Wandering tales: evolutionary origins of mental time travel and language

Greater reliance on model-free learning in adolescent anorexia nervosa: An examination of dual-system reinforcement learning

Alterations in learning and decision-making systems are thought to contribute to core features of anorexia nervosa (AN), a psychiatric disorder characterized by persistent dietary restriction and weight loss. Instrumental learning theory identifies a dual-system of habit and goal-directed decision-making, linked to model-free and model-based reinforcement learning algorithms. Difficulty arbitrating between these systems, resulting in an over-reliance on one strategy over the other, has been implicated in compulsivity and extreme goal pursuit, both of which are observed in AN. Characterizing alterations in model-free and model-based systems, and their neural correlates, in AN may clarify mechanisms contributing to symptom heterogeneity (e.g., binge/purge symptoms). This study tested whether adolescents with restricting AN (AN-R; n = 36) and binge/purge AN (AN-BP; n = 20) differentially utilized model-based and model-free learning systems compared to a healthy control group (HC; n = 28) during a Markov two-step decision-making task under conditions of reward and punishment. Associations between model-free and model-based learning and resting-state functional connectivity between neural regions of interest, including orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), nucleus accumbens (NAcc), putamen, and sensory motor cortex (SMC) were examined. AN-R showed higher utilization of model-free learning compared to HC for reward, but attenuated model-free and model-based learning for punishment. In AN-R only, higher model-based learning was associated with stronger OFC-to-left NAcc functional connectivity, regions linked to goal-directed behavior. Greater utilization of model-free learning for reward in AN-R may differentiate this group, particularly during adolescence, and facilitate dietary restriction by prioritizing habitual control in rewarding contexts.

Touching and being touched: where knowing and feeling meet

Philosophers maintain that touch confers a sense of reality or grounding to perceptual experience. In touching oneself, one is simultaneously both subject and object of touch, a template for experiencing oneself as subject and object of intentions, feelings, and motivations, or intersubjectivity. Here, I explore a form of self-touch carefully documented by Winnicott in observing how the infant engages the transitional object. I compare the processes of self-loss in transitional states, including absorption in art, empathic immersion, drug-induced ego dissolution, and depersonalization. I use examples drawn from Rodin, Dante, and the Beatles; research correlating neurophysiological findings with aspects of self-representation; predictive processing-based models; Hohwy's concepts of minimal and narrative self; Clark's notion of the extended mind; and phenomenological perspectives on touch, to postulate a role for self-touch in the pre-reflective sense of mine-ness, or grounding, in transitional states.

Prevalence and global estimates of unsafe listening practices in adolescents and young adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis

INTRODUCTION

This study aimed to determine the prevalence of unsafe listening practices from exposure to personal listening devices (PLDs) and loud entertainment venues in individuals aged 12-34 years, and to estimate the number of young people who could be at risk of hearing loss from unsafe listening worldwide.

METHODS

We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to estimate the prevalence of unsafe listening practices from PLDs and loud entertainment venues. We searched three databases for peer-reviewed articles published between 2000 and 2021 that reported unsafe listening practices in individuals aged 12-34 years. Pooled prevalence estimates (95% CI) of exposed populations were calculated using random effects models or ascertained from the systematic review. The number of young people who could be at risk of hearing loss worldwide was estimated from the estimated global population aged 12-34 years, and best estimates of exposure to unsafe listening ascertained from this review.

RESULTS

Thirty-three studies (corresponding to data from 35 records and 19 046 individuals) were included; 17 and 18 records focused on PLD use and loud entertainment venues, respectively. The pooled prevalence estimate of exposure to unsafe listening from PLDs was 23.81% (95% CI 18.99% to 29.42%). There was limited certainty (p>0.50) in our pooled prevalence estimate for loud entertainment venues. Thus, we fitted a model as a function of intensity thresholds and exposure duration to identify the prevalence estimate as 48.20%. The global estimated number of young people who could be at risk of hearing loss from exposure to unsafe listening practices ranged from 0.67 to 1.35 billion.

