Localization and the new phrenology: a review essay on William Uttal's<i>The new phrenology</i>

Landreth, Anthony; Richardson, Robert C.

doi:10.1080/0951508042000202417

Cited by 9 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…As expected, this monograph generated innumerous ripples of comments and responses enfolding different degrees of optimism (e.g., Hadley, 2003; Henson, 2005; Hubbard, 2001; Landreth & Richardson, 2004) such as those of Uttal that identified several problems regarding the study of a possible neural instantiation of mental processes (e.g., Hardcastle & Stewart, 2002; McGinn, 2006; Uttal, 2002, 2005), and those of others that are more confident about the possibility of exploring how the mind works and about finding associations with the central nervous system (e.g., Bechtel, 2002; Hadley, 2003; Hubbard, 2001). In this context, by reviewing this book, we intended to revisit the author’s position concerning the philosophic, conceptual, and technical issues underlying the associations between brain-related physiological signals and psychological faculties.…”

supporting

confidence: 59%

Revisiting the contributions of The New Phrenology to the brain–mind debate.

Pereira

2017

Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology

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William Uttal’s The New Phrenology (2001), although published more than a decade ago, remains a fundamental essay concerning the conceptual and methodological shortcomings of the scientific endeavors favoring the concept of localization (as opposed to universalization) of psychological functions in the brain. The book conveys a strong message in which the author explains that the efforts made to localize psychological entities in the brain are flawed for two main reasons: One is associated with the fact that there is no conclusive evidence that our mind can be divided into single modules, and the other is related to the difficulties that bedevil the possible mapping of mental functions and brain regions, especially due to the nonlinear interactions between both. By revisiting this book, the intention was to highlight the author’s position concerning the philosophical, conceptual, and technical issues underlying the associations between brain-related physiological signals and psychological faculties.

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supporting

confidence: 59%

Revisiting the contributions of The New Phrenology to the brain–mind debate.

Pereira

2017

Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology

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“…One often heard criticism in discussions about the usefulness of social neuroscience measurements (especially concerning brain imaging techniques such as fMRI) that social neuroscience is simply a new form of phrenology (Uttal, 2002; but see Landreth & Richardson, 2004). Although we think that there is much to learn from brain imaging in itself-as it allows us to link social psychological processes to knowledge about specifi c functions of brain regions-we think it is important for researchers to move beyond simply showing effects on fMRI, EEG, or ERP measures.…”

Section: Limitations and Recommendations For Future Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Neuroscience of Stigma and Stereotype Threat

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Kang

2008

Group Processes & Intergroup Relations

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This article reviews social neuroscience research on the experience of stigma from the target's perspective. More specifically, we discuss several research programs that employ electroencephalography, event-related potentials, or functional magnetic resonance imaging methods to examine neural correlates of stereotype and social identity threat. We present neuroimaging studies that show brain activation related to the experience of being stereotyped and ERP studies that shed light on the cognitive processes underlying social identity processes. Among these are two projects from our own lab. The first project reveals the important role of the neurocognitive conflict-detection system in stereotype threat effects, especially as it pertains to stereotype threat `spillover'. The second project examines the role of automatic ingroup evaluations as a neural mediator between social identity threats and compensatory ingroup bias. We conclude with a discussion of the benefits, limitations, and unique contributions of social neuroscience to our understanding of stigma and social identity threat

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“…In particular, the book of Uttal (2001) attacks the idea of brain localization and raise the concerns about "neo-phrenology". On the other hand, Hubbard (2003) and Landreth and Richardson (2004) disagree with Uttal (2001) and believe that the two perspectives should not be put on the opposite position. They believe the two theory are, to some extent, complementary to each other.…”

Section: Real Data Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Sparse Kronecker Product Decomposition: A General Framework of Signal Region Detection in Image Regression

Wu¹,

Feng²

2022

Preprint

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This paper aims to present the first Frequentist framework on signal region detection in high-resolution and high-order image regression problems. Image data and scalar-on-image regression are intensively studied in recent years. However, most existing studies on such topics focused on outcome prediction, while the research on image region detection is rather limited, even though the latter is often more important. In this paper, we develop a general framework named Sparse Kronecker Product Decomposition (SKPD) to tackle this issue. The SKPD framework is general in the sense that it works for both matrices (e.g., 2D grayscale images) and (high-order) tensors (e.g., 2D colored images, brain MRI/fMRI data) represented image data. Moreover, unlike many Bayesian approaches, our framework is computationally scalable for high-resolution image problems. Specifically, our framework includes: 1) the one-term SKPD; 2) the multiterm SKPD; and 3) the nonlinear SKPD. We propose nonconvex optimization problems to estimate the one-term and multi-term SKPDs and develop path-following algorithms for the nonconvex optimization.The computed solutions of the path-following algorithm are guaranteed to converge to the truth with a particularly chosen initialization even though the optimization is nonconvex. Moreover, the region detection consistency could also be guaranteed by the one-term and multi-term SKPD. The nonlinear SKPD is highly connected to shallow convolutional neural networks (CNN), particular to CNN with one convolutional layer and one fully connected layer. Effectiveness of SKPDs is validated by real brain imaging data in the UK Biobank database.

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Localization and the new phrenology: a review essay on William Uttal'sThe new phrenology

Cited by 9 publications

References 20 publications

Revisiting the contributions of The New Phrenology to the brain–mind debate.

Revisiting the contributions of The New Phrenology to the brain–mind debate.

The Neuroscience of Stigma and Stereotype Threat

Sparse Kronecker Product Decomposition: A General Framework of Signal Region Detection in Image Regression

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