Do you remember telling a lie at 2, 3, or 4? Well, feel guilty no more! Lying is actually a reliable sign of higher cognitive functioning. It was previously accepted that children were able to start lying at 3.5 years and no earlier. However, a recent study by psychologist Angela Evans found that 25% of two-year olds, 50% of three-year olds, and 80% of four-year olds were capable of lies.

How did she manage this? Evans had a group of 41 two-year-olds and 24 three-year-olds presented with a “really tempting situation.”  The child is told to guess a toy based solely on the noise it makes. The experimenter then tells the child not to peek under the box covering the next toy, leaves, and records the child’s actions on a hidden camera. When the experimenter returns, she asks the child whether they cheated and looked at the toy. To explain why these children are lying, Evans concludes that they feel guilty for defying orders from an adult and are trying to pretend that they never did it to clear their conscience.

Study finds this two-year-old may be capable of lying to you about who really took the cookies from the cookie jar.

Children were also tested for certain cognitive abilities and found that these skills are related to their ability to tell lies. This correlation supports the theory that child liars actually have higher executive functions than those that do not lie. Interestingly enough, Evans found that at the age of three, children were able to distinguish between a lie and a truth and even labeled a lie as something bad.

So if you ever find that a child has lied to you, don’t be offended, they’re just exercising their new cognitive skills!

Check out a great interview with Brock University psychologist Angela Evans here.

Sources:

Emergence of Lying in Very young Children-PsycNET

Toddlers start Lying as Early as Age 2 -CBC News Podcast & Article

A research team led by Laura Matzen at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuqurque, NM has demonstrated that it is possible to predict how well people will remember information by monitoring their brain activity while studying. Matzen’s team monitored test volunteers with electroencephalography (EEG) sensors to make accurate predictions. Why bother making a prediction if the result will show how well someone remembered the information anyways? Matzen brought up this example, ”if you had someone learning new material and you were recording the EEG, you might be able to tell them, ‘You’re going to forget this, you should study this again,’ or tell them, ‘OK, you got it and go on to the next thing.”  Essentially providing a real-time performance metric, the applications of which many students would appreciate.

The team monitored test subjects’ brain activity while they studied word lists, then used the EEG data collected during the trial to predict who would remember the most information. Researchers had a baseline of what brain activity looked like for good and poor memory performance, so they knew the average percentage of correct answers under various conditions. The computer model predicted five of 23 people tested would perform best, based on their EEG scans. And the model was correct, they remembered 72 percent of the words on average, compared to 45 percent for everyone else.

This study is part of Matzen’s overarching research goal to understand the Difference Related to Subsequent Memory, or Dm Effect. The Dm effect is a measure of brain activity that can distinguish remembered items from forgotten ones. A measurable difference would give cognitive neuroscientists a way to test hypotheses about how information is encoded in memory. Matzen is interested in not only what causes the effect, but also how to change it; she wants to discover how different methods of training can help people performing at different levels.  That’s why the second half of this study was done, to predict who would benefit most from memory training.

This second half of the study tested different types of memory training to see how they changed participants’ memory performance and brain activity. This study, still in its preliminary stages, aims to find out whether recording partcipants’ brain activity while they use their natural approach to studying can predict what kind of training would work best for them. The computer model from the first half of the study was used to predict who would perform best on the memory tasks, and after memory training, the high performers did even better.

90 volunteers spent 9 to 16 hours over five weeks in the memory training study. The first half provided a baseline for how well they remembered words or images. Most then underwent memory training for three weeks and were retested. The control group received no training, one group practiced mental imagery strategy, thinking up vivid images to remember words and pictures, and the final group went through working memory training to increase how much information they could handle at a time.  Each volunteer, shut into a sound-proof booth, watched a screen that flashed words or images for one second, interrupted with periodic quizzes on how well the person remembered what was shown.

Sandia National Laboratories researcher Laura Matzen demonstrates the memory testing task of her experiment

The test was divided into five sections, each about 20 minutes long and testing a different type of memory. The first, middle, and last sections consisted of single nouns. During quizzes, volunteers hit buttons for yes or no to whether they’d seen the word before. The other two sections combined adjectives and nouns or pairs of unrelated drawings, and volunteers were tested on what they remembered. The image section tested associative memory or memory for two unrelated things, which according to Matzen is the most difficult because it links arbitrary relationships.