CONCLUSIONS

Unsafe listening practices are highly prevalent worldwide and may place over 1 billion young people at risk of hearing loss. There is an urgent need to prioritise policy focused on safe listening. The World Health Organization provides comprehensive materials to aid in policy development and implementation.

Towards an animal model of consciousness based on the platform theory

The evolution of intellectual capacities has brought forth a continuum of consciousness levels subserved by neuronal networks of varying complexity. Brain pathologies, neurodegenerative, and mental diseases affect conscious cognition and behavior. Although impairments in consciousness are among the most devastating consequences of neurological and mental diseases, valid and reliable animal models of consciousness, that could be used for preclinical research are missing. The platform theory holds that the brain enters a conscious operation mode, whenever mental representations of stimuli, associations, concepts, memories, and experiences are effortfully maintained (in working memory) and actively manipulated. We used the platform theory as a framework and evaluation standard to categorize behavioral paradigms with respect to the level of consciousness involved in task performance. According to the platform theory, a behavioral paradigm involves conscious cognitive operations, when the problem posed is unexpected, novel or requires the maintenance and manipulation of a large amount of information to perform cognitive operations on them. Conscious cognitive operations are associated with a relocation of processing resources and the redirection of attentional focus. A consciousness behavioral test battery is proposed that is composed of tests which are assumed to require higher levels of consciousness as compared to other tasks and paradigms. The consciousness test battery for rodents includes the following tests: Working memory in the radial arm maze, episodic-like memory, prospective memory, detour test, and operant conditioning with concurrent variable-interval variable-ratio schedules. Performance in this test battery can be contrasted with the performance in paradigms and tests that require lower levels of consciousness. Additionally, a second more comprehensive behavioral test battery is proposed to control for behavioral phenotypes not related to consciousness. Our theory could serve as a guidance for the decryption of the neurobiological basis of consciousness.

The Ape That Lived to Tell the Tale. The Evolution of the Art of Storytelling and Its Relationship to Mental Time Travel and Theory of Mind

Engaging in the art of creating and telling stories is a defining behaviour of humankind. Humans have been sharing stories with each other, with and without words, since the dawn of recorded history, but the cognitive foundations of the behaviour can be traced deeper into our past. The emergence of stories can be strongly linked to Mental Time Travel (the ability to recall the past and imagine the future) and plays a key role in our ability to communicate past, present and future scenarios with other individuals, within and beyond our lifetimes. Stories are products engraved within the concept of time, constructed to elucidate the past experiences of the self, but designed with the future in mind, thus imparting lessons of such experiences to the receiver. By being privy to the experiences of others, humans can imagine themselves in a similar position to the protagonist of the story, thus mentally learning from an experience they might have never encountered other than in the mind's eye. Evolutionary Psychology investigates how the engagement in artistic endeavours by our ancestors in the Pleistocene granted them an advantage when confronted with obstacles that challenged their survival or reproductive fitness and questions whether art is an adaptation of the human mind or a spandrel of other cognitive adaptations. However, little attention has been placed on the cognitive abilities that might have been imperative for the development of art. Here, we examine the relationship between art, storytelling, Mental Time Travel and Theory of Mind (i.e., the ability to attribute mental states to others). We suggest that Mental Time Travel played a key role in the development of storytelling because through stories, humans can fundamentally transcend their present condition, by being able to imagine different times, separate realities, and place themselves and others anywhere within the time space continuum. We argue that the development of a Theory of Mind also sparked storytelling practises in humans as a method of diffusing the past experiences of the self to others whilst enabling the receiver to dissociate between the past experiences of others and their own, and to understand them as lessons for a possible future. We propose that when artistic products rely on storytelling in form and function, they ought to be considered separate from other forms of art whose appreciation capitalise on our aesthetic preferences.

