Narcissism

What is narcissism?

Soudhart et al. (2018) argues that narcissism and self-esteem might have a similar evolutionary basis. Narcissism is supposed to be related with high self-esteem, but the findings in reality are not that strong.It is argued that vulnerable narcissism is associated with diminished subjective well -being (Soudhart et al., 2018).

Depersonalization

How would it be that you have feelings that you are an automaton?

Parkinson's Disease

Parkinson's disease is a hypokinetic syndrome. Symptoms include tremor, rigidity, disturbace in posture and bradykenesia among others. parkinson's disease is not only a movement disorder. Several symptoms are also affected in the disease such as sleeping, cognition, digestive symptoms, depression and the like. For instance, dementia has been found to be six times larger in parkinson's disease patients then in the general population.

Cognition

Parkinson's disease patients have besides their motor symptoms also deficits in cognitive functioning. Executive functions encompasses working memory, conceptualization, set activation, set-shifting, set maintenance and resistance to interference. Neuropsychological test available are for example: Digit Span, similarities, Verbal Fluency, Trail Making Test, as well as the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test and Stroop Test (Kulisevsky and Pagonabarraga, 2015). Other aspects in the cognitive domain are memory, language, visuospatial abilities, decision making and impulsivity, which could be assessed for instance with the Ray Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT), free and cued recall, Boston Naming Test, Benton Line Orientation Test, Block copying, Benton Face Recognition Test, Iowa Gambling Task as well as others.

Split-Brain Patients

In "split-brain" patients the corpus callosum (which is the most important route among the two cerebral hemispheres of the brain) is surgically cut to improve very severy epilepsy (Pinto et al., 2017). It was found in this study that patients who lacked a corpus callosum had the ability to make the right answers to cues everywhere in the visual field. The conclusion based on a large sample of tasks is that disconnection does not result in two conscious persons in a single brain.

Reference

Pinto, Y, Neville, D.A, Otten, M, Corballis, P.M. Lamme, V.A., De Haan, E.H. et al. (2017). 

Psychopathy and its Neural Correlates

  While We can now imaging with positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) the brains of pstchopatic individuals (Fallon, 2013). But first, what is a good description of a psychopath?

Psychopathy can be assigned to four different categories, also called factors based on extensive empirical research (Fallon, 2013). These are the interpersonal factor, the affective factor, lack of empathy, and the non taking responsibility for one's own actions. 

Psychopaths are very manipulative and are the best liars. In addition they can be very charming (Fallon, 2013).

Neuropsychology provides information of the brain areas that are possibly different in psychopaths in two ways. The first is to make a comparison among the behaviors and personality aspects of patients with brain damage and individuals with psychopatic traits. The second option is to give individuals with psychopatic traits neuropsychological tests (Glenn and Raine, 2014). neuropsychological tests rely upon the brain areas implicated in it.

Most psychopaths do not have evidence of brain damage, but their impairments are more slight. Patients having damage to their ventromedial prefrontal cortex exhibit signs that mimic psychopatic traits (Glenn and Raine, 2014, p. 87).

Miskovich et al. (2018) investigated local gyrification in male inmates with psychopathy as well as its association with the total factor and separate factor scores of the PCL-R. It was found that PCL-R scores were negatively correlated with measures in the right hemusphere in the mid-cingulate cortex and regions of the superior frontal gyrus and lateral parietal cortex. Factor 1 scores of the PCL-R were associated with less gyrification in the right mid-cingulate cortex, dorsomedial frontal cortex as well as higher gyrification in the occipital cortex. The second factor of the PCL-R did not give evidence of associations with altered gyrification in psychopatic individuals (Miskovich et al., 2018).

Tillem et al. (2019) found that psychopatic individuals had a more effective organized dorsal attention network as compared to non-psychopatic individuals. Furthermore, it was found that the amygdala, caudate nucleus, and hippocampus do not have an effective flow with cortical areas.

Resting state networks in the paralimbic areas, including the amygdala and insula were associated with psychopathy (Espinoza et al., 2019). There were nine functional domains associated with the PCL-R factor 1 scores and subcortical, auditory, sensorymotor, cerebellar, visual, the salience network, the default network, executive control, and attentional control networks (Espinoza et al., 2019).