When performance was compared before and after training, the control group did not change, but the mental imagery group’s performance improved on three of the five tasks. ”Imagery is a really powerful strategy for grouping things and making them more memorable,” Matzen said.

The working memory group did worse on four of the five tasks after training. Volunteers trained on working memory, remembering information for brief periods, improved on the task they had trained on, but that training did not carry over to other tasks. Matzen believes the difference between the two groups boils down to strategy: The imagery training group learned a strategy, while the working memory training group simply tried to push the limits of memory capacity.

While the imagery group did better overall, they made more mistakes than the other groups when tested on “lures” that were similar to, but not the same as, items they had memorized. ”They study things like ‘strong adhesive’ and ‘secret password,’ and then I might test them on ‘strong password,’ which they didn’t see, but they saw both parts of it,” Matzen said. “The people who have done the imagery training make many more mistakes on the recombinations that keep the same concept. If something kind of fits with their mental image they’ll say yes to it even if it’s not quite what they saw before.”

What’s next? Matzen and the Center for the Advanced Study of Language at the University of Maryland plan to study tasks that measure cognitive flexibility and how it relates to training performance, working on understanding and affecting the Dm affect.

Sources:

Sandia Shows Monitoring Brain Activity During Study Can Help Predict Test Performance – ScienceNewsline

Monitoring Brain Activity During Study Can Help Predict Test Performance – Science Daily

In this post, I attempt to present two major metaphysical accounts of space by Kant and Leibniz, then present some recent findings from cognitive neuroscience about the neural basis of spatial cognition in an attempt to understand more about the nature of space and the possible connection of philosophical theories to empirical observations.

Immanuel Kant’s account of space in his Prolegomena serves as a cornerstone for his thought and comes about in a discussion of the transcendental principles of mathematics that precedes remarks on the possibility of natural science and metaphysics. Kant begins his inquiry concerning the possibility of ‘pure’ mathematics with an appeal to the nature of mathematical knowledge, asserting that it rests upon no empirical basis, and thus is a purely synthetic product of pure reason (§6). He also argues that mathematical knowledge (pure mathematics) has the unique feature of first exhibiting its concepts in a priori intuition which in turn makes judgments in mathematics ‘intuitive’ (§7.281). For Kant, intuition is prior to our sensibility and the activity of reason since the former does not grasp ‘things in themselves,’ but rather only the things that can be perceived by the senses. Thus, what we can perceive is based on the form of our a priori intuition (§9). As such, we are only able to intuit and perceive things in the world within the framework naturally provided by the capabilities and character (literally the under–standing) of our understanding. Kant then takes our intuitions of space (and time) as concepts integral to pure mathematics and as necessary components of our intuition (§10.91).

Kant develops that geometry is based on this pure intuition of space (and arithmetic on that of time) and advances that even after removing all sensations and empirical intuitions, the intuitions of space and time remain, proving them as the a priori intuitions that precede any form of empirical experience or sensation (ibid.103). Thus, our experience of space and the means by which we do geometry is a component of our intuition for Kant and does not require the existence of direct objects of experience. Rather, our awareness of things as they appear in space is woven into our intuition and is a basic characteristic of our experience. Kant goes on to describe space as the “form of outer intuition of our sensibility” in that it is the thing in which we perceive things, i.e. that it is a transcendental condition for sensation (§13.317). By this, we arrive at our understanding of the arrangements of objects in the world not by an empirical encounter, but by the form of our intuition. Therefore, Kant’s account makes geometry an intuitive practice that utilizes a basic component of our pure a priori intuition as opposed to our rational activity. In support, Kant offers that we determine a geometrical concept, e.g. congruency, not through concepts formed by reason, but through relations that are apparent as a result of our pure intuition (ibid.325).

