Marc G Berman

University of Chicago | UC · Department of Psychology

In this chapter, we explore the fundamentals of the field of environmental neuroscience. We start by defining the field of environmental neuroscience and then proceed to describing its roots and outlining some of its distinguishing features. We define what we mean by an environment, including those factors that are considered in this work, focus on...

The effects of heat exposure on negative affect are thought to be central to the observed relationships between hot summer days and deleterious outcomes, such as violent crime or mental health crises. As these relationships are likely to be magnified by the effects of climate change, a better understanding of how consistent or variable the effects...

Why are some object concepts (e.g., birds, cars, vegetables, etc.) more memorable than others? Prior studies have suggested that features (e.g., color, animacy, etc.) and typicality (e.g., robin vs. penguin) of object images influences the likelihood of being remembered. However, a complete understanding of object memorability remains elusive. In t...

Although visiting a park is usually considered to be a ‘nature experience’, not all city parks are natural environments. Additionally, parks differ in the affordances they offer in terms of amenities and other characteristics. In this pre-registered, cross-sectional study we asked participants (N = 303, Chicago, USA residents) to visit several city...

Interactions with nature can improve attentional functioning and decrease mental fatigue. However, the perceptual quality of the experience might influence how effectively nature can improve these cognitive measures, as perceptual quality has been linked to how much nature sounds are liked, which may in turn influence aspects of psychological resto...

Background Studies suggest that prosocial behavior, having high empathy and engaging in behaviors intended to benefit others, may predict mental health or vice versa; however, these findings have been mixed. The purpose of the current study was to examine the bidirectional relationships between prosocial behavior and dimensions of psychopathology i...

Recent ethnographic research reveals that gang dynamics in Chicago's Southside have evolved with decentralized micro-gang "set" factions and cross-gang interpersonal networks marking the contemporary landscape. However, standard police datasets lack the depth to analyze gang violence with such granularity. To address this, we employed a natural lan...

The effects of heat exposure on negative affect are thought to be central to the observed relationships between hot summer days and deleterious outcomes, such as violent crime or mental health crises. As these relationships are likely to be magnified by the effects of climate change, a better understanding of how consistent or variable the effects...

Brain networks are continuously modified throughout development, yet this plasticity can also make functional networks vulnerable to early life stress. Little is currently known about the effect of early life stress on the functional organization of the brain. The current study investigated the association between environmental stressors and networ...

Implicit biases - differential attitudes towards members of distinct groups - are pervasive in human societies and create inequities across many aspects of life. Recent research has revealed that implicit biases are generally driven by social contexts, but not whether they are systematically influenced by the ways that humans self-organize in citie...

Sleep is critical to a variety of cognitive functions and insufficient sleep can have negative consequences for mood and behavior across the lifespan. An important open question is how sleep duration is related to functional brain organization which may in turn impact cognition. To characterize the functional brain networks related to sleep across...

Research examining the effects of physical environments on individual behaviors often focuses on self-reported exposures or spatially-derived aggregate exposures. However, to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the environmental and economic drivers of behavior, a holistic approach encompassing multiple scales of analysis is needed. To bette...

Background Many studies of brain-behavior relationships rely on univariate approaches where each variable of interest is tested independently, which does not allow for the simultaneous investigation of multiple correlated variables. Alternatively, multivariate approaches allow for examining relationships between psychopathology and neural substrate...

Research has shown differences in pro-social and pro-environmental attitudes after exposure to different physical environments. It is unclear whether these perspective shifts are associated with changes in conscious thoughts and feelings about other people and the environment. In Study 1, we used a within-subject experiment to measure social and en...

The current study utilized a rarely used statistical tool in anesthetic research, Hurst analysis, to a group of participants who received propofol administration. Our results suggest that the visual imagery pathway, involving visual attention, primary and secondary visual cortex, is the primary target for propofol modulation during sedation. The mo...

The Hurst exponent (H) isolated in fractal analyses of neuroimaging time-series is implicated broadly in cognition. Within this literature, H is associated with multiple mental disorders, suggesting that H is transdimensionally associated with psychopathology. Here, we unify these results and demonstrate a pattern of decreased H with increased gene...

