4 research outputs found
Examining the relationship between schizotypy and self-reported visual imagery vividness in grapheme-colour synaesthesia.
No full textSynaesthesia is a condition in which one property of a stimulus triggers a secondary experience not typically associated with the first (e.g. seeing achromatic graphemes can evoke the perception of colour). Recent work has explored a variety of cognitive and perceptual traits associated with synaesthesia. One example is in the domain of personality, where higher rates of positive schizotypy, agreeableness, and openness to experience have been reported in synaesthetes that experience colour as their evoked sensation relative to typical adult controls. Additionally, grapheme-colour synaesthetes have previously been reported to show elevated mental imagery compared to typical adults. Here, we aimed to further elucidate the relationship between personality, synaesthesia, and other cognitive traits. In Study 1, we examined self-reported schizotypy and self-reported visual imagery vividness in grapheme-colour synaesthetes and typical adults. Our results partially replicated previous findings by showing that synaesthesia was associated with greater positive schizotypy and enhanced self-reported imagery vividness. The results also extend previous reports by demonstrating that differences in positive schizotypy and mental imagery vividness are not related in grapheme-colour synaesthesia. In Study 2, we sought to build on prior work showing lower agreeableness and increased openness to experience in synaesthetes by examining whether grapheme-colour synaesthesia is associated with other conceptually related traits; namely lower self-monitoring and increased sensation seeking. We did not find any differences between synaesthetes and controls on either of these traits. These findings are discussed in relation to potential factors that may contribute to the observed personality profile in grapheme-colour synaesthesia
Best of both worlds: Promise of combining brain stimulation and brain connectome
No full textTranscranial current brain stimulation (tCS) is becoming increasingly popular as a non-pharmacological non-invasive neuromodulatory method that alters cortical excitability by applying weak electrical currents to the scalp via a pair of electrodes. Most applications of this technique have focused on enhancing motor and learning skills, as well as a therapeutic agent in neurological and psychiatric disorders. In these applications, similarly to lesion studies, tCS was used to provide a causal link between a function or behaviour and a specific brain region (e.g., primary motor cortex). Nonetheless, complex cognitive functions are known to rely on functionally connected multitude of brain regions with dynamically changing patterns of information flow rather than on isolated areas, which are most commonly targeted in typical tCS experiments. In this review article, we argue in favour of combining tCS method with other neuroimaging techniques (e.g. fMRI, EEG) and by employing state-of-the-art connectivity data analysis techniques (e.g. graph theory) to obtain a deeper understanding of the underlying spatiotemporal dynamics of functional connectivity patterns and cognitive performance. Finally, we discuss the possibilities of these combined techniques to investigate the neural correlates of human creativity and to enhance creativity
Motor empathy is a consequence of misattribution of sensory information in observers
No full textHuman behavior depends crucially on the ability to interact with others and empathy has a critical role in enabling this to occur effectively. This can be an unconscious process and based on natural instinct and inner imitation (Montag et al., 2008) responding to observed and executed actions (Newman-Norlund et al., 2007). Motor empathy relating to painful stimuli is argued to occur via the mirror system in motor areas (Rizzolatti and Luppino, 2001). Here we investigated the effects of the location of emotional information on the responses of this system. Motor evoked potential (MEP) amplitudes from the right first dorsal interosseus (FDI) muscle in the hand elicited by single pulses of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) delivered over the left motor cortex were measured while participants observed a video of a needle entering a hand over the FDI muscle, representing a painful experience for others. To maintain subjects' internal representation across different viewing distances, we used the same size of hand stimuli both in peripersonal and extrapersonal space. We found a reduced MEP response, indicative of inhibition of the corticospinal system, only for stimuli presented in peripersonal space and not in extrapersonal space. This empathy response only occurring for near space stimuli suggests that it may be a consequence of misidentification of sensory information as being directly related to the observer. A follow up experiment confirmed that the effect was not a consequence of the size of the stimuli presented, in agreement with the importance of the near space/far space boundary for misattribution of body related information. This is consistent with the idea that empathy is, at least partially, a consequence of misattribution of perceptual information relating to another to the observer and that pain perception is modulated by the nature of perception of the pain
