Climate change is the most pressing problem that we face, or have ever faced. Science tells us how severe this problem is and what effect it is going to have on our planet. Many campaigns have been tried without any real success to change this. There also seems to be a very severe disconnect between the reported attitudes of those who do believe in climate change and want to do something, and their subsequent actions. The authors consider cognitive and social biases, and how people maintain that warm glow of optimism in the light of compelling scientific evidence that spells out the devastating effects of climate change. They discuss certain distinct sets of cognitive processes, and the difficulty with much of the psychological work underpinning climate change campaigns, and carbon labelling and all that great advice about reducing carbon footprint, is that this basic fact has not been recognised.

Analyzing geometry of sulcal curves on the human cortical surface requires a shape representation invariant to Euclidean motion. We present a novel shape representation that characterizes the shape of a curve in terms of a coordinate system based on the eigensystem of the anisotropic Helmholtz equation. This representation has many desirable properties: stability, uniqueness and invariance to scaling and isometric transformation. Under this representation, we can find a point-wise shape distance between curves as well as a bijective smooth point-to-point correspondence. When the curves are sampled irregularly, we also present a fast and accurate computational method for solving the eigensystem using a finite element formulation. This shape representation is used to find symmetries between corresponding sulcal shapes between cortical hemispheres. For this purpose, we automatically generate 26 sulcal curves for 24 subject brains and then compute their invariant shape representation. Left-right sulcal shape symmetry as measured by the shape representation's metric demonstrates the utility of the presented invariant representation for shape analysis of the cortical folding pattern.

General intelligence ( g ) captures the performance variance shared across cognitive tasks and correlates with real-world success. Yet it remains debated whether g reflects the combined performance of brain systems involved in these tasks or draws on specialized systems mediating their interactions. Here we investigated the neural substrates of g in 241 patients with focal brain damage using voxel-based lesion–symptom mapping. A hierarchical factor analysis across multiple cognitive tasks was used to derive a robust measure of g . Statistically significant associations were found between g and damage to a remarkably circumscribed albeit distributed network in frontal and parietal cortex, critically including white matter association tracts and frontopolar cortex. We suggest that general intelligence draws on connections between regions that integrate verbal, visuospatial, working memory, and executive processes.

A dichotic listening task consisting of pairs of phonetically “similar” meaningful words (differing in one consonant phoneme only) was given to subjects of different educational levels and reading and writing abilities. Illiterate subjects and subjects with only elementary education and poor reading and writing habits failed to show a right ear advantage (REA) and demonstrated a tendency towards left ear advantage (LEA), while literate subjects exhibited a pattern of REA. By contrast, when markedly “dissimilar” words were used, all subjects showed the classic REA.

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and insular cortex are implicated in distributed neural circuitry that supports emotional decision-making. Previous studies of patients with vmPFC lesions have focused primarily on decision-making under uncertainty, when outcome probabilities are ambiguous (e.g. the Iowa Gambling Task). It remains unclear whether vmPFC is also necessary for decision-making under risk, when outcome probabilities are explicit. It is not known whether the effect of insular damage is analogous to the effect of vmPFC damage, or whether these regions contribute differentially to choice behaviour. Four groups of participants were compared on the Cambridge Gamble Task, a well-characterized measure of risky decision-making where outcome probabilities are presented explicitly, thus minimizing additional learning and working memory demands. Patients with focal, stable lesions to the vmPFC (n = 20) and the insular cortex (n = 13) were compared against healthy subjects (n = 41) and a group of lesion controls (n = 12) with damage predominantly affecting the dorsal and lateral frontal cortex. The vmPFC and insular cortex patients showed selective and distinctive disruptions of betting behaviour. VmPFC damage was associated with increased betting regardless of the odds of winning, consistent with a role of vmPFC in biasing healthy individuals towards conservative options under risk. In contrast, patients with insular cortex lesions failed to adjust their bets by the odds of winning, consistent with a role of the insular cortex in signalling the probability of aversive outcomes. The insular group attained a lower point score on the task and experienced more 'bankruptcies'. There were no group differences in probability judgement. These data confirm the necessary role of the vmPFC and insular regions in decision-making under risk. Poor decision-making in clinical populations can arise via multiple routes, with functionally dissociable effects of vmPFC and insular cortex damage.

