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Mini-Symposium Sessions
Session # |
Day |
Date |
Time |
Location |
Sunday |
April 14 |
3:00 - 4:30 pm |
Bayview Room |
|
Sunday |
April 14 |
3:00 - 4:30 pm |
Seacliff Room |
|
Monday |
April 15 |
1:30 - 3:00 pm |
Garden Room |
|
Monday |
April 15 |
1:30 - 3:00 pm |
Grand Ballroom B |
|
Tuesday |
April 16 |
1:30 - 3:00 pm |
Grand Ballroom B |
Mini-Symposium Session 1
Sunday, April 14, 3:00 - 4:30 pm, Bayview Room
Analyzing patterns of brain activity to understand human vision and cognition
Chair: Frank Tong, Vanderbilt University
Speakers: Frank Tong, John Serences, Jack Gallant
Although the spatiotemporal resolution of the BOLD response provides a rather coarse measure of brain activity, recent studies have demonstrated that a wealth of information can be obtained by analyzing the signals contained in detailed fMRI activity patterns. These studies have revealed selective cortical responses to basic visual features, complex objects, real world scenes and natural movies, allowing for prediction of the viewed stimulus or semantic category with remarkable accuracy. The ability to isolate visually selective responses in the human brain has opened the way to investigations of the cortical mechanisms underlying visual perception, selective attention and working memory. This symposium will focus on recent advances in the study of human vision and cognition, describing how computational approaches can be used to characterize the information contained in the responses of individual voxels and cortical activity patterns. Central themes to be discussed will include the functional organization of visual and semantic selectivity in the human cortex, and how the visual specificity of top-down feedback can lead to adaptive changes to optimize task performance. Specific results will inform current theories of cortical organization, visual attention and working memory.
Talk 1: The role of early visual areas in high-level visual cognition
Frank Tong1; 1Vanderbilt University
What cortical processes underlie people’s ability to perceive, attend to, or remember, basic visual features or complex objects? To what extent might high-level processes of attention or memory depend on accessing relevant information in early visual areas? Using functional MRI and pattern classification methods, my lab has found that it is possible to decode what item a person is seeing, attending to, or remembering, from activity patterns in early visual areas (V1-V4). Our perceptual studies have revealed dynamic changes in cortical responses to orientation, based on task relevance, as well as cortical changes that occur after extensive perceptual training with specific orientation stimuli. When observers must attend to one of two overlapping objects, we observe a strong functional relationship between the attentional bias signals found in high-level object areas and those in early visual areas. Interestingly, object knowledge facilitates the efficacy of object-based selection in early visual areas. In studies of visual working memory, we find that information about simple and complex stimuli is actively maintained in the detailed activity patterns of the visual cortex, even after the overall BOLD response has fallen to baseline levels. Taken together, these results support an interactive model of visual processing, in which feedback signals to early visual areas are important for the top-down selection and maintenance of information needed to perform demanding cognitive tasks.
Talk 2: Evaluating optimal models of information processing in visual cortex
John Serences1; 1University of California, San Diego
Current behavioral goals and motivational drives play a critical role in shaping and refining information processing so that only the most relevant external stimuli are perceived, represented in working memory, and allowed to influence decision making. Traditional accounts hold that such ‘top-down’ attentional factors are critically important in information processing precisely because attention enhances the gain of the sensory neurons that are selectively tuned to relevant stimulus features. These models are intuitively appealing, and suggest that attention effectively increases the intensity of important stimuli so that they are easier to perceive, remember, and act upon. Using the early visual system as a model, recent work in my lab reexamines this traditional framework by showing that the ultimate role for attention is to modulate the gain of the most informative sensory neurons given whatever specific perceptual task confronts the observer. Counterintuitively, enhancing the gain of the most informative sensory neurons often means biasing patterns of neural activity away from the pattern that is evoked by the sensory stimulus. Guided by a simple model of information processing, we exploit multivariate activation patterns in early visual cortex, as measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging, to argue that the primary function of attention is not just to enhance the gain of stimulus-driven responses, but to optimize performance on the current perceptual task.
