Foundations of Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience

PSY 511.003 Spr 2025

Overview

Prelude

melodysheep (2011)

“If understanding everything we need to know about the brain is a mile, how far have we walked?”

National Geographic (2014)

https://databrary.org https://play-project.org https://penn-state-open-science.github.io

Qian, Berenbaum, & Gilmore (2022)

Gilmore, Thomas, & Fesi (2016)

https://acousticbrew.org

https://www.nextstagetheatre.org

https://cpoclub.org

Today’s topics

  • Why neuroscience is harder than physics
  • Course overview
  • Does neuroscience need behavior? Does behavioral science need the brain?

Why neuroscience is harder than physics

What do we need to know to answer the question?

  • What is the state…
    • Of the world (\(W\))
    • Of the organism
      • Body (\(B\))
      • Nervous system (\(N\))
      • Mind (\(M\))

Nested state spaces

(Swanson, 2005, fig. 1)

Some states are more easily measured than others

  • \(W\), \(B\), \(N\) (more or less) directly

Sejnowski, Churchland, & Movshon (2014)

Mental states (\(M\))

  • Measured indirectly
  • Via \(N\), \(B\), \(W\)
  • Do you agree?

What are essential components/dimensions of \(W\)?

  • To explain/understand \(B\) (and \(M\))

What are essential components/dimensions of \(B\)?

  • To explain/understand

Brain & behavior are complex, dynamic systems with

  • Components
  • Interactions
  • Forces/influences
  • Boundaries
  • Inputs/outputs/processes

Systems…

  • “Behave” or change state across time
  • Return to starting state
  • Appear to be regulated, controlled, influenced by feedback loops
  • \(B(t+1) = f(W(t), B(t), N(t), M(t))\)

May be analyzed of as networks

From https://source.wustl.edu/2013/08/brain-flexible-hub-network-helps-humans-adapt/

At multiple levels of organization…

Swanson & Lichtman (2016) Figure 1

Swanson & Lichtman (2016) Figure 3

Hard to simplify

A GIF of a spherical cow.
By Keenan Crane; (The source material is licensed under CC0), CC BY-SA 4.0

Single parts -> multiple functions

Calabrese (2018)

Calabrese (2018)
  • Many circuit wiring patterns
  • Similar dynamics

Biological systems not “designed”

  • …like human-engineered ones

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_architecture

Studying such systems is hard because…

  • Change structure/function over time
  • Hard to measure what is being exchanged, what is being controlled

(Cisek, 2019, fig. 3). Schematic behavioral control systems. (A) When the current nutrient state deviates from a desired state, locomotion is initiated, ultimately bringing the animal to a more desirable state. (B) Elaboration of nutrient state control into a high-level controller (ANS) and a lower-level controller (BNS) capable of two modes of locomotion, local exploitation, and long-range exploration. 5HT, serotonin; ANS/BNS, apical/blastoporal nervous system; DA, dopamine; NPY, neuropeptide Y

Assumptions are problematic

Segal et al. (2024)

Course overview

Goals

  • Master fundamentals of neuroscientific concepts and facts
  • Prepare to read primary source literature in social, behavioral, cognitive, affective, and clinical neuroscience

Structure

https://psu-psychology.github.io/psy-511-scan-fdns-2025-spring/

Questions

  • What is the basic organizational plan of the nervous system?
  • How do neurons work?
  • How do neurons connected in networks achieve behavioral goals?
  • How does the nervous system develop? How has it evolved?
  • How do disorders of the mind reveal themselves in the nervous system?

Approach

  • Brain architecture (neuroanatomy)
  • Brain function (neurophysiology)
  • Brain communication (neurochemistry)
  • Changes over evolutionary and developmental time

Approach

  • The nervous system as an information processing system

Wikipedia

Mindful of limitations in brain/computer metaphors

https://www.explainthatstuff.com/howcomputerswork.html

Or inspired by richer metaphors

Becker (2021)

Inputs

  • From environment, body, brain

Processing

  • Current inputs + brain state + body state + possible future states…
  • Stored information
  • Physiological & behavioral goals

(Cisek, 2019, fig. 1)

Outputs

  • To brain, body, environment

Mapping structures to functions…

Cisek (2019) Figure 8

And vice versa?

Cepelewicz (2021)

“The brainwide representation of behavioral variables suggests that information encoded nearly anywhere in the forebrain is combined with behavioral state variables into a mixed representation…Our data indicate that it happens as early as primary sensory cortex.”

