The research in this dissertation investigates the neural implementation of conceptual knowledge: a level of representation characterized by broad generality and independence from all sensory or motor channels. Decades of neuropsychological work have established that conceptual knowledge is not represented in a single neural locus, but rather across multiple neural loci, and that these loci are often content-selective: they are responsible for certain aspects of conceptual knowledge (e.g., animals; color) more than others. On what basis are these partitions delineated, and what determines their cortical locations? The present work attempts to unravel some of these principles by identifying neural loci that represent non-concrete attributes of action and artifact concepts, such as functions, intentions, and outcomes. As investigated here, these aspects of concepts are not reducible to any particular sensory or motor qualities. This is beneficial in two ways. First, it presents an essential test case for a dominant theory of neural organization of concepts, which proposes that conceptual knowledge is organized by the sensory modality those concepts refer to. Second, it helps overcome a methodological issue in functional magnetic resonance imaging: the difficulty of dissociating conceptual representations from lower-level/sensory-motor associates. The focus on non-concrete properties enabled us to overcome this challenge. Our findings reveal that distinct portions of the inferior parietal lobe represent functions of artifacts and intentions/outcomes of actions. This suggests that different aspects of non-concrete conceptual knowledge are represented in spatially distinct neural areas, implying that neural organizing factors can be abstract. Furthermore, the cortical locations of these aspects of concepts were adjacent to computationally related cognitive systems: outcomes of actions were near an area involved in theory of mind, and functions were near an area previously shown to be involved in physical manipulation knowledge of tools. These observations suggest that conceptual knowledge is neurally localized according to computational considerations: concepts are localized near to cognitive components that rely on those concepts for their operation. / Psychology

Humans can recognize others’ emotions based on overt cues such as facial expressions, affective vocalizations, or body posture, or by recruiting an abstract, causal theory of the conditions that tend to elicit different emotions. Whereas previous research has investigated the recognition of emotion in specific perceptual modalities (e.g. facial expressions), this dissertation focuses on the abstract representations that relate observable reactions to their antecedent causes. A combination of neuroimaging, behavioral, and developmental methods are used to shed light on the mechanisms that support various forms of emotion attribution, and to elucidate the core features or dimensions that structure the space of emotions we represent. Chapter 1 identifies brain regions that contain information about emotional valence conveyed either via facial expressions and or via animations depicting abstract situational information. These data reveal regions with modality-specific representations of emotional valence (i.e. patterns of activity that discriminate only positive versus negative facial expressions), as well as modality-independent representations: in medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), the valence representation generalizes across stimuli, indicating a common neural code that abstracts away from specific perceptual features and is invariant to different forms of evidence. Building on evidence that young infants discriminate and respond to the emotional expressions of others, Chapter 2 investigates whether infants also represent these expressions in relation to the situations that elicit them. The results of several experiments demonstrate that infants within their first year of life have expectations about how facial and vocal displays of emotion relate to the valence of events that precede them. Whereas Chapters 1 and 2 focus on a simple binary distinction between positive and negative affect, Chapter 3 investigates a space of more fine-grained discriminations (e.g. someone feeling proud vs. grateful). A combination of multi- voxel pattern analyses and representational similarity analyses reveal brain regions containing abstract and high-dimensional representations of attributed emotion. Moreover, a set of causal features (encoding properties of eliciting events that vary between different emotions) outperforms more primitive dimensions in capturing neural similarities within these regions. Together, these studies provide a newly detailed characterization of the representations that structure emotion attribution, including their development and neural basis. / Psychology

Psychologists have documented a panoply of beliefs that are sufficiently skewed towards desirability to arouse our suspicion that people believe things in part because they want them to be true (e.g. “above-average” effects (Alicke & Govorun, 2005; Baker & Emery, 1993; Beer & Hughes, 2010; Dunning, Meyerowitz, & Holzberg, 1989; Svenson, 1981; Williams & Gilovich, 2008), unrealistic optimism (Carver, Scheier, & Segerstrom, 2010; Scheier, Carver, & Bridges, 1994; Sharot, Korn, & Dolan, 2011; Weinstein, 1980), and wishful thinking (Aue, Nusbaum, & Cacioppo, 2011; Babad, 1997; Krizan & Windschitl, 2009; Windschitl, Scherer, Smith, & Rose, 2013)). The ostensible irrationality of these motivated biases poses a deep psychological question: how are such biases generated and maintained by a cognitive system that is presumably designed to accurately track reality? Studies that look at the motivated biases and the biased belief updating that may give rise to them tend to employ rich meaningful stimuli covering different targets of belief that are of every day concern: from your health, intelligence, and attractiveness, to your perfidy, academic performance, marital prognosis and driving ability. The use of such stimuli makes it difficult to account for the prior experience and beliefs relevant to such stimuli that a participant brings to the study as well as inadvertently reinforcing a view that motivated biases emerge through rumination upon specific and relatively sophisticated belief content (Lieberman, Ochsner, Gilbert, & Schacter, 2001). In this dissertation we changed this methodological emphasis. Over the course of the first three experiments, we demonstrate wishful thinking in a semantically sparse, repeated decision-making task about which participants can have no prior expectations, where the components of the task have no personal relevance beyond the experiment, and where they will be required to update their belief about the current state of affairs based upon a repeated and varying diet of desirable and undesirable evidence. We then situated this bias in the dual-process framework of judgment and decision-making by manipulating the time participants take to make their judgment in our task (Experiments 4a and 4b), by manipulating participants' cognitive load (Experiment 5), and by manipulating participants' thinking style—the weight participants put on the contribution from each type of processing—with an essay writing prime (Experiments 6a and 6b). On the whole, the results show that automatic processes alone are sufficient for wishful thinking. Though controlled, Type 2 processing inhibits the bias when induced to play a role, it does not typically contribute to the bias, either antagonistically or complementarily, absent such an inducement. Far from being an occasional, effortful rationalization that thrives on evidential complexity and uncertain costs, the wishful thinking bias we engendered is a simple, biased, belief updating process that operates automatically and beneath our awareness. / Psychology

