Beauty on my mind

So composite faces and prototypical faces are the ones judged to be beautiful. And the thought was that it is evolutionarily advantageous to not be attracted to non-average, ie disfigured people who might be a let fit mate.

It looks like Piotr Winkielman of the University of California, San Diego put non-reproductive stimuli in front of people and in short "...the less time it took participants to classify a pattern, the more attractive they judged it."

This is of interest to our group because we're always interested in seeing more general cognitive functions being explanations for what was thought to be a more specific "need" or "adaptation". And if you've been reading along, this tendency is because generative linguistics has been pushing for grammar specific neural networks where our understanding of the brain makes that level of specificity highly unlikely. Studies like this seem to point out that even mate selection based on "beauty" may rest on a more general pattern recognition system.

Science Blog covers the story. Click on for quotes from Science Blog and a link to the paper.

"It seems you don't need to postulate an unconscious calculator of mate value or any other 'programmed-brain' argument to explain why prototypical images are more attractive," Winkielman said. "The mental mechanism appears to be extremely simple: facilitate processing of certain objects and they ring a louder bell.

"This parsimonious explanation," he said, "accounts for cultural differences in beauty – and historical differences in beauty as well – because beauty basically depends on what you've been exposed to and what is therefore easy on your mind."

Link to the paper with subscription to Psychological Sciences

ABSTRACT—People tend to prefer highly prototypical stimuli—a phenomenon referred to as the beauty-in-averageness effect. A common explanation of this effect proposes that prototypicality signals mate value. Here we present three experiments testing whether prototypicality preference results from more general mechanisms—fluent processing of prototypes and preference for fluently processed stimuli. In two experiments, participants categorized and rated the attractiveness of random-dot patterns (Experiment 1) or common geometric patterns (Experiment 2) that varied in levels of prototypicality. In both experiments, prototypicality was a predictor of both fluency (categorization speed) and attractiveness. Critically, fluency mediated the effect of prototypicality on attractiveness, although some effect of prototypicality remained when fluency was controlled. The findings were the same whether or not participants explicitly considered the pattern's categorical membership, and whether or not categorization fluency was salient when they rated attractiveness. Experiment 3, using the psychophysiological technique of facial electromyography, confirmed that viewing abstract prototypes elicits quick positive affective reactions.

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Amygdala, emotion, language learning

Scientific American: Brain Area Foils Fear

Will comment in a bit.

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The Female Brain

Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy.

John Schumann's big read of the summer is Louann Brizendine's The Female Brain.

To him it adds another dimension that needs to be addressed when we consider brain development and learning and thus by extension language acquisition. And I will not argue against that.

However, over at Langague Log, it looks like Brizendine has played a little fast and loose with her reading of source articles. Here's a pretty list of fact checking entries that mount to a pretty damning picture.

In my mind, it's a shame that it has to be this way. I think that there is merit to do sex-differentiated studies of brain development, but Brisendine's "breezy" approach isn't rigorous enough to get traction (or it shouldn't be).

More if I find the energy.

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And the race goes on

Linguists love critical period studies. It never ceases to fascinate them that what appears to come so efforlessly to children is so effortful to adults. Most famously, generativist like to use this to make an argument for some grammar module in the brain some universal grammar built in.

Our colleague Namhee Lee has done really elegant work to examine neural changes over time that seem to show that there may be general brain changes that contribute to changing language learning abilities. Most recently he's been looking at developmental changes in dopamine and opiod production. Here's another developmental change that will be of interest for critical period people:

Harvard Medical School researchers report in the August 17 Science Express that adult mice lacking the immune system protein paired-immunoglobulin like receptor-B (PirB) had brains that retained the plasticity of much younger brains, suggesting that PirB inhibits such plasticity.

From Biosingularity

Basically, it looks like this protien PirB is a player in how brains change in plasticity, which is learning, over time. Our group hasn't spent much time with protiens, but it might be time soon.

More quotes below

Several years ago, Shatz and colleagues made the surprising discovery that MHC Class I genes are turned on in neurons by neuronal activity and in fact are required for normal synaptic plasticity. In the immune system, MHC Class I proteins teach immune cells which cells to attack. They do this by interacting with a large number of receptors found on the surface of immune cells. Syken, Shatz and colleagues wondered whether such receptors might also be expressed in neurons and involved in MHC Class I-mediated synaptic plasticity.

Using a method called in situ hybridization, they found that the MHC Class I receptor PirB is expressed widely throughout the brain and at all ages. To see how PirB was functioning, they generated a mouse deficient in PirB. At first sight, the mutant’s brain appeared normal. To get a better sense of how PirB might be affecting plasticity, they decided to focus on the visual cortex.



“Our discovery underscores further the fascinating and common molecular parallels between the nervous system and the immune system, where PirB was first studied. The discovery of a neuronal receptor for MHC Class I opens up a completely new avenue for thinking about broader roles for this family of molecules beyond the immune system,” he said.

