Combining novel trait and neurocognitive frameworks to parse heterogeneity in borderline personality disorder

OBJECTIVE

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) diagnosis comprises several constellations of trait, neurocognitive, and psychosocial alterations. Dimensional models of psychopathology provide new opportunities to parse heterogeneity and create a stronger interface between individual characterization and psychosocial outcomes. However, dimensional models have focused on either traits or neurocognitive features, lacking integration to capture the multifaceted nature of BPD.

METHOD

We assessed 100 participants with BPD using a combination of tools stemming from trait (Alternative Model for Personality Disorders) and neurocognitive models (Research Domain Criteria; RDoC) to examine if trait-derived subgroups display distinctive social-processing and psychosocial profiles. We used two complementary analytical approaches: person-centered (k-means clustering) and construct-based (multiple factor analysis).

RESULTS

Our person-centered approach identified four subgroups with separable internalizing, detached, externalizing, and low psychopathology trait profiles. These profiles revealed distinctive patterns of affiliation, emotion recognition and mentalization performance in RDoC tasks, and psychosocial measures of quality of life and social connectedness. RDoC-based measures showed close construct proximity with negative affectivity, disinhibition, and antagonism trait domains, relative to the detachment domain, which had close proximity with self-knowledge.

CONCLUSIONS

Altogether, findings support consilience between trait-based and neurobiological frameworks and suggest that trait models are useful to parse BPD heterogeneity leading to unique social functioning profiles.

Accelerating scientific progress through Bayesian adversarial collaboration

Adversarial collaboration has been championed as the gold standard for resolving scientific disputes but has gained relatively limited traction in neuroscience and allied fields. In this perspective, we argue that adversarial collaborative research has been stymied by an overly restrictive concern with the falsification of scientific theories. We advocate instead for a more expansive view that frames adversarial collaboration in terms of Bayesian belief updating, model comparison, and evidence accumulation. This framework broadens the scope of adversarial collaboration to accommodate a wide range of informative (but not necessarily definitive) studies while affording the requisite formal tools to guide experimental design and data analysis in the adversarial setting. We provide worked examples that demonstrate how these tools can be deployed to score theoretical models in terms of a common metric of evidence, thereby furnishing a means of tracking the amount of empirical support garnered by competing theories over time.

Depersonalization affects self-prioritization of bodily, but not abstract self-related information

Depersonalization is a common and distressing experience characterized by a feeling of estrangement from one's self, body, and the world. In order to examine the relationship between depersonalization and selfhood we conducted an experimental study comparing processing of three types of self-related information between nonclinical groups of people experiencing high and low levels of depersonalization. Using a sequential matching task, we compared three types of biases for processing of self-related information: prioritization of one's name, of self-associated abstract stimuli (geometrical shapes), and of self-associated bodily stimuli (avatar faces). We found that both groups demonstrated the standard pattern of results for self-prioritization of one's name and geometrical shapes, but they differed with regard to avatar faces. While people with low depersonalization showed the standard prioritization of avatar faces, people with high depersonalization showed overall better response accuracy with avatar faces, and faster response times for stranger-associated avatar faces. These results were complemented by the additional finding that people with high depersonalization reported being more likely to use avatars of a different gender to their own outside of the experimental context. Finally, in this large sample (N = 180) we investigated the relationships between different measures of self-related processing and self-identification, finding no correlation between explicit reports of self-identification with self-associated avatar faces and geometrical shapes, self-prioritization of these stimuli, and prioritization of one's name. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Do contemplative practices make us more moral?

Contemplative practices are a staple of modern life and have historically been intertwined with morality. However, do these practices in fact improve our morality? The answer remains unclear because the science of contemplative practices has focused on unidimensional aspects of morality, which do not align with the type of interdependent moral functioning these practices aspire to cultivate. Here, we appeal to a multifactor construct, which allows the assessment of outcomes from a contemplative intervention across multiple dimensions of moral cognition and behavior. This offers an open-minded and empirically rigorous investigation into the impact of contemplative practices on moral actions. Using this framework, we gain insight into the effect of mindfulness meditation on morality, which we show does indeed have positive influences, but also some negative influences, distributed across our moral functioning.

Fenneman et al.'s (2022) review of formal impulsivity models: Implications for theory and measures of impulsivity

In Fenneman et al.'s (2022) review of theories and integrated impulsivity model, the authors distinguish between information impulsivity (i.e., acting without considering consequences) and temporal impulsivity (i.e., the tendency to pick sooner outcomes over later ones). The authors find that both types of impulsivity can be adaptive in different contexts. For example, when individuals experience scarcity of resources or when they are close to a minimum level of reserves (critical threshold). In this commentary, we extend their findings to a discussion about the measurement of impulsivity. We argue that a common method for measuring temporal impulsivity in which people make decisions between outcomes that are spaced out in time (intertemporal choice tasks), puts individuals in a specific context that is unlikely to generalize well to other situations. Furthermore, trait measures of impulsivity may only be modestly informative about future impulsive behavior because they largely abstract away from important context. To address these issues, we advocate for the development of dynamic measures of the two types of impulsivity. We argue that measuring temporal impulsivity in naturalistic contexts with varying environmental and state parameters could provide insights into whether individuals (i.e., humans and nonhuman animals) react to environmental changes adaptively, while trait measures of impulsivity more generally should collect and provide more contextual information. Dynamic measurement of different types of impulsivity will also allow for more discussion about adaptive impulsive responses in different contexts, which could help combat the stigmatization of various disorders associated with impulsivity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Episodic future thinking and compassion reduce non-compliance urges regarding public health guidelines: a randomised controlled trial

