Papers by Jan B Engelmann
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory), Jul 28, 2023
While the effects of anxiety on various cognitive processes, including memory, attention, and lea... more While the effects of anxiety on various cognitive processes, including memory, attention, and learning, have been relatively well documented, the neurobiological effects of anxiety on social cognitive processes remain largely unknown. We address this gap using threatof-shock to induce incidental anxiety while participants performed two false-belief tasks, a standard and an economic-games version. During belief formation and belief inferences, regions in a canonical social cognition network showed activation reflecting mentalizing, including the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), precuneus, and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC). At the same time, we found threat-related suppression of social cognition regions during belief inferences. A conjunction analysis confirmed that a network of regions was simultaneously engaged during mentalizing and suppressed by anxiety: bilateral TPJ, bilateral IFG, and putamen. We examined how threat impacted the connectivity between seed regions from the conjunction analyses and its targets. During belief formation, we found that anxiety suppressed the connectivity between the precuneus seed and two key mentalizing nodes, the dmPFC and right TPJ. Moreover, during belief inferences threat specificallty suppressed belief-based connectivity between putamen and its targets in IPS and dlPFC, and dispositional distress significantly modulated threat-related suppression of connectivity between the left TPJ seed and left IPS. Our results highlight important effects of incidental and dispositional anxiety on specific nodes of the social cognition network. Taken together, our study uncovers novel interactions between the reward, social cognition, and attentional systems, indicating that social cognitive processes rely on support from other large-scale networks, and that these network interactions are disrupted under incidental anxiety.
Humans need social closeness to prosper. There is evidence that empathy can induce social closene... more Humans need social closeness to prosper. There is evidence that empathy can induce social closeness. However, it remains unclear how empathy-related social closeness is formed and how stable it is as time passes. We applied an acquisition-extinction paradigm combined with computational modelling and fMRI, to investigate the formation and stability of empathy-related social closeness. Participants observed painful stimulation of another person with high probability (acquisition) and low probability (extinction), and rated their closeness to that person. The results of two independent studies showed increased social closeness in the acquisition block that resisted extinction in the extinction block. Providing insights into underlying mechanisms, reinforcement learning modelling revealed that the formation of social closeness is based on a learning signal (prediction error) generated from observing another’s pain, whereas maintaining social closeness is based on a learning signal gener...
Journal of behavioral addictions, Oct 4, 2023
Background and aims: People with Gambling Disorder (GD) often make risky decisions and experience... more Background and aims: People with Gambling Disorder (GD) often make risky decisions and experience cognitive distortions about gambling. Moreover, people with GD have been shown to be overly confident in their decisions, especially when money can be won. Here we investigated if and how the act of making a risky choice with varying monetary stakes impacts confidence differently in patients with GD (n 5 27) relative to healthy controls (HCs) (n 5 30). Methods: We used data from our previous mixed-gamble study, in which participants were given the choice of a certain option or a 50/50 gamble with potential gains or losses, after which they rated their confidence. Results: While HCs were more confident when making certain than risky choices, GD patients were specifically more confident when making risky choices than certain choices. Notably, relative to HCs, confidence of patients with GD decreased more strongly with higher gain values when making a certain choice, suggesting a stronger fear of missing out or "anticipated regret" of missing out on potential gains when rejecting the risky choice. Discussion: The current findings highlight the potential relevance of confidence and "regret" as cognitive mechanisms feeding into excessive risk-taking as seen in GD. Moreover, this study adds to the limited previous work investigating how confidence is affected in value-based risky contexts.
Although both attention and motivation affect behavior, how these 2 systems interact is currently... more Although both attention and motivation affect behavior, how these 2 systems interact is currently unknown. To address this question, 2 experiments were conducted in which participants performed a spatially cued forced-choice localization task under varying levels of motivation. Participants were asked to indicate the location of a peripherally cued target while ignoring a distracter. Motivation was manipulated by varying magnitude and valence (reward and punishment) of an incentive linked to task performance. Attention was manipulated via a peripheral cue, which correctly predicted the presence of a target stimulus on 70% of the trials. Taken together, our findings revealed that the signal detection measure dЈ, reflecting perceptual sensitivity, increased as a function of incentive value during both valid and invalid trials. In addition, trend analyses revealed a linear increase in detection sensitivity as a function of incentive magnitude for both reward and punishment conditions. Our results suggest that elevated motivation leads to improved efficiency in orienting and reorienting of exogenous spatial attention and that one mechanism by which attention and motivation interact involves the sharpening of attention during motivationally salient conditions.
