One of the key aspects to understanding an Individual’s personality is to see how they respond when confronted with error.
Being confronted with error requires an Individual to have made a prediction about the environment which they felt was strong enough to enact so that they are confounded when the results obtained aren’t the one they anticipated.
You can learn more about a person when they’re informed that they’re wrong than when they get what they expect. People we deem as “anti-social” can be easy to get along with providing they’re getting what they want and this doesn’t involve something that you have – they are not required to sustain cooperation.
You don’t learn anything about them in this case.
Being confronted with error requires a different behavioural response to the environment.
Perhaps most importantly, this is to stop the Individual’s resources being eroded by continually enacting a U which in the real world doesn’t in fact pay-off. Secondarily, to try and regain the resource that needed to be staked to enact U which they face losing.
When an Individual is confounded by the failure of the U they enacted to be realised their Trigger activates and they switch from Cognitive behaviour to Emotional behaviour.
This changes them from attempting to align to (their rendering of) the environment to attempting to orientate it to them.
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The change from Cognitive to Emotional behaviour was not something that I would have expected to find physiological evidence for.
It was a surprise to some that during the development of fMRI that there were not specialised brain areas for specific emotions like there were for say, faces or objects.
If our render of the environment is affected by the signals zipping and pinging along neurons and by the environment of the gap between them, emotions seem to be effected by the composition of the latter, which are unresolvable by MRI.
So, I was quite surprised to be able to find evidence of a participant reacting to being confronted with error when I was carrying out an fMRI experiment into another part of the RoUCa grid.
I was looking for feedback in my participant which could explain how they could escape the grid through the Joy pathway by confirming U. Essentially if U – U’ = 0 they could go off and do other things, rather than hold U (which itself is an anticipation!) and an anticipated result of U in another part of the brain.
The latter case doesn’t make sense, but it’s how some people think the brain works and I wanted to find evidence of feedback in the pathways I was looking for.
I set about constructing an fMRI experiment where I asked my participants to do a task in the scanner.
Being a psychology experiment where things are never quite what they seem, I tricked my participants into believing that they had given the correct answer in some trials and then gave them feedback that they were wrong (irrespective of the actual response they gave).
Processing the data gave rise to some interesting results.
Head movement in fMRI experiments is a pain. The scanner creates a matrix and measures the signal returned from a location is space. It doesn’t care what’s in it. If a participant moves then the bit of brain that was in a specific location is now somewhere else and a new bit of brain is returning a signal to the scanner.
Checking the head movement of my participants I was alarmed to see violent pitches in head movement. During an MRI experiment the head is tightly held to avoid movement. The pitch dimension (imagine a nodding motion) is the only axis where there is much freedom to move.
Checking the time series these spikes correspond to the moment where I had confronted my participants with error.
Essentially the head movement data had inadvertently captured my participants’ Trigger being pulled.
The artifact exhibited itself this in this manner due to the way that the head was restrained. This “flinch” though is not hard to spot and is seemingly sometimes affected by some to show their disbelief.
This is another case where you can watch reality TV for 5 minutes and spot the cue a dozen times. Once you see it you can be sure that the subject will switch from OCNA to BDTR behaviours, I expect much to the producer’s delight.