Lapierre, Braun, and Hodgins (1994) gave criminal psychopaths and criminal non-psychopaths several neuropsychological tests to measure frontal lobe dysfunction. It was found that the tests that were associated wit behavioral disinhibition (such as rule-breaking behavior and errors of commission) and dysnosmia, which are indexes of ventral frontal dysfunction were impaired in the psychopaths. It is concluded by the authors that the findings can be explained by a specific orbitofrontal and/or ventromedial dysfunction in psychopatic individuals (Lapierre et al., 1994).

Lexico-semantic processing was investigated in criminal psychopaths while the underwent fMRI (Kiehl et al., 2004). The behavioral results showed that psychopatic participants displayed slower reaction times as compared to control subjects, when they evaluated abstract words. Furthermore, they also performed more worse than control participants in relation to the processing of pseudowords (Kiehl et al., 2004). The imaging findings found support for alternations in the right superior temporal gyrus in psychopatic individuals (Kiehl et al., 2004). Furthermore it was hypothesized that psychopatic individuals have impairments in temporal lobe functioning (Kiehl et al., 2004). In an earlier study Kiehl and associates (2001) investigated the neural correlates with fMRI while criminal psychopaths performed an affective memory task. Criminal psychopaths showed abnormalities in the limbic system while performing an affective memory task. Abnormalities were also found in the prefrontal cortex during the processing of affective stimuli. Regions that were especially implicated were the anterior and posterior cingulate cortex, the inferior frontal gyrus, the amygdala and hippocampal formation as well as the ventral striatum (Kiehl et al., 2001).

Psychopatic offenders were found to be impaired in nonverbal facial affect recognition, especially the recognition of disgust (Kosson, Suchy, Mayer, and Libby, 2002). This study did not find that psychopaths have impairments in the classification of fear and sadness. A finding that was not expected was that psychopatic individuals were better able to recognize angry facial expressions than the control subjects, Which was especially evident when they had to rely on lelf-hemisphere resources (responding a button with the right hand). It is suggested that psychopatic individuals might be characterized by enhanced attention to aggressive aspects, which might cause them to better recognize angry faces (Kosson et al., 2002). This study also investigated probable effects of abnormalities in hemispheric lateralization. It was found that the psychopaths were more reliant on their right hemisphere, which is in agreement with the probability that the impairment of psychopatic individuals in nonverbal processing might be due to either an impaired function in right-hemisphere emotion processing aspects or a diminished hemispheric asymmetry concerning the processing of emotion. It is concluded that psychopatic individuals are especially impaired in the recognition of disgust and a reliance on right-hemisphere resources and they might as well be better in recognizing anger in certain conditions (Kosson et al., 2002).

Birbaumer et al. (2005) used fMRI to investigate deficient fear conditioning in criminal psychopaths. The imaging analysis was performed while subjects performed a classic aversion differential delay task. Psychopatic individuals had different brain activations in more areas as compared to control subjects. Psychopathic individuals failed to exhibit important neural responses in fear conditioning as well as impaired responses at the behavioral level (Birbaumer et al., 2005). 

Functional magnetic resonance imaging was applied to study the to dimensions of psychopathy and whether they show patterns of neural acivity that is in agreement with different underlying risk factors for the disorder (Sadeh, Spielberg, Heller, Herrington, Engels, Warren et al., 2013). Participants from the community scoring either high or low on psychopatic traits performed an emotion-word Stroop task while they underwent fMRI to measure selective attention. Both neurally and behaviorally, the dimension of fearless dominance was related to higher sensitivity to positive stimuli. Among subjects scoring high on psychopatic traits, there was found an impairment in the suppression of distractor words of positive valence, furthermore, there was found a moderation among activity to positive versus neutral stimuli in left SG/IPL as well as a cluster of the right SFG that was associated with errors of commission. It is suggested that this area was requitted in order to anhance the awareness due to inefficient responses and compensation for deficient attentional control for positively valenced words in the dimension of fearless dominance.

The second dimension, impulsive-antisociality was related to deficient attentional control as revealed by slower reaction times for both positive and negative stimuli as compared to neutral stimuli. It is suggested that persons scoring high on this dimension are highly sensitive to the emotional context of the task. The impulsive-antisociality dimension showed positive correlations in regions affected by emotional and motivational value, that were parts of the left amygdala, left posterior/agranular OFC and right agranular insula/OFC (Sadeh et al., 2013).

There was also an interaction found among the two dimensions, arguing for neural activation moderating selective attention in the presence of words of negative valence. More activation was found in subjects scoring high on both psychopathy dimensions, clusters of relevance were inferior and superior parietal lobules and areas associated with motor planning and response preparation, which included bilateral pre-/post-central gyri, and larger activity of the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, a area that is associated with cognitive control (Sadeh et al., 2013).