Human brains flexibly combine the meanings of individual words to compose structured thoughts. For example, by combining the meanings of ‘bite’, ‘dog’, and ‘man’, we can think either of a dog biting a man, or the newsworthy case of a man biting a dog (Pinker, 1997). Here, in three functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) experiments, we identify a region of left-mid Superior Temporal Cortex (lmSTC) that represents the current values of abstract semantic variables (“Who did it?” and “To whom was it done?”) in anatomically distinct sub-regions. Experiment 1 first identifies a broad region of lmSTC whose activity patterns (a) facilitate decoding of who did what to whom and (b) predict affective amygdala responses that depend on this information (e.g. “the baby kicked the grandfather” vs. “the grandfather kicked the baby”). Experiment 2 then identifies distinct, but neighboring, sub-regions of lmSTC whose activity patterns carry information about the identity of the current agent (“Who did it?”) and the current patient (“To whom was it done?”). These neighboring sub-regions lie along the upper bank of the superior temporal sulcus and the lateral bank of the superior temporal gyrus, respectively. At a high-level, these regions may function like topographically defined data registers, encoding the fluctuating values of abstract semantic variables. Experiment 3 replicates the agent/patient topography of Experiment 2, and further suggests that these variables do not represent the grammatical relations of the sentence, but the semantic relations of the participants in the event described. The code by which lmSTC encodes the values of these variables remains unclear, however. We find no positive evidence that it is either phonological or semantic, leaving open the possibility that lmSTC prioritizes distinctiveness and efficiency by using a compressed code. This functional architecture, which in key respects resembles that of a classical computer, may play a critical role in enabling humans to flexibly generate complex thoughts. / Psychology

Grief is a syndrome of cognitions, emotions, and behaviors that commonly arise together following the death of a loved one. It includes intense pangs of emotional pain, yearning for the deceased, emotional numbness, subjective difficulty imagining the future without the deceased, and preoccupation with thoughts related to the death and the deceased. In the initial months following loss, the majority of bereaved adults will experience some or even many elements of this syndrome. For most, the frequency and severity of these elements diminishes over time. However, for some, grief persists for years after the loss; a condition known as complicated grief (CG). These distinct grief trajectories raise a critically important question for grief research: why does grief persist in some individuals, but not others? In this dissertation, I aimed to take an initial step toward answering this question. I first review recent advances in our understanding of the nature of CG and discuss the implications of these advances for research examining the etiology of CG. Most notably, I review how vulnerability factors that render bereaved adults susceptible to experiencing specific elements of the CG syndrome may contribute to the development or maintenance of CG. I then present three studies in which I examined cognitive impairments that may act as vulnerability factors for the core cognitive elements of CG and, thereby, may contribute to the broader CG syndrome. In Paper 1, I examined the ability to resist distracter information and the ability to resist proactive interference; two types of cognitive inhibition that, if impaired, may render bereaved adults vulnerable to experiencing intrusive grief-related cognitions and, thus, the broader CG syndrome. Contrary to my hypotheses, I found no evidence that bereaved adults with CG exhibit deficits in either type of cognitive inhibition for either emotional or non-emotional information relative to a bereaved comparison group without CG. In Paper 2, I examined another type of cognitive control: the ability to shift between mental representations. Contrary to my hypotheses, bereaved adults with CG did not exhibit deficits in cognitive set shifting for either emotional or non-emotional information. In Paper 3, I examined the ability to engage in episodic simulation of novel future events. Consistent with my hypotheses, bereaved adults with CG produced event simulations with fewer episodic details, less perceptual richness, less emotion/thought content, and less episodic richness than did the bereaved comparison group. Together, these studies provide a small step toward identifying cognitive vulnerabilities that may contribute to the development or maintenance of CG. Papers 1 and 2 suggest that general deficits in cognitive control are unlikely to feature prominently in the etiology of CG. Accordingly, in future studies, it will be important for researchers to examine alternative factors that may contribute to the preoccupying grief-related cognitions observed in CG, including cognitive control for more specific types of information than were assessed in this study (e.g., attachment- or grief-related information) and higher-order cognitive variables such as perceived explicability of the loss. Paper 3 providers further evidence that prospection is impaired in bereaved adults with CG and identifies impaired constructive episodic simulation of novel future events as a potential cognitive vulnerability that may contribute to the etiology of the broader CG syndrome. / Psychology