Stringer et al. (2019)

And do we have the right “psychological” structures?

Psychological sciences have identified a wealth of cognitive processes and behavioral phenomena, yet struggle to produce cumulative knowledge. Progress is hamstrung by siloed scientific traditions and a focus on explanation over prediction…

Eisenberg et al. (2019)

…two issues that are particularly damaging for the study of multifaceted constructs like self-regulation…We conclude that self-regulation lacks coherence as a construct…

Eisenberg et al. (2019)

“Behavioural biologists don’t agree on what constitutes behaviour”

Behavioural biology is a major discipline within biology, centred on the key concept of ‘behaviour’. But how is ‘behaviour’ defined, and how should it be defined? We outline what characteristics we believe a scientific definition should have, and why we think it is important…

Levitis, Lidicker, & Freund (2009)

…that a definition have these traits. We then examine the range of available published definitions for behaviour.

Levitis et al. (2009)

Finding no consensus, we present survey responses from 174 members of three behaviour-focused scientific societies as to their understanding of the term. Here again, we find surprisingly widespread disagreement as to what qualifies as behaviour. Respondents contradict themselves…

Levitis et al. (2009)

…each other, and published definitions, indicating that they are using individually variable intuitive, rather than codified, meanings of `behaviour.’

Levitis et al. (2009)

We offer a new definition, based largely on survey responses: “Behaviour is the internally coordinated responses (actions or inactions) of whole living organisms (individuals or groups) to internal and/or external stimuli, excluding responses more easily understood as developmental changes.”

Levitis et al. (2009)

Sciences of complexity

Favela (2020) Figure 1

Levels of analysis

Sejnowski et al. (2014) Figure 1

David Marr (1945-1980)

David Marr

Marr (1980)

Marr’s Three Levels

Favela (2020) Figure 3

  • What must be computed to carry out task X?
  • What algorithm is used to carry out the computation?
  • What hardware implements the algorithm?

Computational level

  • What has to be computed?
    • What is the shape/form of that unknown object?
    • What did that person just say?
    • Is that unknown object a threat to me?

Algorithmic level

  • What’s the ‘recipe’ for…
    • computing shape
    • perceiving speech
    • recognizing threats

Implementation level

  • How do…
    • neurons
    • areas
    • networks
  • implement the recipe?

Causality in neuroscience

  • Siddiqi, Kording, Parvizi, & Fox (2022)
  • Stimulation & lesion studies needed for inferring causation.
  • Bradford-Hill criteria (Hill, 2015)

Varied notions of mechanism

Fig. 1: The narrow and broad notions of mechanism from Ross & Bassett (2024)

Toward reverse neuroethology

Figure 1 from Asinof & Card (2024)

https://giphy.com/clips/thefastsaga-fast-and-furious-saga-fate-of-the-DF34cUyak7TPs7D4GE

…when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.

Kahneman (2013), p. 12 quoted in Krakauer, Ghazanfar, Gomez-Marin, MacIver, & Poeppel (2017)

Break

Your turn

Does neuroscience need behavior?

Krakauer, J. W., Ghazanfar, A. A., Gomez-Marin, A., MacIver, M. A., & Poeppel, D. (2017). Neuroscience needs behavior: Correcting a reductionist bias. Neuron, 93(3), 480–490. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2016.12.041.

Parada, F. J. & Rossi, A. (2018). If neuroscience needs behavior, what does psychology need? Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 433. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00433.

Key points

  • Questions ‘often tacit…belief in the reductionist program for understanding the link between brain and behavior’
  • Behavior -> understanding; neural interventions -> causality
  • Marr’s 3 levels (computation; algorithm; implementation)

But what is behavior?

“Behavioural biologists don’t agree on what constitutes behaviour”

…“Behaviour is the internally coordinated responses (actions or inactions) of whole living organisms (individuals or groups) to internal and/or external stimuli, excluding responses more easily understood as developmental changes.”

