Chicago Cultural Center
"I have accumulated over 1500 objects exploring the related themes of death and mortality."-Richard Harris
"There is no line between art and pornography. You can make art of anything. You can make an experimental movie with that candle or with this tape recorder. You can make a piece of art with a cat drinking milk. You can make a piece of art with people having sex. There is no line. Anything that is shot or reproduced in an unusual way is considered artistic or experimental."I haven't seen a Noé film myself, so I can't offer any personal opinions. The descriptions themselves are so graphic and repellent that I've avoided them.
The film employs a non-linear narrative and follows two men as they try to avenge a brutally raped girlfriend. ... Several reviewers declared it one of the most disturbing and controversial films of 2002.1Why would researchers show this film to [perhaps unsuspecting]2 college students? To quickly induce a state of extreme psychological stress. In brief, Fernandez et al. are interested in studying the brain under acute stress. A PubMed search suggests there are at least 16 articles using this methodology.
During exposure to a fear-related acute stressor, responsiveness and interconnectivity within a network including cortical (frontoinsular, dorsal anterior cingulate, inferotemporal, and temporoparietal) and subcortical (amygdala, thalamus, hypothalamus, and midbrain) regions increased as a function of stress response magnitudes.The data analysis strategy employed the methods of "neurocinematics" (Hasson et al., 2008) to find inter-subject correlations (ISCs) in the BOLD response during free viewing of the film clips. Then the regions that responded to the aversive film to a greater extent were identified. These included areas associated with interoception and autonomic-neuroendocrine control, peripheral stress effector systems and catecholaminergic signaling, and sensory and attentional (re)orienting.
Fragments (both 140 s) from two different movies entitled "Irréversible" (2002), by Gaspar Noé, and "Comment j’ai tué mon père" (2001), by Anne Fontaine, were selected to serve as aversive and neutral control movie clips, respectively. ... Matching for audiovisual characteristics (see table S1) was performed by the authors by selecting aversive and neutral clips out of a set of candidate clips which best matched on the following measures: presence of faces in the foreground, presence of background actors, amount of distinct camera movements, and percentage of time the camera was moving. Selected aversive scenes contained extreme male-to-male aggressive behavior and violence in front of a crowd. Neutral control scenes also contained people interacting in the foreground in the presence of a background crowd. Fragments were equalized in luminance. Both movies are French spoken, but selected movie clips contained minimal speech.
Slide Session 3
Sunday, April 1, 10:00 am - 12:00 pm, Red Lacquer Room
Estimating the analytic flexibility of functional neuroimaging: Implications for uncertainty and bias in cognitive neuroscience Joshua Carp; University of MichiganHow vulnerable is the field of cognitive neuroscience to bias? According to a recent mathematical model, the potential for scientific bias increases with the flexibility of analytic modes. In other words, the greater the range of acceptable analysis strategies, the greater the likelihood that published research findings are false. Thus, the present study sought to empirically estimate the analytic flexibility of fMRI research. We identified five pre-processing decisions and five modeling decisions for which two or more analysis strategies are commonly used in the research literature. By crossing each of these strategies and decisions, we identified 4,608 unique analysis pipelines. Next, we applied each of these pipelines to a previously published fMRI study of novelty detection in an auditory oddball task. We found that activation estimates were highly dependent on methodological decisions: contrasts that yielded significant positive activation under one pipeline were associated with non-significant positive activation or even with negative activation under other pipelines. Some analysis decisions contributed more to this variability more than others, and each decision exerted a unique pattern of variability across the brain. The effects of a given decision also varied across contrasts, subjects, and other analysis parameters. In sum, we found considerable quantitative and qualitative variability across analysis pipelines, suggesting that the results of cognitive neuroimaging experiments may be more uncertain than they seem. Indeed, given a supercomputer, a sufficiently motivated analyst might observe almost any imaginable pattern of results.