This dissertation examines young children’s acceptance of, memory for, and doubts about counterintuitive claims. In Study 1, children aged 3- to 5-years in the United States and China were asked to categorize hybrids whose perceptual features originated from two different animals or two different objects (75% from one and 25% from the other). At first, most children categorized the hybrids in terms of their predominant perceptual features. However, after hearing counter-perceptual categorizations by an adult, children categorized fewer hybrids in terms of their predominant features. When retested 1-to 2-weeks later, the adult’s earlier counter-intuitive categorizations still impacted children’s categorizations but less strongly. In Study 2, American children aged 3- to 6-years were presented with three different-sized Russian dolls and asked to say which doll was the heaviest. Most children pointed to the biggest doll. They were then told that the smallest doll was the heaviest and that the biggest was the lightest, a claim that was false. Most children subsequently endorsed this claim. Nevertheless, when the experimenter left the room, older children were likely to check it by lifting the biggest and smallest dolls. Younger children rarely conducted such checks. In Study 3, Chinese preschool and elementary school children were presented with five different-sized Russian dolls and asked to indicate the heaviest doll. Half of the children then heard a false, counter-intuitive claim (i.e., smallest = heaviest). The remaining children heard a claim confirming their intuitions (i.e., biggest = heaviest). Again, most children endorsed the experimenter’s claim even when it was counter-intuitive. During the experimenter’s subsequent absence, elementary school children explored the dolls more if they had received counter-intuitive rather than confirming testimony. Preschool children rarely explored no matter what testimony they had received. On the experimenter’s return, children who had explored the dolls were likely to reject her counter-intuitive claim. Thus, counterintuitive claims can overturn children’s beliefs but their influence fades over time and is moderated by children’s opportunities to search for empirical evidence. Across two cultures, older children were more inclined than younger children to use opportunities to seek empirical evidence to check counterintuitive claims.

The external structure and internal boundaries of the moral domain are not sharply defined. Substantive definitions of morality struggle to cleanly encapsulate the full diversity of human moral concern without including too much to retain correspondence to folk understandings, while functionalist definitions are complex and difficult to implement in study. Psychological work in 20th century often assumed morality was a single domain concerned primarily with transgression types emphasized in Western academia. Recent brain-imaging work has suggested that morality may in fact comprise multiple sub-domains, corresponding to moral natural kinds which cover a more diverse spectrum of topics than Western morality is typically concerned with (Parkinson et al., 2011). Moral Foundations Theory (MFT), which takes an evolutionary functionalist approach, is a promising candidate structure for this expanded moral domain. Here I probe the structure of the moral domain in exploratory fashion for correlates to the foundations of MFT in patterns of brain activation in response to moral stimuli generated and categorized by survey respondents. Activation contrasts are used to identify regions of differential activity between the putative foundations. Conjunctive overlaps between foundation contrasts are compared in order to establish which foundations behave similarly to one another relative to the other foundations in the set. Neither the 5-factor structure of MFT nor its coarser 2-factor structure is upheld. Instead, a semi-polarized scheme is suggested, with harm-preventative and purity-maintaining moral types occupying the extremes and more interpersonal foundations grouped together in between and less clearly delineated than previously assumed.

<p> It was not known if and to what extent there was a relationship exists between an affirmative presence of insomnia and less need for sleep to cognitive impairments in bipolar disorder type 1 patient population. Lacanian topology and memory consolidation theory provides a comprehensive theoretical foundation for this quantitative correlational study design to determine whether a correlation exists between impaired sleep and cognitive impairments in BP-1 patients. This study included a convenience sample of 286 BP-1 patients collected from the Genetics of Bipolar Disorder in Latino population study. The Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia Change in Symptomology was used to measure presence of insomnia and decrease need for sleep, and the South Texas Assessment of Neurocognition was used to measure cognitive functioning related to verbal memory, spatial memory, attention, executive function, speed of processing and inhibition. Spearman&rsquo;s rank order correlation analysis was conducted to answer the first and second research questions, and multiple regression to answer the third research question. The results of the study showed significant inverse correlations between insomnia, speed of processing (<i>rs</i> = -.129; <i>p</i> = .029), executive functioning (<i>r_s</i> = -.116; <i>p</i> = .05), decreased need for sleep and speed of processing (<i>r_s</i> = -.118; <i>p</i> = .046). Moreover, it revealed that insomnia and decreased need for sleep as a set were significant predictors for the speed of processing, <i>F</i> (2, 283) = 3.08, <i> p</i> = .048. The findings of this study added to the literature on how sleep disturbances effects cognitive functioning in BP-1 patients and resulted in several implications for clinicians and researchers.</p><p>

Abstract not available.

Abstract not available.