Morgan Beaurenaut, Guillaume Dezecache & Julie Grèzes (2021). Action co-representation under threat: A Social Simon study. Cognition. 215, 104829. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104829

Résumé :
Several studies have shown that individuals automatically integrate the actions of other individuals into their own action plans, thus facilitating action coordination. What happens to this mechanism in situations of danger? This capacity could either be reduced, in order to allocate more cognitive resources for individualistic actions, or be maintained or enhanced to enable cooperation under threat. In order to determine the impact of the perception of danger on this capacity, two groups of participants carried out, in pairs, the Social Simon task, which provides a measure of co-representation. The task was performed during so-called ‘threat blocks’ (during which participants could be exposed at any time to an aversive stimulus) and so-called ‘safety blocks’ (during which no aversive stimulation could occur). In a first group of participants, both individuals were exposed at the same time to threat blocks. In a second group, only one of the two participants was exposed to them at a time. Our results indicate that co-representation, an important cognitive mechanism for cooperation, (i) is preserved in situations of danger; and (ii) may even be increased in participants who are confronted alone to threat but in the presence of a safe partner. Contrarily to popular belief, danger does not shut down our capacities for social interaction.

Margarita Briseño-Jaramillo, Melissa Berthet, Alejandro Estrada, Véronique Biquand, Alban Lemasson (2021). Socially mediated overlap in vocal interactions between free-ranging black howler monkeys. Am J Primatol, 83(8):e23297, doi: 10.1002/ajp.23297.

Résumé :
Study objectives: Total sleep deprivation is known to have significant detrimental effects on cognitive and socio-emotional functioning. Nonetheless, the mechanisms by which total sleep loss disturbs decision-making in social contexts are poorly understood. Here, we investigated the impact of total sleep deprivation on approach/avoidance decisions when faced with threatening individuals, as well as the potential moderating role of sleep-related mood changes.
Methods: Participants (n = 34) made spontaneous approach/avoidance decisions in the presence of task-irrelevant angry or fearful individuals, while rested or totally sleep deprived (27 hours of continuous wakefulness). Sleep-related changes in mood and sustained attention were assessed using the Positive and Negative Affective Scale and the psychomotor vigilance task, respectively.
Results: Rested participants avoided both fearful and angry individuals, with stronger avoidance for angry individuals, in line with previous results. On the contrary, totally sleep deprived participants favored neither approach nor avoidance of fearful individuals, while they still comparably avoided angry individuals. Drift-diffusion models showed that this effect was accounted for by the fact that total sleep deprivation reduced value-based evidence accumulation toward avoidance during decision making. Finally, the reduction of positive mood after total sleep deprivation positively correlated with the reduction of fearful display avoidance. Importantly, this correlation was not mediated by a sleep-related reduction in sustained attention.
Conclusions: All together, these findings support the underestimated role of positive mood-state alterations caused by total sleep loss on approach/avoidance decisions when facing ambiguous socio-emotional displays, such as fear.

Anne Buot, Damiano Azzalini, Maximilien Chaumon, Catherine Tallon-Baudry (2021). Does stroke volume influence heartbeat evoked responses? Biological Psychology, 165, doi: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2021.108165.

Résumé :
We know surprisingly little on how heartbeat-evoked responses (HERs) vary with cardiac parameters. Here, we measured both stroke volume, or volume of blood ejected at each heartbeat, with impedance cardiography, and HER amplitude with magneto-encephalography, in 21 male and female participants at rest with eyes open. We observed that HER co-fluctuates with stroke volume on a beat-to-beat basis, but only when no correction for cardiac artifact was performed. This highlights the importance of an ICA correction tailored to the cardiac artifact. We also observed that easy-to-measure cardiac parameters (interbeat intervals, ECG amplitude) are sensitive to stroke volume fluctuations and can be used as proxies when stroke volume measurements are not available. Finally, interindividual differences in stroke volume were reflected in MEG data, but whether this effect is locked to heartbeats is unclear. Altogether, our results question assumptions on the link between stroke volume and HERs.