Talk 3: Beyond localization: Mapping perceptual and cognitive functions in the human brain
Jack Gallant1; 1University of California, Berkeley
Most functional MRI studies focus on coarse localization of perceptual and cognitive processes. However, neurophysiological experiments suggest that many perceptual and cognitive processes are organized in systematic maps arranged across the cortical surface. One rapidly developing approach, voxel-wise modeling and decoding (VWMD), can recover these detailed maps. VWMD quantifies the transformation between stimulus or task features and BOLD responses. Different feature spaces are tested by comparing model predictions. Voxel-based receptive fields can be recovered, and tuning patterns can be assessed across voxels and across different individuals. VWMD also provides a principled and very sensitive method for decoding. When applied to brain activity evoked by natural movies, VWMD reveals highly detailed and systematic maps of structural and semantic information across the human brain. These patterns are consistent with the coarse parcellations provided by previous techniques, but provide much more detailed information and extend well beyond areas identified in earlier studies. Furthermore, VWMD shows that voxels throughout the brain shift their tuning toward an attended category. These widespread category tuning shifts expand the representation of the semantic space near the attended category, and compress the representation of the semantic space far from the attended category. Taken together these results show that the human brain contains multiple, complex maps of visual information, and that attention dynamically alters visual representations to optimize processing of behaviorally relevant objects during natural vision.
Mini-Symposium Session 2
Sunday, April 14, 3:00 - 4:30 pm, Seacliff Room
The role of concepts in affect and emotion: Contributions from affective neuroscience
Chair: Ajay Satpute, Northeastern University
Co-Chair: Kevin Ochsner, Columbia University
Speakers: Kevin Labar, Matt Lieberman, Kristin Lindquist, Ajay Satpute
Emerging research in cognitive and affective neuroscience is beginning to uncover the many ways in which concepts are central to generalizing, attenuating, constituting, and shaping our emotional and affective responses. In this mini-symposium session, each speaker will present findings that highlight one of these roles. The first speaker, Kevin Labar, examines how people generalize their fearful responses across conceptual categories. He presents findings from a novel fear conditioning paradigm which examines the generalization of fear to conceptually-related stimuli, and discusses how this may play an important role in understanding disorders of fear and anxiety in clinical settings. The second talk by Lisa Burklund and Matt Lieberman examines how concepts attenuate affective responses. They present studies showing that labeling affective responses with emotion words attenuates activity in the amygdala and extend these benefits to clinical settings involving phobia. The third speaker, Kristin Lindquist, shows that concepts play a constitutive role in generating emotional experiences. She presents findings from a meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies showing that manipulations of affect routinely engage regions associated with processing concepts, and results from patients with semantic dementia showing that they are unable to perceive emotion in faces. And the final talk by Ajay Satpute, Jochen Weber, and Kevin Ochsner, suggests that concepts may further shape affective responses. They present neuroimaging findings from a study showing that categorizing affective responses on the boundary between concepts shapes them to be more consistent with the selected concept.
Talk 1: Conceptual contributions to fear learning
Kevin Labar1; 1Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University
While the neural systems that mediate simple expressions of fear learning are well delineated, how fears generalize to other stimuli on the basis of conceptual relationships remains unclear. Here, we used a novel fear-conditioning paradigm to examine how healthy adults acquire and generalize fears based on conceptual similarity. Subjects were presented with exemplars from two different object categories (animals and tools). Some of the exemplars from one of the categories were paired with shock, whereas exemplars from the other category were never paired with shock. Fear learning was quantified as increased skin conductance responses and subjective shock expectancy ratings to exemplars from the ‘threat’ category compared to the ‘safe’ category. The results showed that fear learning to a conceptual category was mediated first by canonical conditioning-related brain regions, such as the amygdala and insula, but also by category-selective brain areas in occipital-temporal cortex. We also discovered a mechanistic account for the spread of fear across category exemplars based on hippocampal signaling of object typicality, which was reflected in greater functional coupling with the amygdala early in learning. Finally, multivariate statistical analyses showed experience-dependent alterations in the cortical and amygdalar representations of the object categories. An additional behavioral study using a sensory preconditioning procedure further showed that categorical boundaries thwart generalization on the basis of conceptual relationships. These studies reveal how conceptual factors contribute to conditioned learning and provide new insights to neurobiologically-based models of human anxiety disorders characterized by overgeneralization of fear, particularly based on conceptual relationships.
