Morality judgment usually refers to the evaluation of moral behavior`s ability to affect others` interests and welfare, while moral aesthetic judgment often implies the appraisal of moral behavior's capability to provide aesthetic pleasure. Both are based on the behavioral understanding. To our knowledge, no study has directly compared the brain activity of these two types of judgments. The present study recorded and analyzed brain activity involved in the morality and moral aesthetic judgments to reveal whether these two types of judgments differ in their neural underpinnings. Results reveled that morality judgment activated the frontal, parietal and occipital cortex previously reported for motor representations of behavior. Evaluation of goodness and badness showed similar patterns of activation in these brain regions. In contrast, moral aesthetic judgment elicited specific activations in the frontal, parietal and temporal cortex proved to be involved in the behavioral intentions and emotions. Evaluation of beauty and ugliness showed similar patterns of activation in these brain regions. Our findings indicate that morality judgment and moral aesthetic judgment recruit different cortical networks that might decode others' behaviors at different levels. These results contribute to further understanding of the essence of the relationship between morality judgment and aesthetic judgment.

Pedophilia is a sexual preference that is often associated with child sex offending (CSO). Sexual urges towards prepubescent children and specifically acting upon those urges are universally regarded as immoral. However, up until now, it is completely unknown whether moral processing of sexual offenses is altered in pedophiles. A total of 31 pedophilic men and 19 healthy controls were assessed by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in combination with a moral judgment paradigm consisting of 36 scenarios describing different types of offenses.Scenarios depicting sexual offenses against children compared to those depicting adults were associated with higher pattern of activation in the left temporo-parietal-junction (TPJ) and left posterior insular cortex, the posterior cingulate gyrus as well as the precuneus in controls relative to pedophiles, and vice versa. Moreover, brain activation in these areas were positively associated with ratings of moral reprehensibility and negatively associated with decision durations, but only in controls. Brain activation, found in key areas related to the broad network of moral judgment, theory of mind and (socio-)moral disgust - point to different moral processing of sexual offenses in pedophilia in general. The lack of associations between brain activation and behavioral responses in pedophiles further suggest a biased response pattern or dissected implicit valuation processes.

A temporal order judgment task was developed for mice. After training male mice (C57BL6NCrj, n=15) to poke their noses into a hole, two stimuli (brief puffs of air) were delivered to the whiskers with a fixed interval of 750 ms in one of four orders: right (R)-left (L), L-R, L-L, and R-R. The mice were rewarded when they oriented their heads toward the first (n=5) or second (n=10) stimulus after a visual go signal. The mice were trained for up to 50 days. All mice met the criterion for task achievement (daily correct response rate >70% on 3 consecutive days) in response to unilateral stimuli (L-L and R-R), and 9 of the 15 mice met the criterion for task achievement in response to bilateral stimuli (L-R and R-L). The median periods for task achievement were 15 and 34 days for unilateral and bilateral stimuli, respectively. The correct response rate dropped to approximately the chance level after all whiskers had been removed. The nine successful mice were trained further and tested with smaller interstimulus intervals. The probability of right-first judgment plotted against the stimulation interval was fitted with a sigmoid function (r2=0.92) with asymptotes of 0.29 and 0.73 and a temporal resolution of 160 ms. The sigmoid curve was biased horizontally by 133 ms, reflecting the fact that stimuli delivered simultaneously were judged as left-first rather than right-first. The results show that mice can be trained to judge the temporal order of tactile stimuli delivered to whiskers and that such judgment might be lateralized to the right hemisphere.

The aim of this review is to summarize current research relating to psychological processes involved in judgment and decision-making (JDM) and identify which processes can be incorporated and used in the construct of health literacy (HL) in order to enrich its conceptualization and to provide more information about people's preferences.

Once associating another person with an unpleasant smell, how do we perceive and judge this person from that moment on? Here, we used aversive olfactory conditioning followed by a social attribution task during functional magnetic resonance imaging to address this question. After conditioning, where one of two faces was repeatedly paired with an aversive smell, the participants reported negative affect when viewing the smell-conditioned but not the neutral face. When subsequently confronted with the smell-conditioned face (without any smell), the participants tended to judge both positive and negative behaviors as indicative of personality traits rather than related to the situation. This effect was predicted by the degree of the preceding olfactory evaluative conditioning. Whole brain analysis of stimulus by stage interaction indicated differential activation of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and right angular gyrus to the conditioned versus the neutral person during the attribution phase only. These results suggest that negative smell associations do not simply induce a negative perception of the target person but rather bias the attribution style towards trait attributions. The fact that this bias was evident regardless of behavior valence suggests it may reflect enhanced psychological distance. Thus, the known observation of social rejection triggered by aversive smell may be driven by a shift in social attribution style.

