Sensation Seeking and Emotional Processing

Zheng, Xu, Jia, Tan, Chan, Zhou, et al. (2011) investigated emotional processing in high and low sensation seekers with an emotional oddball paradigm while event related potentials were recorded. high and low valence and arousal pictures were used. Behaviorally, both high and low sensation seekers did not differ. Low sensation seekers showed an enlarged N2 amplitude to emotional stimuli, wheras high sensation seekers exhibited an enhanced P3 to emotional stimuli.

Sensation Seeking and Reward Processing

Participants either scorin high or low on sensation seeking performed a two choice reward  decision making task durung event related potentials were recorded (Zheng and Liu, 2015). Participants scoring low on sensation seeking were found to be risk averse. In contrast, participants scoring high on sensation seeking exhibited a neutral decision making pattern. The SPN component was found to be enlarged while making risky decisions. This effect vanished in high sensation seekers in risk neutral trials as compared to the low scoring sensation seekers. The FRN appeared in low sensation seekers, but was reduced in high sensation seekers. There was also a diminished P300 component found in high sensation seekers.

Autism and Gambling

It was hypothesized that adult patients with autism would exhibit an abnormal risky decision making pattern on a gambling task in response to win or los rounds (Wu, White, Rees, and Burgess, 2018). A characteristic of autism is repetitiveness, and this was measured as well on the gambling task. The participants in this study had to make gambling decisions to possible gains or losses and were also asked if they choose the risky or secure option. The patients with autism did not differ from healthy control participants in their decision making, in fact, they chose the lose option more often than the win option. It was found that both groups made risky decisions in the same manner. However, the patients were more slower in responding than the healthy controls.

It is hypothesized that this finding might be associated with demands on cognitive flexibility or with psychomotor speed (Wu et al., 2018). In the win trials, all participants responded in the same manner concerning repetitiveness. It was further found that in the patient group with autism, making more consistent gambling decisions during the win rounds As compared to the healthy controls. It is suggested by the authors that in autism the highly consistent manner of responding in these rounds might be due to the win-stay lose shift strategy, however the patients with autism did respond in a more repetitive way as compared to healthy control participants in the equally expected gambling rounds. The consistent response of the group was not enhanced affecting risky decisions, rather in the absense of risky decisions (Wu et al., 2018). In addition, it is argued that this pattern of responding is an exploit decision preference contrary to an explore decision preference (Wu et al., 2018).

Psychopathy and Social Cognition

Several studies have found that psychopatic individuals have a diminished sensitivity to how other people feel (Deming et al., 2018). These authors investigated the neural underpinnings of self versus other in criminal offenders by way of fMRI. The participants made a trait judgment task consisting of three conditions, self, other, and case. Thus self-focussed versus other-focused was assed in psychopatic individuals. Diminished neural activations were found for self-judgments as compared to other judgments in the PCC as well as in the TPJ. These findings were especially associated with impulsivity.

Fear conditioning in Psychopaths

Psychopathic (n 11) men were given an aversive conditioning task while theie ERP's and skin conduction was measured (Rothemund et al., 2012). In the experiment there was a painful cue that was the unconditional stimulus, whereas neutral faces were used as the conditional stimulus. The findings of the experiment showed that psychopatic individuals are impaired in fear conditioning. These psychopatic individuals showed no startle reflecs as well as no difference in skin conductance (Rothemund et al., 2012). The P100 ERP component was found to be attenuated.

R statistics Question

I have a question, does someone know some datasets to practice rstats? I am really struggling with the program.

Sensaton Seeking and the Amygdala

For persons who score high on the dimension of sensation seeking, they persu ovolty despite of the cost of self-harm (Mujica-Parodi, Carlson, Cha, and Rubin, 2014). During fMRI participants performed the anticipation of aversive events task in which the aversive stimuli consisted of a 100 dB white noise and the good stimuli gave 55dB noise. It was found that highly trait anxious particpants exhibited prefrontal-limbic meso circuitry assymetry. 

Sensation Seeking and the Neurophysiology of Risk Processing

The personality trait of sensation seeking is a good predictor of risk-taking behaviors (Zheng and Liu, 2015). The processing of reward was investigated in individuals that were high sensation seekers and low sensation seekers during a two choice simple gambling task with low penalty outcomes and high penalty outcomes, while event-related potentials were recorded. It was found that sensation seeking was a modulating predictor of the effect of risk on the behavioral chosen option, in which participants that were low sensation seekers were more risk-averse than high sensation seekers (Zheng and Liu, 2015). Furthermore, high sensation seekers did not show differences in the high and low risk conditions of the task. 
The SPN ERP component was found in low sensation seekers, but not in high sensation seekers. Concerning the feedback related negativity (FRN) low sensation seekers showed an enhanced amplitude of this ERP component following high risks as compared to low risks. This effect was not found to be evident in high sensation seekers (Zheng and Liu, 2015). The P300 amplitude to gains and losses was found to be diminished in high sensation seekers as compared to low sensation seekers, which might indicate that sensation seeking had an effect on the in-depth processing of both positive and negative rewards. The authors hypothesize that these results might reflect an underarousal in high sensation seekers (Zheng and Liu, 2015).

Huntington's Disease

Huntington's disease is a genetically autosomal-dominant inherited neurodegenerative disease (Perandones, Radrizzani, and Micheli, 2010). Its phenotype encompasses chorea, coordination difficulties, cognitive deficits as well as behavioral problems. The genetic defect is caused by a CAG repeat expansion for coding of the HD gene huntingtin (htt). Huntington's disease is a disease that becomes apparent around the age of fourty years, but the disease can in sporadic cases also emerge in a wider age range (e.g. early onset). Huntington's disease is also known for personality changes in the patients, such as anger outburst. The most important neuropathology is associated with dysfunction in the basal ganglia.

Clinical correlates of huntington's disease include as mentioned earlier chorea. In the greek language chorea means "dance". Choreatic movements of the afflicted patient are involuntary and slow and presents it at random. The muscles that are associated with this symptom are all voluntary muscle groups.

In the early course of huntington's disease these choreatic movements may be mild, however with the progression of the disease these movements interfere with daily activities (Perandones et al., 2010). At the end stage of the disease these movements might diminish and are replaced by rigidity and dystonia. Other movement impairments found in huntington's disease are bradykinesia.

Huntington's disease is also associated with cognitive impairments, including executive function deficits, impairments in short-term and visuospatial skills (Perandones et al., 2010). First, these impairments are rather mild, however as the disease advances more global subcortical dementia may emerge. The areas of the brain that are first implicated are the striatum and neocortex. Neurodegeneration affects first the caudate nucleus and then the putamen. Disruption in the basal ganglia is associated with medium spiny neurons becoming dysfunctional in patients with parkinson's disease (Perandones et al., 2010).

In more advanced stages of huntington's disease, also other brain areas are affected, such as the hippocampus, hypothalamus, the cerebellum, the amygdala as well as some nuclea. The neurons that are mostly affected in huntington's disease are the striatal projection neurons (Perandones et al., 2010). A different neurogenesis may also relate to the disease.

Epilepsy is found to be more apparent in the juvinile case of huntington's disease.

In addition, mood and anxiety disorders are frequently seen in huntington's disease. Also, at later stages of the disease, psychosis is not uncommon.

In the early parts of the disease, cognitive deficits, such as attention problems, working memory impairments, and poor decision making can be seen.

Later in the course, deficits in everyday capabilities become evident, because of more severe motor disfunctions, such as postural instability (Perandones et al., 2010).

I am still working on this post. More information is underway

Implicit Effects of Emotional Contexts

It was investigated if ERP differences are dependend of explicit item recognition by comparing ERP's caused by test items that were either encoded as negatively emotional or neutral study contexts and the question of whether items were classified in a correct manner or misclassified as new (Jaeger and Rugg, 2012). The pictures that were used were 300 emotionally neutral, which were the critical items, and there were also 200 emotional background contexts differing in valence and arousal. During the phase when participants had to encode, the 200 contexts were given and they were associated with 200 critical items. The other 100 items were used as "new" items in the test. After the phase of encoding, the test phase was conducted twentyfour hours afterwards. The task of the participants was to press a button when the test item was seen in the phase of encoding, and another button when participants thought that the test item was new. During this test phase ERP's were recorded.

