If you have bad kids, it may not be your fault.

Well, it could still be your fault, because it's biology and genetics is part of biology, but you can't control genetics. At least you then you wouldn't have to feel guilty about being a lousy parent.

Either way there's a real effort on to blame everything except the actual delinquent kids and a new study in Psychological Science advances that cause. Rutgers University psychologist Daniel Hart and colleagues write that they can use a a Skin Conductance Response (SCR) test, along with some family history, to predict delinquency.

The family history point might be important, especially if you and your husband go at each other like an episode of Spy Vs. Spy.

But first I wanted to know more about this SCR test.  If it can absolve me for bad parenting, maybe it can also help me feel better if I burn the paninis or shrink clothes in the dryer.  

Hart, Eisenberg and Valiente measured the sweat in the palms of these children.  They do this because the eccrine sweat glands on the palms of the hands are responsive to emotional stimuli but don't have much to do with the body's heat regulation.  Sweaty palms are more conductive than dry ones so it's a safe guess that more sweat means a stronger emotional response.

The researchers picked something the children in their tests would not have seen a lot; a swimming dolphin and a house fire. The video of a dolphin swimming in the ocean gave them their baseline reponse, though I think elementary school children with electrodes hooked up to their bodies would set that baseline rather high. Then they watched a film where a lamp caused a fire in a child’s bedroom to measure their stress.

They did these tests four times over the course of six years. They then found out which children were delinquent and matched up their results and determined that the children with the greatest biological reactions and a troubled family history were most likely to be the delinquents.

I am not a neuroscientist, I am an engineer. And in engineering most things make sense, except dogs named “Checkers” and Esther Williams swimming pools, so engineers don’t understand how family history and sweat mean a child will be a criminal, unless your father is Jesse James and takes you out robbing banks.

I consulted this MIT article,The Skin Conductivity Response, and found there are some real flaws with the technique, namely when a danger threshold is reached or a child is exposed to stress often.

Figure (a) shows a subject with no habituation during the experiment, all the three stimuli elicit a response. Figure (b) shows, a subject with rapid habituation, only the first stimulus elicits a response. MIT

So a person living in an Iraqi war zone might not have much stress at all to the sound of a bullet whizzing by whereas one of Donald Trump's children might go into sheer panic if he thinks there's a problem with his American Express Centurion card. Those kinds of variable were not factored in, negating most of the biological response.

Until they get more reliable testing for physical responses to family stress and can then make a stronger correlation between biology and delinquency, it’s still safe to assume that if our kids are screwed up it’s because we made them so the old-fashioned way; by letting them hang out with shifty types that pick up trash along the highways and volunteer at animal shelters on the weekends. I always knew those animal shelter people were trouble.

If you spotted an anaconda poised to strike, the signal to pay attention would originate in a different part of your brain than if you gazed at an anaconda in the zoo, neuroscientists at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory report in the March 30 issue of Science.

The work, which could have implications for treating attention deficit disorder (ADD), is the first concrete evidence that two radically different brain regions-the prefrontal cortex and the parietal cortex-play different roles in these different modes of attention.

What’s more, when you focus your attention, the electrical activity in these two brain areas synchronizes and oscillates at different frequencies. “It’s as if the brain is using two different stops on the FM radio dial for different types of attention,” said study co-author Earl K. Miller, Picower Professor of Neuroscience. Brain signals related to the knowledge we have acquired about the world are called top-down. Signals related to incoming sensory information are called bottom-up.

“Loud, flashy things like fire alarms automatically grab our attention,” Miller said. “By contrast, we choose to pay attention to certain things we think are important. We found two different modes of brain operation related to each, and they seem to originate in different parts of the brain. Further, the automatic (or bottom-up) versus willful (top-down) modes of attention seem to rely on two different frequency channels in the brain, suggesting that the brain might communicate in different frequency bands for different types of signals.”

ADD involves being overly sensitive to the automatic attention-grabbers and less able to willfully sustain attention. “Our work suggests that we should target different parts of the brain to try to fix different types of attention deficits,” Miller said.

“The downside of most psychiatic drugs is they are too broad,” he continued. “It’s like hitting the problem with a sledgehammer; you get the benefits but also many unintended consequences. Our work suggests that we may one day be able to figure out what is the exact problem with each individual and specifically target those shortcomings. And that is the ultimate goal in psychiatric intervention.”

To address the fact that neural activity from the prefrontal and parietal cortices had never been directly compared, Miller and co-author Timothy J. Buschman, an MIT graduate student in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, conducted a series of experiments in which monkeys were engaged in different kinds of tasks. The researchers looked at activity in two areas of their brains simultaneously-the prefrontal cortex, also called the brain’s executive because it is in charge of voluntary behavior, and the parietal cortex, which integrates sensory information coming from various parts of the body.

The monkeys had to pick out rectangles of certain colors and orientations on a video screen. Some of the rectangles popped out at them like the anaconda in the forest; others they had to search for.

The results support the idea that when something pops out at us, sensory cortical areas like the parietal cortex directs our eyes toward the stimulus. When we purposefully look for something, the prefrontal cortex is doing the driving.

“Taken together, these data suggest two modes of operation: When a stimulus pops out, a bottom-up, fast target selection occurs first in the posterior visual cortex; while in search mode, a top-down, longer latency target selection is reflected first in the prefrontal cortex,” Miller said. “To our knowledge, these are the first direct demonstrations that these areas may have different contributions to these different modes of attention.”

This work is supported by the the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and an NSF CELEST Science of Learning Center.

In the futuristic cartoon series “The Jetsons,” a robotic maid named Rosie whizzed around the Jetsons’ home doing household chores–cleaning, cooking dinner and washing dishes.