The Impact of Mindfulness Meditation on the Wandering Mind: a Systematic Review

Through the practice of Mindfulness Meditation (MM), meditators become familiar with the observation of ongoing spontaneous thoughts, while maintaining an attitude of openness and equanimity. The aim of this systematic review is to present a synthesis of available findings of the short and long-term effects of MM on mind wandering (MW). We included studies that considered both first-person and behavioral/physiological measures of MW. The search resulted in 2035 papers, 24 of which were eligible. Reviewed studies revealed a high heterogeneity in designs, outcome measures and interventions. Most of the pre-post intervention studies showed that a protracted practice of MM (at least 2 weeks) reduced MW, limiting its negative effects on different cognitive tasks. Cross-sectional studies highlighted differences between expert meditators and naïve individuals: meditators self-reported less MW and showed decreased Default Mode Network activity, during meditation and resting-state. Further studies are needed to replicate available findings and to more deeply explore how MW is influenced by meditation, also considering its qualitative characteristics that remain largely unexplored.

Neurobiology and Spirituality in Addiction Recovery

This commentary explores the neurobiology of spirituality and asks whether it is possible or desirable to apply genetic engineering to increase human spiritual and religious experience - (gene-spirituality) to deal better with the ever-increasing catastrophes that face humanity? Neurological connections between spirituality and reward genes, reward deficiencies (RDS) (hypodopaminergia), the mirror neuron system, and the default mode network are examined. Some interventions from addiction medicine that may be useful to enhance the neuro-spirituality connectome identified as a cornerstone of the Purpose and Meaning of Life as Reward (PMLR) are identified as reasonable targets for interventions to treat RDS and balance DMN activity.

Congenitally decorticate children's potential and rights

This article is the first indepth ethical analysis of empirical studies that support the claim that children born without major parts of their cerebral cortex are capable of conscious experiences and have a rudimentary capacity for agency. Congenitally decorticate children have commonly been classified as persistently vegetative, with serious consequences for their well-being and opportunities to flourish. The paper begins with an explication of the rights-based normative framework of the argument, including conceptual analysis of the terms 'agency', 'potentiality for agency' and 'gradual approach of agency'. It critically examines Alan Gewirth's account of the criteria for being a rights bearer and principles for settling rights conflicts between agents and potential agents. It then applies the rights-based normative framework to the ethical challenges associated with care for congenitally decorticate children. It argues that recent empirical studies support the claim that the concepts 'potential for agency' and 'capacity for rudimentary agency' apply to children who are born without major parts of their cerebral cortex. The article finally discusses important medical ethical implications of these results. It specifically focuses on congenitally decorticate children's preparatory rights to a stimulating intellectual and social environment.

Change in staff perspectives on indwelling urinary catheter use after implementation of an intervention bundle in seven Swiss acute care hospitals: results of a before/after survey study

OBJECTIVE

To evaluate changes in staff perspectives towards indwelling urinary catheter (IUC) use after implementation of a 1-year quality improvement project.

DESIGN

Repeated cross-sectional survey at baseline (October 2016) and 12-month follow-up (October 2017).

SETTING

Seven acute care hospitals in Switzerland.

PARTICIPANTS

The survey was targeted at all nursing and medical staff members working at the participating hospitals at the time of survey distribution. A total of 1579 staff members participated in the baseline survey (T₀) (49% response rate) and 1527 participated in the follow-up survey (T₁) (47% response rate).

INTERVENTION

A multimodal intervention bundle, consisting of an evidence-based indication list, daily re-evaluation of ongoing catheter need and staff training, was implemented over the course of 9 months.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES

Staff knowledge (15 items), perception of current practices and culture (scale 1-7), self-reported responsibilities (multiple-response question) and determinants of behaviour (scale 1-7) before and after implementation of the intervention bundle.

RESULTS

The mean number of correctly answered knowledge questions increased significantly between the two survey periods (T₀: 10.4, T₁: 11.0; p<0.001). Self-reported responsibilities with regard to IUC management by nurses and physicians changed only slightly over time. Perception of current practices and culture in regard to safe urinary catheter use increased significantly (T₀: 5.3, T₁: 5.5; p<0.001). Significant changes were also observed for determinants of behaviour (T₀: 5.3, T₁: 5.6; p<0.001).

CONCLUSION

We found small but significant changes in staff perceptions after implementation of an evidence-based intervention bundle. Efforts now need to be targeted at sustaining and reinforcing these changes, so that restrictive use of IUCs becomes an integral part of the hospital culture.

