When Pinocchio's nose does not grow: belief regarding lie-detectability modulates production of deception.

Does the brain activity underlying the production of deception differ depending on whether or not one believes their deception can be detected? To address this question, we had participants commit a mock theft in a laboratory setting, and then interrogated them while they underwent functional MRI (fMRI) scanning. Crucially, during some parts of the interrogation participants believed a lie-detector was activated, whereas in other parts they were told it was switched-off. We were thus able to examine the neural activity associated with the contrast between producing true vs.

An fMRI study of joint action-varying levels of cooperation correlates with activity in control networks.

As social agents, humans continually interact with the people around them. Here, motor cooperation was investigated using a paradigm in which pairs of participants, one being scanned with fMRI, jointly controlled a visually presented object with joystick movements. The object oscillated dynamically along two dimensions, color and width of gratings, corresponding to the two cardinal directions of joystick movements.

What if I Get Busted? Deception, Choice, and Decision-Making in Social Interaction.

Deception is an essentially social act, yet little is known about how social consequences affect the decision to deceive. In this study, participants played a computerized game of deception without constraints on whether or when to attempt to deceive their opponent. Participants were questioned by an opponent outside the scanner about their knowledge of the content of a display.

Visual and audiovisual effects of isochronous timing on visual perception and brain activity.

Understanding how the brain extracts and combines temporal structure (rhythm) information from events presented to different senses remains unresolved. Many neuroimaging beat perception studies have focused on the auditory domain and show the presence of a highly regular beat (isochrony) in "auditory" stimulus streams enhances neural responses in a distributed brain network and affects perceptual performance. Here, we acquired functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measurements of brain activity while healthy human participants performed a visual task on isochronous versus randomly timed "visual" streams, with or without concurrent task-irrelevant sounds.

Audiovisual synchrony enhances BOLD responses in a brain network including multisensory STS while also enhancing target-detection performance for both modalities.

The brain seeks to combine related inputs from different senses (e.g., hearing and vision), via multisensory integration.

From threat to fear: the neural organization of defensive fear systems in humans.

Postencounter and circa-strike defensive contexts represent two adaptive responses to potential and imminent danger. In the context of a predator, the postencounter reflects the initial detection of the potential threat, whereas the circa-strike is associated with direct predatory attack. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the neural organization of anticipation and avoidance of artificial predators with high or low probability of capturing the subject across analogous postencounter and circa-strike contexts of threat.

Choking on the money: reward-based performance decrements are associated with midbrain activity.

A pernicious paradox in human motivation is the occasional reduced performance associated with tasks and situations that involve larger-than-average rewards. Three broad explanations that might account for such performance decrements are attentional competition (distraction theories), inhibition by conscious processes (explicit-monitoring theories), and excessive drive and arousal (overmotivation theories). Here, we report incentive-dependent performance decrements in humans in a reward-pursuit task; subjects were less successful in capturing a more valuable reward in a computerized maze.

Neural correlates of observing pretend play in which one object is represented as another.

Observers were scanned while they watched a video of an actor using an object. Three conditions were contrasted in which the same object was used: (i) normally (e.g.

Relationship between activity in human primary motor cortex during action observation and the mirror neuron system.

The attenuation of the beta cortical oscillations during action observation has been interpreted as evidence of a mirror neuron system (MNS) in humans. Here we investigated the modulation of beta cortical oscillations with the viewpoint of an observed action. We asked subjects to observe videos of an actor making a variety of arm movements.

When fear is near: threat imminence elicits prefrontal-periaqueductal gray shifts in humans.

Humans, like other animals, alter their behavior depending on whether a threat is close or distant. We investigated spatial imminence of threat by developing an active avoidance paradigm in which volunteers were pursued through a maze by a virtual predator endowed with an ability to chase, capture, and inflict pain. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we found that as the virtual predator grew closer, brain activity shifted from the ventromedial prefrontal cortex to the periaqueductal gray.

Modulation of the mirror system by social relevance.

When we observe the actions of others, certain areas of the brain are activated in a similar manner as to when we perform the same actions ourselves. This 'mirror system' includes areas in the ventral premotor cortex and the inferior parietal lobule. Experimental studies suggest that action observation automatically elicits activity in the observer, which precisely mirrors the activity observed.