The findings of the behavioral data showed that the participants were more correct in the rejection of new test items rather than endorsing old test items that they studied in the negative and neutral situations in a correct manner.

The ERP analysis was done in three parts. First, differences in ERP amplitude were compared for correctly classified old test items and rejected new items based on the emotional status of the old item. The second stage contrasted the studied items that were incorrectly classified as new for the ability to find emotional memory effects while explicit recognition was absent. The last analysis consisted of contrasting emotionally related hits as compared to misses in order to find possible disparities among explicit and implicit item retrieval.

The results of the event related potentials showed that there was an old-new effect in which correctly recognized items had more positive ERP's as compared to successfully rejected items. These old-new effects were already seen as soon as 200 milliseconds after the onset of the stimulus. Furthermore, it became evident that an analysis that was for the 300-500 ms and 500-800 ms range were apparent in both emotional as well as neutral hits. The authers interpret these findings as instances of the midfrontal and parietal old-new effects (Jaeger and Rugg, 2012). A direct comparison among emotional and neutral hits revealed differences in retrieval associated latencies of 200-300 ms and 800-1,100 ms.

Semantic Priming in Schizotypy

A semantic priming effect happens when there is an enhancement in reaction times as well as in the accuracy when a targed word has been primed with a semantically related word (Johnston, Rossell, and Gleeson, 2008). These researchers assessed direct and indirect semantic priming to see whether there are particular impairments concerning controlled and automatic processing associated with schizotypy. Stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was as well manipulated in this experiment. Direct and indirect priming with short and long SOA's consisting of mostly real words and also a portion of non words. Associated and unassociated word pairs were created. The accuracy as measured for the percent correct responses and reaction times to correct responses only were assessed for associated, unassociated, word and non word and the short and long SOA's. Thus there were in total four priming conditions: direct priming with short SOA, direct priming with long SOA, indirect priming with short SOA, and indirect priming with a long SOA.

The results showed that there was a positive association between cognitive disorganization and indirect priming with a short SOA. In this experiment there were only associations between indirect priming and schizotypy. Cognitive disorganization was found not to be associated with direct priming. It is hypothesized that deficits in semantic priming might have a direct relationship with delusional beliefs and accordingly this is why a part of semantic information is proccessed faulthy and other semantic information processing is not abnormal (Johnston et al., 2008).

Schizotypy and Attention

Schizotypal personality traits are traits that are on a continuum and that are similar as aspects that can be seen in schizophrenia (Steel, Hemsley, and Pickering, 2007). Participants scoring either high or low on traits performed a cued letter-comparison task. The participants were confronted with targed cues consisting of two letters and by pressing "yes" or "no" keys when they were identical or different. The targed stimuli were preceded by different cues. There were three conditions in this task: neutral, expected, and unexpected. Participants were instructed to respond as fast as possible as well as to keep errors to a minimum. The results revealed that positive schizotypy was being influenced of context cues on reaction time. Disorganized schizotypy was related to the facilitation of reaction times during the task. It is suggested that the inhibition and facilitation of reaction times are interacting for a part at different cognitive processes (Steel et al., 2007).

Sensation Seeking and Scary Movies: Neural Correlates

Straube, Preissler, Lipka, Hewig, Mentzel, and Miltner (2010) studied the neural correlates in participants while watching scary movies and its association with the personality trait sensation seeking. Patients underwent during this task fMRI. The fMRI findings showed that while watching threatening video clips as compared to neutral video clips, there was a strong activation in the anterior cingulate cortex, the insula, as well as in the visual regions of the brain. The finding of strong activation of the visual areas is suggestive of enhanced visual processing while watching the threatening video clips (Straube et al., 2010). There was a positive correlation found between experienced anxiety and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. It is suggested that this area might be implicated in the subjective experience of being afraid. Participants that scored high on sensation seeking exhibited large activation in the visual brain areas. In addition, there were also found large activations in sensation seekers in the right thalamus and the right anterior insula. Besides, in both of these areas the positive correlation that was found among high sensation seekers and the activity between threat and neutral vidio clips was related to smaller activity in high compared to low sensation seekers while they were watching the neutral video clips. It is argued that the finding of thalamus activation is indicative of high sensation seekers is coupled with activity in sub-cortical brain regions.  

In low scoring sensation seekers, higher activation in the insula while having less stimulation may give a danger signal and therefore diminishes the look for more challenge (Straube et al., 2010). The diminished activity in the insula in high sensation seekers may be below the just right homeostatic mean of interoceptive sensation in these subjects (Straube et al., 2010).

Word Comprehension and Second Language

Midgley, Holcomb, and Grainger (2011) investigated modalities of the processing of cognate and noncognate words in second language learners in the first (L1) and second (L2) language. Participants were native english speakers learning as their second language french. The subjects required to read lists of words and what their meaning was and making button presses when there were probes from a particular semantic category. During the task, ERP's were recorded. Cognates were 160 items that were chosen for the two languages and the same amount of noncognates were also chosen. There were made two lists of words, an english one, and a french one. The ERP N400 component was affected by the cognate states in the case of both languages. For noncognates, the N400 was even larger than for cognates. In both L1 and L2 there was reduced amplitude of the N400 concerning cognate words as compared to noncognate words in both L1 and L2. It was suggested that the principal finding of this investigation was related to the influence of cognate status upon the recognition of words in the first language (Midgley et al., 2011).

Affect and Recognition Memory, an ERP study

Affect and recognition memory interactions were investigated by use of the International Affective Picture System with either high or low arousal as well as positive and negative valence. The task presented these pictures and the participants had to give an indication whether the picture was seen previously. Event related potentials during task performance were recorded (Kaestner and Polich, 2011). The behavioral results revealed that recognition memory was affected by arousal as well as the valence content of the stimuli. Images that were pleasant were not recognized well, however, they were associated with shorter reaction times as compared to the unpleasant images. High-arousal, unpleasant stimuli showed the longest reaction times. Concerning the ERP components, the amplitudes were higher for high than low arousal stimuli. It was found that the late positive component, the P300 amplitude was the most enhanced concerning high-arousal images that were unpleasant. According to the authors, a quick focus on unpleasant images might be due to the stimulus characteristics that indicate a threat and therefore enhances memory (Kaestner and Polich, 2011).

Reward System Functioning in Depression, an fMRI study

Brain region activations were measured in patients with depression and healthy control participants concerning selection of reward, reward anticipation, and feedback (Smoski, Felder, Bizzell, Green, Ernst, Lynch et al., 2009). More concrete, it was measured if patients with depression hyporesponsivity in the striatal brain areas and hyperresponsivity in the cortical brain areas while performing the wheel of fortune conflict monitoring task. As compared to healthy control subjects, the patients with depression displayed lower activation in the caudate, a region that has been associated with reward prediction. It is concluded by the authors that this is support for the hypothesized hyporesponsivity in the mesolimbic reward system. There was no support found for the hypothesis of altered conflict monitoring Because the patients displayed diminished activation in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex while they were anticipating reward. This region is associated with conflict monitoring (Smoski et al., 2009).

Depression, Affect and Cognitive Control

Dichter, Felder, and Smoski (2009) investigated limbic-prefrontal interactions in patients with major depressive disorder who were unmedicated by using a target detection task while they underwent fMRI scanning. There were seven fMRI runs, in which the first five runs consisted of a forced-choice target detection task (oddball task) in which in rare cases a target cue did appear that was embedded between changing blocks of neutral and sad pictures. The subjects were given the instruction to press a button with their right hand to all emerging stimuli as quickly as they could for every non target stimulus and with the other for a target stimulus. Behavioral performance was not different among patients and healthy control subjects.The imaging findings revealed that when both conditions were combined, there was no evidence of prefrontal hypo-activation in patients with depression. In contrast, differences among the groups were found related to target events that were embedded in sad or neutral blocks. In the neutral condition, the healthy control subjects exhibited more midfrontal and anterior cingulate cortex activation. In the patients with depression, more prefrontal activity was found in the case of sad embedded stimuli. It is suggested that prefrontal dysfunction in patients with depression might lead to an altered way in sad contexts than in either neutral or baseline contexts. The passive viewing runs showed that patients with depression had larger activation of the left amygdala. This is argued to be supportive of hyperactivity of the amygdala in patients with depression associated with sad pictures causes enhanced prefrontal activation to the target stimuli. Furthermore, the authors state that depressed patients need more cognitive effort to disengage from the sad pictures when responding to target cues (Dichter et al., 2009).