According to the authors, these findings suggest that subjects scoring high on both psychopathy dimensions did find words of negative valence more distracting and therefore did make use of more attentional resources in order to compensate for the distraction in performance. As a final result, the interaction of the two psychopathy dimensions exhibited a special association of activity in an area in the anterior, medial OFC (Sadeh et al., 2013).

Conteras-Rodriguez, Pujol, Batalla, Harrison, Bosque, Ibern-Regas et al. (2014) investigated neural processing of emotional faces in criminal psychopaths and healthy control subjects with an emotional face-matching task. The task was chosen in order to investigate the implicit processes of general emotion stimulation in criminal psychopaths, both in the positive and negative domain. During the task, the subjects were presented with a target face and two probe faces and participants had to match the probe that did express the same emotion as the target by pressing a button with either their left or right hand. During the task fMRI was used to disentangle the neural underpinnings (Contreras-Rodriguez et al., 2014).

The behavioral results of the face-matching task did not reveal any differences among the criminal psychopaths and the healthy control subjects. However, at the neural level group differences were found. The psychopatic individuals exhibited more activation in the neocortical regions that were involved in both visual and frontal cortices. Task induced decrements in functional connectivity were found among the amygdala, the visual cortex, and the prefrontal cortex. The present findings are interpreted by the authors as psychopatic individuals' equal task performance resulted in more involvement of the neocortex, and a lessened input to the limbic system (Contreras-Rodriguez et al., 2014).

Psychopatic individuals ans control subjects performed a visual oddball task while event-related potentials were recorded. It was found that psychopatic individuals exhibited a reduced P300 amplitude to target stimuli as compared to control subjects. This finding was present despite that there were no behavioral differences among the groups on the task (Kiehl, Hare, Liddle, and McDonald, 1999). The finding is suggested to be due to larger sensitivity of ERP measures concerning the group differences in information processing (Kiehl et al., 1999). Accordingly, this finding was thought to be in agreement with the hypothesis that the P300 in psychopatic individuals is the result of an impairment in the sustainment of attention or to the right allocation of resources to the task (Kiehl, et al., 1999). In the task that needs a decision response, they found also a larger frontocentral negativity ERP component. Furthermore, in the psychopatic individuals the P300 was to be found larger in amplitude over the right than over the left hemisphere. The authors conclude that their findings support the hypothesis that psychopathy is related to difficulties in the right modulation and allocation of attentional resources (Kiehl et al., 1999).

Fullam et al. (2009) investigated the neural responses during deception using fMRI in male participants with psychopatic traits as measured with the Psychopatc Personality Inventory (PPI). The response times in the lie condition were longer than in the thruth condition. Lying responses showed larger activation of the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. Subscales of the PPI, coldheartedness, fearlessness, machiavellian egocentricity, social potency and stress immunity were associated with activity in brain areas that are both associated with deception as well as related processes. Thus, even in a healthy male group high on psychopatic traits differences were found (Fullam et al., 2009).

Individuals with psychopathy are famous for their grandiose sense of self-word while disregarding the wellbeing of other persons. A possible psychological aspect that might underly these traits is the relative consideration of "self" versus "others". The authors made use of a task based fMRI to investigate the neural activations while participants made personality trait judgments about themself and a familiar other in aduld male incarcerated psychopaths (Deminga, Philippic, Dargisa, Kiehl, and Koenings, 2018). While participants underwent fMRI they performed a task in which they had to make yes/no judgments for trait adjectives encompassing three conditions: self, mother, or case. Than a cueword (self, mother, or case) was presented with every adjective, which did signal the judgment of the participant about the target. The authors hypothesized that PCL-R Factor 1, consisting for example of egocentricity or lack of empathy would be associated with enhanced activity awhile self-judgment as compared to other-judgment in the cortical midline brain areas that are associated with social cognition. Contrary to hypothesis, no regions predicted this association. The factor 2 traits of psychopathy, such as impulsivity and irresponsibility showed diminished activation concerning self-judgment as compared to other-judgment in bilateral PCC as well as in the  treatmenright TPJ (Deminga et al., 2018). 

In conclusion, the authors suggest that the identified brain areas functioning might be disruptive for self-refective judgment in incarcerated psychopaths, for instance impulsivity. It is suggested that these results encompass a key part of socio-affective cognition that might be underlying the impulsive and irresponsible aspects of psychopathy (Deminga et al., 2018).