Identical physical inputs do not always evoke identical percepts. To investigate the role of stimulus history in tactile perception, we designed a task in which rats had to judge each vibrissal vibration, in a long series, as strong or weak depending on its mean speed. After a low-speed stimulus (trial n - 1), rats were more likely to report the next stimulus (trial n) as strong, and after a high-speed stimulus, they were more likely to report the next stimulus as weak, a repulsive effect that did not depend on choice or reward on trial n - 1. This effect could be tracked over several preceding trials (i.e., n - 2 and earlier) and was characterized by an exponential decay function, reflecting a trial-by-trial incorporation of sensory history. Surprisingly, the influence of trial n - 1 strengthened as the time interval between n - 1 and n grew. Human subjects receiving fingertip vibrations showed these same key findings. We are able to account for the repulsive stimulus history effect, and its detailed time scale, through a single-parameter model, wherein each new stimulus gradually updates the subject's decision criterion. This model points to mechanisms underlying how the past affects the ongoing subjective experience.

In recent years the number of human genetic variants deposited into the publicly available databases has been increasing exponentially. The latest version of dbSNP, for example, contains ~50 million validated Single Nucleotide Variants (SNVs). SNVs make up most of human variation and are often the primary causes of disease. The non-synonymous SNVs (nsSNVs) result in single amino acid substitutions and may affect protein function, often causing disease. Although several methods for the detection of nsSNV effects have already been developed, the consistent increase in annotated data is offering the opportunity to improve prediction accuracy.

Extralegal factors may influence judicial outcomes. Here we investigated the experience of incidental haptic sensations on the harshness of punishment recommendations. Based on recent theories of embodiment, which claim that cognitive representations are structured by metaphorical mappings from sensory experience, we hypothesized that tactile priming with hard objects would cause subjects to recommend harsher sentences (to be 'hard on crime'). Furthermore, the theory of embodiment predicts that this effect should be based on sensorimotor brain activation during the judging process. In order to test this we presented participants with scenarios that described various crimes while scanning their brain activity with fMRI. Participants were then asked to rate how severely they would sentence the delinquents. Before the scenarios, the participants were primed by touching either a hard or a soft object. Results revealed tha t hard priming led participants to recommend harder punishments. These results were accompanied by activation of somatosensory brain areas during the judging phase. This outcome is in line with simulation assumptions of the embodiment theory and proposes a central role of the sensorimotor cortices for embodied metaphors. Thus, incidental tactile experiences can influence our abstract cognitions and even how hard we are on criminals.

Neuroimaging studies on moral decision-making have thus far largely focused on differences between moral judgments with opposing utilitarian (well-being maximizing) and deontological (duty-based) content. However, these studies have investigated moral dilemmas involving extreme situations, and did not control for two distinct dimensions of moral judgment: whether or not it is intuitive (immediately compelling to most people) and whether it is utilitarian or deontological in content. By contrasting dilemmas where utilitarian judgments are counterintuitive with dilemmas in which they are intuitive, we were able to use functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify the neural correlates of intuitive and counterintuitive judgments across a range of moral situations. Irrespective of content (utilitarian/deontological), counterintuitive moral judgments were associated with greater difficulty and with activation in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, suggesting that such judgments may involve emotional conflict; intuitive judgments were linked to activation in the visual and premotor cortex. In addition, we obtained evidence that neural differences in moral judgment in such dilemmas are largely due to whether they are intuitive and not, as previously assumed, to differences between utilitarian and deontological judgments. Our findings therefore do not support theories that have generally associated utilitarian and deontological judgments with distinct neural systems.

Faces are the most commonly used stimuli to study emotions. Researchers often manipulate the emotion contents and facial features to study emotion judgment, but rarely manipulate low-level stimulus features such as face sizes. Here, I investigated whether a mere difference in face size would cause differences in emotion judgment. Subjects discriminated emotions in fear-happy morphed faces. When subjects viewed larger faces, they had an increased judgment of fear and showed a higher specificity in emotion judgment, compared to when they viewed smaller faces. Concurrent high-resolution eye tracking further provided mechanistic insights: subjects had more fixations onto the eyes when they viewed larger faces whereas they had a wider dispersion of fixations when they viewed smaller faces. The difference in eye movement was present across fixations in serial order but independent of morph level, ambiguity level, or behavioral judgment. Together, this study not only suggested a link between emotion judgment and eye movement, but also showed importance of equalizing stimulus sizes when comparing emotion judgments.

