Imitation Control

Imitation is essential for social learning and transmission of culture. Imitation is also pervasive in human behavior, Yet, we do not imitate all the time. Some rare neurological patients, however, do imitate most of the time. These patients, with their imitative behavior, tell us that there must be a control mechanism for imitation in the human brain that was damaged by the brain lesion. We believe that understanding how this control mechanism works is important, because it may allow us to modulate it. Why would we want to do that? In some situations we may want to increase or decrease the tendency/capacity to imitate. For instance, social influence tends to facilitate relapse in substance use and abuse. Increased capacity to control imitation may help subjects with previous history of substance abuse to be less sensitive to social cues. On the other hand, imitation is linked with empathy. Increasing imitation (by decreasing its control) may help boost the empathic tendency of subjects with reduced empathy. This project is led by Katy Cross.

Action Observation as a Form of Intervention in Focal Dystonia

Dystonia is a movement disorder that causes the muscles to contract involuntarily. There are different kinds of dystonias. The most common are focal dystonias that affect only one body part, generally the neck or the hand. This condition can be severely debilitating.

We believe that focal dystonia is the result of an abnormal  representation of actions involving that body part. Research on mirror neurons and action observation has shown that observing the actions of other people activate the motor system of the observer. We think that action observation may provide a simple, non-invasive way to reprogram disrupted action representation in patients with focal dystonia.

Imitation Bias: Gender and Race Effects

While imitation is ubiquitous and pervasive in human behavior, it is also true that we don’t imitate others equally. There are well known preferences in human imitation. Two of these preferences are the tendency to imitate people like us, and the tendency to imitate people with high social status. In this project, led by Liz Losin, we investigate the neural systems associated with these imitation preferences, by looking at the effects of gender and race.

Attention and motor resonance

When we observe the actions of other people, our motor system sort of ‘resonates’ with the motor system of the people we are watching. This practically means that the same muscles that are used by the people we are watching are also more easily excitable in our own body. We believe that this motor resonance 1) involves the activation of mirror neurons, 2) is linked to forms of contagion like emotional contagion, and 3) is also associated with an automatic, effortless understanding of the actions we are watching.

Some previous studies, however, have raised the possibility that attention modulates motor resonance substantially. We are trying to investigate systematically this issue with this collaborative project led by Sook-Lei Liew, from the lab of with Lisa Aziz-Zadeh at USC.

Empathy and altruism

Research on empathy and altruism has boomed recently. There are two main lines of investigation in the literature. One looks at forms of empathy associated with mirroring, imitation, and contagion. These are forms of empathy that are fundamentally automatic and do not involve deliberation (let’s call this form of empathy the reflexive form). The other one looks at how people share sums of money in economic games. The decisions made in these games require deliberation, thus we call this form of empathy the reflective form. Curiously, there is no attempt in the literature to investigate these two forms of empathy in the same study and test whether or not they are completely independent or somewhat linked. This project, led by Leo Moore, aims at investigating whether or not there are such connections.

A biomarker of social competence in schizophrenia

There is a strong interest in the study of social cognition in schizophrenia. Indeed, studies suggest impaired social functioning not only impacts the quality of life but also predicts outcomes in schizophrenia, including relapse and poor course of illness. The problem, unfortunately, is that social cognition is a very complex construct and there aren’t good metrics that capture it well.

In the human mirror neuron literature, there are three markers of mirror neuron activity, using fMRI, TMS, and EEG. Studies have often demonstrated correlations between these markers of neural mirroring and some behavioral measures of social competence. There is no study, however, that has used all three markers, investigating the relationships between them. This collaborative project with the lab of Michael Green aims at doing that and at investigating whether the combination of all three markers can provide a better brain indicator of social competence that can be used in schizophrenia research.

Mini TMS coils for neuromodulation in neuropsychiatry

TMS is now widely used to modulate brain activity noninvasively and is a powerful tool in neuropsychiatry. TMS, however, is typically applied only to one brain region at a time, a limiting factor in TMS effectiveness for treatment. Simultaneous or coordinated brain stimulation of multiple brain areas may provide more powerful neuromodulation protocols. Development of such protocols has been limited by the large size of typical TMS coils. Currently, stimulation effects with one coil are broader than ideal and ability to place coils over adjacent but separate brain regions is often impossible. The main idea of this project (in collaboration with the lab of Sat Pannu, specialized in micro- and nano-technology) is to build progressively smaller coils that can be placed in close vicinity on the scalp of the subject/patient. This would allow flexible noninvasive stimulation protocols over multiple brain regions simultaneously or in experimentally controlled and temporally coordinated patterns.

Restoring connectivity in Alzheimer's disease (AD)

Reduced connectivity between brain areas is a typical feature of AD. Furthermore, some studies show that reduced connectivity correlates with the cognitive impairment in AD patients. Restoring connectivity between brain areas may improve the clinical condition of the patients. In this project we stimulate two cortical brain regions simultaneously with TMS in AD patients. By doing so, we hope to increase the connectivity between the stimulated brain regions.