Kant’s theory stands in stark contrast to that of Leibniz, whose account of space is intelligible through arguments in his Discourse on Metaphysics and Monadology. In the former Leibniz foreshadows the concept of the monad in arguing, “each singular substance expresses the universe in its own way,” which develops that the constituent, most fundamental components of reality itself are unique and infinite in number and contain all things present, past and possible (DM.9). In the latter work, Leibniz reiterates that each monad must be different from each other because no two monads can be identical, further establishing the notion of an infinite number of infinite substances that make up the universe (M8-9). Accordingly, objects in the world are made up of monads, which are self contained and distinct from one another. Based on Leibniz’s theory, we arrive at a higher order reality in which everything is separate, distinct and self-contained and therefore, space comes about as a consequence of the existence of objects. That is, when we perceive Leibnizian space, we perceive a thing produced as a result of the existence of two other separate objects.

Leibniz’s account of space also has implications for geometry. By his theory, our perceptions of congruent things for example, become a comparison of two objects made in perception and understood actively by reason. Evidence for this can be found in Leibniz’s arguments concerning physics and causality. Leibniz believes that God constructed the world (with monads) and everything in it in the best possible way (M1,3). As such, the universe carries a predetermined and pre-established order of cause and effect (M6,7) and Leibniz argues that we come to understand nature by finding causes from effects by the use of reason (DM19). Therefore, geometry becomes a rational activity when viewed from a Leibnizian perspective because it is an investigation of that which exists. For Leibniz, we must necessarily invoke our understanding of the nature of objects in the world to do geometry, and this conflicts with the intuitive nature that Kant ascribes to geometry. For Kant, our knowledge (or ‘cognition’) of space is a result of the form of our intuition that comes before sensibility, which makes our understanding of geometry intuitive. For Leibniz, space exists only because discrete objects exist in the world and our understanding of geometry comes from rational manipulations of those objects. Nevertheless, both Kant and Leibniz provide accounts for space that necessarily involve an a priori component rather than perception alone.

Cognitive neuroscientists are now suggesting that spatial cognition is a complex interaction of multiple brain circuits in parallel that make use of both allocentric and egocentric processing of the external world. A pivotally important concept in understanding spatial cognition has been the investigation of representation in the brain. “Representation” is a term that has been used in philosophy for centuries, and science is now using the term to refer to the neural picture of the external world as observed by our brain monitoring and imaging technology. The investigation of representation in the brain essentially involves solving the puzzle of how the world itself is represented physically in the brain. With respect to spatial cognition, the discovery of grid cells in 2005 suggests that a euclidean space is encoded in the brain itself by neurons, and that activation and deactivation of grid cells plays a major role in representing the spatiality of the external world to the perceiver. The discovery of grid cells also suggested a mechanism for the perception of one’s own location that is continually updated by input from the external world, suggesting that, similar to visual perception, the representation of space in the brain itself is an active phenomenon that varies just as much as the visual field.

Most, if not all, of the work on spatial perception and grid cells is performed on rats and conclusions made are inductively applied to humans, which makes us doubt how accurately these mechanisms can apply to the human brain. I say this because while many other studies of physiological phenomena in rats or mice (e.g. those on the cardiovascular and immune systems) may be stronger due to the increased homology to humans present in those systems. In other words, I think that the human and the mouse/rat brain differ quite significantly, perhaps more so than other organs and that this reduces the strength of our inductive conclusions. However, interesting studies are now being performed on humans which place a subject in a virtual maze through a computer program and measure brain activity through noninvasive methods such as functional MRI (fMRI). Many recent studies are pointing to the hippocampus as a major player in way finding and general navigation through virtual mazes, which suggests that our spatial perception is an evolutionarily refined phenomenon, but also one that is fundamental to our basic neural make up. Interestingly, the neural phenomena change when scientists investigate spatial cognition relative to landmarks (i.e. objects) as compared to studies in simple maze navigation. In these object-centric experiments, subjects navigated mazes and were cued with objects present in the virtual environment that they had to collect and place in a distinct virtual location, either at a specific landmark or in a general bounded area. Brain scans in these studies showed both hippocampal and striatal activation during the performed tasks, with hippocampal activity associated with the boundary task and striatal activity associated with the landmark task. Further, separate studies in rats performing similar spatial boundary tasks reveal that the activation of hippocampal “place cells” fire in boundary-space tasks, which scientists think are creating a matched representation of distances and angles relative to the boundaries in the visual field. Results from striatal activation are still unclear and are being more closely investigated. It has also been suggested that the hippocampal and striatal circuits act in parallel rather than in series or in combination. This makes sense given that spatial cognition may involve both boundary and landmark elements, as when we have to hammer a nail into a specific location or plug something into a power outlet.