Giovanni Di Liberto, Guilhem Marion & Shihab Shamma (2021). Accurate decoding of imagined and listened melodies. Frontiers in Neuroscience. doi:10.3389/fnins.2021.673401

Résumé :
Music perception requires the human brain to process a variety of acoustic and music-related properties. Recent research used encoding models to tease apart and study the various cortical contributors to music perception. To do so, such approaches study temporal response functions that summarise the neural activity over several minutes of data. Here we tested the possibility of assessing the neural processing of individual musical units (bars) with electroencephalography (EEG). We devised a decoding methodology based on a maximum correlation metric across EEG segments (maxCorr) and used it to decode melodies from EEG based on an experiment where professional musicians listened and imagined four Bach melodies multiple times. We demonstrate here that accurate decoding of melodies in single-subjects and at the level of individual musical units is possible, both from EEG signals recorded during listening and imagination. Furthermore, we find that greater decoding accuracies are measured for the maxCorr method than for an envelope reconstruction approach based on backward temporal response functions (bTRFenv). These results indicate that low-frequency neural signals encode information beyond note timing, especially with respect to low-frequency cortical signals below 1 Hz, which are shown to encode pitch-related information. Along with the theoretical implications of these results, we discuss the potential applications of this decoding methodology in the context of novel brain-computer interface solutions.

Giovanni Di Liberto, Guilhem Marion & Shihab Shamma (2021). The music of silence. Part II: Music Listening Induces Imagery Responses. Journal of Neuroscience, JN-RM-0184-21. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0184-21.2021

Résumé :
During music listening, humans routinely acquire the regularities of the acoustic sequences and use them to anticipate and interpret the ongoing melody. Specifically, in line with this predictive framework, it is thought that brain responses during such listening reflect a comparison between the bottom-up sensory responses and top-down prediction signals generated by an internal model that embodies the music exposure and expectations of the listener. To attain a clear view of these predictive responses, previous work has eliminated the sensory inputs by inserting artificial silences (or sound omissions) that leave behind only the corresponding predictions of the thwarted expectations. Here, we demonstrate a new alternate approach in which we decode the predictive electroencephalography (EEG) responses to the silent intervals that are naturally interspersed within the music. We did this as participants (experiment 1, 20 participants, 10 female; experiment 2, 21 participants, 6 female) listened or imagined Bach piano melodies. Prediction signals were quantified and assessed via a computational model of the melodic structure of the music and were shown to exhibit the same response characteristics when measured during listening or imagining. These include an inverted polarity for both silence and imagined responses relative to listening, as well as response magnitude modulations that precisely reflect the expectations of notes and silences in both listening and imagery conditions. These findings therefore provide a unifying view that links results from many previous paradigms, including omission reactions and the expectation modulation of sensory responses, all in the context of naturalistic music listening.

Edgar Dubourg & Nicolas Baumard (2021). Why Imaginary Worlds?: The psychological foundations and cultural evolution of fictions with imaginary worlds. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1-52. doi:10.1017/S0140525X21000923

Résumé :
Imaginary worlds are extremely successful. The most popular fictions produced in the last decades contain such a fictional world. They can be found in all fictional media, from novels (e.g., Lord of The Ring, Harry Potter) to films (e.g., Star Wars, Avatar), video games (e.g., The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy), graphic novels (e.g., One piece, Naruto) and TV series (e.g., Star Trek, Game of Thrones), and they date as far back as ancient literature (e.g., the Cyclops Islands in The Odyssey, 850 BCE). Why such a success? Why so much attention devoted to nonexistent worlds? In this article, we propose that imaginary worlds co-opt our preferences for exploration, which have evolved in humans and non-human animals alike, to propel individuals toward new environments and new sources of reward. Humans would find imaginary worlds very attractive for the very same reasons, and under the same circumstances, as they are lured by unfamiliar environments in real life. After reviewing research on exploratory preferences in behavioral ecology, environmental aesthetics, neuroscience, and evolutionary and developmental psychology, we focus on the sources of their variability across time and space, which we argue can account for the variability of the cultural preference for imaginary worlds. This hypothesis can therefore explain the way imaginary worlds evolved culturally, their shape and content, their recent striking success, and their distribution across time and populations.

Gilles Fénelon, Jacques Parant, Laurent Cleret de Langavant (2021). Victor Parant (1848–1924) and the first report of psychosis in the course of Parkinson's disease with dementia. Revue Neurologique. doi: 10.1016/j.neurol.2021.03.004.