Talk 2: Affect Labeling as Implicit Emotion Regulation
Matt Lieberman1; 1University of California, Los Angeles
Spinoza wrote that “Emotion, which is a passion, ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea, thereof.” This talk will explore why it is that putting feelings into words (‘affect labeling’) can help to calm our emotional responses. This talk will examine the ways in which affect labeling serves as a form of self-control in general and as a form of implicit emotion regulation more specifically. Neurally, I will focus on the overlap during affect labeling, reappraisal, and motor self-control. Multiple studies focusing on the experiential and physiological responses during implicit and explicit emotion regulation also point to convergence. Finally, I will present clinical extensions of this work on treating phobias and on mindfulness meditation effects.
Talk 3: Conceptualization supports emotion
Kristin Lindquist1; 1University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Growing evidence suggests that conceptual processes are an important component that help give rise to emotion experiences and perceptions. In particular, constructionist approaches to emotion hypothesize that emotions are emergent products that occur when conceptual knowledge about emotion is used to make meaning of basic affective states in context. In this talk, I present evidence from neuroimaging and neuropsychology suggesting that brain regions involved in conceptual processing play an important role in the experience and perception of emotions. I begin by presenting meta-analytic evidence from the neuroimaging literature on emotion demonstrating that brain areas involved in semantic knowledge representation and retrieval, such as the anterior temporal lobe and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, routinely show increased activation during emotion experiences and perceptions. I next present a neuroimaging study demonstrating that anterior temporal lobe activity increases when participants experience an unpleasant state as an instance of a discrete emotion. I close by presenting neuropsychological evidence that neurodegeneration in the anterior temporal lobes due to Frontotemporal Dementia impairs patients’ ability to perceive discrete emotions on faces. Patients are unable to perceive discrete emotions on faces, although they have the maintained ability to perceive positive, negative and neutral affect. Together, these findings suggest that conceptual processing is indeed an important component, that along with basic affective processing, helps give rise to emotions. I discuss the implications of these findings for the science of emotion and a constructionist approach to the mind, more generally.
Talk 4: The neural dialogue between concepts and affective responses
Ajay Satpute1, Jochen Weber2, Kevin Ochsner2; 1Northeastern University, 2Columbia University
Affective experiences are considered to be continuous and free-flowing, but conceptualizing them requires that people categorize their affective responses into discrete concepts. In this talk, we present studies that examine how continuously varying affective responses are placed into discrete categories and the consequences that this may have for how people make sense of their affective experiences. In the beginning, I describe a study which shows that putting affective feelings into statements such as “I feel bad” engages three systems: one associated with attributing mental states to affective responses that includes the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, a second associated with categorizing affective responses into semantic concepts that includes the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, and a third associated with the intensity of the affective response that includes the amygdala and anterior insula. I then present emerging findings which show that concepts may in turn shape affective responses. Specifically, we investigated the “category boundary effect” for affective responses. We observed that when having to categorize affective feelings that are on the boundary between available concepts (e.g. labeling a mildly negative affective response as either “neutral” or “bad”), that this situation elicits conflict and is associated activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, and that resolving this conflict leads to increasing or decreasing activity in the anterior insula to be more congruent with the selected concept. These findings contribute to delineating the functional architecture involved in putting affective feelings into words, and further outline a neural mechanism for how concepts may in turn shape affective responses.