BACKGROUND

People often feel urges to engage in activities that violate pandemic public health guidelines. Research on these urges has been reliant on measures of typical behaviour, which fail to capture these urges as they unfold. Guideline adherence could be improved through interventions, but few methods allow for ecologically valid observation of the range of behaviours that pandemic guidelines prescribe.

METHODS

In this preregistered parallel randomised trial, 95 participants aged 18-65 from the UK were assigned to three groups using blinded block randomisation, and engaged in episodic future thinking (n = 33), compassion exercises (n = 31), or a control procedure (n = 31). Following an ecological momentary assessment procedure, participants report on the intensity of their occurrent urges (min. 1, max. 10) and their ability to control them. The study further investigates whether, and through which mechanism, state impulsivity and vaccine attitudes affect guideline adherence.

RESULTS

Episodic future thinking (b = -1.80) and compassion exercises (b = -1.45) reduced the intensity of urges. State impulsivity is associated with stronger urges, but we found no evidence that vaccine hesitancy predicts lesser self-control.

CONCLUSIONS

We conclude that episodic future thinking exercises and compassion training may be used to decrease non-compliance urges of individuals who are an acute public health risk for the community, such as those in voluntary isolation.

Modelling pandemic behaviour using an economic multiplayer game

During a pandemic, isolating oneself from the community limits viral transmission and helps avoid repeated societal lockdowns. This entails a social dilemma—either distance oneself from others for the benefit of the public good or free-ride and enjoy the benefits of freedom. It is not yet understood how the unfamiliar incentive structure and interpersonal context presented by a pandemic together modulate individuals’ approach to this social dilemma. In this preregistered study, we take a game-theoretical approach and investigate people’s decisions to self-isolate, using a novel iterated multiplayer game designed to capture the decision-making environment in the pandemic. To elucidate players’ thinking, we use a variation of the strategy method and elicit beliefs about how much others will self-isolate. Players tend to respond to social norms with abidance, rather than transgression; they resist the temptation to freeride when others are self-isolating. However, they deal with exponential growth poorly, as they only self-isolate sufficiently when lockdowns are imminent. Further, increased collective risk can motivate more self-isolation, even though the link between self-isolation and lockdowns is stochastic. Players underreport the influence of others’ choices on their own, and underestimate others’ self-isolation. We discuss implications for public health, and communication to the public.

How selves differ within and across cognitive domains: self-prioritisation, self-concept, and psychiatric traits

Background

How we build and maintain representations of ourselves involves both explicit features which are consciously accessible on reflection and implicit processes which are not, such as attentional biases. Understanding relations between different ways of measuring self-cognition both within and across such cognitive domains is important for understanding how selves may differ from one another, and whether self-cognition is best understood as largely uni-dimensional or more multi-dimensional. Further, uncovering this structure should inform research around how self-cognition relates to psychiatric and psychological conditions. This study explores the relations between different constructs of self-cognition and how variability within them relates to psychiatric traits.

Methods

Our final dataset includes within-subject (n = 288, general population) measures of explicit self-concept (using both the Self Concept Clarity Scale and Self Concept and Identity Measure), implicit self-prioritisation in a shape-label matching task (for both reaction time and sensitivity) and measurement of traits for five psychiatric conditions (autism, borderline personality disorder, schizophrenia, depression and anxiety). We first test whether self-cognitive measures within and across domains are correlated within individuals. We then test whether these dimensions of self-cognition support a binary distinction between psychiatric conditions that either are or are not characterised in terms of self, or whether they support self-cognition as transdiagnostically predictive of the traits associated with psychiatric conditions. To do this we run a series of planned correlations, regressions, and direct correlation comparison statistics.

Results

Results show that implicit self-prioritisation measures were not correlated with the explicit self-concept measures nor the psychiatric trait measures. In contrast, all the psychiatric traits scores were predicted, to varying degrees, by poorer explicit self-concept quality. Specifically, borderline personality disorder traits were significantly more strongly associated with composite explicit self-concept measures than any of depression, anxiety, or autism traits scores were.

Conclusions

Our results suggest that selves can differ considerably, along different cognitive dimensions. Further, our results show that self-cognition may be a promising feature to include in future dimensional characterisations of psychiatric conditions, but care should be taken to choose relevant self-cognitive domains.