Six decades of preventing and treating childhood anxiety disorders: a systematic review and meta-analysis to inform policy and practice

Question

Anxiety disorders are the most prevalent childhood mental disorders. They also start early and persist, causing high individual and collective costs. To inform policy and practice, we therefore asked: What is the best available research evidence on preventing and treating these disorders?

Methods

We sought randomised controlled trials (RCTs) evaluating interventions addressing anxiety problems in young people. We identified RCTs by searching CINAHL, ERIC, MEDLINE, PsycINFO and Web of Science. Thirty-three RCTs met inclusion criteria—evaluating 8 prevention programmes, 12 psychosocial treatments and 7 pharmacological treatments. We then conducted meta-analyses by intervention type.

Findings

For prevention, the cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) programme Coping and Promoting Strength stood out for reducing anxiety diagnoses. For psychosocial treatment, 9 CBT interventions also reduced diagnoses: Cool Kids; Cool Little Kids Plus Social Skills; Coping Cat; Coping Koala; One-Session Treatment; Parent Education Program; Skills for Academic and Social Success; Strongest Families and Timid to Tiger. Successful CBT interventions were used with children ranging from pre-schoolers to teens in homes, communities/schools and clinics. For pharmacological treatment, selective-serotonergic-reuptake-inhibitors (SSRIs) significantly improved symptoms. Fluoxetine stood out for also reducing post-test diagnoses, but caused adverse events. Meta-analyses indicated strongest effects for CBT (Log OR=0.95; 95% CI, 0.69 to 1.21) and SSRI treatments (1.57; 1.09 to 2.06).

Conclusions

CBT is effective for preventing and treating childhood anxiety—across a range of ages and formats. Fluoxetine is also an effective treatment but side effects must be managed. CBT prevention and treatment interventions should be made widely available, adding fluoxetine in severe cases.

Mental time travel in mild cognitive impairment

Introduction: Mental Time Travel (MTT) is the people's ability to remember themselves in the past and to imagine themselves in the future, and influence important life domains such as making decisions and planning future actions. It is widely recognized that patients with aMCI have deficits in episodic memory, but they also show impairments in semantic memory. It has been controversial whether MTT tasks are disturbed in aMCI mainly in relation to internal details related to episodic information, or external details, representing semantic and other extraneous information. The present study assessed whether patients with aMCI are affected in MTT regarding generation of internal details and external details, in past and future dimensions. Furthermore, it analyzed production in individual detail categories (internal: event details, thought/emotion, place, time, perceptual; external: extraneous events, semantic, other, repetitions). Method: Twenty-nine patients with aMCI and 29 healthy controls underwent a MTT task based on an Autobiographical Interview, where they had to generate past and future events in response to cue words. Transcriptions were segmented and classified into internal detail categories and external detail categories, and composite scores were obtained. Results: Patients with aMCI could globally produce significantly less details than controls. Similar to controls, patients with aMCI produced more internal details than external details, had more difficulty in generating details regarding the future as compared to the past, and scored higher in the detail categories event details and thought/emotion which represent internal detail types. Conclusions: Patients with aMCI showed widespread deficits in MTT, presumably reflecting deficiencies in the complex and multiple cognitive abilities required for MTT tasks.

Clinical subcategorization of minimally conscious state according to resting functional connectivity

Patients in minimally conscious state (MCS) have been subcategorized in MCS plus and MCS minus, based on command-following, intelligible verbalization or intentional communication. We here aimed to better characterize the functional neuroanatomy of MCS based on this clinical subcategorization by means of resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Resting state fMRI was acquired in 292 MCS patients and a seed-based analysis was conducted on a convenience sample of 10 MCS plus patients, 9 MCS minus patients and 35 healthy subjects. We investigated the left and right frontoparietal networks (FPN), auditory network, default mode network (DMN), thalamocortical connectivity and DMN between-network anticorrelations. We also employed an analysis based on regions of interest (ROI) to examine interhemispheric connectivity and investigated intergroup differences in gray/white matter volume by means of voxel-based morphometry. We found a higher connectivity in MCS plus as compared to MCS minus in the left FPN, specifically between the left dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex and left temporo-occipital fusiform cortex. No differences between patient groups were observed in the auditory network, right FPN, DMN, thalamocortical and interhemispheric connectivity, between-network anticorrelations and gray/white matter volume. Our preliminary group-level results suggest that the clinical subcategorization of MCS may involve functional connectivity differences in a language-related executive control network. MCS plus and minus patients are seemingly not differentiated by networks associated to auditory processing, perception of surroundings and internal awareness/self-mentation, nor by interhemispheric integration and structural brain damage.

