Biomedical subjects

Andrea S Heberlein

Publications and source records attributed to Andrea S Heberlein.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Dissociation between emotion and personality judgments: convergent evidence from functional neuroimaging.

Cognitive neuroscientists widely agree on the importance of providing convergent evidence from neuroimaging and lesion studies to establish structure-function relationships. However, such convergent evidence is, in practice, rarely provided. A previous lesion study found a striking double dissociation between two superficially similar social judgment processes, emotion recognition and personality attribution, based on the same body movement stimuli (point-light walkers). Damage to left frontal opercular (LFO) cortices was associated with impairments in personality trait attribution, whereas damage to right postcentral/supramarginal cortices was associated with impairments in emotional state attribution. Here, we present convergent evidence from fMRI in support of this double dissociation, with regions of interest (ROIs) defined by the regions of maximal lesion overlap from the previous study. Subjects learned four emotion words and four trait words, then watched a series of short point-light walker body movement stimuli. After each stimulus, subjects saw either an emotion word or a trait word and rated how well the word described the stimulus. The LFO ROI exhibited greater activity during personality judgments than during emotion judgments. In contrast, the right postcentral/supramarginal ROI exhibited greater activity during emotion judgments than during personality judgments. Follow-up experiments ruled out the possibility that the LFO activation difference was due to word frequency differences. Additionally, we found greater activity in a region of the medial prefrontal cortex previously associated with "theory of mind" tasks when subjects made personality, as compared to emotion judgments.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Method matters: an empirical study of impact in cognitive neuroscience.

A major thrust of cognitive neuroscience is the elucidation of structure-function relationships in the human brain. Over the last several years, functional neuroimaging has risen in prominence relative to the lesion studies that formed the historical core of work in this field. These two methods have different strengths and weaknesses. Among these is a crucial difference in the nature of evidence each can provide. Lesion studies can provide evidence for necessity claims, whereas functional neuroimaging studies do not. We hypothesized that lesion studies will continue to have greater scientific impact even as the relative proportion of such studies in the cognitive neuroscience literature declines. Using methods drawn from systematic literature review, we identified a set of original cognitive neuroscience articles that employed either functional imaging or lesion techniques, published at one of two time points in the 1990s, and assessed the effect of the method used on each article's impact across the decade. Functional neuroimaging studies were cited three times more often than lesion studies throughout the time span we examined. This effect was in large part due to differences in the influence of the journals publishing the two methods; functional neuroimaging studies appeared disproportionately more often in higher impact journals. There were also differences in the degree to which articles using one method cited articles using the other method. Functional neuroimaging articles were less likely to include such cross-method citations.

Brain↗

PubMed2004

Impaired spontaneous anthropomorphizing despite intact perception and social knowledge.

Humans spontaneously imbue the world with social meaning: we see not only emotions and intentional behaviors in humans and other animals, but also anger in the movements of thunderstorms and willful sabotage in crashing computers. Converging evidence supports a role for the amygdala, a collection of nuclei in the temporal lobe, in processing emotionally and socially relevant information. Here, we report that a patient with bilateral amygdala damage described a film of animated shapes (normally seen as full of social content) in entirely asocial, geometric terms, despite otherwise normal visual perception. Control tasks showed that the impairment did not result from a global inability to describe social stimuli or a bias in language use, nor was a similar impairment observed in eight comparison subjects with damage to orbitofrontal cortex. This finding extends the role of the amygdala to the social attributions we make even to stimuli that are not explicitly social and, in so doing, suggests that the human capacity for anthropomorphizing draws on some of the same neural systems as do basic emotional responses.

Amygdala↗

PubMed2004

Cortical regions for judgments of emotions and personality traits from point-light walkers.

Humans are able to use nonverbal behavior to make fast, reliable judgments of both emotional states and personality traits. Whereas a sizeable body of research has identified neural structures critical for emotion recognition, the neural substrates of personality trait attribution have not been explored in detail. In the present study, we investigated the neural systems involved in emotion and personality trait judgments. We used a type of visual stimulus that is known to convey both emotion and personality information, namely, point-light walkers. We compared the emotion and personality trait judgments made by subjects with brain damage to those made by neurologically normal subjects and then conducted a lesion overlap analysis to identify neural regions critical for these two tasks. Impairments on the two tasks dissociated: Some subjects were impaired at emotion recognition, but judged personality normally; other subjects were impaired on the personality task, but normal at emotion recognition. Moreover, these dissociations in performance were associated with damage to specific neural regions: Right somatosensory cortices were a primary focus of lesion overlap in subjects impaired on the emotion task, whereas left frontal opercular cortices were a primary focus of lesion overlap in subjects impaired on the personality task. These findings suggest that attributions of emotional states and personality traits are accomplished by partially dissociable neural systems.

Adult↗