State impulsivity amplifies urges without diminishing self-control

A disproportionate amount of research on impulsivity has focused on trait-related aspects rather than state fluctuations. As a result, the relationship between state impulsivity and moment-to-moment behaviour is unclear. Impulsivity is assumed to negatively affect self-control, but an alternative explanation, yet to be tested, could be that changes in state impulsivity and its homeostatic drivers influence the intensity of urges. We tested whether state impulsivity and hunger affected behaviour through a dual-process model, affecting both the experience of various urges, and self-control, using a smartphone-based experience sampling approach. We found that state impulsivity is associated with stronger urges, but we found no evidence of an association with diminished self-control. Being hungry amplifies urges across different types of urges, and both hunger and late hours are negatively related to the likelihood of controlling urges. These findings imply that the influence of hunger is not limited to the food domain, and provide new insight into the role of state impulsivity in daily life.

Differences in working memory coding of biological motion attributed to oneself and others

The question how the brain distinguishes between information about self and others is of fundamental interest to both philosophy and neuroscience. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we sought to distinguish the neural substrates of representing a full‐body movement as one's movement and as someone else's movement. Participants performed a delayed match‐to‐sample working memory task where a retained full‐body movement (displayed using point‐light walkers) was arbitrarily labeled as one's own movement or as performed by someone else. By using arbitrary associations we aimed to address a limitation of previous studies, namely that our own movements are more familiar to us than movements of other people. A searchlight multivariate decoding analysis was used to test where information about types of movement and about self‐association was coded. Movement specific activation patterns were found in a network of regions also involved in perceptual processing of movement stimuli, however not in early sensory regions. Information about whether a memorized movement was associated with the self or with another person was found to be coded by activity in the left middle frontal gyrus (MFG), left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), bilateral supplementary motor area, and (at reduced threshold) in the left temporoparietal junction (TPJ). These areas are frequently reported as involved in action understanding (IFG, MFG) and domain‐general self/other distinction (TPJ). Finally, in univariate analysis we found that selecting a self‐associated movement for retention was related to increased activity in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex.

Zoomed out: digital media use and depersonalization experiences during the COVID-19 lockdown

Depersonalisation is a common dissociative experience characterised by distressing feelings of being detached or 'estranged' from one's self and body and/or the world. The COVID-19 pandemic forcing millions of people to socially distance themselves from others and to change their lifestyle habits. We have conducted an online study of 622 participants worldwide to investigate the relationship between digital media-based activities, distal social interactions and peoples' sense of self during the lockdown as contrasted with before the pandemic. We found that increased use of digital media-based activities and online social e-meetings correlated with higher feelings of depersonalisation. We also found that the participants reporting higher experiences of depersonalisation, also reported enhanced vividness of negative emotions (as opposed to positive emotions). Finally, participants who reported that lockdown influenced their life to a greater extent had higher occurrences of depersonalisation experiences. Our findings may help to address key questions regarding well-being during a lockdown, in the general population. Our study points to potential risks related to overly sedentary, and hyper-digitalised lifestyle habits that may induce feelings of living in one's 'head' (mind), disconnected from one's body, self and the world.

Expectations boost the reconstruction of auditory features from electrophysiological responses to noisy speech

Online speech processing imposes significant computational demands on the listening brain, the underlying mechanisms of which remain poorly understood. Here, we exploit the perceptual "pop-out" phenomenon (i.e. the dramatic improvement of speech intelligibility after receiving information about speech content) to investigate the neurophysiological effects of prior expectations on degraded speech comprehension. We recorded electroencephalography (EEG) and pupillometry from 21 adults while they rated the clarity of noise-vocoded and sine-wave synthesized sentences. Pop-out was reliably elicited following visual presentation of the corresponding written sentence, but not following incongruent or neutral text. Pop-out was associated with improved reconstruction of the acoustic stimulus envelope from low-frequency EEG activity, implying that improvements in perceptual clarity were mediated via top-down signals that enhanced the quality of cortical speech representations. Spectral analysis further revealed that pop-out was accompanied by a reduction in theta-band power, consistent with predictive coding accounts of acoustic filling-in and incremental sentence processing. Moreover, delta-band power, alpha-band power, and pupil diameter were all increased following the provision of any written sentence information, irrespective of content. Together, these findings reveal distinctive profiles of neurophysiological activity that differentiate the content-specific processes associated with degraded speech comprehension from the context-specific processes invoked under adverse listening conditions.

Waiting longer, feeling fatter: Effects of response delay on tactile distance estimation and confidence in females with anorexia nervosa

BACKGROUND

Research suggests that patients with anorexia nervosa (AN) exhibit differences in the perceptual processing of their own bodies. However, some researchers suggest that these differences are better explained with reference to non-perceptual factors, such as demand characteristics or emotional responses to the task. In this study, we investigated whether overestimation of tactile distances in participants with AN results from differences in tactile processing or non-perceptual factors, by measuring the role of allowed response time in an adapted version of the tactile distance estimation task (TDE-D). We further investigated the relationship between allowed response time and participants' confidence in their tactile judgments.

METHOD

Our sample consisted of females: participants with AN (n = 30), recovered (REC) participants (n = 29) and healthy controls (HC) (n = 31). Participants were asked to estimate tactile distances presented on the skin of either a salient (abdomen) or non-salient (arm) body part, either directly after stimulus presentation (direct condition) or after a 5 s delay (delayed condition). Confidence of estimation accuracy was measured after each response.