Motzkin, Newman, Kiehl, and Koenigs (2011) used diffusion tensor imaging and found that there was an attenuation in structural integrity whitin the richt uncinate fasiculus, which is the most important connection among the vmPFC and the anterior temporal lobe in psychopatic individuals. In addition, their fMRI results revealed a diminished functional connectivity among vmPFC and amygdala as well as among the vmPFC and medial parietal cortex in psychopatic individuals.

Structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to investigate the neural correlates of reward and loss sensitivity in criminal psychopatic individuals and in criminal non-psychopatic individuals (Pujara, Motzkin, Newman, Kiehl, and Koenigs, 2013). During the scanning phase, the subjects performed a task that involved the passive gain or loss of money. In order to keep the participants' attention dedicated to the task, participants had to make a button press for the stimulus of which slot machine was the most likely to follow.

The imaging results revealed no group differences in criminal psychopatic individuals and criminal non-psychopatic individuals in the mean level of ventral striatum activity in the conditions of reward or loss. However, there was an important difference among the groups between activation of the ventral striatum in response to reward or loss concerning the severity of psychopathy (Pujara et al., 2013). The positive correlation found in criminal psychopaths associated with gain-loss ventral striatum activation appear to be due to a negative correlation with loss-neutral ventral striatum activation. Further it was found that the nucleus accumbens region of the right ventral striatum was also positively associated with the severity of psychopathy, but not in non-psychopaths. The authors believe that these findings are important indicators for an interaction among psychopathy and reward and loss sensitivity (Pujara et al., 2013).

fMRI scanning was used in participants from the community scoring either high or low on psychopatic traits (Marsh and Cardinale, 2014). It was investigated whether dysfunction of the amygdala would be associated to the willingness of individuals with high psychopatic traits to cause fear in other people.

The participants with high psychopatic traits did judge fear-evoking statements as more morally acceptable. Reduced amygdala activation was found during these judgments in individuals with high psychopatic traits as compared to participants scoring lower on psychopatic traits. Increased middle frontal gyrus activation was also found in individuals scoring high on psychopatic traits when they had to judge several aspects of emotional statements. Concerning the acceptability of frightening others was associated with activity in the amygdala and preceneus in participants scoring high on factor 1 psychopathy traits concerning emotional responsivity (Marsh and Cardinale, 2014).

Brain areas were investigated with the use of fMRI that were related in emotional processing in criminal psychopaths by using pictures of the IAPS (Muller et al. 2003). Pictures consisted either of neutral, positive, and negative load. During this task it was investigated how emotional content was related to different areas in the emotion-associated brain regions in criminal psychopaths. As compared to the control subjects the results of the experiment showed that there were different activations in the emotion-associated brain circuitry in criminal psychopaths, were some areas were to be found overactive and others underactive. It is hypothesized, based on these findings, that there is a dysregulation and impaired functional connectivity in criminal psychopaths. In this group, negative valenced emotions exhibited enhanced activity in right prefrontal areas as well as in the anterior cingulate cortex, and amygdala. In contrast, positive valenced emotions displayed enhanced activity in the left frontal gyrus (Muller et al., 2003). In addition, there was diminished activation found for negatively valenced pictures in the right subgenual cingulate and the right medial temporal gyrus, the left lobus paracentralis, the left dorsal cingulate cortex, as well as in the left parahippocampal gyrus. In contrast, positively valenced emotions exhibited diminished activation in the right medial frontal gyrus and the right medial temporal gyrus. According to the authors, psychopaths show abnormal activation in important cortical as well as subcortical emotion-associated brain areas, that might be responsible for their antagonistic ability. Furthermore, the authors suggest that their findings are in accordance with previous studies that found frontotemporal hyperactivation in psychopatic individuals (Muller et al., 2003). In the group of criminal psychopaths there was also an enhanced activation pattern found in the hippocampus. Based on the results of this experiment, the authors found evidence for an impaired interaction among top-down control which is associated with prefrontal areas as well as bottom-up signals from the limbic regions which might be the neurobiological cause in psychopaths (Muller et al., 2003) .