We stimulate the frontal and parietal cortex of AD patients. EEG data show that TMS produces oscillatory neural activity on the stimulated brain area. We believe that when two brain regions that are connected are also simultaneously stimulated with TMS, they entrain, that is, they oscillate in synchrony. This is an ideal condition to reinforce functional connectivity between them. Fronto-parietal networks are critical for cognition. Thus restoring connectivity in these networks should be beneficial for AD patients.

This project is a collaboration between our lab and three other investigators: Dr. Liana Apostolova is a neurologist who specializes in AD and is a member of the Easton Center for Alzheimer’s Disease Research at UCLA. She has published extensively with Dr. Paul Thompson of the UCLA LONI lab (also co-investigator here) on neuroimaging of AD. Dr. J. J. Wang is an expert in MRI-based blood flow measures (ASL).

Neuroscience of Role-Mediated Learning

This collaboration with Noel Enyedy (UCLA Psychological Studies in Education) and Francis Steen (UCLA Communication Studies) focuses on the pedagogically central topic of concept formation. This study, led by David DeLiema and Darin Hoyer, investigates the effect of imaginative role immersion in understanding the concept of packet switching, a core innovation in digital networking. We compare a traditional method of teaching packet switching with an ‘embodied’ one that induces learners to adopt a particular perspective in relation to the newly learned concept. For instance, learners imagine themselves as a component within the networking process, such as a router or a packet. We believe that imaginative role immersion should facilitate concept learning and yield greater brain activity in sensory-motor areas associated with bodily movements.

Musical Empathy and Mirror Neurons

Music is a universal social and cultural practice that binds groups, articulates personal and collective identities, and demarcates boundaries of self/other, us/them. As a fundamentally social behavior, music invites us to connect with others through shared empathy, yet the root of its unique power to bring people together (or separate them) is very poorly understood. Musicologists have their answers and scientists have theirs, and rarely do paradigms cross the disciplinary divide. In this project we seek to synthesize cultural, theoretical, and philosophical perspectives from the humanities with empirical experimentation from the neurosciences in order to investigate the mechanisms underlying our abilities to empathize with others through music, and conversely, to understand what happens in the brain when empathy collapses during musical experience. This is a collaborative project with Robert Fink (Chair of UCLA Musicology), led by Zachary Wallmark, in which we plan to examine the neural networks responsible for sympathetic listening.

Mini TMS coils for neuromodulation in neuropsychiatry

TMS is now widely used to modulate brain activity noninvasively and is a powerful tool in neuropsychiatry. TMS, however, is typically applied only to one brain region at a time, a limiting factor in TMS effectiveness for treatment. Simultaneous or coordinated brain stimulation of multiple brain areas may provide more powerful neuromodulation protocols. Development of such protocols has been limited by the large size of typical TMS coils. Currently, stimulation effects with one coil are broader than ideal and ability to place coils over adjacent but separate brain regions is often impossible. The main idea of this project (in collaboration with the lab of Sat Pannu, specialized in micro- and nano-technology) is to build progressively smaller coils that can be placed in close vicinity on the scalp of the subject/patient. This would allow flexible noninvasive stimulation protocols over multiple brain regions simultaneously or in experimentally controlled and temporally coordinated patterns.

Reducing Group Prejudice with Neuromodulation

Humans everywhere are inclined to cherish their communities while distrusting, if not despising, groups regarded as alien. We seem particularly susceptible to group prejudice during times of threat. The most intensively studied experimental measure of group bias following threat is worldview defense. This is a psychological effect wherein subtle reminders of death or other poignant threats simultaneously exaggerate ingroup chauvinism and outgroup derogation. Worldview defense has been empirically and theoretically linked to social conformity, including reduced acceptance of cultural diversity. Surprisingly, there have been no neuroscientific explorations of this phenomenon to date. This project bridges this gap by pooling the expertise of evolutionary anthropologists who have made significant contributions to the worldview defense literature, Daniel Fessler and Colin Holbrook, with neuroscientists Marco Iacoboni and Keise Izuma. This would be the first interdisciplinary study of its kind linking neuroscientific research with psychological accounts of worldview defense.

Using TMS, we plan to test the hypothesis that the posterior medial prefrontal cortex (pMFC) plays a key role in worldview defense. Worldview defense owes to a psychological mechanism that intensifies vigilance to emotionally charged environmental stimuli in the aftermath of threat; at the neural level of description, this vigilance effect appears supported by the pMFC. The pMFC has been conceptualized as a “conflict monitor” which heightens attention upon detection of a threat. Converging evidence show that pMFC facilitates shifts in social evaluation upon detection of consensus discrepancy, is activated by reminders of death, and enhances sensitivity to one’s environment following threat-detection. We postulate that reminders of death will not exacerbate group bias while pMFC is temporarily downregulated by TMS.