RESULTS

Results showed that allowing AN and REC more time to respond caused them to estimate tactile distances as larger. Additionally, participants with AN became less confident when given more time to respond.

CONCLUSIONS

These results suggest that non-perceptual influences cause participants with AN to increase their estimates of tactile distances and become less certain of these estimates. We speculate that previous findings-where participants with AN estimate tactile distances as larger than HC-may be due to non-perceptual differences.

Cory COVID-Bot: An Evidence-Based Behavior Change Chatbot for COVID-19

Cory COVID-Bot is an artificial intelligence chatbot designed and built by a multisector collaboration to help people safely step towards COVID normal. Achieving COVID normal and avoiding unnecessary adverse health outcomes requires effective communication to the public regarding COVID safe behaviors, but reaching young, culturally and linguistically diverse members of the community is challenging for government. Cory COVID-Bot was developed to directly engage with difficult to reach populations in English and Vietnamese. In order to resolve public ambiguity and uncertainty about public health guidelines, and to stimulate safe behavior, Cory COVID-Bot provides updated recommendations and behavior change interventions, which emphasize the importance of COVID safe behaviors.

Risk perception, illusory superiority and personal responsibility during COVID-19: An experimental study of attitudes to staying home

Little is known about how different government communication strategies may systematically affect people's attitudes to staying home or going out during the COVID-19 pandemic, nor how people perceive and process the risk of viral transmission in different scenarios. In this study, we report results from two experiments that examine the degree to which people's attitudes regarding the permissibility of leaving one's home are (1) sensitive to different levels of risk of viral transmission in specific scenarios, (2) sensitive to communication framings that are either imperative or that emphasize personal responsibility, or (3) creating 'loopholes' for themselves, enabling a more permissive approach to their own compliance. We find that the level of risk influences attitudes to going out, and that participants report less permissive attitudes to going out when prompted with messages framed in imperative terms, rather than messages emphasizing personal responsibility; for self-loopholes, we find no evidence that participants' attitudes towards going out in specific scenarios are more permissive for themselves than for others. However, participants report they are more rigorous in staying home than others, which may cause moral licensing. Additionally, we find that age is negatively associated with permissive attitudes, and that male participants are more permissive to going out. Thus, during phases where it is important to promote staying home for all scenarios, including those perceived to be low-risk, imperative communication may be best suited to increase compliance.

An active inference model of conscious access: How cognitive action selection reconciles the results of report and no-report paradigms

Cognitive theories of consciousness, such as global workspace theory and higher-order theories, posit that frontoparietal circuits play a crucial role in conscious access. However, recent studies using no-report paradigms have posed a challenge to cognitive theories by demonstrating conscious accessibility in the apparent absence of prefrontal cortex (PFC) activation. To address this challenge, this paper presents a computational model of conscious access, based upon active inference, that treats working memory gating as a cognitive action. We simulate a visual masking task and show that late P3b-like event-related potentials (ERPs), and increased PFC activity, are induced by the working memory demands of self-report generation. When reporting demands are removed, these late ERPs vanish and PFC activity is reduced. These results therefore reproduce, and potentially explain, results from no-report paradigms. However, even without reporting demands, our model shows that simulated PFC activity on visible stimulus trials still crosses the threshold for reportability - maintaining the link between PFC and conscious access. Therefore, our simulations show that evidence provided by no-report paradigms does not necessarily contradict cognitive theories of consciousness.

Latent classes of maladaptive personality traits exhibit differences in social processing

OBJECTIVE

Social processing (SP) deficits manifest across numerous mental disorders. However, this research has been plagued by heterogeneity and a piecemeal approach whereby skills are examined in isolation rather than as part of an integrated cognitive system. Here, we combined two dimensional frameworks of psychopathology to address these limitations.

METHOD

We utilized the Alternative Model for Personality Disorders (AMPD) to distill trait-related heterogeneity within a community sample (n = 200), and the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) 'Systems for Social Processes' to comprehensively assess SP. We first applied latent class analyses (LCA) to derive AMPD-based groups and subsequently contrasted the performance of these groups on a SP test battery that we developed to align with the RDoC SP constructs.

RESULTS

Our LCA yielded four distinct subgroups. The recognizable trait profiles and psychopathological symptoms of these classes suggested they were clinically meaningful. The subgroups differed in their SP profiles: one displayed deficits regarding the self, a second displayed deficits in understanding others, a third displayed more severe deficits including affiliation problems, whilst the fourth showed normal performance.

CONCLUSIONS

Our results support the link between clusters of maladaptive personality traits and distinctive profiles of SP deficits, which may inform research on disorders involving SP dysfunctions.

A systematic review and meta-analysis of 'Systems for Social Processes' in borderline personality and substance use disorders

Deficits in social processing (SP) have been proposed to underpin interpersonal dysfunction in both Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and Substance Use Disorders (SUD). This study aimed to explore potential transdiagnostic cognitive and behavioral phenotypes of these disorders utilizing the NIMH Research Domain Criteria 'Systems for Social Processes'. A systematic review and meta-analysis of the published research was conducted on 134 studies identified through our database searches. Four meta-analyses were conducted, which revealed significant overlapping deficits in the ability to identify facial emotions and infer the mental states of others in both BPD and SUD. Further, people with BPD displayed a higher ostracism effect following perceived social exclusion. Systematically reviewed studies also revealed significant dysfunction amongst individuals with BPD and SUD across both self and other SP constructs, which were broadly similar in magnitude. Taken together, these results support the proposition that SP dysfunction may be considered a core transdiagnostic phenotype of BPD and SUD.