Acute Stress Affects the Expression of Hippocampal Mu Oscillations in an Age-Dependent Manner

Anxiolytic drugs are widely used in the elderly, a population particularly sensitive to stress. Stress, aging and anxiolytics all affect low-frequency oscillations in the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex (PFC) independently, but the interactions between these factors remain unclear. Here, we compared the effects of stress (elevated platform, EP) and anxiolytics (diazepam, DZP) on extracellular field potentials (EFP) in the PFC, parietal cortex and hippocampus (dorsal and ventral parts) of adult (8 months) and aged (18 months) Wistar rats. A potential source of confusion in the experimental studies in rodents comes from locomotion-related theta (6-12 Hz) oscillations, which may overshadow the direct effects of anxiety on low-frequency and especially on the high-amplitude oscillations in the Mu range (7-12 Hz), related to arousal. Animals were restrained to avoid any confound and isolate the direct effects of stress from theta oscillations related to stress-induced locomotion. We identified transient, high-amplitude oscillations in the 7-12 Hz range ("Mu-bursts") in the PFC, parietal cortex and only in the dorsal part of hippocampus. At rest, aged rats displayed more Mu-bursts than adults. Stress acted differently on Mu-bursts depending on age: it increases vs. decreases burst, in adult and aged animals, respectively. In contrast DZP (1 mg/kg) acted the same way in stressed adult and age animal: it decreased the occurrence of Mu-bursts, as well as their co-occurrence. This is consistent with DZP acting as a positive allosteric modulator of GABA_A receptors, which globally potentiates inhibition and has anxiolytic effects. Overall, the effect of benzodiazepines on stressed animals was to restore Mu burst activity in adults but to strongly diminish them in aged rats. This work suggests Mu-bursts as a neural marker to study the impact of stress and DZP on age.

Coding of Event Nodes and Narrative Context in the Hippocampus

Narratives may provide a general context, unrestricted by space and time, which can be used to organize episodic memories into networks of related events. However, it is not clear how narrative contexts are represented in the brain. Here we test the novel hypothesis that the formation of narrative-based contextual representations in humans relies on the same hippocampal mechanisms that enable formation of spatiotemporal contexts in rodents. Participants watched a movie consisting of two interleaved narratives while we monitored their brain activity using fMRI. We used representational similarity analysis, a type of multivariate pattern analysis, which uses across-voxel correlations as a proxy for neural-pattern similarity, to examine whether the patterns of neural activity can be used to differentiate between narratives and recurring narrative elements, such as people and locations. We demonstrate that the neural activity patterns in the hippocampus differentiate between event nodes (people and locations) and narratives (different stories) and that these narrative-context representations diverge gradually over time akin to remapping-induced spatial maps represented by rodent place cells.

SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT

Narratives, especially in movie format, are very engaging and can be used to investigate neural mechanisms underlying cognitive functions in more naturalistic settings than that of traditional paradigms. Narratives also provide a more general context, unrestricted by space and time, that can be used to organize memories into networks of related events. For this reason, narratives are ideally suited to engage neural mechanisms underlying episodic memory formation. In this study, participants watched a movie with two interleaved narratives while their brain activity was monitored using fMRI. We show that the hippocampus, which is involved in formation of spatiotemporal contexts in episodic memory, also represents gradually diverging narrative contexts as well as narrative elements, such as people and locations.

Reflections on the "gesture-first" hypothesis of language origins

The main lines of evidence taken as support for the "gesture-first" hypothesis of language origins are briefly evaluated, and the problem that speech poses for this hypothesis is discussed. I conclude that language must have evolved in the oral-aural and kinesic modalities together, with neither modality taking precedence over the other.

