Modern neuropsychological tests are well characterized in terms of specificity, sensitivity, and predictive values. (2013) examined differences in DNA methylation in adolescents for several genes (GR (NR3C1), dopamine receptor (DRD4), serotonin transporter (5HTT), brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT), and dopamine transporter (DAT1)) in relation to their parents reports of hardship during childhood. Over time, the unifying theory that has emerged is that the amygdala is a salience detector, activating to alert the person to a large variety of stimuli (see Figure 1 in Ref. 23, 3952. The developing brain: from theory to neuroimaging and back. *Correspondence: Sebastin J. Lipina, Unidad de Neurobiologa Aplicada (UNA, CEMIC-CONICET), Moldes 2152 1A, Buenos Aires, C1428CRH Capital Federal, Argentina e-mail: lipina@gmail.com, Critical Neuroscience: The context and implications of human brain research, View all Hum. The scientific nature of the approach is one worthy of discussing as it can be both a strength and weakness, as is its reductionist nature. Thus, it would be correct to say that activity in the amygdala may indicate the individual was experiencing fear. Generally, this is an error of inference that arises because not all logical inferences are symmetrical. (2011). Neurosci. Biological psychology has been dated to Avicenna (980-1037 C.E. (2010). doi: 10.1097/PSY.0b013e3181e1a23c, Goldin, A. P., Hermida, M. J., Shalom, D. E., Elias Costa, M., Lopez-Rosenfeld, M., Segretin, M. S., et al. Strengths of Humanistic Theory. However, as discussed above, neuroscience-based claims are limited by problems of reverse inference and group-to-individual inference and thus can rarely go beyond establishing that an impairment is plausible. The case of Phineas Gage has been of huge interest in the field of psychology and is a largely speculated phenomena. Far transfer to language and math of a short software-based gaming intervention. doi: 10.1016/S0079-6123(02)38074-9, Neville, H., Stevens, C., Pakulak, E., and Bell, T. A. The essential neuro claim made by his team was that Mr. Weinstein's arachnoid cyst impaired his rationality. A Frye26-type prehearing was held in which the judge ruled the scans admissible. 10, 647658. For such a purpose, it is necessary to encourage the design of interventions and the measurement of outcomes driven by theoretical models to include the consideration of underlying mechanisms at different levels of analysis. Socioeconomic status and the brain: mechanistic insights from human and animal research. In addition, current neuroscientific research in the area of early adverse experience on brain development has begun to incorporate concepts and methodologies derived from advances in epigenetics and the analysis of neural activation in animal and human models. Finally, in the interests of justice, when we recognize that neuroscience is being misused or misrepresented, we must be forthright in communicating this information to finders of fact. One of the areas in which these advancements have been verified is the study of stress regulation in early adverse developmental contexts. doi: 10.1111/cdep.12021, Moffitt, T. E., Arseneault, L., Belsky, D., Dickson, N., Hancox, R. J., Harrington, H. L., et al. Pubmed Abstract | Pubmed Full Text | Google Scholar, Gianaros, P. J., and Hackman, D. (2013). In this sense, to generate changes in neurocognitive development, interventions have been introduced recently in the study of attention disorders, dyslexia, dyscalculia, executive functions, and arithmetic performance in samples of children from different SES backgrounds. Rev. Received: 27 December 2013; Accepted: 19 January 2015; Published online: 11 February 2015. Some of the widely accepted psychological theories are the behavioral theories, the cognitive theories, humanist theories, biological theories, psychodynamic and the social psychology theories. Use multiple intelligence strategies with ELL students, as this can be particularly helpful for teaching concepts in a language other than their native tongue. 30, 1496414971. For example, a structural MRI reveals a brain defect in the frontal lobe, which is then used to justify the assertion that because of the defect, the person has impaired impulse control or impaired rationality. Furthermore, we must understand the kinds of questions neuroscience will never be able to answer. Transformation of cortical and hippocampal neural circuit by environmental enrichment. A limitation is that most biological explanations are reductionist. 15:843. doi: 10.1038/ncomms1849, Zhu, X., Wang, F., Hu, H., Sun, X., Kilgard, M. P., Merzenich, M. M., et al. Public Interest 6, 57121. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01643.x, Bradley, R. H., and Corwyn, R. F. (2002). Acad. Psychol. Hum. Let's start by highlighting that our brains have limited capacity to process information and the world provides way more than our brains can handle, which is why we need mental short cuts/habits to function. Presciently, in 2006 Morse identified signs of a cognitive pathology he labeled brain overclaim syndrome (BOS). The authors want to thank CONICET, CEMIC, FONCYT, and Fundacin Conectar for their support, their colleagues at the Unidad de Neurobiologa Aplicada, and Jennifer Simonds and Lesa Ellis for proofreading the manuscript and making suggestions that contributed to its enrichment. Certain patterns have emerged: speculations clothed as facts, errors of logical reasoning, and hasty conclusions unsupported by evidence and unrestrained by caution. Rev. In addition, a recent topic of interest in neuroscience addresses mechanisms of mediation of childhood poverty on cognitive development (Hackman et al., 2010; Noble et al., 2012; Lipina et al., 2013; Neville et al., 2013a), which allows the identification of potential targets for the design of interventions. The resulting gold mine of brainbehavior correlative data will allow neuroscience experts to make far more accurate individual inferences. Early parental care is important for hippocampal maturation: evidence from brain morphology in humans. Explicit and implicit issues in the