Online research in philosophy

Adaptive decision making and veridical decision making are based on different mechanisms. Veridical decision making is based on the identification of the correct response, which is intrinsic to the external situation and is actor-independent. Adaptive decision making is actor-centered and is guided by the actor's priorities. The prefrontal cortex is particularly critical for adaptive decision making and less so for veridical decision making. However, most experimental procedures used in cognitive psychology and neuropsychology focus on veridical decision making and ignore adaptive decision making. Innovative experimental procedures are required to characterize the contribution of the prefrontal cortex to adaptive decision making. We have designed a prototype for such procedures, the Cognitive Bias Task, and present the novel findings generated by this task.

The primrose path and prisoner's dilemma paradigms may require cognitive (executive) control: The active maintenance of context representations in lateral prefrontal cortex to provide top-down support for specific behaviors in the face of short delays or stronger response tendencies. This perspective suggests further tests of whether altruism is a type of self-control, including brain imaging, induced affect, and dual-task studies.

Cognitive neuroscience constitutes the third phase of development of the field of cognitive psychophysiology since it was established about half a century ago. A critical historical overview is given of this development, focusing on recurring problems that keep frustrating great expectations. It is argued that psychology has to regain its independent status with respect to cognitive neuroscience and should take psychophysical dualism seriously. A constructive quantum physical model for psychophysical interaction is presented, based on a new stochastic interpretation of the quantum potential in the de Broglie.

Byrne & Russon suggest that there are two kinds of imitation learning – action level and program level – and that the latter is critical for great apes' learning. I have interpreted this phenomenon from the standpoint of clinical neuropsychology and conjecture that action-level imitation might be related to parietal lobe function and program-level imitation might be related to frontal lobe function.

Social cognitive neuroscience examines social phenomena and processes using cognitive neuroscience research tools such as neuroimaging and neuropsychology. This review examines four broad areas of research within social cognitive neuroscience: (a) understanding others, (b) understanding oneself, (c) controlling oneself, and (d) the processes that occur at the interface of self and others. In addition, this review highlights two core-processing distinctions that can be neurocognitively identified across all of these domains. The distinction between automatic versus controlled processes has long been important to social psychological theory and can be dissociated in the neural regions contributing to social cognition. Alternatively, the differentiation between internally-focused processes that focus on one's own or another's mental interior and externally-focused processes that focus on one's own or another's visible features and actions is a new distinction. This latter distinction emerges from social cognitive neuroscience investigations rather than from existing psychological theories demonstrating that social cognitive neuroscience can both draw on and contribute to social psychological theory.