Choosing food is not a trivial decision that people need to make daily, which is often subject to social influences. Here, we studied a human homolog of social transmission of food preference (STFP) as observed in rodents and other animals via chemosignals of body secretions. Human social chemosignals (sweat) produced during a disgust or neutral state among a group of donors were presented to participants undergoing a 2-alternative-forced-choice food healthiness judgment task during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Response speed and two key signal detection indices-d' (discrimination sensitivity) and β (response bias)-converged to indicate that social chemosignals of disgust facilitated food healthiness decisions, in contrast to primary disgust elicitors (disgust odors) that impaired the judgment. fMRI analyses (disgust vs. neutral sweat) revealed that the fusiform face area (FFA), amygdala, and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) were engaged in processing social chemosignals of disgust during food judgment. Importantly, a double contrast of social signaling across modalities (olfactory vs. visual-facial expressions) indicated that the FFA and OFC exhibited preferential response to social chemosignals of disgust. Together, our findings provide initial evidence for human STFP, where social chemosignals are incorporated into food decisions by engaging social and emotional areas of the brain.

Normative theories of judgment either focus on rationality (decontextualized preference maximization) or reasonableness (pragmatic balance of preferences and socially conscious norms). Despite centuries of work on these concepts, a critical question appears overlooked: How do people's intuitions and behavior align with the concepts of rationality from game theory and reasonableness from legal scholarship? We show that laypeople view rationality as abstract and preference maximizing, simultaneously viewing reasonableness as sensitive to social context, as evidenced in spontaneous descriptions, social perceptions, and linguistic analyses of cultural products (news, soap operas, legal opinions, and Google books). Further, experiments among North Americans and Pakistani bankers, street merchants, and samples engaging in exchange (versus market) economy show that rationality and reasonableness lead people to different conclusions about what constitutes good judgment in Dictator Games, Commons Dilemma, and Prisoner's Dilemma: Lay rationality is reductionist and instrumental, whereas reasonableness integrates preferences with particulars and moral concerns.

The aim of the current study was to investigate morality while also investigating frontal lobe function with the goal of studying the relationship between frontal lobe and morality in patients with idiopathic generalized epilepsy.

Postlingually acquired hearing impairment (HI) is associated with changes in the representation of sound in semantic long-term memory. An indication of this is the lower performance on visual rhyme judgment tasks in conditions where phonological and orthographic cues mismatch, requiring high reliance on phonological representations. In this study, event-related potentials (ERPs) were used for the first time to investigate the neural correlates of phonological processing in visual rhyme judgments in participants with acquired HI and normal hearing (NH). Rhyme task word pairs rhymed or not and had matching or mismatching orthography. In addition, the inter-stimulus interval (ISI) was manipulated to be either long (800 ms) or short (50 ms). Long ISIs allow for engagement of explicit, top-down processes, while short ISIs limit the involvement of such mechanisms. We hypothesized lower behavioral performance and N400 and N2 deviations in HI in the mismatching rhyme judgment conditions, particularly in short ISI. However, the results showed a different pattern. As expected, behavioral performance in the mismatch conditions was lower in HI than in NH in short ISI, but ERPs did not differ across groups. In contrast, HI performed on a par with NH in long ISI. Further, HI, but not NH, showed an amplified N2-like response in the non-rhyming, orthographically mismatching condition in long ISI. This was also the rhyme condition in which participants in both groups benefited the most from the possibility to engage top-down processes afforded with the longer ISI. Taken together, these results indicate an early ERP signature of HI in this challenging phonological task, likely reflecting use of a compensatory strategy. This strategy is suggested to involve increased reliance on explicit mechanisms such as articulatory recoding and grapheme-to-phoneme conversion.

Congruency sequence effects refer to the reduction of congruency effects when following an incongruent trial than following a congruent trial. The conflict monitoring account, one of the most influential contributions to this effect, assumes that the sequential modulations are evoked by response conflict. The present study aimed at exploring the congruency sequence effects in the absence of response conflict. We found congruency sequence effects occurred in graphic judgment task, in which the conflict stimuli acted as irrelevant information. The findings reveal that processing task-irrelevant conflict stimulus features could also induce sequential modulations of interference. The results do not support the interpretation of conflict monitoring and favor a feature integration account that the congruency sequence effects are attributed to the repetitions of stimulus and response features.