Résumé :
Until the beginning of the twentieth century, neurologists considered that mental disorders in the course of Parkinson's disease (PD) occurred in the terminal phases of the disease or were due to coincidental pathologies. Benjamin Ball (1834–1893), in 1881 and 1882, drew attention to the frequency of cognitive and depressive disorders in PD. In 1883, Victor Parant (1848–1924), referring to Ball's work, published the first detailed observation of a PD patient with dementia and psychotic symptoms. Parant was an alienist running a private clinic for mental diseases in Toulouse, France. One of his main interests was the question of the responsibility of the insane, and he was called upon as a forensic expert in several cases. In this context, Parant examined a man who had been suffering from PD for several years, and later developed concurrently severe cognitive impairment and psychotic disorders. The patient would meet modern criteria for PD-associated psychosis: he had multimodal hallucinations (visual, auditory and somatic), visual illusions, and paranoid delusions. He also reported unusual symptoms: supernumerary limbs and Alice in Wonderland syndrome. Parant forwarded the far-sighted hypothesis that cognitive and psychotic disorders were due to the extension of PD lesions within the brain. The unheralded work of Victor Parant should be recognized in the history of neuropsychiatry.

Pablo Fernandez-Velasco, Bastien Perroy & Roberto Casati (2021). The collective disorientation of the COVID-19 crisis. Global Discourse: An interdisciplinary journal of current affairs, 11(3), 44&-462. doi:10.1332/204378921X16146158263164

Résumé :
One of the chief features of this global crisis is that we find ourselves in a shifting landscape. The resulting disorientation extends beyond health research and into many domains of our individual and collective lives. We suffer from political disorientation (the need for a radical shift in economic thinking), from social disorientation (the rearrangement of social dynamics based on distancing measures), and from temporal disorientation (the warping of our sense of time during lockdown), to name but a few. This generalised state of disorientation has substantial effects on wellbeing and decision making. In this paper, we review the multiple dimensions of disorientation of the COVID-19 crisis and use state-of-the art research on disorientation to gain insight into the social, psychological and political dynamics of the current pandemic. Just like standard, spatial cases of disorientation, the non-spatial forms of disorientation prevalent in the current crisis consist in the mismatch between our frames of reference and our immediate experience, and they result in anxiety, helplessness and isolation, but also in the possibility of re-orienting. The current crisis provides a unique environment in which to study non-spatial forms of disorientation. In turn, existing knowledge about spatial disorientation can shed light on the shifting landscape of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Julie Grèzes, Mégane Erblang, Emma Vilarem, Michael Quiquempoix, Pascal Van Beers, Mathias Guillard, Fabien Sauvet, Rocco Mennella, Arnaud Rabat (2021). Impact of total sleep deprivation and related mood changes on approach-avoidance decisions to threat-related facial displays. Sleep, zsab186, doi: 10.1093/sleep/zsab186

Résumé :
Study Objectives: Total sleep deprivation is known to have significant detrimental effects on cognitive and socio-emotional functioning. Nonetheless, the mechanisms by which total sleep loss disturbs decision-making in social contexts are poorly understood. Here, we investigated the impact of total sleep deprivation on approach/avoidance decisions when faced with threatening individuals, as well as the potential moderating role of sleep-related mood changes.
Methods: Participants (n = 34) made spontaneous approach/avoidance decisions in the presence of task-irrelevant angry or fearful individuals, while rested or totally sleep deprived (27 h of continuous wakefulness). Sleep-related changes in mood and sustained attention were assessed using the Positive and Negative Affective Scale and the psychomotor vigilance task, respectively.
Results: Rested participants avoided both fearful and angry individuals, with stronger avoidance for angry individuals, in line with previous results. On the contrary, totally sleep deprived participants favored neither approach nor avoidance of fearful individuals, while they still comparably avoided angry individuals. Drift-diffusion models showed that this effect was accounted for by the fact that total sleep deprivation reduced value-based evidence accumulation toward avoidance during decision making. Finally, the reduction of positive mood after total sleep deprivation positively correlated with the reduction of fearful display avoidance. Importantly, this correlation was not mediated by a sleep-related reduction in sustained attention.
Conclusions: All together, these findings support the underestimated role of positive mood-state alterations caused by total sleep loss on approach/avoidance decisions when facing ambiguous socio-emotional displays, such as fear.