(Levitis et al., 2009)

(Krakauer et al., 2017, fig. 1)

(Krakauer et al., 2017, fig. 2)

(Krakauer et al., 2017, fig. 3)

(Krakauer et al., 2017, fig. 4)

(Parada & Rossi, 2018, fig. 1)

Exercise 01

Main points

  • Psychology is harder than physics
  • Neuroscience needs behavior
  • Psychology needs behavior + mental states + measures of environment

Next time…

  • Neuroanatomy lab

Resources

References

Asinof, S. K., & Card, G. M. (2024). Neural control of naturalistic behavior choices. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 47, 369–388. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-neuro-111020-094019
Becker, C. R. (2021, August 31). A comprehensive list of human-computer interactions. Retrieved January 8, 2025, from https://uxdesign.cc/a-comprehensive-list-of-human-computer-interactions-d72eaca2c0df
Calabrese, R. L. (2018). Inconvenient truth to principle of neuroscience. Trends in Neurosciences, 41(8), 488–491. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tins.2018.05.006
Cepelewicz, J. (2021, August). Mental phenomena don’t map into the brain as expected. https://www.quantamagazine.org/mental-phenomena-dont-map-into-the-brain-as-expected-20210824/. Retrieved from https://www.quantamagazine.org/mental-phenomena-dont-map-into-the-brain-as-expected-20210824/
Cisek, P. (2019). Resynthesizing behavior through phylogenetic refinement. Attention, Perception & Psychophysics. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-019-01760-1
Eisenberg, I. W., Bissett, P. G., Zeynep Enkavi, A., Li, J., MacKinnon, D. P., Marsch, L. A., & Poldrack, R. A. (2019). Uncovering the structure of self-regulation through data-driven ontology discovery. Nature Communications, 10(1), 2319. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-10301-1
Favela, L. H. (2020). Cognitive science as complexity science. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews. Cognitive Science, 11(4), e1525. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1525
Gilmore, R. O., Thomas, A. L., & Fesi, J. (2016). Children’s brain responses to optic flow vary by pattern type and motion speed. PloS One, 11, e0157911. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0157911
Hill, A. B. (2015). The environment and disease: Association or causation? 1965. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 108(1), 32–37. https://doi.org/10.1177/0141076814562718
Kahneman, D. (2013). Thinking, fast and slow (1st edition). Farrar, Straus; Giroux. Retrieved from https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555
Krakauer, J. W., Ghazanfar, A. A., Gomez-Marin, A., MacIver, M. A., & Poeppel, D. (2017). Neuroscience needs behavior: Correcting a reductionist bias. Neuron, 93(3), 480–490. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2016.12.041
Levitis, D. A., Lidicker, W. Z., & Freund, G. (2009). Behavioural biologists don’t agree on what constitutes behaviour. Animal Behaviour, 78(1), 103–110. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2009.03.018
Marr, D. (1980). Vision. Retrieved from https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/vision
melodysheep. (2011, March). Ode to the brain! By symphony of science. Youtube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JB7jSFeVz1U
National Geographic. (2014, January). Beautiful 3-D brain scans show every synapse | national geographic. YouTube. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvXuq9jRWKE
Parada, F. J., & Rossi, A. (2018). If neuroscience needs behavior, what does psychology need? Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 433. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00433
Qian, Y., Berenbaum, S. A., & Gilmore, R. O. (2022). Vision contributes to sex differences in spatial cognition and activity interests. Scientific Reports, 12, 17623. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-22269-y
Ross, L. N., & Bassett, D. S. (2024). Causation in neuroscience: Keeping mechanism meaningful. Nature Reviews. Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-023-00778-7
Segal, A., Tiego, J., Parkes, L., Holmes, A. J., Marquand, A. F., & Fornito, A. (2024). Embracing variability in the search for biological mechanisms of psychiatric illness. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 29, 85–99. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2024.09.010
Sejnowski, T. J., Churchland, P. S., & Movshon, J. A. (2014). Putting big data to good use in neuroscience. Nat. Neurosci., 17(11), 1440–1441. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3839
Siddiqi, S. H., Kording, K. P., Parvizi, J., & Fox, M. D. (2022). Causal mapping of human brain function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 23(6), 361–375. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-022-00583-8
Stringer, C., Pachitariu, M., Steinmetz, N., Reddy, C. B., Carandini, M., & Harris, K. D. (2019). Spontaneous behaviors drive multidimensional, brainwide activity. Science, 364(6437), 255. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aav7893
Swanson, L. W. (2005). Anatomy of the soul as reflected in the cerebral hemispheres: Neural circuits underlying voluntary control of basic motivated behaviors. Journal of Comparative Neurology, 493(1), 122–131. https://doi.org/10.1002/cne.20733
Swanson, L. W., & Lichtman, J. W. (2016). From Cajal to connectome and beyond. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 39, 197–216. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-neuro-071714-033954