No abstract

The P300 amplitude and latency are independent endophenotypes; the former indexing spatial visualisation and working memory, and the latter is hypothesised to index basic processing speed. Individuals with psychotic illnesses, their unaffected relatives, and healthy controls all show similar patterns of associations between endophenotypes, endorsing the theory of a continuum of psychosis liability across the population.

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In growing numbers of court cases, neuroscience is presented to document the mental state of the offender at the level of the brain. While a small body of research has documented the effects of describing the brain state of psychotic offenders, this study tested the impact of neuroscience that could apply to far more offenders; that is the neuroscience of impulse control. In this online vignette experiment, 759 participants sentenced a normally controlled or normally impulsive actor, who committed a violent offense on impulse, explained in either cognitive or neurobiological terms. Although participants considered the neurobiological actor less responsible for his impulsive disposition than the cognitive actor, the neuroscientific testimony did not affect attributions of choice, blame, dangerousness, or punishment for the criminal act. In fact, the neuroscientific testimony exacerbated the perception that the offender offended consciously and “really wanted” to offend. The described disposition of the actor was also influential: participants attributed more capacity for reform, more free choice and consequently, more blame to the normally controlled actor. Participants also attributed this actor's offending more to his social life experiences and less to his genes and brain. However, this shift in attributions was unable to explain the greater blame directed at this offender. Together, such findings suggest that even when neuroscience changes attributions for impulsive character, attributions for impulsive offending may remain unchanged. Hence this study casts doubt on the mitigating and aggravating potential of neuroscientific testimony in court.

Interacting to reach a shared decision is an omnipresent component of human collaboration. We explored the interaction between dyads of individuals with different levels of expertise. The members of the dyads completed a number line task privately, jointly and privately again. In the joint condition, dyad members shared their private estimates and then negotiated a joint estimate. Both dyad members averaged their private individual estimates to determine joint estimates, thereby showing a strong equality bias. Their performance in the joint condition exceeded the performance of the dyad's best estimator, demonstrating interaction benefit, only when the dyad members had similar levels of expertise and when the averaged dyad performance was sufficiently accurate. At the end of the task, participants rated their level and their partner's level of competence. Participants were accurate in classifying themselves as the expert or the novice within the dyad. Nevertheless, novices tended to overestimate their ability as they admitted to being less competent but only slightly worse than their expert partner. Experts, instead, believed themselves to be more competent but were humble and considered their performance only marginally better than their partner's. Overall, these results have important implications for settings in which people with different levels of expertise interact. (PsycINFO Database Record