Mini-Symposium Session 3
Monday, April 15, 1:30 - 3:00 pm, Garden Room
The effects of working memory training on brain and behavior
Chair: Bornali Kundu, University of Wisconsin - Madison
Co-Chair: Bradley R. Postle, University of Wisconsin - Madison
Speakers: Susanne M. Jaeggi, Christos Constantinidis, Torkel Klingberg, Bornali Kundu
The past decade has witnessed an explosion of interest in working memory training, largely because successful demonstrations have refuted the long-held assumption that working memory capacity is an inherent trait, insensitive to environmental influence. Cognitive training has also shown the potential to treat neurological and psychiatric disorders. Of late, however, progress has been slowed by questions of how, or even whether, working memory training may transfer to untrained tasks. This mini-symposium will directly address this by bringing together four perspectives from which working memory training has been studied. Jaeggi will address the theoretical (and practical) bases for predicting the transfer of working memory training to untrained tasks. Constantinidis will characterize the effects of working memory training on single-neuron responses and neuronal population dynamics, as measured in the non-human primate. Klingberg will consider genetic and developmental factors that influence variation in working memory training effects, and their neural correlates as measured through human brain imaging. Finally, Kundu will present evidence that a causal factor underlying working memory training effects is training-related changes in effective connectivity within task-relevant networks. Collectively, these talks will provide a broad foundation from which to evaluate the training literature. Emergent from it will be a principled understanding of what factors determine the success, or otherwise, of a training protocol. Thus, this mini-symposium will bring timely attention to a domain of cognitive neuroscience that is simultaneously among the most exciting and most controversial, and one that holds great potential for translation to the clinic, the classroom, and beyond.
Talk 1: Transfer of working memory training: theoretical and practical considerations
Susanne M. Jaeggi1; 1University of Maryland - College Park
Working memory training and the study of transfer and plasticity are among the current hot topics in cognitive neuroscience. While some have argued that there is no evidence for transfer as a function of cognitive training, we and others have pointed out that working memory training can be, indeed, effective, but that there are important mediating and moderating factors that might determine training success. In this talk, I will provide evidence for the efficacy of several working memory interventions developed in our laboratories, and review the emerging literature coming from other groups. I will show data that demonstrate transfer to non-trained tasks throughout the lifespan, that is, in young adults, in old adults, in typically developing children, as well as children with ADHD. I will also discuss the neural correlates that accompany working memory training as observed with our interventions. However, I will also point out that transfer effects can be elusive, and that some of the effects do not seem to be easily replicated. I will argue that instead of taking inconsistencies as a proof for a lack of efficacy, researchers need to develop innovative approaches to move the cognitive training literature beyond the simple question of whether or not training is effective, and to address questions of underlying mechanisms, individual differences, and training features and parameters that might mediate and moderate the efficacy of training.
Talk 2: Effects of working memory training at the neuronal level
Christos Constantinidis1, Xue-Lian Qi1; 1Wake Forest School of Medicine
Neurons in the lateral prefrontal cortex are active during the execution of cognitive tasks that require working memory. Prior studies suggest that the activity of single neurons is shaped by learning, though much is unknown about how training alters neural activity and cortical organization. To address this question, we performed neurophysiological recordings in non-human primates before and after they were trained to perform working memory tasks. Prior to any training, prefrontal neurons responded to stimuli, exhibited persistent activity after their offset, and differentiated between matching and non-matching stimuli presented in sequence. After training, more neurons were recruited by the stimuli and exhibited higher firing rates, particularly during the delay periods of the task. Operant stimuli that needed to be recognized in order to perform the task elicited higher overall rates of responses, while the variability of individual discharges and correlation of discharges between neurons decreased after training. New information was incorporated in the activity of a small population of neurons highly specialized for the task and in a larger population of neurons that exhibited modest task related information, while information about other aspects of stimuli remained present in neuronal activity. Despite such changes, the relative selectivity of the dorsal and ventral aspect of the lateral prefrontal cortex was not altered with regard to spatial and non-spatial stimuli. These results indicate the nature of neuronal changes induced by training and the limits of plasticity of cortical areas mediating cognitive tasks.