Depression and Error Detection

Major depressive disorder has been related to abnormalities in error processing, in which they show an enhanced sensitivity to cues of negative environmental valence (Chiu and Deldin, 2007). The two error associated components of the ERP, the ERN and Pe were investigated in depressed patients and healthy control participants while they performed a flanker task with reinforcement. Participants got rewards for correct responses and a monetary loss when they did make an incorrect response. There were two conditions in the flanker task. One neutral condition and one incentive condition. The behavioral results showed that both participant groups performed comparable in the neutral condition. The reaction times between the groups were also equally. As well as the latences of the responses in which they were shorter on trials that were correct. In the incentive condition, both groups showed the same accurateness for the punishment and reward conditions. The event related potential results showed that patients with depression exhibited larger ERN amplitudes then healthy control subjects In the neutral condition. In the incentive conditions, patients with depression had an especially enhanced ERN in the punishment condition. In the healthy control subjects, the ERN was almost significantly greater in the reward condition as compared to the punishment condition. Furthermore symptoms were not associated with the error related negativity. Concerning the error positivity, no differences between the groups in amplitude were found in the neutral condition. Patients had a larger Pe in the reward condition than in the punishment condition. According to these authors, the enlarged amplitude of the error related negativity found in the patients with depression may mistakenly give wrong signals that errors are great and very important, which might result in the behavioral, cognitive and affective expressions of patients with depression (Chiu and Deldin, 2007).

Error-Monitoring and Affect in Young Children

Brooker, Buss, and Dennis (2011) investigated error-monitoring ERP components in association with affect and attentional control in children between 4 and 8 years of age. The most research on error-monitoring has been done in adult samples and they want to see if there are some similarities or differences. The children underwent two experiments. The first one was interacting with a stranger, and the second task was a computerized version of The Attention Network Test, child version. During the ANT ERP's were recorded. It was found that the age of the child was positively related to the number of correct responses that were made. In this group of young children clear components as the event related negativity (ERN) as well as the error positivity (Pe) were apparent. A regression analysis revealed that concerning the ERN there was no significant effect of age. There was a gender effect found in which girls showed a larfer difference amplitude of the ERN, which is the relation among correct and incorrect trials. This result was not found in the boys. The Pe showed no difference among the age and gender of the child. The ERN and Pe were both associated with the childrens affective behavior. It is stated that these two ERP components can already be seen at a very young age as well as differences in affective behaviors (Brooker et al., 2011).

Schizophrenia, Emotion, and Working Memory: AN fMRI study

Negative and non emotional interference effects on visual working memory was assessed in patients with schizophrenia while concurrently they underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and it was further tested whether they have an impairment in the capability of filtering emotonal distractors that are aversive (Anticevic, Repovs, Corlett, and Barch, 2011). Participants performed the delayed match-to-sample visual working memory task. Patients with schizophrenia had an enhanced response to distractors as compared to healthy control participants and this effect was held irrespective of the kind of distractor. Consistent with what was hypothesized,  the patients had diminished BOLD activity in prefrontal regions of the cortex, which is to be suggested to be associated with filtering. At more posterior areas, compared to healthy control subjects, the patients with schizophrenia exhibited enhanced activity related to nonemotional distractors (Anticevic et al., 2011).

N-back Task in Schizophrenia

One of the most salient impairments in schizophrenia are in the realm of neurocognition (Zanello, Curtis, Ba, and Merlo, 2009). Working memory impairments in schizophrenia was investigated with the N-back task in first-episode and chronic schizophrenia patients to measure its evolution over time. The participants had to press a key on the N-back task in case of the current stimulus was identical to the one two digits back. According to the results, both patient groups performed worse than a healthy control group on the N-back working memory task. Reaction times in both patient groups were also slower arguing for a slowing of information processing (Zanello et al., 2009). In addition, it was found that both groups of schizophrenia patients had a worse accuracy of responses, both to target and non-targed cues. There were no working memory differences between both patient groups. According to the authors, based on these findings, working memory problems are already evident at the beginning of the disease.

Face Recognition Memory: ERP study

Face recognition was investigated whether the participant was foreign or native and how the language that we use comes in (Baus, Bas, Calabria, and Costa, 2017).  treatmentHe experimental paradigm that was applied was the old/new paradigm,  consisting of an encoding and recognition part. In the experiment, pictures of faces were presented along with an auditatory presentation of sentenses.  treatmentHe results revealed that recognition of faces paired with sentences in the native language of the participant were recognized better then in the foreign language. Turning to the ERP's, the encoding of faces was related to higher amplitudes for the P200 and LPC (late positive component). This was evident for the native language as compared to the foreign language (Baus et al., 2017). According to the authors, their findings suggest that the language in which we have an interaction with impacts face processing.

Facial Action and Emotional Language, an ERP study

Davis, Winkielman, and Coulson (2015) studied the association among embodiment and the comprehension of languague and how facial action has an effect on the real- time responses of emotional language in the brain. Event related potentials as well as electromyography were recorded while participants were reading sentences of either positive or negative emotional content.  iT is stated that facial activation might have an effect on perception as well as on the recognition of emotional faces. Smiling did not interfere with the ERP's to valence words, but a larger amplitude of the N400 was found in the ends of sentences consisting positive events.  treatmentHe N400 is associated with brain activation related to semantic memory processes. When participants were instructed to inhibit their smiling, it had an effect on the real-time processing of sentences and the last word of a sentence showed an enhanced amplitude of the ERP component N400.

Depersonalization, Emotion, and Memory Fragmentation

It is often said that in patients with depersonalization, when confronted with an emotion, the show inhibition in its processing (Giesbrecht, Merckelbach, van Oorsouw, and Simeon, 2010). In addition it is suggested that this leads to memory fragmentation. in the study of Griesbrecht et al. (2010) it was investigated whether there was an association among the temporal aspects of autonomic responses to cues of emotional content and impairments of subjective as well as objective memory formation. The experiment consisted of viewing a long emotional video part in patients and healthy control subjects. In all participants skin conductance was measured. The results showed that in healthy participants, while watching the emotional video clip they exhibited both peritraumatic as well as anxiety enhancement. Patients with depersonalization disorder were both inferior on the subjective as well as the objective memory task. Maximum amplitude of skinn conductance was more pronounced in patients that were more severely affected (Giesbrecht et al., 2010). Compared to healthy control participants, patients with depersonalization disorder displayed an impairment of higher learning of contextual cues in the emotional task. It is suggested by the authors that the absense of good encodement of contextual stimuli might be the result of their lower performance on the memory fragmentation tasks ( Giesbrecht et al., 2010).

Depersonilization Disorder, Emotion

Michal, Koechel, Canterino, Adler, Reiner, Vossel et al. (2013) investigated autonomic responses for emotional stimuli as well as its cognitive evaluations in patients with depersonalization disorder. Depersonalization disorder can be charachterized by the experience that things are unreal, but with a normal reality testing. Emotional stimuli consisted of sounds with an endurance of six seconds. Skin conductance level was assessed while processing. It was found that early emotion proccessing was unimpaired in these patients. However patients with depersonalization disorder did respond more strong to emotions. It was further argued that cognitive evaluation has been disconnected from bodily autonomic responses, because these patients showed a different scenario to negative auditory presented stimuli in the way that they made negative ones more neutral.

Schizophrenia and Cognitive Distortion

There is now evidence that cognitive distortions are seen in patients with schizophrenia  which are associated with the psychotic symptoms (Moritz, Ramdani, Klass, Andreou, Jungclaussen, Englisch, et al., 2014). Patients show often overconfidence in their errors and underconfidence in correct responses. Moritz et al. (2014) investigated if schizophrenia patients would show overconfidence on a perceptual judgment task. The patient group was compared with patients with obsessive compulsive disorder and healthy control participants. It was found that overconfidence to errors was not related to either memory or social cognition, rather it was related to perception.

