The application of neuroimaging technology to the study of the injured brain has transformed how neuroscientists understand disorders of consciousness, such as the vegetative and minimally conscious states, and deepened our understanding of mechanisms of recovery. This scientific progress, and its potential clinical translation, provides an opportunity for ethical reflection. It was against this scientific backdrop that we convened a conference of leading investigators in neuroimaging, disorders of consciousness and neuroethics. Our goal was to develop an ethical frame to move (...) these investigative techniques into mature clinical tools. This paper presents the recommendations and analysis of a Working Meeting on Ethics, Neuroimaging and Limited States of Consciousness held at Stanford University during June 2007. It represents an interdisciplinary approach to the challenges posed by the emerging use of neuroimaging technologies to describe and characterize disorders of consciousness. (shrink)

We are grateful to Friesen and colleagues for drawing attention to the tension between the protection of populations that may experience vulnerability with their inclusion in research (Friesen et a...

Although the neural systems that underlie spoken language are well-known, how they adapt to evolving social cues during natural conversations remains an unanswered question. In this work we investigate the neural correlates of face-to-face conversations between two individuals using functional near infrared spectroscopy and acoustical analyses of concurrent audio recordings. Nineteen pairs of healthy adults engaged in live discussions on two controversial topics where their opinions were either in agreement or disagreement. Participants were matched according to their a priori opinions (...) on these topics as assessed by questionnaire. Acoustic measures of the recorded speech including the fundamental frequency range, median fundamental frequency, syllable rate, and acoustic energy were elevated during disagreement relative to agreement. Consistent with both the a priori opinion ratings and the acoustic findings, neural activity associated with long-range functional networks, rather than the canonical language areas, was also differentiated by the two conditions. Specifically, the frontoparietal system including bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, left supramarginal gyrus, angular gyrus, and superior temporal gyrus showed increased activity while talking during disagreement. In contrast, talking during agreement was characterized by increased activity in a social and attention network including right supramarginal gyrus, bilateral frontal eye-fields, and left frontopolar regions. Further, these social and visual attention networks were more synchronous across brains during agreement than disagreement. Rather than localized modulation of the canonical language system, these findings are most consistent with a model of distributed and adaptive language-related processes including cross-brain neural coupling that serves dynamic verbal exchanges. (shrink)

Two studies document that people are more willing to express emotions that reveal vulnerabilities to partners when they perceive those partners to be more communally responsive to them. In Study 1, participants rated the communal strength they thought various partners felt toward them and their own willingness to express happiness, sadness and anxiety to each partner. Individuals who generally perceive high communal strength from their partners were also generally most willing to express emotion to partners. Independently, participants were more willing (...) to express emotion to particular partners whom they perceived felt more communal strength toward them. In Study 2, members of romantic couples independently reported their own felt communal strength toward one another, perceptions of their partners’ felt communal strength toward them, and willingness to express emotions to each other. The communal strength partners reported feeling toward the participants predicted the participants’ willingness to express emotion to those partners. This link was mediated by participants’ perceptions of the partner’s communal strength toward them which, itself, was a joint function of accurate perceptions of the communal strength partners had reported feeling toward them and projections of their own felt communal strength for their partners onto those partners. (shrink)

We agree with Grossmann that fear often builds cooperative relationships. Yet he neglects much extant literature. Prior researchers have discussed how fear (and other emotions) build cooperative relationships, have questioned whether fear per se evolved to serve this purpose, and have emphasized that human cooperation takes many forms. Grossmann's theory would benefit from a wider consideration of this work.