Predictive processing as an empirical theory for consciousness science

The theories of consciousness discussed by Doerig and colleagues tend to monolithically identify consciousness with some other phenomenon, process, or mechanism. But by treating consciousness as singular explanatory target, such theories will struggle to account for the diverse properties that conscious experiences exhibit. We propose that progress in consciousness science will best be achieved by elaborating systematic mappings between physical and biological mechanisms, and the functional and (crucially) phenomenological properties of consciousness. This means we need theories for consciousness science, perhaps more so than theories of consciousness. From this perspective, 'predictive processing' emerges as a highly promising candidate.

Tracking the Influence of Predictive Cues on the Evaluation of Food Images: Volatility Enables Nudging

In previous research on the evaluation of food images, we found that appetitive food images were rated higher following a positive prediction than following a negative prediction, and vice versa for aversive food images. The findings suggested an active confirmation bias. Here, we examine whether this influence from prediction depends on the evaluative polarization of the food images. Specifically, we divided the set of food images into “strong” and “mild” images by how polarized (i.e., extreme) their average ratings were across all conditions. With respect to the influence from prediction, we raise two alternative hypotheses. According to a predictive dissonance hypothesis, the larger the discrepancy between prediction and outcome, the stronger the active inference toward accommodating the outcome with the prediction; thus, the confirmation bias should obtain particularly with strong images. Conversely, according to a nudging-in-volatility hypothesis, the active confirmation bias operates only on images within a dynamic range, where the values of images are volatile, and not on the evaluation of images that are too obviously appetitive or aversive; accordingly, the effects from prediction should occur predominately with mild images. Across the data from two experiments, we found that the evaluation of mild images tended to exhibit the confirmation bias, with ratings that followed the direction given by the prediction. For strong images, there was no confirmation bias. Our findings corroborate the nudging-in-volatility hypothesis, suggesting that predictive cues may be able to tip the balance of evaluation particularly for food images that do not have a strongly polarized value.

How are attention, learning, and social cognition related on the non-clinical autistic spectrum?

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) - and autistic traits more generally - are associated with a heterogeneous pattern of differences in cognitive function. These include differences in associative learning, attention, and processing of social information. All three cognitive functions have importance in clinical, educational, and research contexts. The present study investigates the relationships between these functions in the context of autistic traits in the neurotypical population. In an online study, we asked a group of over 400 people to complete the Autism Spectrum Quotient questionnaire. We also asked participants to complete one of two standard attentional learning paradigms - either a Kamin blocking or an attentional highlighting task. To investigate the relation of attention and learning to social information processing, we incorporated social cues in one of each kind of paradigm. We found Kamin blocking increased with increasing number of autistic traits, in particular the sub-trait attention switching, but only for non-social cues. We found that highlighting decreased with increasing number of traits, in particular the sub-trait communication, but only for social cues. We interpret these findings as evidence of a crucial role for attention in other characteristics of the broader autistic phenotype, and discuss the relevance of these results for cognitive explanations of autistic traits and symptoms.

"Phantom Kicks": Women's Subjective Experience of Fetal Kicks After the Postpartum Period

Background: During pregnancy, a woman will attribute increased abdominal sensations to fetal movement. Surprisingly, many women report that they feel kick sensations long after the pregnancy; however, this experience has never been reported in the scientific literature. Materials and Methods: We used a qualitative approach to survey n = 197 women who had previously been pregnant. We calculated the number of women who had experienced phantom kicks after their first pregnancy, and explored subjective experiences of kick-like sensations in the post-partum period. Results: In this study, we show that almost 40% of women in our sample experienced phantom fetal kicks after their first pregnancy, up to 28 years (average 6.4 years) post-partum. Women described the phantom sensations as "convincing," "real kicks," or "flutters." Twenty-seven percent of women described the experience as nostalgic or comforting, and 25.7% reported felt confused or upset by the experience. Conclusions: Our results demonstrate that phantom kicks in the postpartum period are a widely experienced sensation, which may have implications for a woman's postpartum mental health. The mechanism behind the phantom kick phenomenon is unknown, but may be related to changes in the somatosensory homunculus or proprioception during pregnancy.

Stranger to my face: Top-down and bottom-up effects underlying prioritization of images of one's face

Recent studies suggest that we rapidly and effortlessly associate neutral information with the self, leading to subsequent prioritization of this information in perception. However, the exact underlying processes behind these effects are not fully known. Here, we focus specifically on top-down and bottom-up processes involved in self-prioritization, and report results from three experiments involving face detection, using a sequential match-non-match task. Across the three experiments we asked participants to associate an unfamiliar face with the self (Experiment 1), to associate one's face with a stranger's name (Experiment 2), and to establish both associations simultaneously (Experiment 3). We found that while participants showed evidence of bottom-up prioritization of their real faces, they did not show such an effect for self-associated strangers' faces. However, the participants showed a robust self-related top-down effect; when presented with a self-related cue, they were later faster at classifying both subsequent correct and incorrect targets. Together, our results suggest that self-prioritization is underpinned by distinct top-down and bottom-up processes. We discuss our findings in the context of the proposal that the self acts as an "integrative glue", and suggest an interpretation of our results within the framework of predictive coding.