Biological Motion and Social Cognition

It is often said that the perception of biological motion is of support to social cognition, which might be relying on embodiment and biological motion (Miller and Saygin, 2013). Direction discrimination assignments were applied with point like walkers. The results of the experiments revealed that there are differences among individual capabilities in the use of form and motion stimuli in the biological motion tasks. Social perception was found to be related to stimuli for processing of biological motion. It was suggested that the association that was found among social perception and biological motion might be a special aspect of a visual form mechanism.

Metaphors and Word Learning

When we speak about ideas with either positive or negative emotional valence, we havily make use of metaphors (Casasanto and de Bruin, 2019). After learning vocabulary flashcards positioned at specific locations, it aids students in learning the facts of new words with either positive or negative emotional valence. This finding was found in the authors' first experiment in which 'alien' words had strong valence. Their second experiment aimed to assess the strategic usage of mental metaphors to a larger sample of words. In this experiment, the 'alien' words were not emotionally laden but they were neutral. Consistent with the first experiment, the definitions of words were better remembered when they were assigned to metaphor-congruent locations. The final experiment aimed to study whether metaphor words were of the same magnitude as motor actions. There were two conditions, a good is up condition and a good is down condition. It was found that in the case of the words up and down motor actions, the metaphor congruency effect vanished (Casasanto and de Bruin, 2019). However, metaphor-congruent motor behaviors improved the learning of words.

Event-Related Potentials (ERP's)

What exactly are event-related potentials (ERP's)? In this post I will give an overview of the ERP techniques. Because the high temporal resulution of the electrophysiology of ERP it is a technique that is well suited for studying attention and perception (Woodward, 2010). ERP's have a temporal resolution that can assess upon to the millisecond. However, unlike fMRI, the spatial resolution is low. The electrophysical recordings provide a direct measurement of the brain processes that we can study, for example in the domain of perception and attention. ERP's are for the most part generated by the post-synaptic potentials associated with pyramidal cells. Because the specific neural generator in our brains we have the possibility to make a prediction of the way of voltage that can be seen across the head. ERP's gives us the possibility to asses the cognitive operations already before a stimulus is given.

Perception and Somatosensory Receptors

Sensory receptors are all over our body and encompass the hair and skin. The tightness of the sensory receptors in the skin, muscles, tendons, and in the joints show high variability, which is the reason why some areas of our body are more or less receptive to stimulation. Our hands, feet, lips, as well as our eyes are very sensitive to stimulation. The sensitivity of the skin regarding touch stimuli is often measured with the two-point sensitivity test (Kolb and Whishaw, 2006, p.369-371). The somatosensory receptors are classically ordered into three different groups. These are nocioception, hapsis, and proprioception.

Autism, Uncertainty Monitoring and Mindreading

There is an important question which states the association among metacognition and mindreading (theory of mind). Nicholson, Williams, Grainger, Lind, and Carruthers (2019) investigated implicit non-verbal as well as explicit verbal uncertainty monitoring in autism and healthy control uncertainty. The study of Nichols et al. (2019) studied a classic judgment of confidence task, the opt out version of the uncertainty monitoring task in patients with autism and healthy control subjects. In such a kind of judgment of confidence task the subjects have to make a perceptual or cognitive discrimination and have to say if their judgment was correct. The first question of the study was whether metacognition is not deficient in autism. The second aim of the study was if the meta-representation of the self was related to the meta-representation of other persons, as assessed with the mindreading task.

It was found that patients with autism had impairments that were related to meta-representation of the self and that of others (Nichols et al., 2019). Metacognition was thus impaired in autism subjects. It is argued that deficient metacognition is might be the result of metarepresentational resources that are shared by metacognition as well as by mindreading (Nichols et al., 2019).

Schizophrenia, Social Cognition, and Social Judgment

Impaired social functioning in schizophrenia is often seen. This might be associated with impairments of theory of mind ToM, which is the capacity of the individual to infer the mental states from others (Langdon, Connors, and Connaughton, 2014).

The Measurement of Sleep

How is sleep measured? This is an important question. The events of sleep are measured by way of the electroencephalogram (EEG). In addition, muscular activation is assessed with the use of an electromyogram (EMG). Finally, eye movements are investigated with the use of the electrooculogram (EOG). A normal night of sleeping is divided in four different stages. For instance, during REM sleep the EEG does show a pattern that resembles the pattern of the waking state, In which the sleeping person produces rapid eye movements. Other stages, non-REM sleep display slower rhythms in the EEG. There are fout to five times alternations among REM sleep and non-REM sleep (Kolb and Whishaw, 2006, p. 479).

Metacognition and Motivation in Schizophrenia

Metacognition is the capability to construct complex aspecs about the self, the world, and about others (Luther, Bonfils, Fisher, Johnson-Kwochka, and Salyers, 2019). It was investigated if metacognition was a moderating variable between self-reported and clinically-reported motivation in disorders of the schizophrenia spectrum. Furthermore, clinical insight and neurocognition were also assessed. As hypothesized, metacognition was found to be a moderator among both self-rated as well as clinically-rated motivation (Luther et al., 2019). When metacognitive abilities were low, no such relationship was found.

Disruptions in Task Performance in Schizotypy

Shifts in interruptions in performance of a task is called intermittent degradation (Roche, Silverstein, and Lenzenweger, 2015). This aspect is very often been seen in performance data of schizophrenia patients. In schizotypy, it was investigated if there is a relationship with intermittent degradation (ID). It was found that their was a positively association among schizotypy, as measured with several common questionnaires and times of ID. Odd speech, and odd eccentric behavior factors were related to this. Other measures, such as mood, depression and state an trait anxiety were to be found unrelated to ID (Roche et al., 2015).

Schizophrenia: Jumping to Conclusions

The forming and remaining of delusions is associated with the jumping to conclusions bias (Takeda, Nakataki, Ohta, Hamatani, Matsuura, and Ohmori, 2018). The bias of jumping to conclusions is often assessed with a probabilistic learning task. Takeda et al. (2018) investigated the association among JTC bias and neurocognition, confidence in decisions, and social cognition.

The authors concluded that JTC bias and confidence in decisions may be associated with different aspects of cognitive functioning. It was found that the jumping to conclusions bias was associated with neurocognition. In addition, the confidence in decisions was to be found to be associated with social cognition in schizophrenia patients (Takeda et al., 2018). The authors conclude finally that neurocognition and social cognition are two different aspects for schizophrenia vulnerability (Takeda et al., 2018).

Schizophrenia, Emotion, Empathy, and Metacognition

Patients with schizophrenia are impaired in emotion recognition, especially in the recognition of facial affect (Bonfils, Haas, and Salyers, in press). The investigators assessed emotion associated performance and its relationship with metacognition with three different task. The first task was emotion recognition, the second was emotional perspective-taking, and the last task concerned affective responsiveness. The results revealed that the performance differed among the three empathy tasks. The emotion of happiness was best identified while patients performed on the emotion recognition task. In addition, the patients with schizophrenia performed also the best on the emotion of happiness during the other two tasks. However, the emotion of anger was performed the worst, which might indicate that this emotion may be a specific difficulty in the range of these higher-order empathy tasks. Concerning metacognition, an unexpected finding was found in which patients with schizophrenia in which they reflected on their selves was especially related. Further, it was found that self reflection in the patients was related in a positive way to every specific emotion (Bonfils et al., in press). Lastly, it was stated that metacognition of self reflection may have an important part in proccesses of social cognitive origin.

Antipsychotic Drugs

The incidence of schizophrenia is rather high, one in hundred will develop the disorder. To treat schizophrenia, which is associated for instance with hallucinations and delusions, antipsychotic drugs lowered institutional care in this disorder. Antipsychotic drugs are sometimes also called major tranquilizers, The action of this drug is not very well understood, however after immediate administration, patients experience reduced motor activity, which is also one of the most listed side-effects, also called parkinsonism. After a while the drugs alleviate the symptoms of schizophrenia (Kolb and Whishaw, 2006).