Talk 3: Training of working memory
Torkel Klingberg1; 1Karolinska Institute
Impaired working memory is associated with low academic performance and with distractability and inattention in clinically defined groups, such as in ADHD, but the same associations are also relevant in the general population. Klingberg and collaborators have developed and tested a computerized method for training working memory (Klingberg et al. 2002, 2005, Klingberg 2010), which showed, for the first time, that working memory capacity can be enhanced. Moreover, improving working memory also decreases the symptoms of inattention in everyday life. This has now been confirmed by several independent research groups using the same method, which also allows comparison of effect sizes across different ages and patient groups. The method can be used as an instrument for studying brain plasticity. Klingberg and collegues have shown that training of working memory changes brain activity in frontal and parietal regions, and is associated with changes in the density of dopamine D1-receptors in the cortex. Polymorphisms of the DAT-1 gene affect the relative benefit of cognitive training, which is consistent with a key role of dopamine for training-related plasticity. Questions for future research include: which tasks are more effective, what training paradigms are more effective and what are the factors promoting plasticity?
Talk 4: Changes in cortical effective connectivity underlie working memory training
Bornali Kundu1, Bradley R. Postle1; 1University of Wisconsin - Madison
Although long considered a natively endowed and fixed trait, working memory ability has recently been shown to improve with intensive training. What remains controversial and poorly understood, however, are the factors underlying this improvement, and the extent to which working memory training gains transfer to other cognitive tasks. To explore these questions, we trained subjects on either an adaptive n-back working memory task or a control task (Tetris) for five hours per day, five days per week, for five weeks. Pre- and post-training measures assessed individual performance on visuospatial short-term memory (VSTM), selective attention, interference control, and several psychometric tasks. Here we will present evidence from electrophysiology (EEG) and simultaneous transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and EEG that both near and far transfer of working memory training to other cognitive tasks is supported by changes in task-related effective connectivity in frontoparietal and extrastriate networks that are engaged by both the trained and transfer tasks. One consequence of this is greater efficiency of stimulus processing, as evidenced by training-related changes in the ‘contralateral delay activity’, an EEG index of individual differences in short-term memory capacity and visual search performance. These patterns of training and transfer highlight the role of common neural systems in determining individual differences in many aspects of visuospatial cognition.
Mini-Symposium Session 4
Monday, April 15, 1:30 - 3:00 pm, Grand Ballroom B
Where memory meets language
Chair: Tamara Y. Swaab, UC Davis
Speakers: Sharon L. Thompson-Schill, Tamara Y. Swaab, Melissa C. Duff, Gina Kuperberg
The idea that language is a modular system, which is relatively insulated from other neurocognitive systems, has been seriously challenged by our growing knowledge of the brain’s functional architecture. In this mini-symposium, we will explore the extent to which language processing and production engage the same neurocognitive mechanisms, representations and circuitry that support long-term memory, working memory, declarative memory and executive function. Our speakers will discuss studies using multiple complementary methods––fMRI, ERPs, MEG, eye-tracking, and neuropsychological work in patient populations. We will present evidence suggesting that language processing and production draw upon: 1) frontally-mediated control mechanisms that act to select the correct linguistic representation from competing alternatives to resolve linguistic ambiguity (Thompson-Schill), 2) fronto-parietal-temporal circuits that maintain higher-level representations within working memory, allowing spoken language comprehension to be guided by discourse context, rather than associations between individual words (Swaab), 3) hippocampal circuits that establish, recover, maintain and use declarative memory representations to process discourse (Duff), and 4) highly distributed semantic representations that interact with a context to generate semantic predictions, which can directly influence the neural circuits that are recruited to integrate incoming words into this context (Kuperberg). Together, we will examine which of these neural circuits are necessary for language processing, how they influence individual differences in language comprehension, and the consequences of their breakdown in patient populations (neuropsychiatric disorders and amnesia patients.
