Week 6 Lecture 6b - Bournemouth University PDF

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Register your attendance online! We are trialling a new online attendance capture solution. 1. Go to 3. Check in with https://bournemouth.studygoal.jisc. the code ac.uk 6008 2. Log in with your BU username and password. The Checkin code is only active for one hour. Need support? Contact the IT Service Desk after this session. https://itservices.bournemouth.ac.uk  CEPPAP Debate 2 Neuroscienc e Anna Metzger Vs Matteo Toscani The proposition is…. Neuroscience is key for understanding Psychology  Neuroscience. Neuroscience is a multidisciplinary field of study that focuses on the scientific exploration of the nervous system Neuroscientists attempt to understand and predict behaviour by studying the brain’s structure and function Neuroscience utilizes a wide range of methods and techniques, including neuroimaging (e.g., MRI and fMRI), electrophysiology, neurochemistry, molecular biology, and behavioural Chapter 4. experiments  Methods Imagin Morphological g o Histology o Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) Functional o Electrophysiology o Electroencephalography o Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) Lesion studies Behavioral ? ht ig rr Computational o ft Le modelling  Morphological: staining How it Example result works Morphological description of neurons and their components  Body  Dendrites  Axons chemical techniques to selectively color and visualize specific neural structures or cell  Morphological: MRI How it Example result works Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI): detailed visualization of the internal structures of the brain. The human body is composed mostly of water, which contains hydrogen More water (tumor? Edema?) atoms.  Functional: Electroencephalography (EEG) How it Example result works EEG is a valuable tool for diagnosing and Alpha waves (~12 Hz) reflect lack of visual monitoring various stimulation (Berger , 1929) neurological conditions, as it provides real-time information about brain activity. It's commonly Light through the used in clinical settings, mouth: visual research, and sleep stimulation  EEG involves placing studies. independent of a set of electrodes on eyelids the scalp With constant stimulation,  The electrodes are connected to an EEG alpha waves are higher machine. These electrodes pick up when the eyes are opened electrical signals generated by the brain's (Toscani et al., 2010) → Alpha waves may reflect a neurons Frequency suppressive mechanism to  The electrical signals detected by the help the eyelids reduce visual  Functional: functional MRI (fMRI) How it Example result works Mueller, de Haas, Metzger, Drewing, & Fiehler (2019). Participants touched two objects that varied in shape and surface Measures changes in the oxygen content of roughness. the blood They either had to compare the 1) shape or the 2) roughness When neurons become more active in a particular Task changed brain activation, brain region, there is a corresponding increase in while Attention to stimulation shape was constant increased activation in the oxygenated blood flow to that region. Deoxygenated blood is more magnetic than supramarginal gyrus and precentral gyrus oxygenated blood (hemoglobin). → activation in these areas does not merely reflect The fMRI scanner detects these changes in stimulus-driven processes, such as exploring magnetic properties and generates what's called a shape, but also entails processes controlled by task  Method: Lesions (human) How it Example result works Memory involves different mechanisms  Short term vs long term Dissociation: Brain injury or condition  Implicit vs in area A that impairs cognitive function alpha while leaving cognitive function explicit Double dissociation: beta intact. Patient A has damage to the prefrontal Double dissociation: cortex.  Brain injury or condition in area A that This damage impairs their short-term impairs cognitive function alpha while memory. leaving cognitive function beta intact. Patient B has damage to the medial  Brain injury or condition in area B that temporal lobe, including the hippocampus. Their long-term memory is significantly  Method: Lesions (virtual) How it Example result works TMS uses magnetic fields to briefly interfere with brain activity without causing damage. It's like a "virtual lesion" allowing researchers to study the brain's role in different functions, without harming the brain. It's safe and temporary.  I will be opposing the proposition that neuroscience is key for understanding Psychology and its applications. 1. Knowledge about the brain is not knowledge about cognition or the mind. 2. Cognitive neuroscience is a pseudo-science constructed on correlations between mental and neuronal states. 3. The increasing dominance of neuroscience is harmful for psychology.  