Schizophrenia and altered Emotion Regulation

A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was conducted in patients with schizophrenia to asses the neural correlates of emotion processing and associative memory (Luck, Joober, Malla, and Lepage, 2016). These researchers hypothesized that in patients with schizophrenia an impairment would be found in emotion modulation as well as in associative memory. Behaviorally, it was found that first episode patients with schizophrenia were impaired in associative recognition memory. In addition, the patients were also impaired in associative memory and emotionally functions. The results showed that in healthy control subjects their performance was better in emotionally related conditions compared to neutral conditions. The reverse was found in patients (Luck et al., 2016). The fMRI results revealed that patients with schizophrenia had lower activity in medial temporal lobe areas. But they exhibited higher activity in the parahippocampal gyrus. It was concluded that in schizophrenia there might be a deficit in the cerebral parts related to encoding strategies (Luck et al., 2016).

Brain Plasticity

Durung development, the brain is highly plastic in that it has the capacity to be adapted by experiences, especially at the microscopic niveau.  iT is both plastic to internal events as well as to external events, which might be due to specific consequences of hormones, injury, faulty genes as well as drugs. When during critical periods of brain development, and when they are not normal, the development of the brain is also imperfect. These abnormalities might cause for instance developmental disorders or even schizophrenia (Kolb and Whishaw, 2006).

Schizophrenia and Reward and Selective Attention Unimpaired

Bansal, Robinson, Geng, Leonard, Hahn, Luck, and Gold (2018) Investigated the effects of learning on selective attention in patients with schizophrenia and healthy control subjects. Two different kinds of learning were investigated. The first was the capability of the value of a reward that was associated with a particular color, and the second was the patients' capability to relate a target stimulus with a particular location. It was found that both kinds of control of attention were generally not impaired in patients with schizophrenia. According to the authors, patients with schizophrenia can both use the associations of reward as well as spatial probability to make their reaction time speed quicker. Thus reward related attentional control was found intact in schizophrenia (Bansal et al., 2018).

Error Awareness in Attention Deficit Disorder

For adaptive control it is needed that we have the ability for the detection and correction of our errors (O'Connell, Bellgrove, Dockree, Lau, Hester, Garavan et al., 2009). In recent time there is a lot of electrophysical research done on error monitoring as well as error awareness. It is argued that the human error processing system consists of pre-consciouss and conscious aspects as indicated by event-related potentials (ERP's). One ERP component is the ERN, or the error-related negativity. Another important ERP component is the error positivity, or Pe. Adults with ADHD were given an error awareness task, the so called Go/No-Go response inhibition task. The subjects were instructed to respond to a single Go trial and withold the other options. The block included 225 stimuli in which there were 200 Go stimuli and 25 No/Go stimuli. ERP's were recorded meanwhile from the participants scalp. The results of the experiment revealed that ADHD adults were less aware of their errors. In addition, their behavioral performance differed also from healthy control subjects associated with errors of commission. There was also a correlation found among diminished error awareness and the severity of the patients symptomalogy. Furthermore, error awareness rates in the patients were also related to errors of omission. It is argued that these kind of errors might be associated with patients' misidentification and off-task behavior (O'Connell et al., 2009). Also the results of the event-related potentials show abnormalities in adult patients with ADHD as compared to healthy control subjects. The both groups did however not differ in ERN amplitede, they did differ in the error positivity, the Pe. It is concluded from this experiment, based on the results, that adult patients with ADHD have a lack of error awareness.

Neurotransmission in the CNS

There are four neurotransmitters that are tiny molecules. These are acetylcholine, dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin. These small molecule neurotransmitters play a role on its neural activation system that regulates huge parts in the brain (Kolb and Whishaw, 2006, p. 168-169). The cholinergic system uses acetylcholine as a transmitter and is involved in the electroencephalographic maintenance while awake. It is suggested that it plays part in memory by the way of neuron exitability. Impairments of cholinergic neurons is suggested to play a role in Alzheimer's disease, a neurodegenerative memory disorder.

The dopaminergic system uses dopamine as a neurotransmitter. It has a role in nigostriatal as well as mesolimbic pathways. In the nigrostriatal pathway it has a role in normal motor behavior and diminished dopamine in this path has been associated with Parkinson's disease, which is characterized by rigidity of the muscles and dyskinesias.

The noradrenergic system uses norepinephrine as a neurotransmitter and plays a role in emotion. Decreases and increases to this system are associated with depression and mania, respectively.

The seotonergic system uses serotonin as a neurotransmitter. Like acetylcholine it is also involved in the electroencelographic awake state. Serotonin activity alterations have been found to be associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder, vocal/motor tics. In addition it is thought to play also a role in schizophrenia. Serotonin decrements are associated with depression.

Neurotransmission

The basic communication among neurons in mammals is a chemical one (Kolb and Whishaw, 2006). In the case when an action potential is released of the presynaptic membrane it comes into the synaptic cleft, In which it diffuses accross it and it is then bend to receptors of the post synaptic membrane. After that, there is deactivation of the transmitter. 

ADHD and the visual oddball task

Patients with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) have impairments in the control of attentional aspects which might be due to enhanced distraction to other stimuli (Marzinzik, Wahl, Kruger, Gentschow, Colla, and Klosterman, 2012). Patients with ADHD and healthy control participants performed on the visual oddball task, which measures novelty processing. During the task ERP's were recorded from the scalp. The behavior task, in which familiar and non-familiar stimuly were assesed did not differ among the both groups. However, it was found that healthy control participants had different frontal event-related potentials to familiar versus unfamiliar stimuli, which was found to be not evident in the patients with ADHD. The novelty event-related potential is called the P3, occuring about 300ms post-stimulus. It is argued by the authors that in patients with ADHD the recall of automatically semantic information on stimuli is impaired (Marzinzik et al., 2012).

Electrical Activity in the Brain

There are three ways to investigate the electrical activity in the brain. These are single cell recordings, which measures electrical activity of the single neuron, the electroencephalogram (EEG) in which differtent aspects of brain waves are measured, which can as well be linked to specific behaviors, and finally Event-Related Potentials (ERP's), which are short alterations in the EEG that can be linked to specific presented stimuli to the participant. For example, to a flash or a specific tone that is presented. With ERP's investigaters have the possibility to find in which areas of the brain the proccessing is taken place, as well in which temporal order. Often in the range of milliseconds. (Kolb and Whishaw, 2006).

Phineas Gage

Phineas Gage was a rail construction worker and had an accident in which an axplosion dropped an iron bar through his head iN 1848 (Glenn and Raine, 2014, p. 87-90). Gage suffered from exhaustive damage to his prefrontal cortex and afterward his personality changed, despite preserved intelligence, movement, speech, memory, and learning. The exact location was to be found in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is known to be associated with decision making, associative learning, and the proccessing of feedback on reward and punishment. Patients with such lesions often exhibit psychopatic traits, and so the term "aquired sociopathy" was invented. Gage became irrevent and capriciously.

Frontal Lobe Patients

Patients with frontal lobe lesions have several difficulties. The are impaired in planning upcoming events out of several possibilities. They are ignorant of external cues where the stick to a current task. They also have difficulties in tracing were they went and for instance which purchases they made in stores (Kolb and Whishaw, 2008). For the accomplishment of these tasks they do need good temporal organization of their behavior. These tasks are functions of the frontal lobe. These kind of tasks, such as planning are now popular under the name "executive functions".

Learning Disabilities

A learning disability is apparent in children with normal intelligence, but despite that they are not successful in the aquisition of school based abilities. There are different types of learning disabilities, such as problems with reading, spatial orientation, math and social skills.

Spatial Disorientation

There are five different kinds of spatial disorientation. These are all traceble to the cortex as well as the limbic system. Egocentric disorientation results from posterior parietal lesions and is associated with the inability in representing the locations of objects as associated with the person. Heading disorientation is characterized by the impairment of direction concerning the environment and is associated with lesions in the posterior cingulate cortex. In landmark agnosia the lesion is to be found in the lingual gyrus. This syndrome is characterized by the inability to the representation of important landmarks. Anterograde disorientation is associated with lesions of the parahippocampal gyrus and the patient in this condition is impaired in the aquisition of new facts about information of the environment. Finally, spatial mapping impairments is associated with hippocampal lesions and is associated with both anterograde and reterograde amne sia for enriched details in especially the spatial area (Kolb and Whishaw, 2008).

