Month: March 2009

The latest Trends in Cognitive Sciences has a fantastic review article on the cognitive neuroscience of eye contact, demonstrating how this fleeting social connection has a powerful impact on the mind and brain.

Past research has shown that making eye contact has an impact on social perception and subsequent behaviour.

The article notes that eye contact has been found to increase the likelihood of recognising someone and helps work out whether someone is male or female.

It also seems to increase general arousal and fixes attention – we’re less likely to notice things happening on the periphery of our vision if we’re staring at a face with eye contact than at a face where the eyes are diverted to the side.

In neuroimaging studies eye contact has been found to increase activity in a group of areas (medial prefrontal cortex, superior temporal gyrus, fusiform gyrus) that have often been associated with social interaction across a wide range of studies.

Interestingly, the authors suggest that basic eye contact information might be detected by a specific subcortical mechanism that quickly detects simple light/dark differences, presumably to pick out the direction of the pupil, which then triggers more complex social processing to make sense of its social meaning.

It’s an interesting field, not least because recognising eye contact and following the gaze direction of others are thought to be some of the most fundamental building blocks on which social communication develops in babies.

Children with autism have been found to show radically different patterns of eye contact recognition and gaze direction, and the authors suggest that one cause could be a problem with the these eye contact neural circuits which leads to slow or impaired social understanding.

Link to article on eye contact.
Link to DOI entry for same.

New Scientist has an excellent article on East-West psychological differences and why they may be more to do with local lifestyle than broad cultural generalisations.

Experiments that compare the responses of, for example, Americans and East Asians, are often used to support theories that Westerners have an analytical, individualistic world-view, while Easterners have a holistic, collectivist outlook.

This has been reported in studies that have compared how Westerners and Easterners categorise objects (shared features vs functional relationships), reasoning about causes for people’s behaviour (individual state of mind vs social situation) and, most famously in recent years, how people view visual scenes (focus on objects vs focus on background).

However, the NewSci article discusses a number of studies suggesting that these differences may not be to be with broad cultural definitions but to do with the lifestyle of the local population. In fact, these exact same differences can be found within both Eastern and Western cultures.

So it’s not all that surprising, perhaps, that other studies find that local and current social factors rather than the broad sweeps of history or geography tend to shape the way a particular society thinks. For example, Nisbett’s group recently compared three communities living in Turkey’s Black Sea region who share the same language, ethnicity and geography but have different social lives: farmers and fishers live in fixed communities and their trades require extensive cooperation, while herders are more mobile and independent.

He found that the farmers and fishers were more holistic in their psychology than herders, being more likely to group objects based on their relationships rather than their categories: they preferred to link gloves with hands rather than with scarves, for instance (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 105, p 8552). A similar mosaic pattern of thought can be found in the east. “Hokkaido is seen as the Wild West of Japan,” says Nisbett. “The citizens are regarded as cowboys – highly independent and individualistic – and sure enough, they’re more analytic in their cognitive style than mainland Japanese.”

Even more surprisingly, the article describes how these same cognitive tendencies are malleable – they can be changed in individuals by simply priming them with individualistic or collectivist concepts.

The article is a thought-provoking challenge to the East – West psychological stereotypes common in both the popular press and the scientific literature and discusses some intriguing studies I was completely unaware of.

By the way, the author is Ed Yong, who writes the Not Exactly Rocket Science blog we often link to.

An excellent article that is highly recommended.

Link to ‘Beyond east and west: How the brain unites us all’.

Below are a couple of strangely beautiful delusions described in a 1993 paper on ‘The reliability of three definitions of bizarre delusions’ published in the American Journal of Psychiatry:

A 22-year-old woman had the delusion that thoughts and feelings emanating from her mother’s unconscious were being carried in raindrops that fell on her air conditioner. When the raindrops hit the air conditioner they made a noise, and simultaneously these thoughts and feelings merged with her own unconscious. This merging had resulted in her own mental illness.

A 27-year-old man had the delusion that the voice he heard throughout the day was that of an invisible girlfriend. His girlfriend gave him advice and told him to do things. At night she would come to him, although still invisible, and they would make love.

Link to PubMed entry for paper.