The ability to maintain focus and process task-relevant information continues developing during adolescence, but the specific physical environmental factors that influence this development remain poorly characterized. One candidate factor is air pollution. Evidence suggests that small particulate matter and NO2 concentrations in the air may negativ...

Although practicing a task generally benefits later performance on that same task, there are individual differences in practice effects. One avenue to model such differences comes from research showing that brain networks extract functional advantages from operating in the vicinity of criticality, a state in which brain network activity is more sca...

Implicit biases, expressed as differential treatment towards out-group members, are pervasive in human societies. These biases are often racial or ethnic in nature and create disparities and inequities across many aspects of life. Recent research has revealed that implicit biases are, for the most part, driven by social contexts and local histories...

Sustained attention (SA) and working memory (WM) are critical processes, but the brain networks supporting these abilities in development are unknown. We characterized the functional brain architecture of SA and WM in 9- to 11-year-old children and adults. First, we found that adult network predictors of SA generalized to predict individual differe...

Homophily and heterophobia, the tendency for people with similar characteristics to preferentially interact with (or avoid) each other are pervasive in human social networks. Here, we develop an extension of the mathematical theory of urban scaling which describes the effects of homophily and heterophobia on social interactions and resulting econom...

Background When brain networks deviate from typical development, this is thought to contribute to varying forms of psychopathology. However, research has been limited by the reliance on discrete diagnostic categories that overlook the potential for psychological comorbidity and the dimensional nature of symptoms. Methods The present study examined...

Research has consistently shown differences in affect and cognition after exposure to different physical environments. The time course of these differences emerging or fading during exploration of environments is less explored, as most studies measure dependent variables only before and after environmental exposure. In this within-subject study, we...

A polygenic risk score (PRS) for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has been found to be associated with ADHD in multiple studies, but also with many other dimensions of problems. Little is known, however, about the processes underlying these transdiagnostic associations. Using data from the baseline and 1-year follow-up assessments of...

Resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) measured with fMRI has been used to characterize functional brain maturation in typically and atypically developing children and adults. However, its reliability and utility for predicting development in infants and toddlers is less well-understood. Here, we use fMRI data from the Baby Connectome Project...

This paper is a methodological and empirical contribution that reports on the results of an innovative on-line survey of streetscape preference. The ratings of experts and non-experts were compared to gauge the reliability of preference for views about streetscape quality. The goal was to evaluate the degree to which a set of streetscape design cha...

Individual differences in children's cognitive abilities impact life and health outcomes. What factors influence these individual differences during development? Here, we test whether children's environments predict cognitive performance, independent of well‐characterized socioeconomic effects. We analyzed data from 9002 9‐ to 10‐year olds from the...

Background Early life stressors can adversely affect the developing brain. While hierarchical modeling has established the existence of a general factor of psychopathology, no studies have modeled a general factor of environmental stress and related this factor to brain development. Using a large sample of children from the Adolescent Brain Cogniti...

Objective: In this rapidly digitizing world, it is becoming ever more important to understand people's online behaviors in both scientific and consumer research settings. The current work tests the feasibility of inferring personality traits from mouse movement patterns as a cost-effective means of measuring individual characteristics. Method: M...

Scale invariant neural dynamics are a relatively new but effective means of measuring changes in brain states as a result of varied cognitive load and task difficulty. This study tests whether scale invariance (as measured by the Hurst exponent, H) can be used with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to quantify cognitive load, paving the...

Research has shown differences in pro-social and pro-environmental behaviors after exposure to different physical environments. In this within-subject design, we used repeated surveys to measure social and environmental thought content throughout one-hour environmental explorations of a nature conservatory and an indoor mall. At each survey, partic...

Compared to urban environments, interactions with natural environments have been associated with several health benefits including psychological restoration and improved emotional well-being. However, dichotomizing environments as either natural or urban may emphasize between-category differences and minimize potentially important within-category v...