Relating the philosophy and neuroscience presented in this post, it seems that both Kantian and Leibnizian conceptions of space are compatible with neuroscientific findings about spatial cognition. Kant’s theory applies to the current understanding of hippocampal, boundary influenced tasks in that both suggest a holistic conception of space – that is, space can be understood as object independent. On the other hand, Leibnizian conceptions of space and the landmark results suggest a more object-dependent framework for spatial cognition. As spatial cognition and perception are our most direct means to accessing and interacting with the external world, both scientists and philosophers of the future ought to work together on this enormously complex problem in an effort to postulate how spatial phenomena as presented to us by the mind relate to neural phenomena in the brain. Perhaps then we will move closer to filling the explanatory gap between the mind and brain.

Prolegomena – Kant
Discourse on Metaphysics – Leibniz
The Monadology – Leibniz
Spatial Cognition and the Brain – Neil Burgess

We all know that we should hit the gym so we can look good, marry a rich dude, and not need to do science anymore. But can dragging yourself to the gym improve your cognitive assets as well?

Recent studies show that even in normal, healthy brains, that forced exercise has effects. Rats who ran voluntarily on a wheel placed on a cage were compared with those who forced to run on a treadmill. Even though the rats who ran voluntarily ran faster, those who were forced to run on a treadmill showed more proliferation in the dentate gyrus and performed better on cognitive tests.
Forced exercise has also been shown to decrease the risk of developing certain neurological disorder, and in the case of Parkinson’s has been shown to alleviate the symptoms of the disease to a certain extent. When forced to pedal at the relatively high speed of 90 rpms on a tandem bicycle, Parkinson’s patients had better full body motor control, with a decrease in symptoms like micrographia and tremors, as compared to controls who performed gentler activities like walking or biking at their own pace.

These recent developments are starting to be incorporated into how we treat Parkinson’s and may change how we treat other neurological conditions. Tandem pedaling programs have been started at several YMCAs and the leader of the study hopes to expand the program all over the country, and to investigate the effects of forced intense exercise on stroke recovery and other neurological diseases in the future.

What Parkinson’s Teaches Us About the Brain – The New York Times

Differential Effects of Forced and Voluntary Exercise – National Center for Biotechnology Information

Treadmill vs. Wheel Running – Journal of Physiology

Forced Exercise and Parkinsons – National Center for Biotechnology Information

Why is it wrong to kill babies? Why is it wrong to take advantage of mentally retarded people? To lie with the intention of cheating someone? To steal, especially from poor people? Is it possible that Medieval European society was wrong to burn women suspected of witchcraft? Or did they save mankind from impending doom by doing so? Is it wrong to kick rocks when you’re in a bad mood?

Questions of right and wrong, such as these, have for millenia been answered by religious authorities who refer to the Bible for guidance. While the vast majority of people still turn to Abrahamic religious texts for moral guidance, there are some other options for developing a moral code. Bibles aside, we can use our “natural” sense of what’s right and wrong to guide our actions; a code based on the natural sense would come from empirical studies on what most people consider to be right or wrong. Ignoring the logistics of creating such as code, we should note that the rules in this code would not have any reasoning behind them other than “we should do this because this is what comes naturally.” How does that sound? Pretty stupid.

The other option is to develop a moral code based on some subjective metaphysical ideas, with a heavy backing of empirical facts. “Subjective” means these ideas won’t have an undeniability to them; they are what they are and that’s it. Take as an example the rule such as “we should not kill babies.” There is no objective, scientific reason why we shouldn’t kill babies. Wait!, you say, killing babies is wrong because it harms the proliferation of our species and inflicts pain on the mothers and the babies themselves! But why should we care about the proliferation of our species? About hurting some mother or her baby? While no one will deny that we should care about these, there is nothing scientific that will explain why. Science may give us a neurological reason why we care about species proliferation (it will go something like, “there is a brain region that makes us care about proliferation of our species.”), but why should we be limited to what our brains tend to make us think or do?

