Researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus have found that many pregnant Black Americans have low levels of choline, an essential nutrient that aids in prenatal brain development. Stress caused by institutional racism may play a role. The study, out now in Schizophrenia Bulletin, also found that these low levels of choline were […]

A defendant is criminally responsible for his action only if he is shown to have engaged in a guilty act—actus reus (eg for larceny, voluntarily taking someone else’s property without permission)—while possessing a guilty mind—mens rea (eg knowing that he had taken someone else’s property without permission, intending not to return it)—and lacking affirmative defenses […]

According to philosophy of mind and neuroscientific models, the sense of agency can be defined as the sense that I am the one that is generating an action and causing its effects. Such ability to sense ourselves as causal agents is critical for the definition of intentional behavior and is a primary root for human […]

In a series of preregistered studies, we explore (a) the difference between people’s intuitions about indeterministic scenarios and their intuitions about deterministic scenarios; (b) the difference between people’s intuitions about indeterministic scenarios and their intuitions about neuro-deterministic scenarios (i.e., scenarios where the determinism is described at the neurological level); (c) the difference between people’s intuitions […]

Since its introduction, the reward prediction error theory of dopamine has explained a wealth of empirical phenomena, providing a unifying framework for understanding the representation of reward and value in the brain1,2,3. According to the now canonical theory, reward predictions are represented as a single scalar quantity, which supports learning about the expectation, or mean, […]

The capacity to predict future events permits a creature to detect, model, and manipulate the causal structure of its interactions with its environment. Behavioral experiments suggest that learning is driven by changes in the expectations about future salient events such as rewards and punishments. Physiological work has recently complemented these studies by identifying dopaminergic neurons […]

Laypeople and scientists alike believe that they know anger, or sadness, or fear when they see it. These emotions and a few others are presumed to have specific causal mechanisms in the brain and properties that are observable (on the face, in the voice, in the body, or in experience)—that is, they are assumed to […]

The brain is assumed to be hypoactive during cardiac arrest. However, the neurophysiological state of the brain immediately following cardiac arrest has not been systematically investigated. In this study, the authors performed continuous electroencephalography in rats undergoing experimental cardiac arrest and analyzed changes in power density, coherence, directed connectivity, and cross-frequency coupling. We identified a […]

This paper states that it is inappropriate to build any implications for the free will and by extension to legal definition of criminal responsibility from the famous Libet’s experiment. However, even if we could take Libet’s results at face value, the paper shows that at least in the context of German law, the change in […]

The seminal Libet experiments proposed that consciousness may not be part of the causal role leading to action, and thus that humans might generally make decisions unconsciously. However, the Libet experiments were carried out on arbitrary decisions (e.g., raising the left or right hand for no reason or purpose). This paper demonstrates that the Libet […]