Deeley, Daly, Tunstall, Meyzey, Beer et al. (2006) tested wether psychopatic individuals would have a specific deficit in the processing of distressing stimuli. Event-related fMRI was performed to assess the neural responses in psychopatic individuals and control subjects while they were viewing emotional expressions of distress (fearful faces) and expression of positive emotion (happy faces). The results showed that psychopatic individuals had an abnormal response to fearful faces as compared to control subjects. Decreased activation was found in fusyform and extrastriate cortex. It is suggested that this might be accountable for a diminished autonomic responsiveness to signals of fear as well as the deficits in empathy (Deeley et al., 2006).

HEMISPATIAL NEGLECT

Key words hemispatial neglect, attention, personal neglect, extrapersonal neglect

Left visual neglect as a result of right hemisphere defects, which is usually vascular in origin is associated with patients not eating from their left side of their plate, or shaving just one part of their face. 

Personal neglect can be assesed by looking wether the patient is caring only about the contralesional site. Extrapersonal neglect can be investigated with for example the line bisection task, in which patients have to cut the line in similar halves. Patients with neglect are impaired at this task. In cancellation tasks it is assesed whether the patient pays attention to the contralesional field.

SELF-AWARENESS

The paralimbic network is related to self-awareness (Lou et al., 2017).

SENSE OF AGENCY

Key words sense of agency, intentional binding, action, free will, automaton

How do I know that I am the person who is moving?

Sense of agency is the capability of having control someone's actions and thinking and thereby also events in the real world (Beck, Di Costa, and Haggard, 2017). For humans it is critically Important to be aware of our actions that have an effect on our environment, which is needed for the navigation and associations among other beings as well as objects (Kawabe, Roseboom, and Nishida, 2013).

Hon, Poh, and Soon (2013) studied explicit agency judgment under various amounts of cognitive load during a working memory task. It is hypothesized that sense of agency is affected on general consciouss cognitive capabilities because the authors found that working memory load had an effect on judgments of agency especially under greater working memory load in which the ratings of agency were to be found lower.

Sense of agency can be divided in implicit sense of agency and explicit Sense of agency (Moore, 2018). In explicit sense of agency the participant can directly report about it. An implicit measure is intentional Binding. intentional Binding is a temporal bias and its effect is perceived as an action generating an effect earlier in time (Rues, Thomaschke, and Kiesel, 2018).

The purpose of the study by Rues et al. (2018) was to investigate the visual action effects as compared to auditory action effects. It was found that the experienced time point of a visual action effect was more close to the causing action. In addition, it also depended on delay. Lastly, intentional binding in the auditory domain was stronger than in the visual domain.

Intentional binding does also appear in complex circumstances, such as an aircraft supervision task (Berberian, Sarrazin, Le Blaye, and Haggard, 2012). In this task, subjects had to track the move of their aircraft while on a predefined flight route and had to intervene when it was needed depending on the situation. The study revealed three important results. Firstly, there was found a strong relationship among aspects of intentional binding and the different amounts of system automation. Next, it was found that there was a gradually increment in temporal estimation with increasing amount of automation. Finally, the effect of automation amount on intentional binding was the result of the actual action-effect delays. According to these investigators, their results provide evidence that intentional binding is an implicit measure of sense of agency (Berberian et al., 2012).

One suggested marker of implivit sense of agency is called 'intentional binding', which is the propensity to see voluntary actions and their results as secured as time (Beck et al., 2017). Intentional binding was found to be responsive to the scene that was presented due to a difference among probabilistic and non-probabilistic blocks. Control was modulated by the outcomes of painful and nonpainful presented stimuli.  Accordingly, the implicit sense of agency due to intentional binding mirrors the capability to have a choice among actions concerning different results and their consequences which presented an important association between volition, motivation, as well as responsibility (Beck et al. 2017).

It was investigated by Aarts and van den Bos (2011) if free will was related to self-agency. Human beings can be in goal-directed actions while being conscious and performing goal-directed actions in order to have an effect on action autcomes. The can also be in an unconscious state after being primed with action outcomes.

In their first experiment, Kawabe et al. (2013) created a situation where in perceptual grouping of stimuli among cross-modal trials was affected by sensory signals from an unrelated modality. The results showed that a detection in the delay among the beginnings of tactile and visual cues could be enhanced due to the presence of synchronized signals that were presented in a different modality that was not related to the particular task.

Wen, Yamashita, and Asama (2015) investigated how performance on a task with delayed events had an influence on one's sense of agency while ongoing action is related to a goal. participants performed better in the assisted condition.

