Some unsettled problems in behavioral neuroscience research

Abstract

The goal of behavioral neuroscience is to map psychological concepts onto physiological and anatomical concepts and vice versa. The present paper reflects on some of the hidden obstacles that have to be overcome in order to find unique psychophysiological relationships. These are, among others: (1) the different status of concepts which are defined in the two domains (ontological subjectivity in psychology and ontological objectivity in physiology); (2) the distinct hierarchical levels to which concepts from the two domains may belong; (3) ambiguity of concepts, because-due to limited measurement resolution or definitional shortcomings-they sometimes do not cover unique states or processes; (4) ignored context dependencies. Moreover, it is argued that due to the gigantic number of states and state changes, which are possible in a nervous system, it seems unlikely that neuroscience can provide exact causal explanations and predictions of behavior. Rather, as in statistical thermodynamics the transition from the microlevel of explanations to the macrolevel is only possible with probabilistic uncertainty.

Understanding the effects of constraint and predictability in ERP

“…Our findings suggest that the cost of strong probabilistic representation strength is to increase sensitivity to input that conflicts with expectations, rather than to increase the effort required to suppress or update a previous representation. Our findings do not rule out that a costly shift in interpretation or suppression of previous representations occurs, but we do not observe evidence that such a process is inevitably engaged by manipulating contextual strength, or that it is mappable to a single ERP phenomenon (for a discussion of the difficult "mapping problem" in behavioural neuroscience see Rösler, 2012). The fact that low predictability lexical items seen in strongly constraining contexts did not elicit conclusive differences in post-N400 amplitude relative to high predictability lexical items strongly suggests that conflict monitoring was driven by the semantic richness of the preceding context rather than a simple unexpectedness detection.…”

Understanding the Effects of Constraint and Predictability in ERP

“…Source localisation of processing associated with the P600 has proven difficult ( Friederici, 2011 ), however the P600 has been associated with a left inferior prefrontal-temporal cortical circuit ( Brouwer et al, 2017 ; Brouwer & Hoeks, 2013 ), which also includes areas of the frontal inferior gyrus thought to mediate suppression of previous interpretations and possibly hints at the involvement of executive control ( Hagoort, 2013 ; Kutas, 1993 ). Thus while we interpret our P600 constraint effect as a conflict signal, we do not believe our findings rule out that a shift in interpretation or suppression of previous representations occurs: We simply did not observe evidence that such a process is inevitably engaged by manipulating contextual strength, or that it is mappable to a single ERP phenomenon (for a discussion of the difficult “mapping problem” in behavioural neuroscience see Rösler, 2012 ). Indeed, if both processes involve the same cortical circuit at the same time, they may be difficult to disentangle without experimental methodologies better suited to spatial mapping such as magnetoencephalography and functional magnetic imaging.…”