Memory, Reward, and Dopamine

Nice review of Dopamine and Adaptive Memory from TICS.

When Princeton student volunteers where told that they would receive a significance monetary reward for some pictures on a computer screen that would follow, their midbrain reward centers and medial temporal lobe became activated in anticipation of the pictures that they would see. Testing the next day showed that the rewarded pictures were better remembered and better associated with their associated context.

It's an interesting review because it ties together data involving episodic / autobiographical / personal memory, novelty, and generalization. In our dyslexia practice, we often see students with a very strong bias toward episodic memory - memory for events that happened at specific times and in specific places.  Many of these students could meet diagnostic criteria for ADD or ADHD; at the same time, they may learn well with novelty and have gifts at "big picture" thinking (mentioned as "generalization" in the paper).

So how to we reconcile these results with anti-reward proponents?

Carol Dweck and Dan Pink have cautioned about perils of rewards, but the distinction may be tasks that particularly work well with rewards are those that have little intrinsic interest or motivation themselves.

For instance, if a child loves playing the piano, don't pay them to practice...just give them plenty of opportunity to play and enjoy their performances. If , however, piano practice for a new student is complete chore, then little rewards and games (novelty) may be that spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down until they master enough that the enjoyment of playing is reward enough.

For the classroom, one implication is that for some students (those that heavily prefer episodic memory, for instance), engagement, novelty, and rewards may be educational necessities to maximize student achievement.






Problems and Perils of Praise
carrot picture

Happy Thanksgiving in the Brain

We wish you all a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday.

Gratitude and thanksgiving are whole brain activities that involve deep-seated emotional areas, areas associated with context-sensitive morality, and abstract conceptual understanding.

Thankfulness to God involves multisensory areas, imagery, and regions associated with feelings of justice, peace, happiness, and unconditional love.

Our family has very much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving - bless you all!

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving week.

Gratitude, Neural basis of human social values fmri pdf
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Celebrating Thanksgiving with all your mind
Eide Neurolearning Blog: Thanksgiving, Charity, and the Brain

Thanksgiving

Complex Development of Moral Sensitivity and Empathy - fMRI

From the Decety lab:

"Moral reasoning involves a complex integration between affective and cognitive processes that gradually changes with age and can be viewed in dynamic transaction across the course of ontogenesis. The findings support the view that negative emotion alerts the individual to the moral salience of a situation by bringing discomfort and thus can serve as an antecedent to moral judgment."

Children as young as 6 months seem to preferentially interact with people who help and altruistic behavior can be seen in early childhood, but developmental steps, biological underpinnings, and individual variations are not well understood.

This study (age 4 to 37 years) provides insight into the complicated brain dance of perception, emotional response, and empathetic concern when viewing unintentional and intentional hurtful acts. All age groups reported feeling sad and upset when viewing intentional harm and harm directed toward people vs. objects. Emotional responses were similar in young children as adults, but  amygdala activation was greater - the adults were better able to turn down amgydala activation compared to younger children. What being older also seemed to help with was distinguishing accidental from intentional harm (children tended to view all harmers as 'malevolent').

The study made us think of children (like those with sensory processing disorders) who struggled with empathetic behaviors although their emotional reactions and mirroring seemed normal. The perceptual side of empathy was intact, but the intensity of emotion reactions and cognitive decision making immature. On the flipside, other children might reason well about empathy, but have blunted emotional responses. The behaviors could look the same, but causes and interventions would be completely different.

Brooding Perfectionism -

We recently came across the topic of Brooding Perfectionism.
There are different types of perfectionism (e.g. failure to live up to one's idealized standards or failure to live up to idealized others' standards), but brooding perfectionism adds the element of rumination, which Olson and Kwan define as "a maladaptive style that is defined as the unintentional process of repetitively and passively thinking about one's negative emotions and focusing on depressive symptoms and their meaning." It can be a difficult vicious cycle because reflection and seeking to understand both seem to be good things - but what's striking is how negative an effect rumination has on general thinking (it swamps working memory), problem solving, and resilient behaviors.

Excerpt (sorry the whole article is not available free access - but it can be rented with a free DeepDyve.com trial): "A ruminative response style has also been shown to prolong depressive episodes. Rumination leads to irrational, negative interpretations of life events. In addition, focus on negative thoughts leads to an absence of potential efforts to ameliorate the consequences of a negative life event. The combination of a depressed mood and rumination may activate doubt regarding one's problem solving abilities, leading the individual to give up hope on solving problems. Individuals may also believe that their problems are less controllable than they actually are. These individuals are unsuccessful in efforts to diminish the problems, focusing more on their emotions than on productive behaviors that could potentially correct the problems."

What the researchers found is that a ruminative tendency predicted whether depression would be severe in the setting of setbacks. High brooding perfectionists were not more depressed as a group when they hadn't experienced serious negative life experiences. But they were very vulnerable to depression when negative events occurred.

For another great read, check out Rethinking Rumination. Interesting tidbits covered included the difference between worry and rumination, the difficulty that ruminators have with task-switching, the paralyzing effect of rumination (more think than do), and rumination's effects on attention and memory bias. It turns out ruminators are more likely to generalize rather than specifically remember from life events (autobiographical memory). Fortunately, the paper also includes interventions to overcome rumination and there are papers like this Seligman paper have specific suggestions to reduce destructive rumination and increase happiness. For highly intellectual persons, it can be freeing notion learning more about this dark side of reflection and perfectionism.

For a pretty accessible self-help book, check out The Power of Now.

Thinker Pic - Flickr Dan MacKay