Journal article
Illuminating the conceptual structure of the space of moral violations with searchlight representational similarity analysis
NeuroImage (Orlando, Fla.), Vol.159, pp.371-387
10/01/2017
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2017.07.043
PMCID: PMC5671354
PMID: 28743459
Abstract
Characterizing how representations of moral violations are organized, cognitively and neurally, is central to understanding how people conceive and judge them. Past work has identified brain regions that represent morally relevant features and distinguish moral domains, but has not yet advanced a broader account of where and on what basis neural representations of moral violations are organized. With searchlight representational similarity analysis, we investigate where category membership drives similarity in neural patterns during moral judgment of violations from two key moral domains: Harm and Purity. Representations converge across domains in a network of regions resembling the mentalizing network. However, Harm and Purity violation representations respectively converge in different regions: precuneus (PC) and left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG). Examining substructure within moral domains, Harm violations converge in PC regardless of subdomain (physical harms, psychological harms), while Purity subdomains (pathogen-related violations, sex-related violations) converge in distinct sets of regions – mirroring a dissociation observed in principal-component analysis of behavioral data. Further, we find initial evidence for representation of morally relevant features within these two domain-encoding regions. The present analyses offer a case study for understanding how organization within the complex conceptual space of moral violations is reflected in the organization of neural patterns across the cortex.
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Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Illuminating the conceptual structure of the space of moral violations with searchlight representational similarity analysis
- Creators
- E.A Wasserman - Dept. of Psychology, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, United StatesA Chakroff - Dept. of Psychology, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, United StatesR Saxe - Dept. of Brain & Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United StatesL Young - Dept. of Psychology, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, United States
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- NeuroImage (Orlando, Fla.), Vol.159, pp.371-387
- DOI
- 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2017.07.043
- PMID
- 28743459
- PMCID
- PMC5671354
- NLM abbreviation
- Neuroimage
- ISSN
- 1053-8119
- eISSN
- 1095-9572
- Publisher
- Elsevier Inc
- Grant note
- DOI: 10.13039/100000893, name: Simons Foundation; DOI: 10.13039/100000925, name: John Templeton Foundation, award: 5001695; DOI: 10.13039/100000002, name: National Institutes of Health, award: 1R01 MH096914-01A1
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 10/01/2017
- Academic Unit
- Psychological and Brain Sciences; Iowa Neuroscience Institute
- Record Identifier
- 9984071667902771
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