The experiment by Oisi, Tanaka, and Watanabe (2018) is about wheter explicit feedback resulting from an action (whether succeeding or failing) did have an effect on sense of agency. It was found that sense of agency was reduced after a longer delay between a key press and a response. Sense of agency was higher in a succesful rather than an unsuccesful task. When during the task more obstacles were present it resulted in failed trails for sense of agency. According to the authors, goal-directed inference by giving feedback of the last outcome was associated with sense of agency. In this study participants did rate their sense of agency (Oisi et al., 2018).

Hearing and Kiesel (2015) investigated whether the sense of agency after an action altered after immediate or delayed effects.

Lynn, Muhle-Karbe, Aarts, and Brass (2014) investigated whether weakening the participants free will would be causally associated with sense of agency. Intentional binding was measured with time judgments after a tone. Explicit sense of agency was invistigated with the Sato task. Intentional binding was significantly attenuated in the anti free will condition. Beliefs do bias easy and implicit aspects that underlie our pre-reflective self-perceptions as intentional beings. In such instances in which integration of agency stimuli on judgment is transparent explicit processes may overrule implicit aspects.

Burin, Pyasik, Ronga, Cavallo, Salatino, and Pia (2017) studied agency and body ownership and if their triggered agency had the same temporal constraints to agency affected during actual movement. Either actual hand movement or illusory hand movement.

Participants underwent the Rubber Hand Illusion paradigm. Implicit and explicit measures of sense of agency were assesed with the movements that were made by their own hand, by a fake non-embodied hand, and by a fake embodied hand after some delay. Both implicit and explicit agency were found to be related to illusory ownership of the fake hand (Burin et al., 2017).

Philosophy of Mind

I am interested in the philosophy of mind and consciousness. There are a lot of theories on the subject matter. Furthermore, I am interested in people who have deficits in their consciousness. An example is visuospatial neglect, in which the patients don't pay attention to one side. For example, they shave only one side of their face. It is interesting to know whether conscious experience in such states is altered.

Theory of Mind in Autism

Theory of mind is the ability to reflect on own and others mind (Baron-Cohen, 2001). The capacity to attribute mental states to one self and some other is important in making sense and predicting someone's behavior (Colle et al., 2006).

Deficits in theory of mind are one of the most important cognitive deficits in autism. In this post I will look at research on theory of mind in autism and will discuss the findings.

Moran et al. (2011) studied adult patients with asperger disorder and adult control subject on a moral judgment task in which intentions and outcomes of an action by a person were considered. Intentions for moral judgments is dependend on theory of mind. A standard false belief task was also applied in which both groups did not differ. However, on the moral judgment task for intentions, adults with asperger disorder were impaired (Moran et al. 2011). patiens with asperger disorder are not impaired at explicit theory of mind tasks, rather they are impaired on implicit tasks.

In the study by Chevallier et al. (2011) prosody was used to study theory of mind in autism. Patiens with autism were impaired in these tasks.

The Chiprain the Artificial Brain

Consider a robot, that is designed the same as a human being. It looks the same, feels the same, but thinks? the same? This robot's name is Chiprain, because it has no brain, but a skull full with chips and other electronics. It is not a real brain, rather an artificial brain. The robot is designed by its programmers. How does it feel like to be Chiprain? I argue that he does not have feelings, he uses just as-like feelings that are designed by his inventors. Can Chiprain think? My answer is yes, because he is so programmed to execute actions on demand. However, this way of thinking is like an order generator. When we ask the robot questions he can respond. But if we are talking about feelings he cannot help himself. The only answers he generates are how it should be in humans answers. The emotion answers of the robot are empty, they do not have any associated content. 

Does Chiprain have a theory of mind? Definitely not! He can not assign mental states to himself and surely not to others. Chiprain is thus incapable of mindreading. 

Action imitation, is the mimicry of an agents actions. I think Chiprain can to a certain extent display the same actions as human beings, for instance, he can watch a human being grasping a cup and mimic this action by itself. In primates there are certain brain areas which are activated when watching another performing an action. These neurons are called mirror-neurons and there is evidence for a mirror-neuron system in humans as well. Well, in this case Chiprain's artificial brain has not the right stuff inside for such a system. In human beings mirror-neurons are also associated with empathy, which I state that Chiprain is incapable of. 

What can we say about planning, which belongs to the executive functions. Can Chiprain complete the Tower of Hanoi? Here I think yes. He can plan his sequences step by step to perform perfectly.