Guilhem Marion, Giovanni Di Liberto & Shihab Shamma (2021). The Music of Silence. Part I: Responses to Musical Imagery Encode Melodic Expectations and Acoustics. Journal of Neuroscience, JN-RM-0183-21. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0183-21.2021

Résumé :
Musical imagery is the voluntary internal hearing of music in the mind without the need for physical action or external stimulation. Numerous studies have already revealed brain areas activated during imagery. However, it remains unclear to what extent imagined music responses preserve the detailed temporal dynamics of the acoustic stimulus envelope and, crucially, whether melodic expectations play any role in modulating responses to imagined music, as they prominently do during listening. These modulations are important as they reflect aspects of the human musical experience, such as its acquisition, engagement, and enjoyment. This study explored the nature of these modulations in imagined music based on EEG recordings from 21 professional musicians (6 females and 15 males). Regression analyses were conducted to demonstrate that imagined neural signals can be predicted accurately, similarly to the listening task, and were sufficiently robust to allow for accurate identification of the imagined musical piece from the EEG. In doing so, our results indicate that imagery and listening tasks elicited an overlapping but distinctive topography of neural responses to sound acoustics, which is in line with previous fMRI literature. Melodic expectation, however, evoked very similar frontal spatial activation in both conditions, suggesting that they are supported by the same underlying mechanisms. Finally, neural responses induced by imagery exhibited a specific transformation from the listening condition, which primarily included a relative delay and a polarity inversion of the response. This transformation demonstrates the top-down predictive nature of the expectation mechanisms arising during both listening and imagery.

Olivier Morin, Pierre Olivier Jacquet, Krist Vaesen & Alberto Acerbi (2021). Social information use and social information waste. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B3762020005220200052. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2020.0052

Résumé :
Social information is immensely valuable. Yet we waste it. The information we get from observing other humans and from communicating with them is a cheap and reliable informational resource. It is considered the backbone of human cultural evolution. Theories and models focused on the evolution of social learning show the great adaptive benefits of evolving cognitive tools to process it. In spite of this, human adults in the experimental literature use social information quite inefficiently: they do not take it sufficiently into account. A comprehensive review of the literature on five experimental tasks documented 45 studies showing social information waste, and four studies showing social information being over-used. These studies cover ‘egocentric discounting’ phenomena as studied by social psychology, but also include experimental social learning studies. Social information waste means that human adults fail to give social information its optimal weight. Both proximal explanations and accounts derived from evolutionary theory leave crucial aspects of the phenomenon unaccounted for: egocentric discounting is a pervasive effect that no single unifying explanation fully captures. Cultural evolutionary theory's insistence on the power and benefits of social influence is to be balanced against this phenomenon.

Stefano Palminteri, Maël Lebreton (2021). Context-dependent outcome encoding in human reinforcement learning, Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 41, 144-151, doi: 10.1016/j.cobeha.2021.06.006.

Résumé :
A wealth of evidence in perceptual and economic decision-making research suggests that the subjective assessment of one option is influenced by the context. A series of studies provides evidence that the same coding principles apply to situations where decisions are shaped by past outcomes, that is, in reinforcement-learning situations. In bandit tasks, human behavior is explained by models assuming that individuals do not learn the objective value of an outcome, but rather its subjective, context-dependent representation. We argue that, while such outcome context-dependence may be informationally or ecologically optimal, it concomitantly undermines the capacity to generalize value-based knowledge to new contexts — sometimes creating apparent decision paradoxes.

Lou Safra, Amine Sijilmassi & Coralie Chevallier (2021). Disease, perceived infectability and threat reactivity: A COVID-19 studyPersonality and Individual Differences , 180, 110945. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2021.110945

Résumé :
Using a two-wave online experiment, we investigate whether COVID-19 exposure changes participants' threat-detection threshold. Threat reactivity was measured in a signal detection task among 277 British adults who also reported how vulnerable they felt to infectious diseases. Participants' data were then matched to the local number of confirmed COVID-19 cases announced by the NHS every day. We found that participants who perceive themselves as more likely to catch infectious diseases displayed higher threat reactivity in response to increased COVID-19 cases.

Frederique de Vignemont (2021). Fifty Shades of Affective Colouring of Perception, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, doi: 10.1080/00048402.2021.1965176

Résumé :
Recent evidence in cognitive neuroscience indicates that the visual system is influenced by the outcome of an early appraisal mechanism that automatically evaluates what is seen as being harmful or beneficial for the organism. This indicates that there could be valence in perception. But what could it mean for one to see something positively or negatively? Although most theories of emotions accept that valence involves being related to values, the nature of this relation remains highly debated. Some explain valence in terms of evaluative content, others in terms of evaluative attitude. Here I shall argue that an account of affective perception in terms of attitude has more chance of succeeding. To do so, I will first highlight the difficulties that a content-based approach faces, considering the many forms that it might take. I will conclude that seeing the world positively or negatively involves more than a positive or negative content; it involves a distinctive attitude, but which one? Should it be conceived of in imperative or evaluative terms? And what makes this attitude distinct from a proper emotion?

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