Such a vision of robotic housekeeping is likely decades away from becoming reality. But at MIT, researchers are working on a very early version of such intelligent, robotic helpers–a humanoid called Domo who grasp objects and place them on shelves or counters.

A robot like Domo could help elderly or wheelchair-bound people with simple household tasks like putting away dishes. Other potential applications include agriculture, space travel and assisting workers on an assembly line, says Aaron Edsinger, an MIT postdoctoral associate who has been working on Domo for the last three years.

Edsinger describes Domo as the “next generation” of earlier robots built at MIT–Kismet, which was designed to interact with humans, and Cog, which could learn to manipulate unknown objects. Domo incorporates elements of both of those robots.

“The real potential of robots in the future is going to be realized when they can do many types of manual tasks,” including those that require interaction with humans, Edsinger said.

There are now plenty of robots doing manual work on factory assembly lines, but those machines follow a script and can’t learn to adapt to new situations, as Domo can, said Rodney Brooks, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

“Robots in an automobile factory manipulate objects, but they do the same thing, along the same path, every time,” Brooks said. “If robots are ever going to be truly useful, they need to be able to manipulate the objects we manipulate.”

LIVING IN THE REAL WORLD

Edsinger’s team, overseen by Brooks, decided to focus on making a robot that can function in a real human environment–in someone’s kitchen, for example. Robots that are designed to help people in their homes will have to be able to ignore the clutter found in most environments and focus only on certain stimuli, says Edsinger.

“Typically robots are placed in very restricted worlds because then you can control the environment. If you put a robot in someone’s home, that approach just doesn’t extend to that,” he said. “We want the robot to adapt to the world, not the world to adapt to the robot.”

Perched on a table in Edsinger’s workspace, Domo can “see” everything going on in front of it. As the robot’s large blue eyes roam across the room, cameras feed information to 12 computers that analyze the input and decide what to focus on.

Domo’s visual system is attuned to unexpected motion, allowing it to focus on important stimuli within human environments. For example, locating human faces is critical for social interaction, and people are often in motion. When Domo spots motion that looks like a face, it locks its gaze onto it.

Edsinger recently demonstrated how Domo can interact with people to help them accomplish useful tasks.

Once he captures Domo’s gaze, they exchange greetings. “Hey, Domo,” Edsinger says, to which Domo responds, “Hey, Domo.” “Shelf, Domo,” says Edsinger, prompting the robot to find a shelf. Domo looks around until it spots a nearby table that looks promising. The robot reaches out its left hand to touch the shelf, much like a person groping for a light switch in the dark, to make sure the shelf is really there.

Once Domo has located the shelf, it reaches out its right hand towards Edsinger, who places a bag of coffee beans in the open hand. Domo wiggles them a little to get a feel for the object, then transfers the bag from its right hand to its left hand (nearest the shelf). Domo then reaches up and places the bag on the shelf.

Though it seems like a minor movement, wiggling the object is key to the robot’s ability to accurately place it on a shelf, Edsinger says. Domo is programmed to learn about the size of an object by focusing on the tip of the object, for example, the cap of a water bottle. When the robot wiggles the tip back and forth, it can figure out how big the bottle is and decide how to transfer it from hand to hand or to place it on a shelf.

“You can hand it an object it’s never seen before, and it can find the tip and start to control it,” Edsinger said.

THE HUMAN CONDITION

The philosophy behind the team’s approach is that humans and robots can work together to accomplish tasks that neither could do all alone.

“If you can offload some parts of the process and let the robot handle the manual skills, that is a nice synergistic relationship,” Edsinger said. “The key is that it has to be more useful or valuable than the effort put into it.”

For Domo or any robot to safely interact with humans, the robot has to be able to sense when a human is touching it. Domo has springs in its arms, hands and neck that can sense force and respond to it. If you grab its hand and push, the robot will move the way you want it to.

“By placing that spring in there, you get physical compliance that makes the whole body sort of springy, which makes it safer for human interaction,” Edsinger said. But if you apply too much force or move Domo’s arms in the wrong direction, it voices its displeasure by saying “ouch.”

If robots are going to be useful in the home, it’s also important for them to have a humanoid form, so people will feel more comfortable around them.

Such assistive robots could be very useful in finding solutions to the impending health care crisis caused by the aging of the baby boomers, Edsinger said. Having help with simple tasks, such as getting a glass from a cabinet, could make a big difference for elderly or wheelchair-bound people.

The original work on Domo was funded by NASA, and the project is now supported by Toyota, which is interested in developing partner robots for the home. Another application is in assembly line production. The idea is that intelligent robots could work together with people to make workers more productive and save manufacturing jobs from being sent overseas, says Edsinger.

Although a life of leisure enabled by robots who perform all manual labor is still securely in the realm of science fiction, Brooks says he can foresee a future where robots specialized for different functions help out with household chores.

“I don’t think there’s going to be one Rosie the robot doing everything in the home,” said Brooks. “It’s more likely to be a team of robots doing different things.”

Adapted from an MIT press release.

Large mammals–humans, monkeys, and even cats–have brains with a somewhat mysterious feature: The outermost layer has a folded surface. Understanding the functional significance of these folds is one of the big open questions in neuroscience. Now a team led by MIT, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School researchers has developed a tool that could aid such studies by helping researchers “see” how those folds develop and decay in the cerebral cortex.

What do YOU think might be the reason behind such a topology?  Comment and let others know what you think.

Neuroengineers at MIT have figured out how to turn neurons off by expressing a gene found in a bacterium in neurons that causes them to be silenced when a yellow light is shined on them. They describe several uses for the new technique, including providing non-invasive treatments for people with neurological disorders like Parkinson’s and epilepsy. The new technique may also prove invaluable for studying the healthy brain (selectively inhibiting certain neurons and seeing what the effects of the inhibition are on an entire network, for example).

Read the entire article here.