Doctoral Dissertation in Political Science:Thinking About Politics--A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) Study

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

This Doctoral Dissertation takes advantage of innovations in brain imaging technology to investigate the neural substrates of political thinking. Studies of expertise in other fields have demonstrated that novices and sophisticates do not use the same mechanisms when thinking about problems (See Lieberman et al. 2001). Do political novices and sophisticates engage different parts of their brain in thinking about political issues? More generally, what is the nature of political thought? What are the regions of the brain that determine it? What differences in regional activation correspond to thinking about "hot button" issues (e.g. race and abortion) or humdrum issues (e.g. the size of national parks)? In this study, the principal investigator uses functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to study political cognition and affect during three experiments. The subject population consists of undergraduate political sophisticates and novices. In the first experiment, the principal investigator shows subjects the faces of white and black, famous and not famous, political and nonpolitical persons. In the second experiment, subjects view images of whites and blacks who are either value violators or value exemplars. The third experiment asks subjects to answer a series of questions that are either political or nonpolitical, and threatening, non-threatening, or racial. Using fMRI to measure cerebral blood flow will allow us to infer the variety of cognitive and affective processes that subjects use when they answer political questions The functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) method in this dissertation should allow us to discriminate neural roots of political behaviors that appear identical and connect distinct behaviors that share cognitive underpinnings. Doing so will shed light on the debate about the nature of political sophistication as well as increase our understanding of specific issues like race.