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Copycat Monkeys: Macaque babies ape adults' facial feats

Copycat Monkeys: Macaque babies ape adults' facial feats

Bruce Bower

Scientists for the first time have established that for a brief period after birth, baby monkeys imitate facial movements made by people and adult monkeys. This copycat capacity, until now observed only in human and chimpanzee infants, seems to have evolved in all these primates as a way to jump-start newborns' face-to-face communication with adults, say evolutionary biologist Pier F. Ferrari of the University of Parma in Italy and his colleagues.


Between 3 and 7 days after birth, macaque babies smacked their lips and stuck out their tongues just as an experimenter did, the researchers report in the September PLoS Biology. Adult macaques make these facial gestures during friendly or cooperative interactions, such as mutual grooming.

The baby monkeys stared impassively when experimenters opened and closed their mouths or right hands. A rotating, colored disk about the size of a face also elicited no reaction.

Preliminary observations of free-ranging macaques by Ferrari's group further suggest that newborns mimic their mothers' lip smacking and tongue protrusion.

"I think that [infant] imitation developed in species in which face-to-face communication predominates over other channels of communication," Ferrari says.

Researchers have generally held that imitation in the service of social learning occurs only in people and apes. Ferrari's team questioned that assumption after the recent discovery in macaque brains of mirror neurons. These cells, also found in people, vigorously react both when an individual performs an action and when he or she watches it being executed by another (SN: 5/24/03, p. 330: Available to subscribers at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20030524/bob9.asp).

The scientists tested 21 baby macaques at 1, 3, 7, 14, and 30 days after birth. In each session, an experimenter held an infant monkey at face level and briefly exhibited a neutral expression. A random series of displays then followed, consisting of tongue protrusion, mouth opening, lip smacking, hand opening, and disk spinning, each separated by a return of the neutral expression.

Many day-old infants smacked their lips frequently after viewing a mouth opening and closing, but they didn't mimic what they had seen.

Of 16 macaque babies tested when 3 days old, 13 copied tongue protrusions, lip smacking, or both. By day 7, imitation of the experimenter had largely disappeared except for continued mimicry of lip smacking by 4 animals. By day 14, all imitation had stopped.

It's not clear why some babies, whether macaque, chimp, or human, fail to imitate facial gestures, Ferrari says. His team plans to track the monkeys into adulthood to see whether the imitators and the others later differ in temperamental or sensory traits. The team will also examine whether infant monkeys that imitate develop any special social or cognitive abilities later on.

In contrast to macaques, human and chimp babies typically begin mimicry at 2 to 3 weeks of age and continue for several months, as infants become emotionally tuned to their mothers. Macaque imitation occurs in a briefer time span because these primates grow up and gravitate into a social network much faster than people or apes do, Ferrari surmises.

Psychologist Kim A. Bard of the University of Portsmouth in England calls the new report "simply a terrific study." Investigators can now determine in various monkey species whether the first week of life represents a critical period for learning via imitation, says Bard, who has studied imitation among chimp infants.

"We have not yet tapped the full extent of imitative abilities in nonhuman primates," she says.

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Sensory Motor Loop

University of Washington's Toshiaki Imada and Patricia Kuhlperform a study on Finnish infants using MEG to examine the process of perceiving and producing particulate sounds.

Interesting that this study is conducted over time, applies MEG to infants, and isn't done in English.

Look forward to more studies of the like. Read below for quotes from the article.

"We think the connection between perception and production of speech gets formed by experience, and we are trying to determine when and how babies do it," said Kuhl, who also is a professor of speech and hearing sciences.

The study involved 43 infants in Finland -- 18 newborns, 17 6-month-olds and 8 one-year olds. Special hardware and software developed for this study allowed the infants' brain activity to be monitored even if they moved and captured brain activation with millisecond precision.

The babies were exposed to three kinds of sounds through earphones -- pure tones that do not resemble speech like notes played on a piano, a three-tone harmonic chord that resembles speech and two Finnish syllables, "pa" and "ta." The researchers collected magnetic data only from the left hemisphere of the brain among the newborns because they cannot sit up and the magnetoencephalography cap was too big to securely fit their heads.

At all three ages the infants showed activation in the temporal part of the brain, Broca's area, that is responsible for listening and understanding speech, showing they were able to detect sound changes for all three stimuli. But the pure perception of sound did not activate the areas of the brain responsible for speaking. However, researchers began seeing some activation in Broca's area when the 6-month-old infants heard the syllables or harmonic chords. By the time the infants were one-year old, the speech stimuli activated Broca's area simultaneously with the auditory areas, indicating "cross-talk" between the area of the brain that hears language and the area that produces language, according to Kuhl.

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""People have been talking about how the brain encodes concepts for 150 years. We believe we have found it,"

Reuter's article reports Matthew Lambon-Ralph of Manchester University making a REALLY big claim. Haven't had a chance to dig in and see what the research really is, but definitely something that needs to be followed up.

More detailed article from the BBC.

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