Symposium Session 4
Tuesday, April 3, 10:00 am - 12:00 pm, Grand Ballroom
The Brain on Food: Investigations of motivation, dopamine and eating behaviors
Food is a highly motivating stimulus in our environment. We eat for many non-homeostatic reasons, such as celebration, comfort, and hedonic pleasure. Novel investigations of the neural basis of healthy and disordered eating reveal that throughout the multisensory process of food consumption, sensory, reward processing and cognitive control brain regions work together to keep track of how rewarding the experience is and help us decide whether or not to continue eating. A complete cognitive neuroscience model of food motivation requires understanding the sensory, reward, and cognitive mechanisms associated with healthy eating, and how those mechanisms can run amok. The first talk will review recent fMRI studies in lean individuals which identify how neural systems involved in retrieving food taste and reward information contribute to food motivation and food-related decision making. The second talk describes a study that uses multi-modal (visual and auditory) food cues to examine a dynamic, distributed reward-related network specifically associated with subjective ratings of cue-induced desire to eat in lean and obese women. The third talk provides evidence suggesting that overweight individuals show deficits in dopamine-dependent learning, as indicated by reduced error signal generation in the OFC and ventral striatum, and impaired insula-mediated flavor-nutrient conditioning. The final talk will bring together evidence across the spectrum from healthy to disordered eating behaviors by examining the neural circuitry underlying differences in food motivation between anorexia, healthy weight, obese, and Prader-Willi syndrome populations. Together, the talks will provide a stimulating introduction to the networks involved in food motivation.
Court Transcript of BTK's Confession. . .The Court: -- you were engaged in some kind of fantasy during this period of time?The Defendant: Yes, sir.The Court: All right. Now, where you use the term “fantasy,” is this something you were doing for your personal pleasure? The Defendant: Sexual fantasy, sir.
Context Sexual sadism is a psychiatric disorder in which sexual pleasure is derived from inflicting pain, suffering, or humiliation on others. While the psychological and forensic aspects of sexual sadism have been well characterized, little is known about the neurocognitive circuitry associated with the disorder. Sexual sadists show increased peripheral sexual arousal when observing other individuals in pain. The neural mechanisms underlying this unusual response are not well understood. We predicted that sadists relative to nonsadists would show increased responses in brain regions associated with sexual arousal (amygdala, hypothalamus, and ventral striatum) and affective pain processing (anterior cingulate and anterior insula) during pain observation.The participants were 15 violent sexual offenders housed at Sand Ridge Secure Treatment Center: 8 sadists and 7 nonsadists, as rated on the Severe Sexual Sadism Scale.1 One additional participant with an ambiguous score was excluded. The groups were fairly well-matched for age (about 50 yrs), education (12 yrs), IQ (92-97), substance use, and level of psychopathy.
A. Over a period of at least 6 months, recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving acts (real, not simulated) in which the psychological or physical suffering (including humiliation) of the victim is sexually exciting to the person.B. The person has acted on these sexual urges with a nonconsenting person, or the sexual urges or fantasies cause marked distress or interpersonal difficulty.2
In any scenario where pain is imminent, sadists may pay closer attention than nonsadists to the thoughts and feelings of the victim because this enhances their sexual arousal when pain is inflicted. In other words, whereas sadists lack sympathy for their victims, they may exhibit empathy (simulating their victims' feelings) when consistent with their goals.In support of this view, the sadists rated Pain pictures as higher in severity than the nonsadists did. The two groups did not differ in their ratings of No-Pain pictures. In the future, comparison to a control population of nonviolent offenders would be helpful.
Kent Kiehl outside the mobile scanner he has used to look at the brains of inmates at a New Mexico prison. Credit: Nature News.
It is interesting to consider whether the neural abnormalities that characterize incarcerated sexual sadists generalize to individuals in the community with sadistic sexual preferences. Sadists who offend may differ from those who do not in early environment (eg, abuse or inadequate social and family environment). Individuals involved in consenting sadomasochistic relationships are also different from criminal sadists because criminal sadists do not generally engage in sadomasochism, nor do those in sadomasochistic relationships generally victimize others. Nonetheless, all experience sexual arousal to pain infliction. Therefore, whether the present results generalize to all sadists is a question for future research.
an 11-item scale rated according to history of sexual behavior. Items are rated yes (1 point) or no (0 points) and include the following: (1) engages in gratuitous violence toward or wounding of victim; (2) exercises power, control, or domination over victim; (3) humiliates or degrades victim; (4) is sexually aroused by the act; (5) tortures victim or engages in acts of cruelty to victim; (6) shows evidence of ritualism in offense; (7) abducts or confines victim; (8) inserts object or objects into victim's bodily orifice or orifices; (9) mutilates sexual parts of victim's body; (10) mutilates nonsexual parts of victim's body; and (11) keeps trophies (eg, underwear or identification) of victim or keeps records of the offense. To meet sexual sadist criteria, an offender's behavior must include at least 4 items (3 of which must be items 2-5 or item 9).It is considered more reliable than DSM-IV and PPG-based (penile plethysmography) diagnoses.