Knowledge about the brain is not knowledge about the mind It is true that neuroscience has made stunning discoveries about the cellular and molecular mechanisms of neural conductance and transmission. How neurons process signals physiologically and electrochemically. Axonal and dendritic development. But… Knowledge about the brain is not knowledge about the mind It is difficult to see what this has got to do with psychology. The ‘explanatory gap’ between neuronal activity and the properties of conscious experience (Chalmers, 1996). No amount of knowledge about neuronal activity can ever answer this ‘hard question’. Why should that activity give rise to that conscious experience? Mary the super-scientist (the ‘explanatory gap’) “Mary is a brilliant scientist who is […] forced to investigate the world from a black and white room. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires […] all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on [in our brain] when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like "red", "blue", and so on. […] What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room […]? Will she Knowledge about the brain is not knowledge about the mind The mind is a complex system; we don’t fully know how it works. We could take a well known complex system (i.e. a microprocessor) and see how much we can explain its behaviour by applying neuroscience methods (Jonas & Kording, 2017). Here we will focus on lesion studies Prof. Konrad Kording Knowledge about the brain is not knowledge about theKong Donkey mindPitfall! Space invaders The microprocessor is able to perform three different complex behaviours consisting of these three old fun games What circuits of the processor are responsible for each of the Knowledge about the brain is not knowledge about the mind What did we learn?  There is a relationship between transistors and behaviour: many are not crucial for any game, some are crucial for only one game, some for two, and some for all. i.e. transistors are causally involved in producing the observed behaviour. Jonas & Kording, 2017 The brain is necessary “The psychologist wishes to know how the mind works, not where the brain works” (Page, 2006, p.429)  Cognitive neuroscience is a pseudo-science constructed on correlations All the methods sound very scientific – functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS), etc. – but does recording brain activity whilst undertaking tasks, tell us anything about cognition? Results from any of these techniques only mean something because they are correlated with prior research using other methods (psychophysics, observational, self-report, etc.). Unlike ‘proper’ sciences, cognitive neuroscience has no theories, laws, etc. that explain how cognition emerges from neuronal activity. It is just a mixture of correlations gained from  Cognitive neuroscience is a pseudo- science constructed on correlations These techniques are based on questionable assumptions: Localization fMRI and other methods ‘localize’ neural activity at the macro-level. But this could be totally wrong… We might need to look at microscopically distributed activity. With an equally likely theory of broadly distributed mental activity, the tools of cognitive neuroscience can  Cognitive neuroscience is a pseudo- science constructed on correlations Even if one accepts a broadly ‘modular’ account of the mind, can imaging techniques even show this (Page, 2006)? Different stimuli will produce a different pattern of activity (with billions of neurons). As scanners become more sensitive a difference will always be detected when participants respond to different items. So … when can you say that different parts of the brain perform different  It’s 21st century phrenology. Phrenology = pseudoscience involving head measurements. Premised on modularity (sound familiar?). Certain processes occur in certain parts of the brain. Shape and size of the brain associated with particular traits. Provided an attractive ‘biological’ basis for understanding the mind (sound familiar?).  PHRENOLOGY NEUROSCIENCE Lombroso (19th 11% less prefrontal Century criminologist brain volume in anti- and doctor) argued social personality that skull size is disorder groups different between (Raine et al., 2000). criminals and non- criminals. Differentiating criminals and non- criminals on the basis of a measurement of the head. Neuroscience is harmful for psychology Psychologists have always been fragile about the status of the discipline as a science. Neuroscientific approaches seem to provide some hard scientific credibility (it distracts from the real scientific problems) But they cannot answer questions about cognition or the mind. Neuroscience is expensive and takes up lots of research funding (money not spent on actual psychology) and affects progress in the discipline.  Weisberg et al. (2008): the Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Participants presented explanations for psychological phenomena and these explanations either included neuroscience or no neuroscience subjects found the explanations Mean ratings of how satisfying “The neuroscience information had a particularly striking effect on nonexperts’ judgments of bad explanations, masking otherwise salient problems in these explanations”  To conclude Cognitive neuroscience is a pseudo-science that cannot answer psychological questions. It is expensive, unnecessary and misleading. Rebuttals Representational similarity analysis Decoding Closing statements  e ! ot V  CEPPAP Debate 1: Questions?