For More Posts Like This Go To @mypsychology

For more posts like these, go to @mypsychology​

Neurons That Distinguish Between Reality and Imagination Discovered

Neurons found to be abnormal in psychosis play an important role in our ability to distinguish between what is real and what is perceived, researchers say.

New Western University research shows that neurons in the part of the brain found to be abnormal in psychosis are also important in helping people distinguish between reality and imagination.

The researchers, Dr. Julio Martinez-Trujillo, principal investigator and professor at Western University’s Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry and Dr. Diego Mendoza-Halliday, postdoctoral researcher at M.I.T., investigated how the brain codes visual information in reality versus abstract information in our working memory and how those differences are distributed across neurons in the lateral prefrontal cortex region of the brain. The results were published today in Nature Communications.

“Neuronal population coding of perceived and memorized visual features in the lateral prefrontal cortex” by Diego Mendoza-Halliday & Julio C. Martinez-Trujillo in Nature Communications. Published online June 1 2017 doi:10.1038/ncomms15471

The 4 Attachment Styles in Love

Do you ever think about why you’re more inclined to attract or be attracted to certain types of people? Or why the people you’ve dated in the past weren’t as compatible with you as you thought? Love involves constant choice, commitment, and work—which all demand an intuitive understanding both of your partner and of yourself. One useful piece of information is learning about you and your partner’s attachment styles.

The intent of learning about attachment styles isn’t to box love up neatly into categories (that’s absurd), nor does it mean you’re stuck with one attachment style forever. In fact, it’s important to note that as time goes on, your attachment style can change from the way you evolve as a lover. If things have been fragile between you and your partner, realize that this is your chance to grow. You can start from self-examination and learn how to be a better person. Psych2Goshares with you the 4 attachment styles in love:

1. Secure

When you have a secure attachment style, you have a great advantage in love. You feel comfortable going to your partner when something is off and, in return, you allow your partner absolute freedom. People with a secure attachment style tend to…….

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Stay Focused, If You Can

What makes some people better able to resist temptation than others? Lucina Uddin and Jason Nomi, cognitive neuroscientists at the University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences collaborated with Rosa Steimke, a visiting postdoctoral researcher in the Brain Connectivity and Cognition Laboratory at UM, to explore this question.

Steimke conducted a study as part of her dissertation work at Charité University in Berlin, Germany, in which participants were asked to perform a simple task: focus on one side of a screen where a letter – either an “E” or “F” – would quickly appear then disappear, and press a button indicating which letter they saw.

But before the letter appeared on the screen, an image would pop up to the right, and—this is where it gets interesting—the images were quite sensual and erotic. Not surprisingly, participants’ eyes definitely wandered to the right for a quick peek, which was captured by eye-tracking equipment.

“Using this setup, we were able to challenge participants’ self-control in the face of temptation,” said Steimke.

Adds Uddin, “This study is about individual differences in the ability to control impulses and behavior.”

According to previous research, the brain’s “cognitive control network” is typically involved in behavior that requires self-control. Here, the researchers explored another potential candidate brain system known as the “salience network.” The salience network is a collection of regions in the brain that selects which stimuli are deserving of our attention, such as a driver responding to a pedestrian running across the street or a large billboard along the highway.

The cognitive control network is related to ‘’top-down’’ effortful control of attention while the salience network is related to ‘’bottom-up’’ automatic direction of attention.

“We were interested in comparing the roles of these two networks in self-control behavior,” said Nomi.

Uddin and her team have taken a new approach to studying brain activity and its moment-to-moment variations using a method called “dynamic functional network connectivity.” Using this method, the team was able to examine whether the cognitive control or salience network was more closely linked to participants’ tendency to glance at the sensual pictures when they knew the goal was to focus on the letter.

Surprisingly, they found no links between cognitive control network dynamics and individual differences in performance of the task. However, those individuals whose brains showed a specific pattern of salience network dynamics were better able to perform the task. Specifically, for some people their salience networks were not as well-connected with the visual networks in the brain. Individuals who showed this pattern were better able to resist tempting distractors and perform the task.

“Researchers normally study connectivity using traditional approaches, but we used the dynamic approach, which gave us new insight that traditional connectivity analysis did not reveal,” said Uddin. “When we looked at the moment-to-moment, dynamic measures of connectivity we saw the relationship with individual differences in eye-gazing behavior emerge.”

The study, “Salience network dynamics underlying successful resistance of temptation,” is published in the journal SCAN.

Different Sex Drive Than Your Partner? Here’s How to Manage it

You mustn’t force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex.—Mary Mcarthy

Sex is a topic people get all funny talking about. For many it is awkward and uncomfortable, for some it is embarrassing, and for others, it is soul-baring and they are left feeling exposed.