Kluver-Bucy Syndrome

The Kluver-Bucy syndrome has been found in several neurological diseases. The most prominent symptom of this syndrome is a lack of affect (Kolb and Whishaw, 2008). In the case of animals, the do not exhibit fear When there are serious threads to them. This behavioral syndrome was experimentally studied in monkeys following bilateral anterior temporal lobectomy. The symptoms are loss of fear and unexitement, a choose of diet that they formerly rejected as a result of indifference, increased (same) sex drive including for objects, very reactive to all visual signs, studying objects with the mouth and finally visual agnosia. The syndrome is as well found in humans and is the result of bilateral amygdala and inferior cortex removal.

Language

Only human beings have the unique ability of language. It gives us the possibility to organize inputs from sensation associated with information. Due to this, we can make categorization and conceptualizations of objects as well as speaking to ourselves related to the present, past, and future. Motor aspects, such as syllables as well as grammatica has an increment on the system. Language is haused in different part of the human cortex and it is suggested to represent neural webs (Kolb and Whishaw, 2008). Disorders of language are for example aphasia and aquired dyslexia. About these disorders I will spent a separate post.

Apraxia

Apraxia results from parietal lobe lesions. It is a movement syndrome in which everyday movements is not the result of weakness, failure to move, impaired muscle tone, impairments of intellect, or other syndromes (Kolb and Whishaw, 2008).There are some kinds of apraxia. In ideomotor apraxia the patient cannot make the same movements by copying them, as well as difficulties with gestures. In the other apraxia, constructional apraxia, patients are impaired in spatial organization.

Visual Agnosia

Visual agnosia can be subdivided in object agnosias and other agnosias (Kolb and Whishaw, 2008). 

Object agnosias

There are two kinds of visual object agnosia, these are apperceptive agnosia and associative agnosia. Apperceptive agnosia is a failure of object recognition wherin the visual functions basically are not affected. The most important difficulty in this agnosia is that patients cannot form a percept about the structural characteristics of objects. Associative agnosia, however, is the impairment in the recognition of an object. But this impairment is not the result of apparent perception. In this syndrome, the patient can make drawings very well, but they have an impairment in recognizing it. It is especially associated with memory.

Other agnosias

In prosopagnosia, patients cannot recognize faces, Including their own face in a mirror. Alexia is a condition in which the patient is not capable of reading. Visuospatial agnosia are disorders of spatial perception as well as impairments in orientation. An example of this agnosia is "topographical disorientation", in which the patient cannot find his way in environments that were formerly familiar to them (Kolb and Whishaw, 2008).

Inattentional Blindness

What is inattentional blindness? In this post I will give you a short overview.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=z-Dg-06nrnc

Inattentional blindness is the fact that an object were we do not pay attention to is going to be unnoticed (Horstmann and Ansorge, 2016).

Memmert (2006) investigated inattentional bias using the gorilla paradigm. In experiment one, children had to count how many basketball passes were delivered. In the middle a gorilla appeared between the players for five seconds. It was found that all children watched the gorilla for one second. However, most children did not notice because their attention was elsewhere. The fact that the gorilla did not become into consciousness was supportive for inattentional blindness.

Patient H.M.

Because of severe epilepsy, the medial parts of the temporal lobe of patient H.M. Were surgically removed (Kolb and Whishaw, 2008, p.15-16). The surgery resulted in a recovery from epilepsy, however patient H.M. was afterwards incapable of forming new memories for more than seconds or minutes. He was not able to recall any memories since his surgery that was performed in 1953. Childhood and school memories of patient H.M. were found to be spared. H.M. was a very social person and could have good conversations, however he could not recall anything of these Conversations that just took place. When patient H.M. Is in the hospital setting he often did ask the nurses where he just is and how he did come in that place. Contrary to these kind of memory problems, his implicit memory is almost normal so implicit memory in H.M. is intact, in contrast to his explicit memory (Kolb and Whishaw, 2006, p. 494).

Consciousness in Animals?

Are animals conscious? 

Analysis of animal behavior

Simone de Rooij

Introduction 

It is normally accepted that we, homo sapiens exhibit consciousness. There are a lot of theories on the subject matter. We are aware of our thoughts, feelings, emotions, morality and aspirations. But how is it like to be me when another human being has to imagine all those contents of me? This is the third person's view. How is it like to be a person?

We can gather a lot of third Person data about consciousness. We can introspect about our experiences and can now even use fMRI and other neurophysiological indexes measuring about human conscious 'states' to get more direct access. But still we cannot fully explain or give a theory of consciousness. But for me consciousness has a seat in our brains, but how it functions is unclear.

But are we the only one of species that is conscious? I definitely do not think like that. Are chimpanzees conscious? And what about drosophila the well known and studied fruitfly?

Of course we cannot sit in these animals minds, but the same holds true for us humans. But i think that it is impossible that only we 'homo sapiens' are equipped with that fantastic aspect. I think that there are a lot of animals that are not only driven by their instincts. Rather, some animals are conscious in one or another way. Below I will set out my theory of animal consciousness and try to give some interesting examples from some animals.

My intelligent cats

Ten years ago I had two kittens shortly after another. The first one was a male and short haired. The second kitten was a female Ragdoll kitten that came to my place a few weeks later. Her name was Bella. After a few weeks she started to have recurrent fevers and after many visits to the vet and months later she died of feline infectious peritonitis (fip). I left her at the vet and she finally was being cremated. Now comes the story about my argument of consciousness. My other cat was very quit after losing his friend and came to me and went on laying on the couch,  then he putted his pawn on my hand and looked sad and lonely. Of course I cannot know his feelings from a third person view but to me it was like he felt grief. And the pawn on my hand might be explained as showing his grief to me. He also refused to eat the first days and was like a kind of searching Bella. Food and water are essential needs so these behaviors I consider as innate instinct. But the refusal I do not consider instinctual, rather a conscious decision because of feeling grief. And when as I think of this is a feeling my cat must have some catlike thoughts and I consider him conscious.  

Human beings have language with which they can communicate about their experiences, animals cannot. I think animals communicate also with each other and their pet owners. For example, a communication dialogue comes into existence when the animal e.g. cat or dog finds an empty bowl and comes to the pet owner and makes some gestures that you need to follow. When you arrive at the empty Bowl you understand the animal is thirsty and wants water. To me this is a form of communication, not the act of drinking, rather the way it is 'asked' and your resulting behavior. Therefore, I consider this a conscious act. Rather than asking your friend a glass of water by the use of the communicating devices of language, animals do it otherwise.

Consciousness can be subdivided in primary consciousness and higher-order consciousness. Edelman et al. consider whether consciousness has evolved or whether other stakes are at play (Edelman, Baars, and Seth, 2005).

When animals are not sleeping (when they I argue are not conscious) they have sensations and perceptions. Then I consider on that part conscious.

When we humans are in pain we can say it. We are fully conscious about or state 'I am being in pain'. what about when your normally happy playful dog comes to you with a bite mark on his head and making 'crying' sounds? Is this not consciousness? To me this dog is fully conscious about its physical state.

Shriver (2006) states: "Research on the lateral and medial pain pathways has provided some additional evidence to support the claim that it is reasonable to believe that mammals feel pain similar to that categorized as suffering in humans" (Shriver, 2006, p. 440).

My reply to Shriver is that we can only get insight in such things from a third person's' viewpoint. But my opinion is that the difference might be due because we humans have the capacity to communicate by language (and other gestures as well). Animals cannot. But they can to my opinion still communicate their pain status through other modalities.

Donald Griffin and Gayle Speck think that inasmuch animals possess consciousness, its content of their awareness maybe vary from a continuum of the simplest and crudest feelings toward thinking about the confrontations they get and different actions they may select (Griffin and Speck, 2004).

Alain Morin describes: "self awareness" refers to the capacity to become object of one's own attention. It occurs when an organism focusses not on the external environment, but on the internal milieu: it becomes a reflective observer, possessing self-information. The organism becomes aware that it is awake and actually experiencing Specific mental events, emitting behaviors, and possessing unique characteristics (Morin, 2006). Morin further goes: A language component creature may thus verbalize "I feel tired", or "I've been working for three hours", or "I am a good-looking, intelligent person" (Morin, 2006, p. 359).

