpectedly, that they predominantly fixate on the eye region of the face as opposed to the mouth. Here, we tested the evolutionary basis for such a behavioral strategy by examining the eye movements of rhesus monkeys observers as they viewed vocalizing conspecifics. Under a variety of listening conditions, we found that rhesus monkeys predominantly focused on the eye region versus the mouth and that fixations on the mouth were tightly correlated with the onset of mouth movements. These eye movement patterns of rhesus monkeys are strikingly similar to those reported for humans observing the visual components of speech. The data therefore suggest that the sensorimotor strategies underlying bimodal speech perception may have a homologous counterpart in a closely related primate ancestor.     

Effect of temporal constraints on hemispheric asymmetries during spatial frequency processing

Studies on functional hemispheric asymmetries have suggested that the right vs. left hemisphere should be predominantly involved in low vs. high spatial frequency (SF) analysis, respectively. By manipulating exposure duration of filtered natural scene images, we examined whether the temporal characteristics of SF analysis (i.e., the temporal precedence of low on high spatial frequencies) may interfere with hemispheric specialization. Results showed the classical hemispheric specialization pattern for brief exposure duration and a trend to a right hemisphere advantage irrespective of the SF content for longer exposure duration. The present study suggests that the hemispheric specialization pattern for visual information processing should be considered as a dynamic system, wherein the superiority of one hemisphere over the other could change according to the level of temporal constraints: the higher the temporal constraints of the task, the more the hemispheres are specialized in SF processing.     

Hemispheric predominance assessment of phonology and semantics: a divided visual field experiment

The aim of the present behavioural experiment was to evaluate the most lateralized among two phonological (phoneme vs. rhyme detection) and the most lateralized among two semantic ("living" vs. "edible" categorization) tasks, within the dominant hemisphere for language. The reason of addressing this question was a practical one: to evaluate the degree of the hemispheric lateralization for several language tasks, by using the divided visual presentation of stimuli, and then choose the most lateralized semantic and phonological for mapping language in patients by using fMRI in future studies. During the divided visual field experiment by using words (semantic tasks) and pseudo-words (phonological tasks) as stimuli, thirty-nine right-handed participants were examined. Our results have shown that all tasks were significantly left hemisphere lateralized. Furthermore, the rhyme was significantly more lateralized than phoneme detection and "living" was significantly more lateralized than "edible" categorization. The rhyme decision and "living" categorization will be used in future fMRI studies for assessing hemispheric predominance and cerebral substrate for semantics and phonology in patients. Our results also suggest that the characteristics of stimuli could influence the degree of the hemispheric lateralization (i.e., the emotional charge of stimuli for words and the position of the phoneme to be detected, for pseudo-words).     

Neural modeling and imaging of the cortical interactions underlying syllable production

This paper describes a neural model of speech acquisition and production that accounts for a wide range of acoustic, kinematic, and neuroimaging data concerning the control of speech movements. The model is a neural network whose components correspond to regions of the cerebral cortex and cerebellum, including premotor, motor, auditory, and somatosensory cortical areas. Computer simulations of the model verify its ability to account for compensation to lip and jaw perturbations during speech. Specific anatomical locations of the model's components are estimated, and these estimates are used to simulate fMRI experiments of simple syllable production.     

Exogenous attention differentially modulates the processing of categorical and coordinate spatial relations

Carrasco and her colleagues have suggested that exogenous attention reduces the size of receptive fields at an attended location (Gobell & Carrasco, 2005; Yeshurun & Carrasco, 1998, 2000). Based on the hypothesis that categorical and coordinate spatial relations are more efficiently processed by smaller and larger receptive fields, respectively, we predicted that exogenous attention would be more beneficial to the processing of categorical spatial relations than coordinate spatial relations while it would disrupt the processing of coordinate spatial relations. To test these hypotheses, participants were tested using a variant of Posner's (1980) attentional cueing paradigm. Exogenous attention produced larger facilitative effects on categorical spatial processing than on coordinate spatial processing at a short cue-target stimulus onset asynchrony (100 ms, Experiment 1, N = 28), and this result was replicated regardless of cue size in Experiment 2 (N = 24). When the coordinate judgment was sufficiently difficult, exogenous attention disrupted the processing of coordinate spatial relations (Experiment 3, N = 28). These findings indicate that exogenous attention can differentially modulate the processing of categorical and coordinate spatial relations.     

Chess as a Behavioral Model for Cognitive Skill Research: Review of Blindfold Chess by Eliot Hearst and John Knott

This multifaceted work on chess played without sight of the pieces is a sophisticated psychologist's examination of this topic and of chess skill in general, including a detailed and comprehensive historical account. This review builds on Hearst and Knott's assertion that chess can provide a uniquely useful model for research on several issues in the area of cognitive skill and imagery. A key issue is the relationship between viewing a stimulus and mental imagery in the light of blindfold chess masters' consistent reports that they do not use or have images. This review also proposes a methodology for measuring and quantifying an individual's skill shortfall from a theoretical maximum. This methodology, based on a 1951 proposal by Claude Shannon, is applicable to any choice situation in which all the available choices are known. The proposed “Proficiency” measure reflects the equivalent number of “yes—no” questions that would have been required to arrive at a best choice, considering also the time consumed. As the measure provides a valid and nonarbitrary way to compare different skills and the effects of different independent variables on a given skill, it may have a wide range of applications in cognitive skill research, skill training, and education.