Two experienced drivers who developed severe amnesia due to bilateral hippocampal lesions participated in a series of standardized challenges of driving performance and knowledge of driving rules. During drives in a high fidelity simulator and on the road in an instrumented vehicle, they demonstrated vehicle control similar to that of normal drivers on measures of steering, speed control, safety errors, and driving with distraction. Their knowledge of driving rules, safety procedures, and road sign meaning also was normal. However, both participants were impaired at following route directions, and both had unsafe responses in a difficult crash avoidance scenario on the simulator. These findings suggest that memory impairment acquired by experienced drivers does not impair most aspects of driving performance, but may increase safety risk under some challenging circumstances.

Abstract The germ for this paper was a suggestion that Chris Hsee made during a phone conversation we had as I was leaving on a trip to Iowa to explore possible collaborations with Baba Shiv and his colleagues. Chris suggested that we might want to examine the dark side of emotions (though I don’t think he used that exact language). Historically, the dark side was the main side of emotions that people recognized; emotions were seen as opposed to the rule of reason and as the major cause of self-destructive behavior. Psychology, for much of the twentieth century, did not adopt this negative view of emotions—or any other for that matter; it ignored emotions altogether.

A recent study by Maia and McClelland on participants' knowledge in the Iowa Gambling Task suggests a different interpretation for an experiment we reported in 1997. The authors use their results to question the evidence for the somatic marker hypothesis. Here we consider whether the authors' conclusions are justified.

Using both the lesion method and functional imaging (positron emission tomography) in large cohorts of subjects investigated with the same experimental tasks, we tested the following hypotheses: (A) that the retrieval of words which denote concrete entities belonging to distinct conceptual categories depends upon partially segregated regions in higher-order cortices of the left temporal lobe; and (B) that the retrieval of conceptual knowledge pertaining to the same concrete entities also depends on partially segregated regions; however, those regions will be different from those postulated in hypothesis A, and located predominantly in the right hemisphere (the second hypothesis tested only with the lesion method). The analyses provide support for hypothesis A in that several regions outside the classical Broca and Wernicke language areas are involved in name retrieval of concrete entities, and that there is a partial segregation in the temporal lobe with respect to the conceptual category to which the entities belong, and partial support for hypothesis B in that retrieval of conceptual knowledge is partially segregated from name retrieval in the lesion study. Those regions identified here are seen as parts of flexible, multi-component systems serving concept and word retrieval for concrete entities belonging to different conceptual categories. By comparing different approaches the article also addresses a number of method issues that have surfaced in recent studies in this field.

Abstract Damage to the human brain has consequences for cognitive function, including emotional and social behavior. While the majority of impairments in brain function result from damage that is not focal, such as neurodegenerative disease or psychiatric disorders, there is a subset of cases that feature impaired processing of emotion as a result of focal damage in specific neural structures. It is these latter cases that are especially well suited to explore the relationships between particular structures and particular functions. Historically, investigations of brain-cognition relationships on the basis of focal brain damage have relied on single, or a small number, of rare case studies. In the ideal case, such studies of individuals can provide the opportunity to link impairments in a particular domain of cognitive function to damage in a single structure. The single-case approach is complemented with approaches that utilize larger sample sizes and that examine patterns shared across many subjects whose lesions share a common focus, even though those lesions may not be restricted to a single structure of interest. We briefly discuss some of these developments in the analysis of lesions, before reviewing their contribution to the field of emotion research. At the outset, it is important to bear in mind what the lesion method can and cannot demonstrate. Regardless of the specific methods used, inferences from impaired performances following brain damage always focus on the same conclusion: an inference regarding which structures are necessary to perform a given task. In most cases, the structures so revealed are only a subset of the structures that are sufficient to perform the task. This logic contrasts the lesion method with functional imaging of normal individuals. While functional imaging studies attempt to reveal all the structures that are engaged when normal subjects perform a certain task, the lesion method demonstrates which of these are critical, in the sense that normal performance is impossible in their absence.

Some of the outstanding cognitive capabilities of humans are commonly attributed to a disproportionate enlargement of the human frontal lobe during evolution. This claim is based primarily on comparisons between the brains of humans and of other primates, to the exclusion of most great apes. We compared the relative size of the frontal cortices in living specimens of several primate species, including all extant hominoids, using magnetic resonance imaging. Human frontal cortices were not disproportionately large in comparison to those of the great apes. We suggest that the special cognitive abilities attributed to a frontal advantage may be due to differences in individual cortical areas and to a richer interconnectivity, none of which required an increase in the overall relative size of the frontal lobe during hominid evolution.