Talk 1: The role of cognitive control in language production and comprehension
Sharon L. Thompson-Schill1; 1University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA USA
For over a century, the relationship between left prefrontal cortex and language processing has been accepted, yet the precise characterization of this link remains controversial. Recent advances in both the psycholinguistic study of language processing and the neuroscientific study of frontal lobe function have converged on an intriguing possibility: The demands to resolve competition between incompatible characterizations of a linguistic stimulus may recruit top-down cognitive control processes mediated by prefrontal cortex. Under this account, the brain region traditionally known as “Broca’s area” – one of the principle language centers in classical models of language dysfunction – may be better described in attentional than linguistic terms. This hypothesis draws on a large body of research into the function of prefrontal cortex, and contrasts with other more domain-specific accounts of the function of Broca’s region. I will present recent evidence from a number of methodologies that demonstrate the link between frontally-mediated control processes and language production and comprehension. Evidence of shared regulatory mechanisms across domains has implications for the psychological and neural architecture of language and may broadly inform the study of both linguistic and nonlinguistic cognitive processes.
Talk 2: Speech and span: the role of working memory in spoken language comprehension
Tamara Y. Swaab1; 1University of California, Davis CA USA
Spoken language comprehension involves managing a set of interrelated cognitive tasks, including activation of stored phonological and semantic representations of words, activation or construction of syntactic structure representations, determination of how newly activated words relate to previously introduced information, and ultimately the construction of a representation of the meaning of the message. Whereas the processing of individual words and syntactic structures in isolation can proceed relatively automatically, the construction of a coherent representation of the overall message may rely more on controlled processing, requiring maintenance of previous context and rapid integration of incoming input in Working Memory (WM). This is especially the case for spoken language comprehension since listeners have no control over the rate of input, nor can they ‘‘re-experience’’ parts of the speech signal. I will present evidence from healthy adults and schizophrenia patients indicating that individual differences or impairments in the controlled maintenance of context predict which kind of language information is prioritized or processed during spoken language comprehension: the meanings of individual words or the integrated representation of the language context. I propose that processing of individual word meanings or scenarios is supported by a ventral pathway in the temporal lobes and that controlled maintenance of the language context is supported by a dorsal pathway that connects prefrontal cortex with temporal cortex via the parietal lobes. The degree to which these pathways are activated not only depends on the language task at hand, but also on language processing differences between individuals as a function of WM.
Talk 3: The role of declarative memory in language use and processing
Melissa C. Duff1; 1University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA USA
Language use requires the creative (re)combination and integration of mental representations and the rapid and incremental processing of flexible and contextually defined mappings. How this is accomplished in the brain, however, is an open question. Attempts to link aspects of memory (e.g., working memory) to specific properties of language are longstanding. The hippocampal declarative memory system, however, has not received serious consideration as a neural/cognitive system involved in language use and processing. I propose that the hallmark characteristics of the hippocampal declarative memory system including its relational binding and representational flexibility, along with recent findings stretching the scope of hippocampus-dependent processes to include functions that operate in-the-moment, position this memory system as a key contributor to language. That is, the same processes by which the hippocampal declarative memory system creates and flexibly integrates representations across diverse sources in the formation of new memories, and maintains representations on-line, are the same processes necessary for the use and processing of language. Combining discourse analysis, eye-tracking, and neuropsychological methods I will present evidence of disruptions across various aspects of language use and real-time language processing in patients with hippocampal amnesia suggesting difficulty establishing, recovering, maintaining and using declarative memory representations in service of language use and processing. Linking disruptions in language to the declarative memory system demonstrates how promiscuously the hallmark processing features of the hippocampus are called upon by a variety of cognitive domains, including language, and expands the network of neural and cognitive systems that support language use.