Regardless of how it makes you feel to talk about it, there is one thing we all have in common regarding sex, we all do it. Of course, just like every rule, there are exceptions and we’ll save those for another time. Right now, let’s discuss the human sex drive.

A Little Sex. A Lot of Sex. What is Normal?

First, it is important to understand that having a healthy sex life is a basic human need. Not everyone has the same level of desire for sex, and that is perfectly normal. Some people do not have a sex drive at all. They are hypersexual.

Your sex drive may be low and interest in sex isn’t high on your list of priorities whereas mine may rank right up there with breathing. Neither of these is a problem by themselves. The problem comes into play when…..

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Making A.I. Systems that See the World as Humans Do

A Northwestern University team developed a new computational model that performs at human levels on a standard intelligence test. This work is an important step toward making artificial intelligence systems that see and understand the world as humans do. 

“The model performs in the 75th percentile for American adults, making it better than average,” said Northwestern Engineering’s Ken Forbus. “The problems that are hard for people are also hard for the model, providing additional evidence that its operation is capturing some important properties of human cognition.”

The new computational model is built on CogSketch, an artificial intelligence platform previously developed in Forbus’ laboratory. The platform has the ability to solve visual problems and understand sketches in order to give immediate, interactive feedback. CogSketch also incorporates a computational model of analogy, based on Northwestern psychology professor Dedre Gentner’s structure-mapping theory. (Gentner received the 2016 David E. Rumelhart Prize for her work on this theory.)

Forbus, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering, developed the model with Andrew Lovett, a former Northwestern postdoctoral researcher in psychology. Their research was published online this month in the journal Psychological Review.

The ability to solve complex visual problems is one of the hallmarks of human intelligence. Developing artificial intelligence systems that have this ability not only provides new evidence for the importance of symbolic representations and analogy in visual reasoning, but it could potentially shrink the gap between computer and human cognition.

(Image caption: An example question from the Raven’s Progressive Matrices standardized test. The test taker should choose answer D because the relationships between it and the other elements in the bottom row are most similar to the relationships between the elements of the top rows)

While Forbus and Lovett’s system can be used to model general visual problem-solving phenomena, they specifically tested it on Raven’s Progressive Matrices, a nonverbal standardized test that measures abstract reasoning. All of the test’s problems consist of a matrix with one image missing. The test taker is given six to eight choices with which to best complete the matrix. Forbus and Lovett’s computational model performed better than the average American.

“The Raven’s test is the best existing predictor of what psychologists call ‘fluid intelligence, or the general ability to think abstractly, reason, identify patterns, solve problems, and discern relationships,’” said Lovett, now a researcher at the US Naval Research Laboratory. “Our results suggest that the ability to flexibly use relational representations, comparing and reinterpreting them, is important for fluid intelligence.”

The ability to use and understand sophisticated relational representations is a key to higher-order cognition. Relational representations connect entities and ideas such as “the clock is above the door” or “pressure differences cause water to flow.” These types of comparisons are crucial for making and understanding analogies, which humans use to solve problems, weigh moral dilemmas, and describe the world around them.

“Most artificial intelligence research today concerning vision focuses on recognition, or labeling what is in a scene rather than reasoning about it,” Forbus said. “But recognition is only useful if it supports subsequent reasoning. Our research provides an important step toward understanding visual reasoning more broadly.”

Sex. Yes or No? How to Know if You Aren’t Quite Ready

Sex: the thing that takes up the least amount of time and causes the most amount of trouble.” — John Barrymore

When I was in high school, I dated often. A cute guy would ask me out, and I would pretend to think about it and say I had to make sure I didn’t already have plans. Of course, I never had plans and always said yes. I would wait for Friday to come with great anticipation and spend hours getting ready.

The date would start off fine, General chit chat about school, homework, teachers, and whatnot kept us busy followed by a movie or maybe we’d hang out at the local hang-out spot with friends.

I always had to be home by midnight, and the end of the date was inevitable. Kissing, wandering hands, clothes in disarray, the usual pre-sex stuff was to be expected. I knew the point would come though when I would want to say no, and he would be taking me home.

I always wondered what was going through my date’s minds when they dropped me off. I knew two things for certain. I wouldn’t be asked out on a second date, and he wouldn’t have any conquests to share with the boys on Monday morning at school.

I was happy to wait. I knew I wasn’t ready because the thought of having sex with my date, any of my dates, made me want to run the other way. Then I fell in love and everything changed.

You are Uncomfortable Talking About Sex

If you can’t talk about the ins and outs (no pun intended) of a sexual relationship, the odds are that you are not ready to be in one. If you get anxious and uncomfortable or avoid the topic altogether, then you should wait to have sex.

A sexual relationship requires…….

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