Although cooperation can lead to mutually beneficial outcomes, cooperative actions only pay off f... more Although cooperation can lead to mutually beneficial outcomes, cooperative actions only pay off for the individual if others can be trusted to cooperate as well. Identifying trustworthy interaction partners is therefore a central challenge in human social life. How do people navigate this challenge? Prior work suggests that people rely on facial appearance to judge the trustworthiness of strangers. However, the question of whether these judgments are actually accurate remains debated. The present research examines accuracy in trustworthiness detection from faces and three moderators proposed by previous research. We investigate whether people show above-chance accuracy (a) when they make trust decisions and when they provide explicit trustworthiness ratings, (b) when judging male and female counterparts, and (c) when rating cropped images (with non-facial features removed) and uncropped images. Two studies showed that incentivized trust decisions (Study 1, n = 131 university students) and incentivized trustworthiness predictions (Study 2, n = 266 university students) were unrelated to the actual trustworthiness of counterparts. Accuracy was not moderated by stimulus type (cropped vs. uncropped faces) or counterparts' gender. Overall, these findings suggest that people are unable to detect the trustworthiness of strangers based on their facial appearance, when this is the only information available to them.
Social Science Research Network, 2019
It is widely hypothesized that anxiety and worry about an uncertain future lead to the adoption o... more It is widely hypothesized that anxiety and worry about an uncertain future lead to the adoption of comforting beliefs or "wishful thinking". However, there is little direct causal evidence for this effect. In our experiment, participants perform a visual pattern recognition task where some patterns may result in the delivery of an electric shock, a proven way of inducing anxiety. Participants engage in significant wishful thinking, as they are less likely to correctly identify patterns that they know may lead to a shock. Greater ambiguity of the pattern facilitates wishful thinking. Raising incentives for accuracy does not significantly decrease it.
Gambling disorder (GD) is a behavioural addiction characterized by impairments in decision-making... more Gambling disorder (GD) is a behavioural addiction characterized by impairments in decision-making, favouring risk- and reward-prone choices. One explanatory factor for this behaviour is a deviation in attentional processes, as increasing evidence indicates that GD patients show an attentional bias toward gambling stimuli. However, previous attentional studies have not directly investigated attention during risky decision-making. 25 patients with GD and 27 healthy matched controls (HC) completed a mixed gambles task combined with eye-tracking to investigate attentional biases for potential gains versus losses during decision-making under risk. Results indicate that compared to HC, GD patients gambled more and were less loss averse. GD patients did not show a direct attentional bias towards gains (or relative to losses). Using a recent (neuro)economics model that considers average attention and trial-wise deviations in average attention, we conducted fine-grained exploratory analyses ...