Dysfunctional personality beliefs and emotion recognition in individuals with methamphetamine dependence

Previous studies have demonstrated that individuals with methamphetamine dependence have impaired emotion recognition. However, heterogeneity in results from these studies may indicate that individual factors such as personality beliefs moderate emotion recognition deficits. Thus, we aimed to examine the relationship between dimensional estimates of dysfunctional personality beliefs and facial emotion recognition in 86 Australian treatment seekers with methamphetamine dependence. Dysfunctional beliefs were measured using the Personality Beliefs Questionnaire, and emotion recognition was measured with the Ekman's Faces Test. We applied hierarchical regression analyses to test the relationship between beliefs and emotion recognition after accounting for the effects of intelligence. Results indicated that personality beliefs reflecting antisocial and paranoid schemas together accounted for a significant increase in the variance in fear recognition (higher levels of beliefs associated with poorer fear recognition). Further, high levels of passive-aggressive personality beliefs were associated with a tendency to misclassify faces as disgust. Our findings suggest that antisocial, paranoid, and passive-aggressive dysfunctional personality beliefs may underlie inter-individual differences in emotion recognition in methamphetamine dependent individuals. Additional research is required to better understand the relationship between personality and social processing biases, and investigate the direct impact these have on the significant psychosocial impairments present in individuals with methamphetamine dependence.

Events, Event Prediction, and Predictive Processing

Events and event prediction are pivotal concepts across much of cognitive science, as demonstrated by the papers in this special issue. We first discuss how the study of events and the predictive processing framework may fruitfully inform each other. We then briefly point to some links to broader philosophical questions about events.

Raised visual contrast thresholds with intact attention and metacognition in functional motor disorder

Functional motor disorders (FMDs) are distinguished by signs that lack congruence with recognised patterns of organic disease and show inconsistency over time. Their pathophysiology is poorly understood, but there is evidence that irregularities in perceptual and cognitive processing lie at the heart of these conditions. Here, we draw on a predictive coding account of functional neurological disorders to study perceptual decision-making in three groups: 20 patients with FMDs (14 with functional movements and 6 with functional weakness), 20 with phenotypically-matched organic motor disorders, and 20 age-matched healthy controls. We examine four cognitive domains with putative roles in FMD pathogenesis: attention, expectations, sensory processing (perceptual sensitivity), and metacognition (introspective evaluation of performance). We augmented a dual-task paradigm, manipulating the visual contrast required for target detection to examine these domains in one design. With sensory input (stimulus contrast) psychometrically adjusted to staircase target detection at a fixed level for all groups, the FMD group exhibited statistically equivalent attentional, expectational and metacognitive processing to healthy controls. However, we demonstrate Bayesian evidence and a frequentist trend that FMD patients require higher visual contrast than controls to maintain the same detection sensitivity (BF₁₀ = 8.1, p_holm = .066). This was statistically equivalent to the visual contrast required by the organic group, and unlikely to be accounted for by medication use or comorbid psychopathology. The organic group showed differences in processing of attention and expectations for target detection that were not observed in either healthy controls or the functional group. The distinctive behavioural profile of FMDs may arise from abnormalities in basic sensory processing, while higher attentional, expectational and metacognitive mechanisms remain intact. Conceptualising functional neurological disorders under a predictive coding account may consolidate and refine existing pathophysiological theories about them.

The hierarchically mechanistic mind: an evolutionary systems theory of the human brain, cognition, and behavior

The purpose of this review was to integrate leading paradigms in psychology and neuroscience with a theory of the embodied, situated human brain, called the Hierarchically Mechanistic Mind (HMM). The HMM describes the brain as a complex adaptive system that functions to minimize the entropy of our sensory and physical states via action-perception cycles generated by hierarchical neural dynamics. First, we review the extant literature on the hierarchical structure of the brain. Next, we derive the HMM from a broader evolutionary systems theory that explains neural structure and function in terms of dynamic interactions across four nested levels of biological causation (i.e., adaptation, phylogeny, ontogeny, and mechanism). We then describe how the HMM aligns with a global brain theory in neuroscience called the free-energy principle, leveraging this theory to mathematically formulate neural dynamics across hierarchical spatiotemporal scales. We conclude by exploring the implications of the HMM for psychological inquiry.