Talk 4: Where memory meets language: a dynamic neural architecture of language comprehension
Gina Kuperberg1,2,3; 1Tufts University, 2Mass. General Hospital, 3Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging
Our semantic and real-world knowledge is highly distributed across the brain. How much of this stored knowledge can we draw upon to make sense of language? And how quickly can we mobilize it during real-time comprehension? I will discuss ERP, MEG and fMRI studies suggesting that, through connections to the left anterior temporal cortex, all our stored semantic knowledge is potentially available to facilitate our access to the semantic features of an incoming word within only 250ms of its onset. Moreover, in a locally constraining context, a pre-activated semantic representation can be linked to its stored orthographic, phonological and syntactic representation(s) to generate a lexical prediction within the left posterior lateral temporal cortex. I propose that we actually begin to integrate these lexical predictions into their context, ahead of any bottom-up input. This means that if an incoming word matches a prediction, it is very easily integrated. If, however, there is a prediction error at any level of representation (semantic, syntactic, phonological or orthographic), we recruit left inferior frontal, inferior parietal and sometimes dorsolateral prefrontal cortices in additional, and sometimes prolonged, attempts to combinatorially integrate that word into its context. Thus, direct neural links between semantic memory, the lexicon and domain-general control regions allow for a highly dynamic language comprehension system. This Bayesian framework helps us understand how we use our semantic and real-world knowledge to resolve ambiguity, protect us from misinterpretations in noisy environments, flexibly allocate resources in response to environmental demands, and learn new linguistic and non-linguistic information.
Mini-Symposium Session 5
Tuesday, April 16, 1:30 - 3:00 pm, Grand Ballroom B
Neuroscience and Law: Promise and Perils
Chair: Francis Shen, University of Minnesota Law School, MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience
Co-Chair: Anthony Wagner, Stanford University
Speakers: Hank Greely, BJ Casey, Anthony Wagner, Francis Shen
This mini-symposium will introduce recent and exciting developments at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience and law. Recent years have seen tremendous growth in neuroscience evidence in courts and legislatures. These recent developments include: the first hearing on admissibility of fMRI lie detection evidence; the first admission of qEEG evidence for a reduced sentence in a homicide case; and the U.S. Supreme Court citing brain development research in multiple cases. International developments are also in progress. France has established a national Neuroscience and Public Policy program; U.K. policymakers have been briefed on developmental neuroscience; and courts in India have considered brain-based memory evidence in criminal cases. These and other developments create a pressing need for increased dialogue between neuroscience and law. This CNS mini-symposium is an excellent opportunity to foster such dialogue, and to introduce the science community to some of the ways in which (for better or worse) their work is being used in legal settings. The four scholars in the proposed panel are contributing to this interdisciplinary field, participating in the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience. In so doing, they have wrestled with the often difficult translation of scientific research into legal doctrine and policy. Panelists will speak both to the general challenges of this interdisciplinary enterprise, as well as to specific insights gleaned from their scholarship on topics such as brain-based memory and lie detection; adolescent brain development and criminal responsibility; neuroethics; and the evidentiary challenges faced by courts and legislatures in evaluating neuroscientific data.
Talk 1: Neuroscience, Responsibility, and the Law
Hank Greely1; 1Stanford Law School
The issue of neuroscience and responsibility has drawn significant academic interest, as well as media coverage. In this first talk, Professor Greely, Deane F. and Kate Edelman Johnson Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, Director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences and Director of the Stanford Interdisciplinary Group on Neuroscience and Society, will discuss the fundamental distinction between: (1) the use of neuroscience to question the very idea of free will and thus challenge the foundations of law, and (2) the use of neuroscience, working within existing legal frameworks, to help establish relevant legal facts such as capacity for self-control or memory of a crime scene. By establishing this distinction at the start of the panel, Prof. Greely will lay the groundwork for the subsequent panel talks on developmental neuroscience, and on memory detection. Neuroscientific evidence of cognitive impairment is already being used in courts to support arguments for diminished legal responsibility. Focusing on the issues of self-control and addiction, Greely will assess whether this trend is likely to continue and whether such developments should be welcomed. As the public learns more about advances in the neuroscience of decision-making, antisocial behavior and so forth, will these changing societal intuitions produce a shift in the system of legal punishment? Will cognitive neuroscience shed new and useful light on the mental states and abilities that the law deems relevant in assessing responsibility? Greely will address these questions, as he explores the present and future potential of neuroscience to provide useful information to legal actors.