The change in the B. criterion from DSM-IV to DSM-IV-TR represents one of the few changes in criteria from DSM-IV to DSM-IV-TR. This change was made to all of the paraphilias which involved a victim, to remove any ambiguity about whether acting out sexual urges with others was sufficient for a diagnosis; some had argued that an individual with a paraphilia who was not distressed about his or her behavior could not be diagnosed with a paraphilia, and this new wording allowed for a diagnosis to be made in such a circumstance.The addition of "nonconsensual" was also instituted in 2000, thereby depathologizing those who engage in consensual BDSM activities.
...(the insular cortex) is a brain region that is active in as many as one third of all brain imaging studies.
What do zucchini and hammers have in common? Both might be processed by the dorsal stream.
We propose that the ventral stream of projections from the striate cortex to the inferotemporal cortex plays the major role in the perceptual identification of objects, while the dorsal stream projecting from the striate cortex to the posterior parietal region mediates the required sensorimotor transformations for visually guided actions directed at such objects.Other researchers have extended the degree of specialization shown by the visual and semantic systems. Some studies have suggested there might be category-specific processing of living and non-living things (e.g., animals and tools), although the reasons for this specialization are a matter of debate (Caramazza & Shelton, 1998; Thompson-Schill et al., 1999). Chao and Martin (2000) found that pictures of tools activated the left posterior parietal cortex in the dorsal stream to a greater extent than pictures of animals, houses, and faces. The idea is that objects with salient motor-based properties (hammers) should recruit "vision for action" cortical regions to a greater extent than objects without such affordances (zucchini).
We used two techniques to render prime pictures invisible: continuous flash suppression (CFS), which obliterates input into ventral temporal regions, but leaves dorsal stream processes largely unaffected, and backward masking (BM), which allows suppressed information to reach both ventral and dorsal stream structures.Their results suggested that categorically related primes suppressed under CFS still facilitated reaction times to tool targets, but not to animal targets. In other words, participants were faster to classify tools when preceded by a picture of a tool than when preceded by a picture of an animal, and this priming effect held up when the ventral stream was unavailable.
Fig. 1 (Sakuraba et al., 2012). Procedure using CFS. Different images were presented into the subject's left and right eyes by using anaglyphs. Dynamic high-contrast random-noise patterns (10 Hz) were presented to the dominant eye, while low-luminance, low-contrast prime stimuli were presented to the nondominant eye. Subjects could report the dynamic noise but not the static image. Each trial started with a fixation cross for 500 ms, followed for 200 ms by a prime stimulus suppressed by CFS. Finally, a target stimulus masked by 70% additive noise was presented until the subject responded (maximum duration: 3 s) by pressing a key to indicate the category of the target stimulus. In Experiment 2, we used tool pictures without elongated shape components, namely stubby tools (e.g., a punch, a squeezer, a mouse, and so on). ... In Experiment 3, elongated stick figures were used as prime stimuli. In Experiment 4, elongated and stubby vegetable pictures were presented as prime stimuli. Because the elongated shapes involve an orientation component, we could not exclude the possibility that orientation, rather than shape attribute, explained the results. Therefore, we conducted Experiment 5 to clarify this. We used elongated stick figures, diamond shapes, and cut circles that were rotated in 45° increments as prime stimuli.Interestingly, membership in the category of tools per se was irrelevant; it was the shape of the prime that mattered.
Fig. 4 (Sakuraba et al., 2012). Priming effect in Experiment 4 and 5.2 Light and dark gray bars represent mean priming effects to tool targets and animal targets, respectively. Error bars indicate SEM. The pictures represent examples of the prime stimuli we used. 
Image from Cakehead Loves Evil.I once had the unique opourtunity to borrow an authentic human skull and make a mold of it to cast in plaster. When I purchased my supplies, I discovered the availability of food grade materials, and instantly, the notion of chocolate skulls came to mind!These chocolate skulls are available in three flavors: bone chocolate (a "signature blend of Belgian white and creamy milk chocolate"), dark chocolate, and semi-sweet chocolate.
