Developing cortex is functionally pluripotent: Evidence from blindness

How rigidly does innate architecture constrain function of developing cortex? What is the contribution of early experience? We review insights into these questions from visual cortex function in people born blind. In blindness, occipital cortices are active during auditory and tactile tasks. What 'cross-modal' plasticity tells us about cortical flexibility is debated. On the one hand, visual networks of blind people respond to higher cognitive information, such as sentence grammar, suggesting drastic repurposing. On the other, in line with 'metamodal' accounts, sighted and blind populations show shared domain preferences in ventral occipito-temporal cortex (vOTC), suggesting visual areas switch input modality but perform the same or similar perceptual functions (e.g., face recognition) in blindness. Here we bring these disparate literatures together, reviewing and synthesizing evidence that speaks to whether visual cortices have similar or different functions in blind and sighted people. Together, the evidence suggests that in blindness, visual cortices are incorporated into higher-cognitive (e.g., fronto-parietal) networks, which are a major source long-range input to the visual system. We propose the connectivity-constrained experience-dependent account. Functional development is constrained by innate anatomical connectivity, experience and behavioral needs. Infant cortex is pluripotent, the same anatomical constraints develop into different functional outcomes.

The stability of physicians' risk attitudes across time and domains

Risk attitude is known to influence physicians' decision-making under uncertainty. Research on the risk attitudes of physicians is therefore important in facilitating a better understanding of physicians' decisions. However, little is known about the stability of physicians' risk attitudes across domains. Using five waves of data from a prospective panel study of Australian physicians from 2013 to 2017, we explored the stability of risk attitudes over a four-year period and examined the association between negative life events and risk attitudes among 4417 physicians. Further, we tested the stability of risk attitude across three domains most relevant to a physician's career and clinical decision-making (financial, career and clinical). The results showed that risk attitude was stable over time at both the mean and individual levels but the correlation between domains was modest. There were no significant associations between negative life events and risk attitude changes in all three domains. These findings suggest that risk attitude can be assumed to be constant but domain-specificity needs to be considered in analyses of physician decision-making.

Domain-specific connectivity drives the organization of object knowledge in the brain

The goal of this chapter is to review neuropsychological and functional MRI findings that inform a theory of the causes of functional specialization for semantic categories within occipito-temporal cortex-the ventral visual processing pathway. The occipito-temporal pathway supports visual object processing and recognition. The theoretical framework that drives this review considers visual object recognition through the lens of how "downstream" systems interact with the outputs of visual recognition processes. Those downstream processes include conceptual interpretation, grasping and object use, navigating and orienting in an environment, physical reasoning about the world, and inferring future actions and the inner mental states of agents. The core argument of this chapter is that innately constrained connectivity between occipito-temporal areas and other regions of the brain is the basis for the emergence of neural specificity for a limited number of semantic domains in the brain.

The domain-specificity of serial order working memory

Making a turn while driving is simple: turn on the indicator, check for cars, then turn. Two types of information are required to perform this sequence of events: information about the items (e.g., the correct indicator), and the serial order of those items (e.g., checking before turning rather than vice-versa). Previous research has found distinct working memory capacities (WMCs) for item and serial order information in both verbal and nonverbal domains. The current study investigates whether the serial order WMC is shared for sequences from different content domains. One hundred and fifty-three participants performed sequence matching tasks with verbal (letters and words) and nonverbal (locations and arrows) stimuli. The accuracy of detecting mismatched item-identity and serial order information in sequences was used to operationalize item and order WMC. Using structural equation modeling analyses, we directly compared models that included either domain-specific or domain-general serial order WMC latent variables, finding that models with domain-specific serial order WMC latent variables for verbal and nonverbal materials fit the data better than models with domain-general latent variables. The findings support the hypothesis that there are separate capacities for serial order working memory depending on the type of material being ordered.

Are Different Individuals Sensitive to Different Environments? Individual Differences in Sensitivity to the Effects of the Parent, Peer and School Environment on Externalizing Behavior and its Genetic and Environmental Etiology

Externalizing behavior is substantially affected by genetic effects, which are moderated by environmental exposures. However, little is known about whether these moderation effects differ depending on individual characteristics, and whether moderation of environmental effects generalizes across different environmental domains. With a large sample (N = 1,441 individuals) of early adolescent twins (ages 11 and 13), using a longitudinal multi-informant design, we tested interaction effects between negative emotionality and both positive and negative aspects of three key social domains: parents, peers, and schools, on the phenotypic variance as well as the etiology of externalizing. Negative emotionality moderated some of the environmental effects on the phenotypic, genetic, and environmental variance in externalizing, with adolescents at both ends of the negative emotionality distribution showing different patterns of sensitivity to the tested environmental influences. This is the first use of gene-environment interaction twin models to test individual differences in environmental sensitivity, offering a new approach to study such effects.