Face perception is a fundamental aspect of human social interaction, yet most research on this topic has focused on single modalities and specific aspects of face perception. Here, we present a comprehensive multimodal dataset for examining facial emotion perception and judgment. This dataset includes EEG data from 97 unique neurotypical participants across 8 experiments, fMRI data from 19 neurotypical participants, single-neuron data from 16 neurosurgical patients (22 sessions), eye tracking data from 24 neurotypical participants, behavioral and eye tracking data from 18 participants with ASD and 15 matched controls, and behavioral data from 3 rare patients with focal bilateral amygdala lesions. Notably, participants from all modalities performed the same task. Overall, this multimodal dataset provides a comprehensive exploration of facial emotion perception, emphasizing the importance of integrating multiple modalities to gain a holistic understanding of this complex cognitive process. This dataset serves as a key missing link between human neuroimaging and neurophysiology literature, and facilitates the study of neuropsychiatric populations.

We recorded brain activity when 21 subjects judged the beauty (aesthetic or affective judgment) and brightness (perceptual or cognitive judgment) of simultaneously presented paintings. Aesthetic judgments engaged medial and lateral subdivisions of the orbitofrontal cortex as well as subcortical stations associated with affective motor planning (globus pallidus, putamen-claustrum, amygdala, and cerebellar vermis), whereas the motor, premotor and supplementary motor areas, as well as the anterior insula and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, were engaged by both kinds of judgment. The results lead us to conclude: (i) that there is a functional specialization for judgment, with aesthetic judgments engaging distinct systems, in addition to those that they share with perceptual judgments; (ii) that the systems engaged by affective judgments are those in which activity correlates with polar experiences (e.g. love-hate, beauty-ugliness, and attraction-repulsion); and (iii) that there is also a functional specialization in the motor pathways, with aesthetic judgments engaging motor systems not engaged by perceptual judgments, in addition to those engaged by both kinds of judgment.

People tend to judge more recent events, relative to earlier ones, as the cause of some particular outcome. For instance, people are more inclined to judge that the last basket, rather than the first, caused the team to win the basketball game. This recency effect, however, reverses in cases of overdetermination: people judge that earlier events, rather than more recent ones, caused the outcome when the event is individually sufficient but not individually necessary for the outcome. In five experiments (N = 5507), we find evidence for the recency effect and the primacy effect for causal judgment. Traditionally, these effects have been a problem for counterfactual views of causal judgment. However, we argue that an extension of a recent counterfactual model of causal judgment explains both the recency and the primacy effect. In line with the predictions of our extended counterfactual model, we also find that, regardless of causal structure, people tend to imagine the counterfactual alternative to the more recent event rather than to the earlier one. Moreover, manipulating this tendency affects causal judgments in the ways predicted by this extended model: asking participants to imagine the counterfactual alternative to the earlier event weakens the interaction between recency and causal structure, and asking participants to imagine the counterfactual alternative to the more recent event strengthens the interaction between recency and causal structure. We discuss these results in relation to work on counterfactual thinking, causal modeling, and late-preemption.

The nature of moral action versus moral judgment has been extensively debated in numerous disciplines. We introduce Virtual Reality (VR) moral paradigms examining the action individuals take in a high emotionally arousing, direct action-focused, moral scenario. In two studies involving qualitatively different populations, we found a greater endorsement of utilitarian responses-killing one in order to save many others-when action was required in moral virtual dilemmas compared to their judgment counterparts. Heart rate in virtual moral dilemmas was significantly increased when compared to both judgment counterparts and control virtual tasks. Our research suggests that moral action may be viewed as an independent construct to moral judgment, with VR methods delivering new prospects for investigating and assessing moral behaviour.

Human observers easily recognize complex natural phenomena, such as flowing water, which often generate highly chaotic dynamic arrays of light on the retina. It has not been clarified how the visual system discerns the source of a fluid flow. Here we show that the magnitude of image deformation caused by light refraction is a critical factor for the visual system to determine the perceptual category of fluid flows. Employing a physics engine, we created computer-rendered scenes of water and hot air flows. For each flow, we manipulated the rendering parameters (distortion factors and the index of refraction) that strongly influence the magnitude of image deformation. The observers rated how strongly they felt impressions of water and hot air in the video clips of the flows. The ratings showed that the water and hot air impressions were positively and negatively related to the magnitude of image deformation. Based on the results, we discuss how the visual system heuristically utilizes image deformation to discern non-rigid materials such as water and hot air flows.