Subjective rules like these must therefore be agreed upon with the understanding that they are subject to change. Interestingly, some argue that science can answer moral questions because it can show us what “well-being” is, how we can get it, etc. But the scientific reason why we should care about well-being is nowhere to be found. The result is that we can use science to answer moral questions, but we have to first agree (subjectively) that we want well-being. Science by itself cannot answer moral questions because it shows us what is rather than what ought to be. (Actually, Sam Harris is the only one to argue that science can be an authority on moral issues; his technical faux-pas is an embarrassment to those who advocate “reason” in conduct).

But more on the idea of metaphysically constructed moral codes. What properties should this code have, and how should we go about synthesizing it? Having one fixed/rigid source as an authority for moral guidance is dangerous. Make no mistake: there must be some authority on moral questions, but it must be flexible, and adaptable; it must be able to stand the test of time on the one hand, but to be able to adjust to novel conditions on the other. This sounds a lot like the constitution of the U.S. But even with such a document as The Constitution, which has provided unity and civil progress since the country’s founding, there are some who take its words literally and allow no further interpretation; if it’s not written in the constitution, it can’t be in the law, they argue (see Strict Constructionism versus Judicial Activism). These folks also tend to be rather religious (read: they spend a lot of time listening to stories from the Bible; not to be confused with “spiritual” or of religions other than the Abrahamic ones). So while we must have a moral code, it must be flexible (i.e. change with time) and we must seek a balance between literal and imaginative interpretations, just as we do with the US Constitution.

Why and how is a rigid moral authority dangerous? Our authority must change with time because new developments in our understanding of the world must update how we interact with others. For example, if science finds tomorrow that most animals have a brain part that allows them to feel emotional pain in the same way that humans do, we will have to treat them with more empathy; research on dolphin cognition has recently produced an effort by scientists to have dolphins be considered and treated as nonhuman persons. Furthermore, if we don’t explain why we do certain things, we won’t understand why we do them and therefore won’t know why violating them is bad. This unquestionability aspect of God as moral authority or the Strict Constructionists as law-makers is what makes them particularly dangerous and leads to prejudice and ignorance. Our moral code must therefore be based on empirical research, with every rule being subject to intense scrutiny (think of two-year-olds who keep asking, “but why?”).

But why should we have a moral code in the first place? Perhaps if everyone followed a moral code of some sort, the world would have fewer injustices and atrocities. Getting people to follow a moral code of any kind is a completely different issue.

Sam Harris gets it wrong.

Nonhuman Personhood for Dolphins

Cetacean Cognition

Mirror Self –Recognition in Dolphins

Witches are immoral and should be burned

If I told you that a theater company and a medical school collaborated to produce one of the best plays of the year, would you believe me?

Probably not, because this is not the case. However, this unlikely partnership of industries did produce a substantial therapeutic program for people who are currently suffering the cognitive deficits associated with dementia.

Based on the theory of cognitive reserve - or the brain’s resilience to neuropathological damage – it is widely hypothesized that creative and interactive activities, such as painting, singing, and acting, would help patients maintain their cognitive functions for as long as possible.

With this hypothesis and the guidance of the Lookingglass Theater Company, the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University formed the first-ever “Memory Ensemble.” The cast included six elderly patients suffering from early stages of memory loss, a common symptom attributable to various types of dementia.

Quoted as “one of the first-of-its-kind,” the directors of this production sought to design a program that would improve the quality of life for these patients by setting up a safe and supportive environment. With the serene scene set, patients were encouraged to express every emotion and/or words associated with their neurological deficits to help them alleviate any pains or questions of uncertainty accompanied by these disorders.

As a part of a seven week pilot study, the ensemble would meet and participate in various cognitive activities, including an impromptu-style of acting that actively engaged the patients both physically and mentally. As a baseline measure, metaphor-based warm-up exercises prompted the patients to choose a color that symbolizes their current emotional state. Prior to their regularly scheduled regime, the patient’s reports ranged from a happy sunny yellow to a melancholy blue. Nevertheless, after a stretching routine, body-sculpting exercises portraying various feelings, and an active discussion of the hardships involved with their disorders, all of the patients were quick to describe their emotional state at the end of the workshop as a happy yellow.