Caretaking stability in the early life environment supports neurobehavioral development, while instability and neglect constitute adverse environments that can alter maturational processes. Research in humans suggests that different types of early life adversity can have differential effects on caretaker relationships and later cognitive and social development; however, identifying mechanistic underpinnings will require animal models with translational validity. Two common rodent models, maternal separation and limited bedding, influence the mother-infant relationship during a critical window of development. We hypothesized that these paradigms (...) may affect the development of communication strategies on the part of the pup. Ultrasonic vocalizations are a care-eliciting mechanism and ethologically relevant response to stressors in the rat pup. USV emission rates and acoustic parameters change throughout early development, presenting the opportunity to define developmental milestones in USVs that would reflect neurobehavioral aberrations if disrupted. This study investigated the effects of MS or LB on the dam-pup relationship by quantifying pup USVs, maternal behavior, and the relationship between the two. First, we used a generalized additive model approach to establish typical developmental trajectories of USV acoustic properties and determine windows of change in MS or LB rearing. Additionally, we quantified maternal behaviors and the predictability of maternal care sequences using an entropy rate calculation. MS and LB each shifted the developmental trajectories of USV acoustic parameters and call types in a sex-specific manner. MS more often impacted male USVs, while LB impacted female USVs. MS dams spent more time passive nursing, and LB dams spent more time on the nest. The predictability of maternal care was associated with the rate of USV emissions exclusively in females. Taken together, findings demonstrate sex- and model-specific effects of rearing environments on a novel developmental trajectory involving the mother-infant relationship, facilitating the translation of animal ELA paradigms to assess later-life consequences. (shrink)

L'arrivée de l'immense Asie non monothéiste sur le devant de la scène mondiale et le Printemps arabe remettent en question des certitudes que l'on croyait bien établies. Quelle compréhension avoir des monothéismes (islam, judaïsme, christianisme)? La place de la loi, de la foi, de la raison permettent de saisir les différences entre les trois monothésimes. A partir du moment où l'on admet un Dieu créateur de l'humanité, maître de l'histoire, l'optique est similaire.

Rose's accomplishment in combining ontological unity with epistemological diversity contrasts it with Wilson's failure in overemphasizing the former and not appreciating the latter. This commentary cites the two most authoritative discussions of the inapplicability of heritability to human data, corrects several historical errors or inaccuracies in genetics, and criticizes the characterizations of Jacques Loeb and Robert Plomin.

The Hospital of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City was founded on the hypothesis that direct contact with illness is a strong force in igniting the curiosity and energy that can, from time to time, lead to great leaps in our understanding of human biology and disease. This was repeatedly proven at the Hospital, a special locale where the “prepared minds” of physicians uncovered new facts that often led to effective treatments. It is neither a hospital (...) nor a laboratory, but a hospital-laboratory, which celebrated its 100th birthday in 2010. Although this was a first for America, the idea had been in the minds of European and British physician-investigators from the late 19th .. (shrink)

Priority of the “self” is thought to be evolutionarily advantageous. However, evidence for this priority has been sparse. In this study, subjects performed a gender categorization task on self- and non-self target faces preceded by either congruent or incongruent periliminal or subliminal primes. We found that subliminal primes induced a priming effect only on self target faces. This discovery of a self-specific priming effect suggests that functional specificity for faces may include timing as well as spatial adaptations.

The self/non-self distinction is essential for survival, but its neural bases are poorly understood. Studies have sought neural specificity for 'self ' in cortical regions. However, behavioural evidence showing that humans are able to single out self-relevant information in the absence of awareness suggests that the cognitive self/non-self distinction might be rooted in subcortical structures involved in automatic, unconscious functions. Here we employ subliminal presentation of self and non-self faces and repetition suppression to show neural specificity for 'self ' in (...) the brainstem reticular formation, providing the first evidence for self/non-self distinction in subcortical structures. Our finding suggests that the brainstem may act as a neural substrate for the sense of 'self '. (shrink)

Many neuroimaging studies of semantic memory have argued that knowledge of an object's perceptual properties are represented in a modality-specific manner. These studies often base their argument on finding activation in the left-hemisphere fusiform gyrus-a region assumed to be involved in perceptual processing-when the participant is verifying verbal statements about objects and properties. In this paper, we report an extension of one of these influential papers-Kan, Barsalou, Solomon, Minor, and Thompson-Schill (2003 )-and present evidence for an amodal component in the (...) representation and processing of perceptual knowledge. Participants were required to verify object-property statements (e.g., "cat-whiskers?"; "bear-wings?") while they were being scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We replicated Kan et al.'s activation in the left fusiform gyrus, but also found activation in regions of left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and middle-temporal gyrus, areas known to reflect amodal processes or representations. Further, only activations in the left IFG, an amodal area, were correlated with measures of behavioural performance. (shrink)

Measurements are shown to be processes designed to return figures: they are effective. This effectivity allows for a formalization as Turing machines, which can be described employing computation theory. Inspired in the halting problem we draw some limitations for measurement procedures: procedures that verify if a quantity is measured cannot work in every case.