Working memory is associated with keeping things online to perform tasks. I think that Chiprain when equipped can pass working memory tasks. I think further that he can have meta-memory as well as semantic memory of facts. However, he does not have autobiographical memory, because its artificial brain has not the power and possibility to create narratives of Chiprain's experiences of the past. Also episodic memory is not possible in the robot. 

Can we ever model an artificial brain which represents consciousness? I think the answer is yes. There is much work on artificial intelligence and neural modelling. I have the opinion that these might contribute to a better insight of consciousness.

Animal Consciousness

Human beings are equipped with a highly intelligent brain. The also have consciousness. What someone is feeling or experiencing we only know from a first-person view. What it is to be me. I argue that not only humans, but also other higher animals, such as our most related ancestors and dolphins. Humans have the capability of language to report of their states, animals do not. It is suggested that the main function of language is social. But I think that animals have the ability to communicate in other ways and they might have some aspects of social cognition. Some primates do recognize themselves in a mirror when they were marked. Others use deception in favour of themselves, which I think is a high cognitive ability and possibly needs consciousness to carry out the plans. I think some animals are therefore self-aware and maybe other-aware as well. 

The Neural Correlates of Humor

In this blog I will search for the neural correlates of humor. Where in our brain will humor be processed?

To comprehend a joke someone must go further than the aspect of surprise! you must formulate a new comprehension of the situation.

Here first a little joke: Q: How do you call a Norwegian prostitute? A: A fjord escord.

SENSE OF AGENCY IN SCHIZOPHRENIA

Keywords: schizophrenia, schizotypy, sense of agency, rubber hand illusion, hand

In our normally daily life we all perform goal-directed actions on which we even do not reflect upon. But we normally experience these actions as self-initiated (Werner et al. 2014). Abnormally self-experiences have been related to disorders of the schizophrenia spectrum (Ferri et al., 2013). Deficits of Sense of Agency (SoA) have been associated with sensory-motor integration in schizophrenia (Werner et al. 2014). In the study of Ferri et al. (2014) it was hypothesized that the higher susceptability to the rubber hand illusion would be related to the positive symptoms of schizophrenia. It was investigated whether patients with schizophrenia was associated with visuo-tactile integration with the rubber hand illusion. Patiens seemed to have a different experience to the rubber hand than control participants. The negative symptoms od schizophrenia were suggested to be the result of a disturbed body ownership which manifests itself when the actual sensory stimuli are absent as related to the rubber hand illusion, and according to the authors this would be especially related to anhedonia (Ferri et al., 2013). A limitation of their study is that they only got subjective reports of the participants. In their study, Werner et al. (2014) developped an experiment where subjects had to report subjective agency  episodes while they were controlling a virtual pen. Participants with schizophrenia differed from healthy control participants in the duration of false negative agency judgments which was to be found prolonged in patients. Errors in external agency judgments happened while there were no differences among motor signals and sensory feedback when they did not differ. The authors argue that their findings are in agreement with the hypothesis that changes seen in schizophrenia patients are the result of a deficient and stronger integration mechanism that is more vulnerable to errors because of the strong dependence on extenal, but not internal cues (Werner et al., 2014).

In the study of Thakkar, Nichols, McIntosh, and Park (2011) the rubber hand illusion was also stronger in patients with schizophrenia than in healthy control participants. The patients reported this illusion as more vivid on a questionnaire. They also exhibited mislocation of their own hand, which is indicative of a deficit in body ownership in schizophrenia (Thakkar et al. 2011). Asai, Sugamori, and Tanno (2008) found that in healthy participants scoring high on schizotypal traits, passivity phenomena might be due to the anomalous prediction of one's own movements or actions. In another study by Asai and Tanno (2008) participants scoring eighter low or high on schizotypal traits had to press a button, whereafter a tone followed. The participants had to indicate whether they had the feeling that they themselves or someone else had elicited the tone. It was concluded that participants high on schizotypal traits show impairments in their sense of agency. 

Subjective feeling of control can be saparated from motor performance. Prospective internal signals are evident in the prefrontal cortex in patients with schizophrenia, but they are not doing well in communicating and monitoring by the parietal cortex (Voss et al. 2017).

