Models and Neural Bases of the Believing Process

Abstract

Departing from the long debates on the role of faith/belief, recent interdisciplinary research has turned to characterize the features of the psychophysical processes underlying believing. Here we review recent cognitive neuroscience models of the believing process and propose a conceptual framework that integrates current theoretical and empiric knowledge about the processes of believing. There are theories that elegantly explain believing as a self-organization process of cognitive and emotional elements. Adding to the component of self-organized belief representation, dual-component models assume a belief evaluation component, which is probably supported by the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and explains the stability of the belief despite the changing environment. Borrowing an idea from the neural models for the mental representation of action or situation, inclusion of both perceptive and action informations as the construct of belief representation allows the intimate relationship between a specific belief and a specific range of behaviour. Furthermore, inclusion of the personal value or affective information in the representation explains the deep impact of one's emotional and physical state on the believing process. For associating perception, action, and value in a representation, the medial frontal cortex (MFC) may play a key role. Recent neuro-cognitive models of self-cognition explain the developmental origin of such a representation and the hierarchically nested structure of three levels of complexity in the representations: basic physical level, interpersonal level, and higher social level. The integrated model provides a comprehensive perspective of the believing process which suggests the importance and future directions of this interdisciplinary approach. * Corresponding author. M. Sugiura et al.13

Building Worldviews With Credition Teaching Model in High School Curricula of Religious Education: A Controlled Experimental Study

“…The "stabilizer function" stabilizes the belief despite the functioning of the enclosure function in a changing environment. The "modulator function" reveals the influence of the emotion state (either conscious or unconscious) (Sugiura et al 2015) (see Figure 2).…”

“…The Mental Functions of the Believing Process as Supported by the Credition Model(Sugiura et al 2015). process took place in the fields of a teaching topic instructed in the 2nd grade high school curricula of Religious Education in Greece.…”

Processes of believing: Where do they come from? What are they good for?

“…The processes that regulate the performance of actions are replete with probabilistic reward and cost predictions determined by the personal meanings attributed to the mental representations of the signals from the outside world ( Friston et al , 2014). The action-perception-valuation triad has been postulated to account, in context of a hierarchical dimension, for computations of physical, social, and cultural matters ( Sugiura et al , 2015). …”

Taking another’s perspective promotes right parieto-frontal activity that reflects open-minded thought

“…The last involves the inhibition of a self-perspective because the participant's own beliefs must be bracketed to allow for fair consideration of others' perspectives. Previous neuroimaging studies have found that these cognitive processing strategies involve activation of the right parietofrontal network (Fletcher et al, 2001;Lévesque et al, 2003;Corlett et al, 2004Corlett et al, , 2006Corlett et al, , 2007Turner et al, 2004;van der Meer, Groenewold, Nolen, Pijnenborg, & Aleman, 2011;Hartwright, Apperly, & Hansen, 2012Ochsner, Silvers, & Buhle, 2012;Buhle et al, 2014;Sugiura, Seitz, et al, 2015); therefore, we expected that the progression in open-minded thought would enhance activation of the right parieto-frontal network.…”