Talk 2: Developmental Neuroscience and Criminal Responsibility
BJ Casey1; 1Cornell University
The criminal justice system continues to debate how best to respond to and to help prevent adolescent criminal behavior. Increasingly, cognitive neuroscience is contributing to these debates. In the 2012 U.S. Supreme Court case, Miller v. Alabama, for instance, which “forbids a sentencing scheme that mandates life in prison without possibility of parole for juvenile offenders,” Justice Elana Kagan noted that “developments in psychology and brain science continue to show fundamental differences between juvenile and adult minds” in “parts of the brain involved in behavior control.” As the Supreme Court, as well as lower courts and legislatures, increasingly look to neuroscience to inform their judgments, new questions arise about how this science is (and should be) used by judges and policymakers. In this talk, Dr. Casey will discuss the potential legal relevance of our growing understanding of the developmental influences on adolescent decision-making and risk-taking. Although adolescents are quite capable of making informed decisions, in the heat of the moment, their decisions are often suboptimal. Casey will highlight her work and others showing that these poor decisions may be due to enhanced activity of deep structure in the brain (ventral striatum) to appetitive cues in adolescents in the absence of a mature top down control from slower developing prefrontal regions. Casey will consider the promises, and limitations, of the current knowledge base for informing legal decision making and discuss the ways in which the research has been influenced by collaborative work with legal scholars.
Talk 3: fMRI-based Memory and Lie Detection
Anthony Wagner1; 1Stanford University
Decisions at many stages of the legal process are frequently informed by testimonial evidence. Relevant legal decision makers––e.g., jurors, judges, attorneys, and parole board members––are frequently faced with the challenge of deciding whether testimonial evidence is accurate or inaccurate. For instance, legal decision makers often must decide whether they believe an eye witness’s memory to be accurate or mistaken; at other times, decision makers must decide whether they believe testimony to be honest or dishonest. How these decisions are made often dramatically affects whether a fair and just legal outcome is reached. Development of methods capable of detecting deception and memory with high sensitivity and specificity, while being robust to countermeasures, could greatly improve the legal system. On the other hand, premature or improper use of brain-based detection techniques could do serious harm. These possibilities are no longer purely academic speculation, as attempts to introduce brain-based lie detection and memory detection evidence in the courts have increased in recent years. In light of these legal developments, this talk will provide an assessment of the current and future feasibility of using fMRI to identify and characterize the neural processes associated with lying and remembering in legally relevant contexts. The talk will consider what is known and not known about fMRI-based lie detection, and will discuss on-going research examining whether memories can be detected at the individual-subject and individual-event levels, as is often required by the legal system.
Talk 4: The Future of Neuroscience and Law
Francis Shen1,2; 1University of Minnesota Law School, 2MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience
In this final talk, Dr. Shen, the Executive Director of Education and Outreach for the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience, and co-author of the first law coursebook on Law and Neuroscience, will discuss how neuroscience is likely to be at times adopted, and at times rejected, across different legal contexts. The talk will emphasize the distinction between scientific certainty versus legal certainty, and how this difference animates much of the debate about whether, and how, neuroscience should be used in law. The talk will provide context, by summarizing (beyond the other three talks) the many ways in which neuroscience is already being contemplated by law. The talk will then discuss law’s rules governing admissibility of expert evidence in court, and why, in the criminal law, this evidence has appeared primarily for sentencing rather than guilt determinations. The talk will next discuss the possible constitutional limitations on the collection and use of certain neuroimaging evidence. Finally, the talk will discuss ways in which neuroscience experiments might be made more legally relevant. The talk will highlight emerging research on the neural correlates of criminal mental states as one example of a successful collaboration between legal scholars and cognitive neuroscientists. The talk will conclude by discussing the rise of: new funding sources as the MacArthur Law and Neuroscience Network; interdisciplinary neurolaw conferences; cross-listed Law and Neuroscience courses for students; and outreach efforts to disseminate law and neuroscience materials to the public.