Facial cues and trust-related behavior
PsycEXTRA Dataset
Cognitive Neuroscience
The Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology, Jan 30, 2010
Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics, Sep 1, 2013
There are two regularities we have learned from experimental studies of choice under risk. The fi... more There are two regularities we have learned from experimental studies of choice under risk. The first is that the majority of people weigh objective probabilities non-linearly. The second regularity, although less commonly acknowledged, is that there is a large amount of heterogeneity in how people distort probabilities. Despite of this, little effort has been made to identify the source of heterogeneity. In this paper, we explore the possibility that personality type is linked to probability distortions. Using validated psychological questionnaires, we clustered participants into distinct personality types: motivated, impulsive, and affective. We found that the motivated viewed gambling more attractive, whereas the impulsive were the most capable of discriminating non-extreme probabilities. Our results suggest that the observed heterogeneity in probability distortions may be explained by personality profiles, which can be elicited though standard psychological questionnaires. Keywords choice under risk; personality; experiments; probability weighting function There are two regularities that we have learned from experimental studies of choice under risk. The first is that the majority of people weigh objective probabilities non-linearly, challenging the view from traditional economics that expected utility is linear in probability. In particular, several studies suggest that people overweigh small probabilities of a gain or loss and underweigh medium and large probabilities, and the "typical" probability weighting function has an inverse S-shape as depicted below (
Hermeneutische Blätter, Jun 1, 2010
Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, Jul 26, 2019
Contextual and social influences on valuation and choice
Elsevier eBooks, 2013
To survive in our complex environment, we have to adapt to changing contexts. Prior research that... more To survive in our complex environment, we have to adapt to changing contexts. Prior research that investigated how contextual changes are processed in the human brain has demonstrated important modulatory influences on multiple cognitive processes underlying decision-making, including perceptual judgments, working memory, as well as cognitive and attentional control. However, in everyday life, the importance of context is even more obvious during economic and social interactions, which often have implicit rule sets that need to be recognized by a decision-maker. Here, we review recent evidence from an increasing number of studies in the fields of Neuroeconomics and Social Neuroscience that investigate the neurobiological basis of contextual effects on valuation and social choice. Contrary to the assumptions of rational choice theory, multiple contextual factors, such as the availability of alternative choice options, shifts in reference point, and social context, have been shown to modulate behavior, as well as signals in task-relevant neural networks. A consistent picture that emerges from neurobiological results is that valuation-related activity in striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex is highly context dependent during both social and nonsocial choice. Alternative approaches to model and explain choice behavior, such as comparison-based choice models, as well as implications for future research are discussed.
Trust and Emotion
Cambridge University Press eBooks, Nov 30, 2021
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2009
We investigated how the brain integrates motivational and attentional signals by using a neuroima... more We investigated how the brain integrates motivational and attentional signals by using a neuroimaging paradigm that provided separate estimates for transient cue-and target-related signals, in addition to sustained block-related responses. Participants performed a Posner-type task in which an endogenous cue predicted target location on 70% of trials, while motivation was manipulated by varying magnitude and valence of a cash incentive linked to task performance. Our fi ndings revealed increased detection performance (d ′) as a function of incentive value. In parallel, brain signals revealed that increases in absolute incentive magnitude led to cue-and target-specifi c response modulations that were independent of sustained state effects across visual cortex, fronto-parietal regions, and subcortical regions. Interestingly, state-like effects of incentive were observed in several of these brain regions, too, suggesting that both transient and sustained fMRI signals may contribute to task performance. For both cue and block periods, the effects of administering incentives were correlated with individual trait measures of reward sensitivity. Taken together, our fi ndings support the notion that motivation improves behavioral performance in a demanding attention task by enhancing evoked responses across a distributed set of anatomical sites, many of which have been previously implicated in attentional processing. However, the effect of motivation was not simply additive as the impact of absolute incentive was greater during invalid than valid trials in several brain regions, possibly because motivation had a larger effect on reorienting than orienting attentional mechanisms at these sites.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Oct 9, 2017
The right posterior parietal cortex (PPC) is implicated in spatial attention, but its specific ro... more The right posterior parietal cortex (PPC) is implicated in spatial attention, but its specific role in emotional spatial attention remains unclear. In this study, we combined inhibitory transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) with a fear-conditioning paradigm to test the role of the right PPC in attentional control of task-irrelevant threatening distractors. In a shamcontrolled within-subject design, 1-Hz repetitive TMS was applied to the left and right PPC after which participants performed a visual search task with a distractor that was either associated with a loud noise burst (threat) or not (non-threat). Results demonstrated attentional capture across all conditions as evidenced by the typical reaction time costs of the distractor. However, only after inhibitory rTMS to the right PPC reaction time cost in the threatening distractor condition was increased relative to the non-threatening distractor condition, suggesting that attention lingered longer on the threatening distractor. We propose that the right PPC is involved in disengagement of attention from emotionally salient stimuli in order to reorient attention to task relevant stimuli and may have implications for anxiety disorders associated with difficulties to disengage from threatening stimuli.