Garbani et al. (2016) aimed to study the integrety of body representation in patients with schizophrenia and also the pattern of performance concerning the passivity symptoms on a body illusion task and a hand laterality task. The results show that patients with schizophrenia exhibited deficient performance on both of those two tasks. The patients with schizophrenia showed enhanced disembodiment of their own hand. In addition, they showed a decreased sense of agency over their own hand as compared to healthy control participants (Garbani et al., 2016). The suggestion of these authors is that symptoms of passivity are associated to impairments in body representations, including body schema, alternations in the sense of agency, as well as internal timing deficits that lead to overwhelming associability with external sensory stimuli, such that the sensation becomes that someone's actions are produced by another (external) agent (Garbani et al., 2016).

Bulot, Thomas, and Delevoye-Turrell (2007) designed an easy motor task to measure as an implicit indicator of how a pre-reflective  sense of agency in schizophrenia patients works. The actually wanted to know the immediate sense of agency. The experiment consisted of a fall of a pendulum either caused by the experimenter or the participant. Patients with schizophrenia experienced self- and -other initiated action as the same. They did not improve the force of the grip when they were themselves the agent of the pendulum release. According to the authors, these findings are suggestive of an impairment in pre-reflective sense of agency in patients (Bulot et al., 2007). Patients with schizophrenia performed a prime-based agency inference assignment in which they learned that it was about evaluating their experiences of personal effects and how they come and go (Prikken et al. 2017). In every trial, one place was gently primed shortly before the subjects did press the stop button and saw the outcome location. Patients with schizophrenia who had positive symptoms had a reduced agency. furthermore, schizophrenia patients exhibited a diminished capacity to use implicit cues for self-agency that were available to them. This finding was still evident after taken into consideration the disease state and is therefore suggested to be a stable trait (Prikken et al. 2017).

Surprise has an influence on sense of agency (Moore et al., 2011). In schizotypy, training with more surprising results was related to an enhanced sense of agency. individual differences in associative learning might be associated to higher level experiences of their world (Moore et al., 2011).

Renes et al. (2013) examined implicit and explicit ways to inferences about self agency. In the explicit condition (matching goal to outcome), both healthy controls and patients with schizophrenia exhibited enhanced self agency. In the implicit condition (priming) only the healthy control subjecs exhibited enhanced self agency whereas patients with schizophrenia did not. It has been suggested that implicit causes are the result of a disturbance in self agency in schizophrenia (Renes et al. 2013).

I think that the positive symptoms, such as delusions and hallucinations can be explained by a reduced sense of agency. The patient has in these instances not the ability to attribute states to their own, rather they think these experiences are generated from the outside. Delusions in which the patient thinks that the police task force is after him or her might be explained by defective sense of agency. Auditory hallucinations might be explained by voices that the patients hears which might be their own thought and associated with not from themselves.

mirror-neurons

Key words mirror neurons, actions, neuroimaging, imitation, social behavior, empathy, action understanding

Observing other people in action does activate the so called "mirror neuron system", which is needed for comprehending and predicting the specific action (of others).

In primates there are three brain areas involved in the obsevations of actions of others. These are the superior temporal sulcus (STS), area PF and F5. the last two areas have been associated with the so called mirror neurons, or the mirror neuron system. Area PF contains neurons that are active in grasping and mouth movements.

In humans, neuroimaging results have located the probability of mirror neurons in the rostral inferior parietal cortex and the rostral premotor cortex. Furthermore BOLD activation was found during action observation an execution in the middle temporal gyrus and superior temporal sulcus.

Some studies in humans found an auditory mirror neuron system.

Motor parts of the human brain were found to be active when participants Performed actions while they underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). These activations were the same as when the subject saw a robot or human being perform those actions (Pineda, 2009).

In humans, Mainieri et al. (2013) investigated the neural correlates of communicative gestures that were associated with abstract mental states while obseving and performing. Communicative intention was investigated by imitation, which is a social behavior. The mirror neuron system was activated.

Why do we feel empathy toward unreal characters in a movie? Because we know how they are feeling, in view of the fact that we strictly have the experience of the same emotions. This is empathy and it is associated with the human mirror neuron system.

In the case that we see that somebody else is suffering from pain, the mirror neurrons aid us to read the facial expression of this person. This makes us actually feel the suffering of the other person suffering from pain.

It is suggested that part of the same neurons are firing when we watch a player catch a ball and that they as well fire when we catch the ball ourselves (Iacoboni, 2009, p. 5).

"The simple fact that a subset of the cells in our brains - the mirror neurons - fire when an individual kicks a soccer ball, sees a ball being kicked, and even says or hears the word 'kick' leads to amazing consequences and new understanding" (Iacoboni, 2009, p. 12).