Although these patients verbally reported an improvement in their quality of life within the given time period, it was noted that this qualitative research study could not quantitatively provide evidence in support of their hypothesis. Thus, a lack of evidence from this study could be detrimental to implementing this therapeutic program in hospitals across the US simply because of the lack of funding.

Though not discussed in this article, pre- and post-study fMRI scans and intermittent neuropsychological tests could provide quantitative insight on whether or not such a therapeutic program significantly contributes to the patient’s cognitive reserve. Pre- and post-study fMRI scans of the patients performing these neuropsychological tests can be compared to control subjects, as well as across-patients and within-patients, in order to identify the statistical differences between the patterns of activity associated with each task. Other measures, such as reaction time, can also be recorded to correlate with the patients behavioral performance to provide more information and insight on whether or not this is an effective prevention program.

Despite this predicament, I must say that I am very impressed and optimistic about this new style of therapy because it helps the patient positively cope with such a disastrous and unfortunate mental disorder. In the future, I hope that quantitative measures, as discussed before, will be implemented to help facilitate and disambiguate the uncertainty pertaining to dementia-related research.

Trying Improv as Therapy for Those with Memory Loss – Chicago News Cooperative - NYTimes.com

Cognitive Reserve – Dr. Yaakov  Stern (2009) - Neuropsychologia (PDF)

As my good friend Cobb once told me, “Dreams feel real while we’re in them. It’s only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.”

OK, fine, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character from Inception isn’t real, but he does make a valid point. Oneirologists, those who study dreams, have traditionally viewed dreams as uncontrollable streams of sounds and images with the ability to induce a tremendous spectrum of emotion. However, the idea of lucid dreaming has caused the conventional understanding of dreams to collapse. A “lucid dream,” terminology coined by the Dutch psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden, is one in which the sleeper is aware that he or she is dreaming. This example of dissociation is wonderfully paradoxical in that it exhibits components of both waking and dreaming consciousness.

An American psychiatrist and dream researcher named Allan Hobson specializes in the quantification of mental events and their corresponding brain activities. Although he vehemently dismisses the idea of hidden meanings in dreams, he has embarked on a search along with other neurobiologists and cognitive scientists to decipher the neurological basis of consciousness. Hobson hypothesizes that subjects may learn to become lucid, self-awaken, and regulate plot control by intercalating voluntary decisions into the involuntary nature of the dream.

The validation of this idea would imply that the mind is capable of experiencing a waking and a dreaming state at the same time. Consequently, Hobson states, “…it may be possible to measure the physiological correlates of three conscious states, waking, non-lucid dreaming, and lucid dreaming in the laboratory.” If there is a psychological distinction between the three, there should also be a physiological difference.

The advent of lucid dreaming experimentation has not only benefitted Hollywood, but it has also provided possible treatment options for those hindered by frequent nightmares or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Methodologically speaking, the study of lucid dreaming presents a formidable challenge, but it is becoming an important component of the cognitive neurosciences.

Josefin Gavie and Antti Revonsuo have built on Hobson’s theories by proposing a technique termed lucid dreaming treatment (LDT). The key to this treatment is that the subject learns how to identify cues that facilitate lucidity during a dream, and the subject learns to manipulate the environment once lucidity is attained. The phenomenon of lucidity may prove to be a useful device in that it offers the sleeper a method to control components of the dream – altering and diminishing any threatening situation. Although the investigation of LDT is extremely new and incontestably controversial, it has shown promising preliminary results in its ability to lower the frequency of nightmares in the selected subjects.

The premise of the film Inception may be wildly hypothetical, but it has expertly amplified the current research on lucid dreams. However, researchers in the field should take a word of advice from the character of Eames: “You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.”

The Neurobiology of Consciousness: Lucid Dreaming Wakes Up – J. Allan Hobson
The Future of Lucid Dreaming Treatment (PDF) – Josefin Gavie and Antti Revonsuo