各位老师：

        您好！由实验室罗跃嘉老师邀请了George Mason大学的  Frank Krueger博士来实验室讲座，欢迎感兴趣的老师和同学去听。讲座信息如下：        

时间：2012年10月30日上午9点半       

地点：英东楼422        

报告人：Dr Frank Krueger, George Mason  University, Assistant Professor        

题目：Psychological and neural  components of legal third-party punishment        

摘要        

Exploring how the human brain governs our  response to social norm violations can lead to advanced knowledge for lawmakers  in understanding juror’s decision making in trials and to more effective  criminal sentencing. Although  legal third-party punishment (TPP) is an essential feature of large-scale human  societies, remarkably little is known about the psychological components of TPP  and the effective connectivity (direction and strength of connections) of its  underlying neural network. By employing parametric fMRI and a TPP rating task in  a group of healthy participants asking them to estimate how much  punishment an offender deserved for crimes, we revealed a neural TPP network  relying upon specific psychological components  each modulated by a distinct cortical midline structure drawing on elementary and domain-general computations:  norm violation of the offense (dorsomedial prefrontal cortex), harm to  the victim (posterior cingulate), and benefit for the offender (ventromedial  prefrontal cortex). Applying multivariate Granger causality mapping, we  identified a reciprocally connected vmPFC-dmPFC circuit as the driver of the TPP  network, which served as a convergence zone linking information across TPP  regions to determine the appropriate degree of punishment for illegal behavior.  The identified  components of TPP confirm  the criminal law’s central underpinnings of  punishment: it depends first on the detection of a norm violation and then on an  assessment of the costs and benefits of the violation (i.e. the harm to the  victim and the benefits to the offender). Our novel findings help to address  future questions about law and policy that have been difficult to resolve based  on traditional models of academic and folk  psychology.       

    此致

敬礼！

认知神经科学与学习国家重点实验室

2012年10月25日