developmental cognitive neuroscience of social inequality. It is generally accepted now that brain functions are indeed localized (functional specialization18), but only to a certain extent. Because the amygdala activates to threatening images, sexual images, donuts, and chrome rhinoceri, knowledge of amygdala activity alone does not necessarily mean the person was experiencing fear. Acad. In other words, although we may be guided by science in making moral decisions, ultimately they remain ours to make. Proc. Although many conceptual and methodological issues should be explored, initial epigenetic findings support the notion that epigenetic changes underlie, at least partially, the long-term impact of early experiences, and that epigenetic alterations are potentially reversible or modifiable through pharmacological or behavioral intervention (Hensch, 2004). Med. Training, maturation and genetic influences on the development of executive attention. Although science may prove to be helpful in ascertaining behaviors and mental states, it will always be blind to the cultural and moral context needed to judge their appropriateness in a given situation. Experience-dependent structural synaptic plasticity in the mammalian brain. Strengths and Weaknesses of Humanistic Theory. (2014). Dev. Nat. ), a physician who recognized physiological psychology in the treatment of illnesses and linked the physical and psychological together. In this study, these theories will be . Psychopathol. Georgieff, M. K. (2007). Weaknesses of the Biological Perspective The weakness of this approach is that it often fails to account for other influences on behavior. Consider a clinical example: a patient walks into your office complaining of back pain and asks for opiates. When behavioral evidence conflicts with neuroimaging findings, in general the high percentage move will be to side with the behavioral, because neuroscience is so poor at predicting individual outcomes of brain defects. However, later research found that the amygdala is activated in other situations as well, when viewing pictures of donuts,13 for example, but only when the subject was hungry, and photographs of seminude women and interesting and novel objects,14 such as a chrome rhinoceros. Neuroevidence may effectively generate hypotheses, but generally cannot answer them. Brain activity is presumably the source of all these things, but how, exactly? Neuroscience as a field is hindered by underpowered study designs that involve sample sizes that are too small. (2013). qEEG signals have not yet been adequately characterized in the general population, and definitions are needed to distinguish what is a normal or abnormal signal in the first place. It is likely that environmental stimulation does influence learning. In addition, most of the evidence is limited to cross-sectional or short-term longitudinal designs, which present difficulty for understanding changes in the study of brain development in adverse contexts. To do this, we should understand what kinds of questions neuroscience currently can and cannot answer. Neurosci. (2010) have suggested that properties (i.e., magnitude, duration and chronicity), and types (e.g., social exclusion vs. physical threat) of stressors in early adverse developmental contexts modulate the impact on neural networks involved in acute and chronic responses to stress. Issues and Debates Free will vs. Determinism The position of the cognitive approach is unclear as it argues, on the one hand, the way we process information is determined by our experience (schemas). . Effects of stress throughout the lifespan on the brain, behavior and cognition. Psychol. Not everyone who wears black has been to a funeral. Relevance can be a concern as well, as it is often unclear how exactly certain neuropsychological test concepts, such as executive functioning, line up with legally relevant mental states and capacities. . I describe how ignorance of these problems leads to reasoning errors and brain overclaim syndrome. Epigenetic vestiges of early developmental adversity: childhood stress exposure and DNA methylation in adolescence. Neuroscience and Psychology offer a powerful insight as to what is happening in our brains and those of others. The aim of this section is to highlight the contributions made by neuroscientific research, that have allowed the growth and expansion of the field of poverty and brain development in recent years. Disadvantages. Behaviourism: "Behaviourism (also called behavioural psychology) refers to a psychological approach which emphasises scientific and objective methods of investigation" (Simple Psychology, 2016). 4, 315. A dominant cognitive approach evolved, advocating that sensory information is manipulated internally prior to responses made - influenced by, for . I discuss two fundamental problems that limit the evidentiary utility of neuroscience-based claims: the problems of reverse inference and group-to-individual inference. For instance, Bakermans-Kranenburg and van Ijzendoorn (2011) found that children with secure attachment representations donated more money to a charity (e.g., UNICEF) in the context of an attachment story completion task, only if they had the DRD4 7-repeat allele; and that children with less efficient dopamine-related genes (D2, DRD4, DAT1) had more adaptive difficulties in negative rearing environments. Cogn. Psychobiol. Neuroscience; See All. 6:277. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2012.00277, Hackman, D. A., and Farah, M. J. In the case of the neural circuits involved in complex behaviors, the closure of sensitive periods seems to depend on whether they are associated with circuits performing computations at either basic or complex levels, such as feature representation, categorization function, top-down interactions, and cross-modal reorganization (Kral, 2013). There are several known sources of biovariability that make individual predictions of brain impairment devilishly tricky. 