Mind wandering and the attention network system

Attention and mind wandering are often seen as anticorrelated. However, both attention and mind wandering are multi-component processes, and their relationship may be more complex than previously thought. In this study, we tested the interference of different types of thoughts as measured by a Thought Identification Task - TIT (on task thoughts, task related interference thoughts, external distractions, stimulus independent and task unrelated thoughts) on different components of the attention network system - ANT (alerting, orienting, executive). Results show that, during the ANT, individuals were predominantly involved in task related interference thoughts which, along with external distractors, significantly impaired their performance accuracy. However, mind wandering (i.e., stimulus independent and task unrelated thoughts) did not significantly interfere with accuracy in the ANT. No significant relationship was found between type of thoughts and alerting, orienting, or executive effects in the ANT. While task related interference thoughts and external distractions seemed to impair performance on the attention task, mind wandering was still compatible with satisfactory performance in the ANT. The present results confirmed the importance of differentiating type of "out of task" thoughts in studying the relationship between though distractors and attention.

The ideomotor recycling theory for tool use, language, and foresight

The present theoretical framework highlights a common action-perception mechanism for tool use, spoken language, and foresight capacity. On the one hand, it has been suggested that human language and the capacity to envision the future (i.e. foresight) have, from an evolutionary viewpoint, developed mutually along with the pressure of tool use. This co-evolution has afforded humans an evident survival advantage in the animal kingdom because language can help to refine the representation of future scenarios, which in turn can help to encourage or discourage engagement in appropriate and efficient behaviours. On the other hand, recent assumptions regarding the evolution of the brain have capitalized on the concept of "neuronal recycling". In the domain of cognitive neuroscience, neuronal recycling means that during evolution, some neuronal areas and cognitive functions have been recycled to manage new environmental and social constraints. In the present article, we propose that the co-evolution of tool use, language, and foresight represents a suitable example of such functional recycling throughout a well-defined common action-perception mechanism, i.e. the ideomotor mechanism. This ideomotor account is discussed in light of different future ontogenetic and phylogenetic perspectives.

Evidence of Criterion Validity for One Pharmacy School's Progress Examination Program

Objective. To provide evidence that the progress examination program accurately assesses student failure to demonstrate competence. Methods. A progress examination program aligned with each grade level was locally developed and administered annually to 289 PharmD students in the spring of their first year - fourth year. Correlations and linear regressions were performed to compare the examination scores to performance on national licensing examinations and cumulative didactic grade point average (GPA). Odds ratio analysis was run to determine the ability of the passing scores of the progress examination to identify students at increased risk of failing to graduate on time, earn a GPA below 3.0, and fail the licensing examinations on their first attempt. Results. Progress examination scores were strongly correlated to GPA and national licensing examination scores and weakly correlated to jurisprudence examination scores. Regression analysis indicated a significant linear relationship between examination scores and both GPA and the licensing examinations. Students who performed poorly on the progress examinations were more likely fail the national licensing examination, more likely to fail to graduate on time, and more likely to earn a cumulative didactic GPA below 3.0. Conclusions. The second-year examination program strongly predicts students at risk for failure to graduate on time or achieve a GPA below 3.0, while all four examinations identify students at risk of failing the national licensing examination on their first attempt.

Prospection and the Present Moment: The Role of Episodic Foresight in Intertemporal Choices between Immediate and Delayed Rewards

Humans are capable of imagining future rewards and the contexts in which they may be obtained. Functionally, intertemporal choices between smaller but immediate and larger but delayed rewards may be made without such episodic foresight. However, we propose that explicit simulations of this sort enable more flexible and adaptive intertemporal decision-making. Emotions triggered through the simulation of future situations can motivate people to forego immediate pleasures in the pursuit of long-term rewards. However, we stress that the most adaptive option need not always be a larger later reward. When the future is anticipated to be uncertain, for instance, it may make sense for preferences to shift toward more immediate rewards, instead. Imagining potential future scenarios and assessment of their likelihood and affective consequences allows humans to determine when it is more adaptive to delay gratification in pursuit of a larger later reward, and when the better strategy is to indulge in a present temptation. We discuss clinical studies that highlight when and how the effect of episodic foresight on intertemporal decision-making can be altered, and consider the relevance of this perspective to understanding the nature of self-control.