Recent research has quantified aspects of the built environment to understand which visual features may play a role in environmental preferences and behavior. The occurrence of different low-level (e.g., spatial and color properties) and mid-level features (e.g., objects) that mimic patterns seen in nature may influence the quality of pedestrian ex...

Scale invariant neural dynamics are a relatively new but effective means of measuring changes in brain states as a result of varied cognitive load and task difficulty. This study is the first to test whether scale invariance (as measured by the Hurst exponent, H ) can be used with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to quantify cognitive...

In this rapidly digitizing world, it is becoming ever more important to understand people’s online behaviors in both scientific and consumer research settings. A cost-effective way to gain a deeper understanding of these behaviors is to examine mouse movement patterns. This research explores the feasibility of inferring personality traits from thes...

The Hurst exponent ( H ) isolated in fractal analyses of neuroimaging time-series is implicated broadly in cognition. The connection between H and the mathematics of criticality makes it a candidate measure of individual differences in cognitive resource allocation. Relationships between H and multiple mental disorders have been detected, suggestin...

Environmental neuroscience is a field which uses multiple scales of analysis to elucidate the ways in which the physical environment interacts with neural processing to affect behavior. One environment that is heavily studied by environmental neuroscientists is the natural environment and how interacting with more natural environments (e.g., a city...

Significance Depression is the global leading cause of disability and related economic losses. Cities are associated with increased risk for depression, but how do depression risks change between cities? Here, we develop a mathematical theory for how the built urban environment influences depression risk and predict lower depression rates in larger...

Sustained attention and working memory are central cognitive processes that vary between individuals, fluctuate over time, and have consequences for life and health outcomes. Here we characterize the functional brain architecture of these abilities in 9– 11-year-old children using models based on functional magnetic resonance imaging functional con...

Nature exposure, broadly defined, has been repeatedly shown to engender a more positive affective state. In this chapter, a detailed overview of the type of research that has been conducted in this field is provided, focusing on how the effects of nature differ by modality (i.e. nature walks, virtual reality, videos, and images) and by measurement...

The current outbreak of COVID-19 poses an unprecedented global health and economic threat to interconnected human societies. Strategies for controlling the outbreak rely on social distancing and face covering measures which largely disconnect the social network fabric of cities. We demonstrate that early in the US outbreak, COVID-19 spread faster o...

Many eye-tracking data analyses rely on the Area-of-Interest (AOI) methodology, which utilizes AOIs to analyze metrics such as fixations. However, AOI-based methods have some inherent limitations including variability and subjectivity in shape, size, and location of AOIs. In this article, we propose an alternative approach to the traditional AOI dw...

The developing brain is marked by high plasticity, which can lead to vulnerability to early life stressors. Previous studies indicate that childhood maltreatment is associated with structural aberrations across a number of brain regions. However, prior work is limited by small sample sizes, heterogeneous age groups, the examination of one structure...

Crime is a costly societal issue. While many factors influence urban crime, one less-studied but potentially important factor is neighborhood greenspace. Research has shown that greenspace is often negatively associated with crime. Measuring residents’ use of greenspace, as opposed to mere physical presence, is critical to understanding this associ...

Lack of self-control has been theorized to predict an individual’s likelihood to engage in antisocial behaviors such as impulsive aggression upon provocation, but existing measures have not allowed for the specific examination of costly, reactive aggression. We introduce a novel paradigm, the Retaliate or Carry-on: Reactive AGgression Experiment (R...

Societal responses to crises require coordination at multiple levels of organization. Exploring early efforts to contain COVID-19 in the U.S., we argue that local governments can act to ensure systemic resilience and recovery when higher-level governments fail to do so. Event history analyses show that large, more urban areas experience COVID-19 mo...

Neuroimaging research frequently demonstrates load-dependent activation in prefrontal and parietal cortex during working memory tasks such as the N-back. Most of this work has been conducted in fMRI, but functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is gaining traction as a less invasive and more flexible alternative to measuring cortical hemodynam...

