Illuminating the conceptual structure of the space of moral violations with searchlight representational similarity analysis.

ABSTRACT: Characterizing how representations of moral violations are organized, cognitively and neurally, is central to understanding how people conceive and judge them. Past work has identified brain regions that represent morally relevant features and distinguish moral domains, but has not yet advanced a broader account of where and on what basis neural representations of moral violations are organized. With searchlight representational similarity analysis, we investigate where category membership drives similarity in neural patterns during moral judgment of violations from two key moral domains: Harm and Purity. Representations converge across domains in a network of regions resembling the mentalizing network. However, Harm and Purity violation representations respectively converge in different r

SUBMITTER: Wasserman EA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5671354 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature