Browsing by Author "Luo, Yi"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Early childhood investment impacts social decision-making four decades later
    Luo, Yi; Hétu, Sébastien; Lohrenz, Terry; Hula, Andreas; Dayan, Peter; Ramey, Sharon L.; Sonnier-Netto, Mary Elizabeth; Lisinski, Jonathan; LaConte, Stephen M.; Nolte, Tobias; Fonagy, Peter; Rahmani, Elham; Montague, P. Read; Ramey, Craig T. (Nature Research, 2018-11-20)
    Early childhood educational investment produces positive effects on cognitive and non-cognitive skills, health, and socio-economic success. However, the effects of such interventions on social decision-making later in life are unknown. We recalled participants from one of the oldest randomized controlled studies of early childhood investment—the Abecedarian Project (ABC)—to participate in well-validated interactive economic games that probe social norm enforcement and planning. We show that in a repeated-play ultimatum game, ABC participants who received high-quality early interventions strongly reject unequal division of money across players (disadvantageous or advantageous) even at significant cost to themselves. Using a multi-round trust game and computational modeling of social exchange, we show that the same intervention participants also plan further into the future. These findings suggest that high quality early childhood investment can result in long-term changes in social decision-making and promote social norm enforcement in order to reap future benefits.
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    Emotional adaptation during a crisis: decline in anxiety and depression after the initial weeks of COVID-19 in the United States
    Shuster, Anastasia; O'Brien, Madeline; Luo, Yi; Berner, Laura A.; Perl, Ofer; Heflin, Matthew; Kulkarni, Kaustubh; Chung, Dongil; Na, Soojung; Fiore, Vincenzo G.; Gu, Xiaosi (2021-08-20)
    Crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic are known to exacerbate depression and anxiety, though their temporal trajectories remain under-investigated. The present study aims to investigate fluctuations in depression and anxiety using the COVID-19 pandemic as a model crisis. A total of 1512 adults living in the United States enrolled in this online study beginning April 2, 2020 and were assessed weekly for 10 weeks (until June 4, 2020). We measured depression and anxiety using the Zung Self-Rating Depression scale and State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (state subscale), respectively, along with demographic and COVID-related surveys. Linear mixed-effects models were used to examine factors contributing to longitudinal changes in depression and anxiety. We found that depression and anxiety levels were high in early April, but declined over time. Being female, younger age, lower-income, and previous psychiatric diagnosis correlated with higher overall levels of anxiety and depression; being married additionally correlated with lower overall levels of depression, but not anxiety. Importantly, worsening of COVID-related economic impact and increase in projected pandemic duration exacerbated both depression and anxiety over time. Finally, increasing levels of informedness correlated with decreasing levels of depression, while increased COVID-19 severity (i.e., 7-day change in cases) and social media use were positively associated with anxiety over time. These findings not only provide evidence for overall emotional adaptation during the initial weeks of the pandemic, but also provide insight into overlapping, yet distinct, factors contributing to depression and anxiety throughout the first wave of the pandemic.
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    From gratitude to injustice: Neurocomputational mechanisms of gratitude-induced injustice
    Zhu, Ruida; Xu, Zhenhua; Su, Song; Feng, Chunliang; Luo, Yi; Tang, Honghong; Zhang, Shen; Wu, Xiaoyan; Mai, Xiaoqin; Liu, Chao (Academic Press-Elsevier, 2021-12-15)
    Gratitude shapes individuals' behaviours and impacts the harmony of society. Many previous studies focused on its association with prosocial behaviours. A possibility that gratitude can lead to moral violation has been overlooked until recently. Nevertheless, the neurocognitive mechanisms of gratitude-induced moral violation are still unclear. On the other hand, though neural correlates of the gratitude's formation have been examined, the neural underpinnings of gratitude-induced behaviour remain unknown. For addressing these two overlapped research gaps, we developed novel tasks to investigate how participants who had received voluntary (Gratitude group) or involuntary help (Control group) punished their benefactors' unfairness with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The Gratitude group punished their benefactors less than the Control group. The self-report and computational modelling results demonstrated a crucial role of the boosted protection tendency on behalf of benefactors in the gratitude-induced injustice. The fMRI results showed that activities in the regions associated with mentalizing (temporoparietal junction) and reward processing (ventral medial prefrontal cortex) differed between the groups and were related to the gratitude-induced injustice. They suggest that grateful individuals concern for benefactors' benefits, value chances to interact with benefactors, and refrain from action that perturbs relationship-building (i.e., exert less punishment on benefactors' unfairness), which reveal a dark side of gratitude and enrich the gratitude theory (i.e., the find-bind-remind theory). Our findings provide psychological, computational, and neural accounts of the gratitude-induced behaviour and further the understanding of the nature of gratitude.
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    Human substantia nigra and ventral tegmental area involvement in computing social error signals during the ultimatum game
    Hétu, Sébastien; Luo, Yi; D’Ardenne, Kimberlee; Lohrenz, Terry; Montague, P. Read (Oxford University Press, 2017-08-17)
    As models of shared expectations, social norms play an essential role in our societies. Since our social environment is changing constantly, our internal models of it also need to change. In humans, there is mounting evidence that neural structures such as the insula and the ventral striatum are involved in detecting norm violation and updating internal models. However, because of methodological challenges, little is known about the possible involvement of midbrain structures in detecting norm violation and updating internal models of our norms. Here, we used high-resolution cardiacgated functional magnetic resonance imaging and a norm adaptation paradigm in healthy adults to investigate the role of the substantia nigra/ventral tegmental area (SN/VTA) complex in tracking signals related to norm violation that can be used to update internal norms. We show that the SN/VTA codes for the norm’s variance prediction error (PE) and norm PE with spatially distinct regions coding for negative and positive norm PE. These results point to a common role played by the SN/ VTA complex in supporting both simple reward-based and social decision making.
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    Noradrenaline tracks emotional modulation of attention in human amygdala
    Bang, Dan; Luo, Yi; Barbosa, Leonardo S.; Batten, Seth R.; Hadj-Amar, Beniamino; Twomey, Thomas; Melville, Natalie; White, Jason P.; Torres, Alexis; Celaya, Xavier; Ramaiah, Priya; McClure, Samuel M.; Brewer, Gene A.; Bina, Robert W.; Lohrenz, Terry; Casas, Brooks; Chiu, Pearl H.; Vannucci, Marina; Kishida, Kenneth T.; Witcher, Mark R.; Montague, P. Read (Elsevier, 2023-11-20)
    The noradrenaline (NA) system is one of the brain’s major neuromodulatory systems; it originates in a small midbrain nucleus, the locus coeruleus (LC), and projects widely throughout the brain. The LC-NA system is believed to regulate arousal and attention and is a pharmacological target in multiple clinical conditions. Yet our understanding of its role in health and disease has been impeded by a lack of direct recordings in humans. Here, we address this problem by showing that electrochemical estimates of sub-second NA dynamics can be obtained using clinical depth electrodes implanted for epilepsy monitoring. We made these recordings in the amygdala, an evolutionarily ancient structure that supports emotional processing, and receives dense LC-NA projections, while patients (n = 3) performed a visual affective oddball task. The task was designed to induce different cognitive states, with the oddball stimuli involving emotionally evocative images, which varied in terms of arousal (low versus high) and valence (negative versus positive). Consistent with theory, the NA estimates tracked the emotional modulation of attention, with a stronger oddball response in a high-arousal state. Parallel estimates of pupil dilation, a common behavioral proxy for LC-NA activity, supported a hypothesis that pupil-NA coupling changes with cognitive state, with the pupil and NA estimates being positively correlated for oddball stimuli in a high-arousal but not a lowarousal state. Our study provides proof of concept that neuromodulator monitoring is now possible using depth electrodes in standard clinical use.
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    Randomized Manipulation of Early Cognitive Experience Impacts Adult Brain Structure
    Farah, Martha J.; Sternberg, Saul; Nichols, Thomas A.; Duda, Jeffrey T.; Lohrenz, Terry; Luo, Yi; Sonnier, Libbie; Ramey, Sharon L.; Montague, P. Read; Ramey, Craig T. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2021)
    Does early exposure to cognitive and linguistic stimulation impact brain structure? Or do genetic predispositions account for the co-occurrence of certain neuroanatomical phenotypes and a tendency to engage children in cognitively stimulating activities? Low socioeconomic status infants were randomized to either 5 years of cognitively and linguistically stimulating center-based care or a comparison condition. The intervention resulted in large and statistically significant changes in brain structure measured in midlife, particularly for male individuals. These findings are the first to extend the large literature on cognitive enrichment effects on animal brains to humans, and to demonstrate the effects of uniquely human features such as linguistic stimulation.