The effect of expertise, target usefulness and image structure on visual search

Experts outperform novices on many cognitive and perceptual tasks. Extensive training has tuned experts to the most relevant information in their specific domain, allowing them to make decisions quickly and accurately. We compared a group of fingerprint examiners to a group of novices on their ability to search for information in fingerprints across two experiments-one where participants searched for target features within a single fingerprint and another where they searched for points of difference between two fingerprints. In both experiments, we also varied how useful the target feature was and whether participants searched for these targets in a typical fingerprint or one that had been scrambled. Experts more efficiently located targets when searching for them in intact but not scrambled fingerprints. In Experiment 1, we also found that experts more efficiently located target features classified as more useful compared to novices, but this expert-novice difference was not present when the target feature was classified as less useful. The usefulness of the target may therefore have influenced the search strategies that participants used, and the visual search advantages that experts display appear to depend on their vast experience with visual regularity in fingerprints. These results align with a domain-specific account of expertise and suggest that perceptual training ought to involve learning to attend to task-critical features.

Individual differences in functional food consumption: The role of time perspective and the Big Five personality traits

Prior research suggests inconsistent relationships between individuals' personality traits, time perspective, and specific behavior. In a large representative sample of Norwegian consumers (N = 810), we investigated the relationships between the Big Five personality traits, domain-specific consideration of future consequences (CFC), and consumption of functional foods. Structural equation modeling was employed to test the hypothesized associations. Both CFC-Future and CFC-Immediate were positively related to the consumption of functional foods, whereas personality traits exerted no direct influence on consumption. Several significant associations between personality traits and CFC-Future and CFC-Immediate were found, and three of the five personality traits-Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism-exerted indirect effects on consumption frequency via CFC-Future. Results support an integrative and hierarchical understanding of how personality traits and time perspective interact in explaining variation in functional food consumption. The findings support the notion that (domain-specific) CFC is better conceptualized as two distinct-albeit related constructs-that are shaped, in part, by broader personality traits.

The longitudinal role of mathematics anxiety in mathematics development: Issues of gender differences and domain-specificity

INTRODUCTION

Mathematics anxiety (MA) is an important risk factor hindering the development of confidence and capability in mathematics and participation in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics workforce. The aim of the present study is to further our understanding of these relations in adolescence by adopting a threefold approach. First, we adopted a longitudinal design to clarify the temporal order in the developmental relations between (a) MA and mathematics achievement and (b) MA and mathematics self-perceived ability. Second, we investigated whether the developmental relations between MA and mathematics achievement/self-perceived ability differed between boys and girls. Finally, we explored the domain-specificity of MA by examining its role in foreign language (L2) learning.

METHODS

Data were collected from 1043 Italian high school students. Students reported their anxiety, self-perceived ability, and school achievement in mathematics and L2 over two separate waves, one semester apart.

RESULTS

Using multi-group cross-lagged panel analyses, we found that (a) mathematics achievement predicted MA longitudinally, whereas MA did not predict subsequent mathematics achievement; (b) there was a negative reciprocal relation between MA and mathematics self-perceived ability in male, but not female students; and (c) there were longitudinal relations between MA and L2 achievement and self-perceived ability above and beyond L2 anxiety.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings support the deficit view of the developmental relation between MA and mathematics achievement, highlight high school male students as a vulnerable group evincing vicious transactions between high anxiety and low self-efficacy in mathematics, and reveal the importance of internal cross-domain comparison processes in MA development.

The relationships between musical expertise and divergent thinking

Musical expertise has positive effects on cognition, especially on verbal and linguistic processing. In this study the relationships between musical expertise, not involving improvisation training, and divergent thinking were explored. Expert and self-taught musicians were tested in musical, verbal and visual divergent thinking, and were compared with a group of non-musicians in verbal and visual divergent thinking. The musical task required to generate many different pieces of music using the incipit of 'Happy Birthday' as a starting point; the verbal task required to list unusual uses for a cardboard box; the visual task asked to complete drawings adding details to basic stimuli. For each task fluency flexibility and originality scores were measured. Based on these scores, musical, verbal and visual creative indices were computed. In general, expert musicians showed higher creative indices in musical and verbal domains than self-taught musicians and in verbal creative index than non-musicians. No group difference was found in terms of visual creative index. These findings confirm that musical expertise enhances not only musical divergent thinking but also verbal divergent thinking, probably supporting the semantic associative modes of processing and improving verbal working memory, which facilitates the online recombination of information in new ways. This effect seems to be specifically supported by formal musical training. The lack of the association between musical expertise and visual divergent thinking, as well as future research directions, are discussed.