While navigating a fundamentally uncertain world, humans and animals constantly produce subjectiv... more While navigating a fundamentally uncertain world, humans and animals constantly produce subjective confidence judgments, thereby evaluating the probability of their decisions, actions or statements being correct. Confidence typically correlates with neural activity positively in a ventromedial-prefrontal (VMPFC) network and negatively in a dorsolateral and dorsomedial prefrontal network. Here, combining fMRI with a reinforcement-learning paradigm, we leverage the fact that humans are more confident in their choices when seeking gains than avoiding losses to reveal a functional dissociation: whereas the dorsal prefrontal network correlates negatively with a condition-specific confidence signal, the VMPFC network positively encodes task-wide confidence signal incorporating the valence-induced bias. Challenging dominant neuro-computational models, we found that decision-related VMPFC activity better correlates with confidence than with option-values inferred from reinforcement-learning...
Reply to Komatsu et al.: From local social mindfulness to global sustainability efforts?
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Niels J. Van Doesum , Ryan O. Murphy, Marcello Gallucci, Efrat Aharonov-Majar, Ursula Athenstaedt... more Niels J. Van Doesum , Ryan O. Murphy, Marcello Gallucci, Efrat Aharonov-Majar, Ursula Athenstaedt , Wing Tung Au, Liying Bai , Robert B€ ohm , Inna Bovina , Nancy R. Buchan , Xiao-Ping Chen, Kitty B. Dumont , Jan B. Engelmann , Kimmo Eriksson , Hyun Euh , Susann Fiedler , Justin Friesen , Simon G€ achter , Camilo Garcia, Roberto Gonz alez , Sylvie Graf , Katarzyna Growiec , Serge Guimond , Martina H reb ı ckov a , Elizabeth Immer-Bernold, Jeff Joireman, Gokhan Karagonlar , Kerry Kawakami , Toko Kiyonari , Yu Kou, Alexandros-Andreas Kyrtsis , Siugmin Lay , Geoffrey J. Leonardelli , Norman P. Li, Yang Li , Boris Maciejovsky , Zoi Manesi, Ali Mashuri , Aurelia Mok , Karin S. Moser , Ladislav Mot ak , Adrian Netedu , Michael J. Platow , Karolina Raczka-Winkler, Christopher P. Reinders Folmer , Cecilia Reyna , Angelo Romano , Shaul Shalvi , Cl audia Sim~ ao , Adam W. Stivers , Pontus Strimling, Yannis Tsirbas , Sonja Utz , Leander van der Meij , Sven Waldzus , Yiwen Wang, Bernd Weber , Ori Weisel , Tim Wildschut , Fabian Winter , Junhui Wu , Jose C. Yong , and Paul A. M. Van Lange
NeuroImage, 2019
We are often presented with choices that differ in their more immediate versus future consequence... more We are often presented with choices that differ in their more immediate versus future consequences. Interestingly, in everyday-life, ambiguity about the exact timing of such consequences frequently occurs, yet it remains unknown whether and how time-ambiguity influences decisions and their underlying neural correlates. We developed a novel intertemporal fMRI choice task in which participants make choices between sooner-smaller (SS) versus later-larger (LL) monetary rewards with systematically varying levels of time-ambiguity. Across trials, delay information of the SS, the LL, or both rewards was either exact (e.g., in 5 weeks), of low ambiguity (4 week range: e.g., in 3-7 weeks), or of high ambiguity (8 week range: e.g., in 1-9 weeks). Choice behavior showed that the majority of participants preferred options with exact delays over those with ambiguous delays, indicating time-ambiguity aversion. Consistent with these results, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex showed decreased activation during ambiguous versus exact trials. In contrast, intraparietal sulcus activation increased during ambiguous versus exact trials. Furthermore, exploratory analyses suggest that more time-ambiguity averse participants show more insula and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activation during subjective value (SV)-coding of ambiguous versus exact trials. Lastly, the best-fitting computational choice models indicate that ambiguity impacts the SV of options via time perception or via an additive ambiguity-related penalty term. Together, these results provide the first behavioral and neural signatures of time-ambiguity, pointing towards a unique profile that is distinct from impatience. Since time-ambiguity is ubiquitous in real-life, it likely contributes to shortsighted decisions above and beyond delay-discounting.
Uploads
Papers by Jan B Engelmann