Mapping the Mind and Brain

Photo at right: Phrenology Head
“Phrenology is an old theory which claims to be able to determine character, personality traits, and criminality on the basis of the shape of the head.”

Phrenology bust photo by Scott Spencer.

We begin our quest to understand people by looking at the mind and brain. Insight into the minds and brains of people is necessary to understanding their behavior. SBS researchers are examining how our brain physiology influences our actions -- how we develop depression and memory loss, why we act with aggression, how we develop stereotypes, what influences decision making, and much more. They are also looking at the brain/mind connection: trying to understand how the physiology of the brain translates into our representations of the world.

UA psychology researchers have made fundamental discoveries about brain structure and physiology alterations that accompany memory changes in normal aging. These discoveries resulted in a $5 million award from the McKnight Brain Research Foundation to establish The Evelyn F. McKnight Brain Institute for the study of the neural basis for cognitive changes that occur during normal aging.

UA psychology researchers are investigating whether a particular brain wave physiology marker, called frontal electroencephalographic asymmetry, is useful in identifying people who are at risk for depression.

A UA philosopher argues that the key to understanding human consciousness may lie in the online integration of thoughts about the world and thoughts about oneself.

UA psychologists discovered how negative stereotypes reduce the academic test performance of women and minorities by interfering with a specific aspect of memory capacity. This phenomenon is called “stereotyping threat.“

A UA philosopher is working on a general theory of rationality and using it to create an artificial rational agent called OSCAR. OSCAR, which was created with the help of funds from the National Science Foundation, is based upon a general purpose defeasible reasoner capable of operating in a rich logical environment. Defeasible reasoning consists of drawing reasonable conclusions that the reasoner may have to take back later when it gets more information. One possible application for the system is planetary explorers, which need to make decisions based on unique environments.

The golden mean proportion refers to a division of line or figure where the ratio of a smaller section to the larger section is the same as the ratio of the larger section to the whole (1:1.618...). This proportion shows up in nature (as demonstrated by the shell of a nautilus) and in constructions by humans (such as in Greek architecture).

It has long been known that people prefer rectangle shapes in a ratio of about 1.62:1, the so-called “golden mean rectangle.” Artists from various periods tend to choose that ratio to frame landscapes. While many studies have confirmed this, no one has offered a psychological explanation for the preference. UA linguists and psychologists have shown that depth perception is increased when scenes are presented in frames using the golden mean rectangle.

A UA communication researcher has examined our mental models for communication between younger and older people, showing that younger and older people have fairly fixed images of how such conversations “work.“ The researcher has shown that sometimes grandparents and grandchildren deal with one another in terms of these images, thus treating one another more as representatives of age groups than as members of the same family. Young people who have more diverse relationships with their grandparents (e.g., one grandparent they love, one they do not get along with) also have more diverse perceptions of older adults as a group.

UA psychologists look at how people form, retain and recollect memories, and how the brain’s records of these memories change over time. They use functional MRI to map regions of the brain that mediate recollection of autobiographic memories. Thus far, their results indicate that the same brain areas important for establishing episode memories remain important in recollecting them at much later times.

UA psychologists have developed new methods of measuring the degree to which people with Alzheimer’s disease are aware of their impairments and have shown this aspect of self-awareness to be dependent upon the integrity of the brain’s frontal lobes.

One of the puzzles of language structure is why words stay as different from one another as they do. Humans tend to cut corners in speech, mumbling and otherwise making words less distinct, suggesting that words should slowly get simpler and more alike over time. A UA linguist has run computer simulations that suggest that words compete with one another in a way very similar to species that share the same environment. His work suggests that words that are more distinct from other words have a greater selective advantage, thus counteracting any other pressures for words to become more alike. This finding may help us to understand the general properties of mental categories beyond language.

UA psychologists invented the first neurophysiological method for the recording of neuronal activity simultaneously from nearly 600 individual microelectrodes in the awake monkey brain. This technology provides an unprecedented new window on the ability to measure neuronal population activity.

UA psychologists have developed an influential theory of the role of the hippocampus in spatial memory.

UA psychologists have discovered what may be the neurophysiological basis of how older humans and other animals become lost.

A UA philosopher is exploring the concept of virtue ethics, a vigorous new area of ethical theory, where new connections have emerged with work in psychology. She rebuts claims by other philosophers who assert that results in ‘situationist’ social psychology undermine the central ideas of virtue ethics.

The Tower of Hanoi is a puzzle that is often used to determine things like speed and problem solving in cognitive tasks.

Using the cognitive task the Tower of Hanoi to assess frontal lobe functioning, researchers in the Southwest Institute for Research on Women, in collaboration with researchers from the College of Education, compared substance-abusing youth with a control group of resilient youth. Results indicated that the substance-abusing groups made more moves and spent less time per move - a strategy that could be considered impulsive. The researchers are exploring whether this impulsivity is a result of substance abuse or whether it is a predictor for substance abuse, along with whether experimentation with substances can, in part, be correlated with brain immaturity.

Did you know? Cognitive Science is the interdisciplinary study of the mind, encompassing the study of intelligent behavior as well as the brain mechanisms and computations underlying that behavior. The UA Cognitive Science Program has participation from 50 faculty members from nine different UA departments. Discussion between various units such as psychology, linguistics, philosophy, computer science and neuroscience is facilitated through conferences and brown bag seminars.

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