Meta-analytic evidence for a core problem solving network across multiple representational domains

Problem solving is a complex skill engaging multi-stepped reasoning processes to find unknown solutions. The breadth of real-world contexts requiring problem solving is mirrored by a similarly broad, yet unfocused neuroimaging literature, and the domain-general or context-specific brain networks associated with problem solving are not well understood. To more fully characterize those brain networks, we performed activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis on 280 neuroimaging problem solving experiments reporting 3166 foci from 1919 individuals across 131 papers. The general map of problem solving revealed broad fronto-cingulo-parietal convergence, regions similarly identified when considering separate mathematical, verbal, and visuospatial problem solving domain-specific analyses. Conjunction analysis revealed a common network supporting problem solving across diverse contexts, and difference maps distinguished functionally-selective sub-networks specific to task type. Our results suggest cooperation between representationally specialized sub-network and whole-brain systems provide a neural basis for problem solving, with the core network contributing general purpose resources to perform cognitive operations and manage problem demand. Further characterization of cross-network dynamics could inform neuroeducational studies on problem solving skill development.

A common neural hub resolves syntactic and non-syntactic conflict through cooperation with task-specific networks

Regions within the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) have simultaneously been implicated in syntactic processing and cognitive control. Accounts attempting to unify LIFG's function hypothesize that, during comprehension, cognitive control resolves conflict between incompatible representations of sentence meaning. Some studies demonstrate co-localized activity within LIFG for syntactic and non-syntactic conflict resolution, suggesting domain-generality, but others show non-overlapping activity, suggesting domain-specific cognitive control and/or regions that respond uniquely to syntax. We propose however that examining exclusive activation sites for certain contrasts creates a false dichotomy: both domain-general and domain-specific neural machinery must coordinate to facilitate conflict resolution across domains. Here, subjects completed four diverse tasks involving conflict -one syntactic, three non-syntactic- while undergoing fMRI. Though LIFG consistently activated within individuals during conflict processing, functional connectivity analyses revealed task-specific coordination with distinct brain networks. Thus, LIFG may function as a conflict-resolution "hub" that cooperates with specialized neural systems according to information content.

How working memory relates to children's reading comprehension: the importance of domain-specificity in storage and processing

Working memory is considered a well-established predictor of individual variation in reading comprehension in children and adults. However, how storage and processing capacities of working memory in both the phonological and semantic domain relate to reading comprehension is still unclear. In the current study, we investigated the contribution of phonological and semantic storage, and phonological and semantic processing to reading comprehension in 123 Dutch children in fifth grade. We conducted regression and mediation analyses to find out to what extent variation in reading comprehension could be explained by storage and processing capacities in both the phonological and the semantic domain, while controlling for children's decoding and vocabulary. The analyses included tasks that reflect storage only, and working memory tasks that assess processing in addition to storage. Regression analysis including only storage tasks as predictor measures, revealed semantic storage to be a better predictor of reading comprehension than phonological storage. Adding phonological and semantic working memory tasks as additional predictors to the model showed that semantic working memory explained individual variation in reading comprehension over and above all other memory measures. Additional mediation analysis made it clear that semantic storage contributed indirectly to reading comprehension via semantic working memory, indicating that semantic storage tapped by working memory, in addition to processing capacities, explains individual variation in reading comprehension. It can thus be concluded that semantic storage plays a more important role in children's reading comprehension than previously thought.

Increased distractibility in schizotypy: Independent of individual differences in working memory capacity?

Individuals with schizophrenia typically show increased levels of distractibility. This has been attributed to impaired working memory capacity (WMC), since lower WMC is typically associated with higher distractibility, and schizophrenia is typically associated with impoverished WMC. Here, participants performed verbal and spatial serial recall tasks that were accompanied by to-be-ignored speech tokens. For the few trials wherein one speech token was replaced with a different token, impairment was produced to task scores (a deviation effect). Participants subsequently completed a schizotypy questionnaire and a WMC measure. Higher schizotypy scores were associated with lower WMC (as measured with operation span, OSPAN), but WMC and schizotypy scores explained unique variance in relation to the mean magnitude of the deviation effect. These results suggest that schizotypy is associated with heightened domain-general distractibility, but that this is independent of its relationship with WMC.

Socio-cognitive influences on the domain-specificity of prosocial behavior in the second year

The main aim of this study was to explain the domain-specificity of early prosocial behavior in different domains (i.e., helping, comforting, and cooperation) by simultaneously assessing specific socio-cognitive factors (i.e., self-other-differentiation and joint attentional skills) that were hypothesized to be differentially related to the three domains of prosocial behavior. Based on a longitudinal study design, observational and parental report data were collected when toddlers (N=42) from German urban middle-class families were 15 and 18 months of age. At 15 months, regression analyses indicated differential relationships between socio-cognitive development and prosocial behavior (i.e., joint attentional skills were positively related with helping and, as hypothesized, both joint attentional skills and self-other differentiation were positively related with cooperation). Furthermore, self-other differentiation at 15 months predicted increases in coordination between 15 and 18 months. Finally, between 15 and 18 months, parental reports of socio-cognitive measures increased significantly while behavioral measures of both socio-cognitive concepts and prosocial behavior were stable across time. In sum, these results support the theoretical assumption of domain-specific socio-cognitive influences that constitute differential development of prosocial behavior. Implications of the results for theory and future studies are discussed from different perspectives with a focus on an interference interpretation calling for the integration of socialization approaches to the study of prosocial development.