Edelman et. al. (2005) question whether vocal learning for birdsong in birds resemble a sort of consciousness. In their review about non-mammalian consciousness, Edelman et. al. (2005) searched for the conditions that are needed for consciousness in these species, such as birds and octopuses. Included conditions considered where reentrant neural structures resembling the cortex and thalamus as well as electrical brain activity during task and conditions including also discriminatory behavior. These authors argue that these are not enough for consciousness in these class of species, rather their appearance might suggest that there could be evolutionary precursors that are needed for consciousness.

Birds have great cognitive and behavioral potentials that are in agreement with conscious states including working memory, social learning, planning and the likelihood that they have insight in problem solving (Edelman and Seth, 2009).

 In their paper "Evolution of the neural basis of consciousness: a bird mammal comparison", Butter, Manger, Lindahl, and Arhem discuss avian consciousness. The critical organization thought to be needed for consciousness in the brains of mammals have their homologues equivalents in avian brains (Butter, Manger, Lindahl, and Arhem, 2005). For visual occurance the higher collopallial visual areas and the lemnopallial PFC are obligatory, and according to the authors this is in accordance with the hypothesis of avian brain consciousness.

Crows were trained on a detection task whereby they had to vocalize in reply to the discovery of a visual go cue in order to get a reward (Brecht, Hage, Gavrilov, and Nieder, 2019). It was found that carrion crows can readily control vocal output in a way that is related to its goal. The behavior of the crows supports the criteria for "volitional vocalizations". At first did the crows trustworthy vocalize in response to colored squares, which were the flexible visual cues that did not have any special meaning. further, they gave responses at time after the instruction cue was withheld when there was no vocalizing cuing stimulus, as well as non response to prohibited vocalization (Brecht et. al. 2019).

Animals are sometimes aware of events and objects in their surroundings (Griffin and Speck, 2004).

Imitation recognition was found to be evident in a captive chimpanzee (Nielsen, Collier, Baker, Davis, and Suddendorf, 2005).

Categorization

It is hypothesized by Cook, Shaw, and Blaisdell (2001) that pigeons may be capable in forming generalized natural types for varying kind of motions while they are watching videos. Two experiments were performed. In the first experiment, it was investigated if gaining and shifts for trough/around discrimination. The results of this first experiment revealed that pigeons can learn to differentiate the motion chains around and trough across a large diversity of objects for these actions to occur. This experiment also revealed that this discrimination predominantly moved to new objects. The second experiment used a manipulation of the video frames by showing them in their normal sequences, which is most in accord with with an approaching object, or in a sequence randomized that broke up this motion and natural continuity. It was that the normal course presentation of motion discrimination was better as presentation in a random fashion of the same video (Cook et. al. 2001). The concluding remarks are that the experiments that were done are in agreement with the hypothesis that pigeons can discriminate the motion ways around and trough with a lot of approaching objects in a context that is half-realistic. Furthermore, the authors suggest that their experimental set-up might be used in other investigations as a worthwhile tool in the area of cognition and behavior (Cook et. al., 2001).

It is not known whether the categorization of natural classes in animals is due to perceptual similarity or to an abstract conceptual representation (Marsh and MacDonald, 2008). Two experiments were runned in urang utans to identify the perceptual characteristics while animals are categorizing pictures. the authors wanted to know whether they categorize to local characteristics in isolation or to a "gestalt" that belonged to a special category. It was stated that urang utangs attent to one or more local perceptual characteristics when making discriminations.

Self-awareness in dolphins?

Diana Reiss and Lori Marino investigated mirror self-recognition in two dolphins. These dolphins where marked and showed clear self-recognition on reflective surfaces. These dolphins inspected their body parts where they were marked (Reiss and Marino, 2001). Then, the question arises: are dolphins self-aware? The authors argue that their findings might mean that the emergence of self-recognition is not a by-product of components that are specific to great apes and humans, however, it might be assigned to more common attributes such as a high proportion of encephalization and cognitive ability (Reiss and Mariano, 2001).

Self-recognition in an Asian elephant

Marks were applied to the heads of elephants to see if they would pass the mirror self-recognition test for self-recognition in these animals. The mark-touching elephant has been suggested as evidence that these animals have the capability to recognize itself in a mirror (Plotnik, de Waal, and Reiss, 2006).

Self recognition in rhesus monkeys

Rhesus monkeys may pass the mark test after visuo-somatosensory training. Self directed behaviors were seen with the lack of food reward. These behaviors lasted for a minimum of one year (Chang, Fan, Zhang, Poo, and Gong, 2015).

Deception and empathy

Another series of abilities that are germane to the study of awareness in animals includes the interactions among individuals which encompasses behaviors like deception and empathy (Kuczaj, Tranel, Trone, and Hill, 2001). There is some evidence for these behaviors, which might indicate that these animals (in this report it goes about dolphins and whales) have some form of self-awareness as well of the awareness of the states of others. These authors further argue that for these behaviors other cognitive abilities are required. In deception and empathy, the ability to plan a behavior by deciding an explicit action plan and the skill to successfully carry out the plan are important when the behaviors that are chosen for accomplishing their goals (Kuczaj et. al., 2001).

Marian Stamp Dawkins (2000) contributed to see what the study of animal emotions could tell us about consciousness in animals. There have been two methods that have been set out to study emotions in animals. These are the functional and mechanistic method. In the functional approach the role of emotions in humans is examined and it is then asked if this function is the same in humans and non-humans. The mechanistic approach to study animal emotions is to see whether humans and non-humans have the same mechanisms underlying emotions (Dawkins, 2000).

It was found that rhesus monkeys could be trained in evoking various call types in a direction to a response to subjective visual cues in a go/no-go task (Hage, Gavrilov, and Nieder, 2013). One monkey had learned to shift among two different call types from trial to trial as an effect of cues that were visually dissimilar. Accordingly, it is suggested that these monkeys can voluntarily control their vocal behavior.

Episodic memory?

Babb and Crystal (2005) found that rats had the knowledge of what, when, and where after a taste aversion manipulation. It is suggested that animals might exhibit an episodic-like memory.

What does all this tells us about consciousness in animals?

Until now I have given some personal and experimental examples of the possibility that some animals are conscious. From my own experience and the discussed experiments I argue that some animals have this ability. Behaviorally they show complex acts such as self-recognition as well as deception and empathy. How can these occur without being in a conscious state? There are further numerous experiments on animal learning, for example classical conditioning and operant learning. When animals (there is a lot of research in this area in rodents) perform such tasks, does consciousness come in? Another question I am interested in is whether some animals have a Theory of Mind capacity. I think that this is a difficult question to answer and responses will be in different directions. For now I let it in between whether there are animals with a theory of mind. Later in this paper, after presenting some research I will give my opinion. However, I think that there might be a difference for example among monkeys that are instantly in contact with humans and monkeys living in the wild.  

Animal meta-cognition and theory of mind

Regulating and monitoring our cognitive states is called meta-cognition. It is thinking about thinking. In humans, the language component is considered important. In animals these tasks in the search for meta-cognition are perceptual behavioral tasks (because animals lack the capacity of language). In his review, Smith (2009) describes the uncertainty response (UR). Animals were made uncertain in two tasks. At first, animals were given difficult perceptual discriminations, which made them maybe uncertain in their mind. Thereafter, in the second task, the animals were given a second response which was apart from the discrimination response. The animals could reject to finish any trials of their decision. This UR permits animals to disclose on, or cope with the struggle. If the animals oversee cognition correctly, they should in advance know difficult trials as error-risking by refusing those trials selectively (Smith, 2009). When animals are untrained, they obviously show the uncertainty response (UR). They show delayed reinforcement as well and so further. Smith (2009) argues that in humans these are diagnostics of conscious uncertainty (p. 395).

In the animal literature there is an important question as to whether meta-cognition in humans and animals resemble each other (Morgan, Kornell, Kornblum, and Terrace, 2014). These investigators designed two experiments to assess the flexibility of rhesus monkeys' metacognitive capabilities, retrospectively as well as prospectively. In the first experiment it was tested if monkeys that were previously trained in making risky choices would transfer this capability to a new memory task. In the second experiment, it was tested whether monkeys, by using the same memory task as in the first experiment, would make good prospective memory judgments. In the first experiment monkeys exhibited immediate transfer of metacognitive capabilities to a new memory task and in experiment two, involving metamemory prospective judgment the monkeys showed transfer to the new task as soon that when it was possible to assess their metacognitive capabilities. Accordingly, it is concluded by these investigators that monkeys have metacognitive abilities (Morgan et. al. 2014).