Perceptual awareness and active inference

Perceptual awareness depends upon the way in which we engage with our sensorium. This notion is central to active inference, a theoretical framework that treats perception and action as inferential processes. This variational perspective on cognition formalizes the notion of perception as hypothesis testing and treats actions as experiments that are designed (in part) to gather evidence for or against alternative hypotheses. The common treatment of perception and action affords a useful interpretation of certain perceptual phenomena whose active component is often not acknowledged. In this article, we start by considering Troxler fading - the dissipation of a peripheral percept during maintenance of fixation, and its recovery during free (saccadic) exploration. This offers an important example of the failure to maintain a percept without actively interrogating a visual scene. We argue that this may be understood in terms of the accumulation of uncertainty about a hypothesized stimulus when free exploration is disrupted by experimental instructions or pathology. Once we take this view, we can generalize the idea of using bodily (oculomotor) action to resolve uncertainty to include the use of mental (attentional) actions for the same purpose. This affords a useful way to think about binocular rivalry paradigms, in which perceptual changes need not be associated with an overt movement.

From intermodulation components to visual perception and cognition-a review

Perception results from complex interactions among sensory and cognitive processes across hierarchical levels in the brain. Intermodulation (IM) components, used in frequency tagging neuroimaging designs, have emerged as a promising direct measure of such neural interactions. IMs have initially been used in electroencephalography (EEG) to investigate low-level visual processing. In a more recent trend, IMs in EEG and other neuroimaging methods are being used to shed light on mechanisms of mid- and high-level perceptual processes, including the involvement of cognitive functions such as attention and expectation. Here, we provide an account of various mechanisms that may give rise to IMs in neuroimaging data, and what these IMs may look like. We discuss methodologies that can be implemented for different uses of IMs and we demonstrate how IMs can provide insights into the existence, the degree and the type of neural integration mechanisms at hand. We then review a range of recent studies exploiting IMs in visual perception research, placing an emphasis on high-level vision and the influence of awareness and cognition on visual processing. We conclude by suggesting future directions that can enhance the benefits of IM-methodology in perception research.

Expectation and attention increase the integration of top-down and bottom-up signals in perception through different pathways

Perception likely results from the interplay between sensory information and top-down signals. In this electroencephalography (EEG) study, we utilised the hierarchical frequency tagging (HFT) method to examine how such integration is modulated by expectation and attention. Using intermodulation (IM) components as a measure of nonlinear signal integration, we show in three different experiments that both expectation and attention enhance integration between top-down and bottom-up signals. Based on a multispectral phase coherence (MSPC) measure, we present two direct physiological measures to demonstrate the distinct yet related mechanisms of expectation and attention, which would not have been possible using other amplitude-based measures. Our results link expectation to the modulation of descending signals and to the integration of top-down and bottom-up information at lower levels of the visual hierarchy. Meanwhile, the results link attention to the modulation of ascending signals and to the integration of information at higher levels of the visual hierarchy. These results are consistent with the predictive coding account of perception.

Self-awareness deficits associated with lower treatment motivation in cocaine addiction

BACKGROUND

Individuals with cocaine use disorder (CUD) often display behaviours that are paradoxically misaligned with their situation. Typical examples include poor treatment motivation and inconsistent self-reported craving. These behaviours may reflect impairments in the awareness of one's own behaviour.

OBJECTIVES

We examined whether impaired self-awareness of addiction-related frontostriatal dysfunction (i.e., symptoms of apathy, disinhibition, and executive dysfunction) was associated with treatment motivation and craving.

METHODS

Sixty-five outpatients with CUD (57 male) and their informants (those who knew the patient well) completed parallel self and informant versions of the Frontal Systems Behaviour Scale. Self-awareness was indexed through the discrepancy between self and informant scores in the three sub-scales; apathy, disinhibition and executive dysfunction. The University Rhode Island Change Assessment Scale assessed treatment motivation. Self-reported craving was assessed using a visual analogue scale. Multiple linear regression models examined associations between self-awareness and treatment motivation and craving, adjusting for sociodemographic factors and lifetime drug use.

RESULTS

We found an inverse relationship between self-awareness of symptoms of disinhibition and treatment motivation maintenance. Although impaired awareness of disinhibition was also correlated with craving, this association was not significant after adjusting for sociodemographic factors and drug use. The apathy and executive dysfunction awareness scores were not associated with treatment motivation or craving.

CONCLUSION

We show that people with lower insight into their disinhibition problems (e.g., impulsivity, mood instability) have more problems maintaining motivation when initiating treatment. Findings suggest that self-awareness interventions could be useful to prevent premature treatment dropout and improve addiction treatment outcomes.

Down the rabbit hole: assessing the influence of schizotypy on the experience of the Barbie Doll Illusion

INTRODUCTION

"Body swapping" illusions have been used to explore factors contributing to the experience of "owning" an artificial body. Preliminary research indicated that those people diagnosed with schizophrenia experience more vivid illusions of this kind than do "normal" individuals.

OBJECTIVES

Here, we explored whether participants who rated themselves "high" on the cognitive-perceptual factor of the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (SPQ) experienced a more compelling sense of immersion in a variation of the body swapping illusion: The Barbie Doll Illusion. We also hypothesised that these individuals would experience a change in size perception when immersed in the illusion.

METHOD

Forty-four participants wore a pair of Head-Mounted Display goggles connected to a video-camera, and thus a doll's body replaced their own body in their visual field. In two conditions, touch was either applied synchronously or asynchronously to the doll's and each participant's leg. After each condition, participants filled out a questionnaire relating to their experience in the illusion. When both conditions were completed, they filled out the SPQ.