46, 287292. Dev. Neurosci. (2012). Among the most cited factors affecting development are neural plasticity, epigenetics, the influence of environmental toxins, nutrition, stress regulation, poverty modulation of cognitive and emotional processing, cognitive functioning, and health of adults with a history of childhood poverty (Hackman and Farah, 2009; Lipina and Colombo, 2009; Hackman et al., 2010; Bryck and Fisher, 2012; Miller and Chen, 2013). 4:3. doi: 10.3389/neuro.09.003.2010, Rao, H., Betancourt, L., Giannetta, J. M., Brodsky, N. L., Korczykowski, M., Avants, B. doi: 10.1016/j.dcn.2010.12.001, DAngiulli, A., Lipina, S. J., and Olesinska, A. Environmental acoustic enrichment promotes recovery from developmentally degraded auditory cortical processing. Another technique invented in his laboratory, CLARITY,55 renders the brain transparent and, coupled with fluorescent molecular dyes, has allowed us to see for the first time intact brain circuits that traverse the whole brain. The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The five major perspectives in psychology are biological, psychodynamic, behavioral, cognitive and humanistic. As I have already stated, problems arise when neuroevidence is incorrectly viewed as a confirmatory test, when in fact, it is best suited for use as a hypothesis generator. Cogn. Psychol. 82, 1732. Nat. Evidence of the modulation of epigenetic mechanisms during early development in individuals growing under different rearing conditions (e.g., deprived SES, stress exposure) has recently been incorporated into this line of research. Front. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0506897102, Segretin, M. S., Lipina, S. J., Hermida, M. J., Sheffield, T. D., Nelson, J. M., Espy, K. A., et al. 33, 1722117231. This means that the understanding of the role of the epigenome on the behavioral modifications driven by early experiences could contribute to our understanding of the relationship between childhood poverty and brain development. Psychoanalysis refers to both a theory and a type of therapy based on the belief that all people possess unconscious thoughts, feelings, desires, and memories. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Hum. This is especially important since the current neuroscientific evidence on developmental patterns has contributed to our understanding of poverty as a phenomenon much more complex and dynamic than the definitions proposed by other social and human scientific disciplines. Nutr. Thus, integration of the different forms of plasticity should be the focus for neuroscience research in the field of poverty and brain development aimed at establishing windows for intervention opportunities. To find behavioral evidence that could corroborate or disconfirm the presence of cognitive impairment, the expert examined personal writings, journals, datebooks, calendars, checkbook records, and financial records for a three year period surrounding the time of the offense and concluded this analysis showed no evidence of impairment or change in his management of his everyday affairs (Ref. However, because many brain defects do not result in impairment, neuroimaging alone cannot establish, except in rare cases,42 whether an individual is impaired, or, if impaired, whether the brain defect is the cause. Front. 16, 697707. Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law Online, Neuroscience and behavioral genetics in US criminal law: an empirical analysis, Brain overclaim syndrome and criminal responsibility: a diagnostic note, Seeing is believing: the effect of brain images on judgments of scientific reasoning, The seductive allure of neuroscience explanations, The seductive allure of seductive allure, Forensic psychiatry, neuroscience, and the law, The non-problem of free will in forensic psychiatry and psychology, The value of quantitative electroencephalography in clinical psychiatry: a report by the Committee on Research of the American Neuropsychiatric Association, Assessment of digital EEG, quantitative EEG, and EEG brain mapping: report of the American Academy of Neurology and the American Clinical Neurophysiology Society, Quantitative EEG and the Frye and Daubert standards of admissibility, Response and habituation of the human amygdala during visual processing of facial expression, The spatial attention network interacts with limbic and monoaminergic systems to modulate motivation-induced attention shifts, Ecstasy and agony: activation of the human amygdala in positive and negative emotion, Motivational salience: amygdala tuning from traits, needs, values, and goals, Inferring mental states from neuroimaging data: from reverse inference to large-scale decoding, A direct demonstration of functional specialization in human visual cortex, Large-scale neurocognitive networks and distributed processing for attention, language, and memory, Lesion mapping of cognitive control and value-based decision making in the prefrontal cortex, Emotion, decision making and the orbitofrontal cortex, People v. Weinstein, 591 N.Y.S. In this context, it is necessary to take into consideration the structural, electrophysiological, and molecular changes in brain plasticity in terms of (a) how neural operations change after adverse experience; (b) the physiological and biochemical involvement of components related to connectivity between different neural networks; (c) how experience and neuropil transformations contribute to brain functional specialization; and (d) the role of epigenetics, sensitive periods and differential susceptibility in shaping neural networks (Hackman et al., 2010; DAngiulli et al., 2012; Hirase and Shinohara, 2014). For instance, recently, the topic of stress regulation has been included in the study of poverty and cognitive development through different perspectives, such as vulnerability and environmental susceptibility (Ellis and Boyce, 2011; Hackman et al., 2012; Sheridan et al., 2013), the impact of poverty on executive functions (Blair et al., 2011), and even child development policy (Shonkoff and Bales, 2011). Copyright 2015 Lipina and Segretin. In addition, there is the problem of time: because people do not walk around wearing scanners, neuroimaging evidence presents information regarding brain structure or function after the fact.

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