Childhood is an important time for the manifestation of psychopathology. Psychopathology is characterized by considerable comorbidity which is mirrored in the underlying neural correlates of psychopathology. Both common and dissociable variations in brain volume have been found across multiple mental disorders in adult and youth samples. However, t...

Background Executive functions (EF) are important partly because they are associated with risk for psychopathology and substance use problems. Because EF has been linked to white matter microstructure, we tested the prediction that fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusivity (MD) in white matter tracts are associated with EF and dimensions of p...

We experience our neighborhoods and cities through our streets. An essential question is what street features contribute to a superior pedestrian experience? Further, can interacting with urban streetscapes improve cognitive functioning, as interacting with nature does? To answer these questions, large urban street perception databases are enormous...

Reports an error in "Criterion validity and relationships between alternative hierarchical dimensional models of general and specific psychopathology" by Tyler M. Moore, Antonia N. Kaczkurkin, E. Leighton Durham, Hee Jung Jeong, Malerie G. McDowell, Randolph M. Dupont, Brooks Applegate, Jennifer L. Tackett, Carlos Cardenas-Iniguez, Omid Kardan, Gab...

Nature interactions have been demonstrated to produce reliable affective benefits. While adults demonstrate strong preferences for natural environments over urban ones, it is not clear whether these affective benefits result from exposure to nature stimuli per se, or result from viewing a highly preferred stimulus. In one set of studies (Study 1 an...

It has recently been shown that the perception of visual features of the environment can influence thought content. Both low-level (e.g., fractalness) and high-level (e.g., presence of water) visual features of the environment can influence thought content in real-world and experimental settings where these features can make people more reflective...

Computer vision-based research has shown that scene semantics (e.g., presence of meaningful objects in a scene) can predict memorability of scene images. Here, we investigated whether and to what extent overt attentional correlates, such as fixation map consistency (also called inter-observer congruency of fixation maps) and fixation counts, mediat...

Neuroimaging research frequently demonstrates load-dependent activation in the prefrontal cortex during working memory tasks such as the N-back. Most of this work has been conducted in fMRI, but functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is gaining traction as a less invasive and more flexible alternative to measuring cortical hemodynamics. Few...

It is commonly assumed that cities are detrimental to mental health. However, the evidence remains inconsistent and, at most, makes the case for differences between rural and urban environments as a whole. Here, we propose a model of depression driven by an individual's accumulated experience mediated by social networks. The connection between obse...

Societal responses to crises require coordination at multiple levels of organization. Exploring early efforts to contain COVID-19 in the U.S., we argue that local governments can act to ensure systemic resilience and recovery when higher-level governments fail to do so. Event history analyses show that large, more urban areas experience COVID-19 mo...

Many eye-tracking data analyses rely on the Area-of-Interest (AOI) methodology, which utilizes AOIs to analyze metrics such as fixations. However, AOI-based methods have some inherent limitations including variability and subjectivity in shape, size, and location of AOIs. In this article, we propose an alternative approach to the traditional AOI dw...

One of the central questions of neuroethology is how specialized brain areas communicate to form dynamic networks that support complex cognitive and behavioral processes. Developmental song learning in the male zebra finch songbird (Taeniopygia guttata) provides a unique window into the complex interplay among sensory, sensorimotor, and motor netwo...

Psychopathology can be viewed as a hierarchy of correlated dimensions. Many studies have supported this conceptualization, but they have used alternative statistical models with differing interpretations. In bifactor models, every symptom loads on both the general factor and 1 specific factor (e.g., internalizing), which partitions the total explai...

Individual differences in children’s cognitive abilities have significant consequences for life and health outcomes. What factors influence individual differences in cognitive performance during development? Here we test the hypothesis that children’s environments predict their cognitive performance, independent of well-characterized effects of soc...

Individuals with KCNJ11 or ABCC8 mutations express over-activated KATP channels both in pancreatic beta cells as well as in the brain, and consequently exhibit a spectrum of neurodevelopmental difficulties. Even those with milder mutations exhibit more difficulty than sibling controls on a wide range of measures including executive functioning and...