RESULTS

Our first hypothesis was confirmed, which suggested that people with higher cognitive-perceptual SPQ scores do indeed experience a more compelling Barbie Doll Illusion; however, our second hypothesis was not supported.

CONCLUSION

Our study demonstrated, for the first time, that proneness to the positive and interpersonal factors of schizotypy in a normal population is sufficient to produce a compelling sense of swapping bodies.

Reforming the taxonomy in disorders of consciousness

This article examines the serious shortcomings that characterize the current taxonomy of postcomatose disorders of consciousness (DoC), and it provides guidelines for how an improved DoC taxonomy might be developed. In particular, it is argued that behavioral criteria for the application of DoC categories should be supplemented with brain-based criteria (eg, information derived from electroencephalography and functional magnetic resonance imaging), and that the categorical framework that currently characterizes DoC should be replaced by a multidimensional framework that better captures the performance of patients across a range of cognitive and behavioural tasks. Ann Neurol 2017;82:866-872.

Seeing it both ways: Using a double-cuing task to investigate the role of spatial cuing in Level-1 visual perspective-taking

Previous research using the dot-perspective task has produced evidence that humans may be equipped with a mechanism that spontaneously tracks others' gaze direction and thereby acquires information about what they can see. Other findings, however, support the alternative hypothesis that a spatial-cuing mechanism underpins the effect observed in the dot-perspective task. To adjudicate between these hypotheses, we developed a double-cuing version of Posner's (1980) spatial-cuing paradigm to be implemented in the dot-perspective task, and conducted 3 experiments in which we manipulated stimulus-onset asynchrony, as well as secondary task demands. Crucially, the 2 conflicting hypotheses generated divergent patterns of predictions across these experimental conditions. Our results support the hypothesis of an automatic perspective-taking mechanism. (PsycINFO Database Record

Neural markers of predictive coding under perceptual uncertainty revealed with Hierarchical Frequency Tagging

There is a growing understanding that both top-down and bottom-up signals underlie perception. But it is not known how these signals integrate with each other and how this depends on the perceived stimuli’s predictability. ‘Predictive coding’ theories describe this integration in terms of how well top-down predictions fit with bottom-up sensory input. Identifying neural markers for such signal integration is therefore essential for the study of perception and predictive coding theories. To achieve this, we combined EEG methods that preferentially tag different levels in the visual hierarchy. Importantly, we examined intermodulation components as a measure of integration between these signals. Our results link the different signals to core aspects of predictive coding, and suggest that top-down predictions indeed integrate with bottom-up signals in a manner that is modulated by the predictability of the sensory input, providing evidence for predictive coding and opening new avenues to studying such interactions in perception.

DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.22749.001

Priors in perception: Top-down modulation, Bayesian perceptual learning rate, and prediction error minimization

I discuss top-down modulation of perception in terms of a variable Bayesian learning rate, revealing a wide range of prior hierarchical expectations that can modulate perception. I then switch to the prediction error minimization framework and seek to conceive cognitive penetration specifically as prediction error minimization deviations from a variable Bayesian learning rate. This approach retains cognitive penetration as a category somewhat distinct from other top-down effects, and carves a reasonable route between penetrability and impenetrability. It prevents rampant, relativistic cognitive penetration of perception and yet is consistent with the continuity of cognition and perception.

Are There Levels of Consciousness?

The notion of a level of consciousness is a key construct in the science of consciousness. Not only is the term employed to describe the global states of consciousness that are associated with post-comatose disorders, epileptic absence seizures, anaesthesia, and sleep, it plays an increasingly influential role in theoretical and methodological contexts. However, it is far from clear what precisely a level of consciousness is supposed to be. This paper argues that the levels-based framework for conceptualizing global states of consciousness is untenable and develops in its place a multidimensional account of global states.

Context sensitivity in action decreases along the autism spectrum: a predictive processing perspective

Recent predictive processing accounts of perception and action point towards a key challenge for the nervous system in dynamically optimizing the balance between incoming sensory information and existing expectations regarding the state of the environment. Here, we report differences in the influence of the preceding sensory context on motor function, varying with respect to both clinical and subclinical features of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Reach-to-grasp movements were recorded subsequent to an inactive period in which illusory ownership of a prosthetic limb was induced. We analysed the sub-components of reach trajectories derived using a minimum-jerk fitting procedure. Non-clinical adults low in autistic features showed disrupted movement execution following the illusion compared to a control condition. By contrast, individuals higher in autistic features (both those with ASD and non-clinical individuals high in autistic traits) showed reduced sensitivity to the presence of the illusion in their reaching movements while still exhibiting the typical perceptual effects of the illusion. Clinical individuals were distinct from non-clinical individuals scoring high in autistic features, however, in the early stages of movement. These results suggest that the influence of high-level representations of the environment differs between individuals, contributing to clinical and subclinical differences in motor performance that manifest in a contextual manner. As high-level representations of context help to explain fluctuations in sensory input over relatively longer time scales, more circumscribed sensitivity to prior or contextual information in autistic sensory processing could contribute more generally to reduced social comprehension, sensory impairments and a stronger desire for predictability and routine.