The ecology of human fear: survival optimization and the nervous system

We propose a Survival Optimization System (SOS) to account for the strategies that humans and other animals use to defend against recurring and novel threats. The SOS attempts to merge ecological models that define a repertoire of contextually relevant threat induced survival behaviors with contemporary approaches to human affective science. We first propose that the goal of the nervous system is to reduce surprise and optimize actions by (i) predicting the sensory landscape by simulating possible encounters with threat and selecting the appropriate pre-encounter action and (ii) prevention strategies in which the organism manufactures safe environments. When a potential threat is encountered the (iii) threat orienting system is engaged to determine whether the organism ignores the stimulus or switches into a process of (iv) threat assessment, where the organism monitors the stimulus, weighs the threat value, predicts the actions of the threat, searches for safety, and guides behavioral actions crucial to directed escape. When under imminent attack, (v) defensive systems evoke fast reflexive indirect escape behaviors (i.e., fight or flight). This cascade of responses to threat of increasing magnitude are underwritten by an interconnected neural architecture that extends from cortical and hippocampal circuits, to attention, action and threat systems including the amygdala, striatum, and hard-wired defensive systems in the midbrain. The SOS also includes a modulatory feature consisting of cognitive appraisal systems that flexibly guide perception, risk and action. Moreover, personal and vicarious threat encounters fine-tune avoidance behaviors via model-based learning, with higher organisms bridging data to reduce face-to-face encounters with predators. Our model attempts to unify the divergent field of human affective science, proposing a highly integrated nervous system that has evolved to increase the organism's chances of survival.

Storytelling, behavior planning, and language evolution in context

An attempt is made to specify the structure of the hominin bands that began steps to language. Storytelling could evolve without need for language yet be strongly subject to natural selection and could provide a major feedback process in evolving language. A storytelling model is examined, including its effects on the evolution of consciousness and the possible timing of language evolution. Behavior planning is presented as a model of language evolution from storytelling. The behavior programming mechanism in both directions provide a model of creating and understanding behavior and language. Culture began with societies, then family evolution, family life in troops, but storytelling created a culture of experiences, a final step in the long process of achieving experienced adults by natural selection. Most language evolution occurred in conversations where evolving non-verbal feedback ensured mutual agreements on understanding. Natural language evolved in conversations with feedback providing understanding of changes.

Sharing mental simulations and stories: hippocampal contributions to discourse integration

Accumulating evidence suggests that mental simulation of the future and past relies on common processes supported by the hippocampus. However, it is currently unknown whether the hippocampus also supports the ability to share these mental simulations with others. Recently, it has been proposed that language and language-related structures in the brain are particularly important for communicating information not tied to the immediate environment, and indeed specifically evolved so that humans could share their mental time travels into the future and the past with others. The current study investigated whether processes supported by the hippocampus are necessary for effectively communicating the contents of one's mental simulations by examining the discourse of amnesic patients with medial temporal lobe damage. In Experiment 1 we tested whether patients can produce integrated discourse about future and past events by measuring lower-level discourse cohesion and higher-level discourse coherence. Striking reductions in both measures were observed in amnesic patients' narratives about novel future events and experienced past events. To investigate whether these deficits simply reflected concurrent reductions in narrative content, in Experiment 2 we examined the status of discourse integration in patients' verbal narratives about pictures, which contained an equivalent amount of narrative content as controls'. Discourse cohesion and coherence deficits were also present when patients generated narratives based on pictures, and these deficits did not depend on the presence of neural damage outside the hippocampus. Together, these results reveal a pervasive linguistic integration deficit in amnesia that is not limited to discourse about the past or the future and is not simply secondary to reductions in narrative content. More broadly, this study demonstrates that the hippocampus supports the integration of individual narrative elements into coherent and cohesive discourse when constructing complex verbal accounts, and plays a critical role in the effective communication of information to others.