Cognition could be used for human and animal minds (Smith, 2009). In situations in which animals did not have training, they need adaptive action. Such a situation does not include habits for responding in the right manner. As such, they need to collect associated facts in their minds as well as memories to evaluate what their risks and opportunities are. What they need is a place where they can collect the information and make a decision for making the best action. When consciousness works in a good way, these functions are supported (Smith, 2009). The evolution of consciousness in some vertebrates is according to Smith promoted by a requirement for a difficulty/novelty decisional advantage.

According to Kaminski, Call, and Tomasello (2008) do understand goal-directed actions and perceptions as well as the knowledge of others in the case of wat was seen in the recent past. They furthermore argue that chimpanzees do not exhibit a fully representational theory of mind, because they do not pass the false-believe task.

Paukner, Anderson, and Fujita (2006) investigated whether capucin monkeys did understand their own visual search capabilities as a means to get information. The experiment consisted of u tube test in one was hidden food. Searching behavior was to be found unrelated to successful Outcomes (Paukner et. al., 2006). the conclusion was that capucin monkeys have limited meta-cognitive abilities.

Orangutans and bonobos were found to point to an object that a human needed (Zimmermann, Zemke, Call, and Gomez, 2009).

Nate Kornell states that meta-cognition needs a response that is based on internal states. The capability to make judgements of certainty might be so because the animal can use self-reflection by looking inward and assess the strength of their personal memories (Kornell, 2014).

Capuchin monkeys were analyzed in a food requesting task by two behavioral indexes: that were the amount of pointing and how long to monkeys looked at the experimenter (Hattori, Kuroshima, and Fujita, 2007). Two experiments were conducted. In the first experiment, the experimenter looked either toward the monkey or toward the ceiling. Monkeys paid more attention to the experimenter while looking at than when to the ceiling. Pointing behavior was not found. In the second experiment, there was an eyes open condition and an eyes closed condition in which the experimenter looked between two cups. Also in this experiment pointing behavior was not really observed, however the monkeys had more attention to the experimenter when their eyes were open. In both experiments there was no difference in pointing whitch was explained as that pointing gestures having not a communicative function, such as the gestures that come from intens operant conditioning training (Hattori et al., 2007).

In their article "What do monkeys know about others' knowledge" Drayton and Santas (2018) results were in agreement with the explanation that rhesus macaques assume others to update their depictions of unseen objects. Rhesus macaque monkeys performed on a rotational displacement task in which they looked longer in the case when the demonstrator was reaching in a box that did not had fruit inside suggesting that the experimenter was able to track the fruit to the current place. In the other experiment it was tested whether these findings were the result of the experimenter witnessing. However, this was not the case. These findings are in agreement that monkeys are expecting that others dynamically update their likeness of objects that are unseen (Drayton and Santas, 2018).

Cheny and Seyfath (1992) investigated social behavior and communication in vervet monkeys of East Africa. It was concluded that these monkeys do notice social interactions and also recognize the associations that occur among others. They as well categorize relationships into meaning.

In their paper, Subiaul, Romansky, Cantlon, Klein, and Terrace (2007) conclude that monkeys as well as humans share the capability of the imitation of new cognitive rules. These investigators stress that their results may be viewed as signs about the emergence of imitation in evolution.

MacLean and Hare (2011) assessed whether bonobos and chimpanzees have and use their knowledge of a human experience in the past and what that human is emotionally responding to in the present. In the first experiment, bonobos and chimpanzees were tested for the hypothesis whether they would be more feasible to gaze past an object emoted by the experimenter when in the first case the experimenter did previously orient towards this object and being not responsive to it, and in the second case, whether the experimenter was not orienting to the object. The results of the first experiment revealed that chimpanzees are similar to human beings considering making inferences about the attention of others. In their second experiment, bonobos and chimpanzees used information about what was not seen by the investigator when attention was payed to gaze cues that were not of diagnostic use. In this study, the authors conclude that our 'last common ancestor' was capable of assigning the attentional states of others. They further state that the capacity to represent the psychological states is not only apparent in humans and does not only depend on language (MacLean and Hare, 2011).

Krupenye, Kano, Hirata, Call, and Tomasello (2017) suggest that retrieval and contextual cuing are not enough to explain the correct prediction of actions that were mistaken by an agent. Apes performed a false-belief task but the authors found no evidence for submentalizing while they made anticipatory looks (Krupenye et. al. 2017).

Experiments suggest that nonhuman primates as well as human infants have the same capacity to recognize and assess the right way of goal-directed behavior. But this capability is more elaborated in human infants (Rochet, Serva, Fadiga, and Galese, 2008). Furthermore, it suggests that perceptual and/or motor expertise are pivotal parts for the evolution of the capability in understanding intentional behavior in others in human beings (Rochet et al. 2008).

Meta-cognition in animals is to me a real potential. To perform some behaviors an animal has to think what it will do to him or her and how it must be accomplished to reach his or her final act. The animal has to think in steps and may have several options of how to proceed to reach its goal. And here comes meta-cognition come in. I do not think that all animals have this capacity, but more intelligent animals should have some form of it. However, a theory of mind as in human beings I consider not probable. I think that some higher animals can have some aspects of it but not everything. I think that some animals have the capacity to mentalize. But thinking about thinking is maybe a bit to harsh. I think meta-cognition in animals is only apparent in chimpanzees and other great apes, and maybe in dolphins.

Experiments suggest that nonhuman primates as well as human infants have the same capacity to recognize and assess the right way of goal-directed behavior. But this capability is more elaborated in human infants (Rochet, Serva, Fadiga, and Galese, 2008). Furthermore, it suggests that perceptual and/or motor expertise are pivotal parts for the evolution of the capability in understanding intentional behavior in others in human beings (Rochet et al. 2008).

Problem solving

Puzzle boxes were presented to great apes by Voelter and Call (2012). To solve problems it was found that great apes can make use of visual feedback. Visual inspection by those apes helps them to solve different apparatus problems. In the first experiment a tube opened on both sides was presented in two conditions (clear vs opaque) in which a reward could be revealed (a banana). In this experiment the subjects had a stick with which they could extract the banana. The second experiment had also those two versions, but now another apparatus was applied. The clear vision version was made of transparent acrylic glass which included sticks, such that the subjects could see how it worked. It was found that most of the subjects were capable to solve this task, that was not due to the degree of the visual information about the apparatus mechanisms. The latency was however longer in the hidden condition then in the clear condition. In the last experiment another apparatus was used with both a clear and a hidden version. This task required coordinated actions by the subject. For example, at first the handle of the crank had to be turned constantly with either one or both of their hands, on one or both sides of the apparatus. The reward was reached at the right height (Voelter and Call, 2012).

Imitation

Imitation recognition was found in a captive chimpanzee by Nielsen, Collier, Baker, Davis, and Suddendorf (2005).

Differences among primates?

There are sigb

Are animals conscious?

The above cited experiments are in favor higher animals having conscious states. knowing about knowing can but also be unconsciously happen. But several behaviors to me are indicative that some animals have conscious like properties the same as human beings have. Of course, we cannot know for sure because we are not that specific animal. Furthermore, I argue that language is not a necessary condition to be considered in a conscious state. For example, some children with autism do not speak, but they are fully conscious (it is suggested that people with autism lack a theory of mind). 

Hashiya and kojima (2001) conclude that there is a cognitive weakness for auditory-related tasks in chimpanzees. Chimpanzees exhibited a sharp decline interlude among the sample and selection of alternative exhibitions when the sound was alone, but not when the visual stimulus was alone, that made a contribution as a sample.

Memory in animals

In humans, pictorial recognition is far superior than non pictorial recognition (Vaughan, Jr. and Greene, 1984). Long-term memory capacity in pigeons to complex stimuli was investigated with natural pictures among different birds. It was found that they could have memories about them.

Please note this draft is not finished yet, I am just trying out something.