Does metarepresentation make human mental time travel unique?

Recent neurological evidence suggests that rats can mentally represent novel spatial trajectories and then are more likely to follow these paths in the future. Consequently, it has been proposed that human and nonhuman mental time travel capacities may differ in degree rather than kind. As of yet, however, there is no evidence for the crucial and qualitatively distinct component of metarepresentation in any nonhuman animal, not even our closest great ape relatives. Metarepresentation allows humans to represent the relationship between current reality and mere representations of reality-including those of the future. Drawing on parallels with dreaming and mind-wandering, I outline the future-oriented benefits associated with uncontextualized (non-metarepresentational) representations of past and novel events, but propose that further, immense benefits flowed from the addition of metarepresentational insight. I critique previous behavioral paradigms used to assess mental time travel in animals and suggest how future-oriented metarepresentation might possibly be demonstrated nonverbally. WIREs Cogn Sci 2014, 5:519-531. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1308 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

The author has declared no conflicts of interest for this article.

The myth of cognitive agency: subpersonal thinking as a cyclically recurring loss of mental autonomy

This metatheoretical paper investigates mind wandering from the perspective of philosophy of mind. It has two central claims. The first is that, on a conceptual level, mind wandering can be fruitfully described as a specific form of mental autonomy loss. The second is that, given empirical constraints, most of what we call “conscious thought” is better analyzed as a subpersonal process that more often than not lacks crucial properties traditionally taken to be the hallmark of personal-level cognition - such as mental agency, explicit, consciously experienced goal-directedness, or availability for veto control. I claim that for roughly two thirds of our conscious life-time we do not possess mental autonomy (M-autonomy) in this sense. Empirical data from research on mind wandering and nocturnal dreaming clearly show that phenomenally represented cognitive processing is mostly an automatic, non-agentive process and that personal-level cognition is an exception rather than the rule. This raises an interesting new version of the mind-body problem: How is subpersonal cognition causally related to personal-level thought? More fine-grained phenomenological descriptions for what we called “conscious thought” in the past are needed, as well as a functional decomposition of umbrella terms like “mind wandering” into different target phenomena and a better understanding of the frequent dynamic transitions between spontaneous, task-unrelated thought and meta-awareness. In an attempt to lay some very first conceptual foundations for the now burgeoning field of research on mind wandering, the third section proposes two new criteria for individuating single episodes of mind-wandering, namely, the “self-representational blink” (SRB) and a sudden shift in the phenomenological “unit of identification” (UI). I close by specifying a list of potentially innovative research goals that could serve to establish a stronger connection between mind wandering research and philosophy of mind.

A penny for your thoughts: dimensions of self-generated thought content and relationships with individual differences in emotional wellbeing

A core aspect of human cognition involves overcoming the constraints of the present environment by mentally simulating another time, place, or perspective. Although these self-generated processes confer many benefits, they can come at an important cost, and this cost is greater for some individuals than for others. Here we explore the possibility that the costs and benefits of self-generated thought depend, in part, upon its phenomenological content. To test these hypotheses, we first developed a novel thought sampling paradigm in which a large sample of young adults recalled several recurring thoughts and rated each thought on multiple content variables (i.e., valence, specificity, self-relevance, etc.). Next, we examined multi-level relationships among these content variables and used a hierarchical clustering approach to partition self-generated thought into distinct dimensions. Finally, we investigated whether these content dimensions predicted individual differences in the costs and benefits of the experience, assessed with questionnaires measuring emotional health and wellbeing. Individuals who characterized their thoughts as more negative and more personally significant scored higher on constructs associated with Depression and Trait Negative Affect, whereas those who characterized their thoughts as less specific scored higher on constructs linked to Rumination. In contrast, individuals who characterized their thoughts as more positive, less personally significant, and more specific scored higher on constructs linked to improved wellbeing (Mindfulness). Collectively, these findings suggest that the content of people’s inner thoughts can (1) be productively examined, (2) be distilled into several major dimensions, and (3) account for a large portion of variability in their functional outcomes.