events (Bechara et al., 1997; Damasio et al., 1990), we predicted that patients with VMPC damage would fail to perceive the emotional significance of harmful intentions (e.g., unobservable mental states), and therefore deliver abnormal moral judgments in the case that judgments depend on emotional responses to such abstract representational content. We predicted that, as a direct result, VMPC p...

INTRODUCTION Human moral decision-making has long been a topic of philosophical debate, and, more recently, a topic for empirical investigation. Central to this investigation is the extent to which emotional processes underlie our decisions about moral right and wrong. Neuroscience offers a unique perspective on this question by addressing whether brain regions associated with emotional process...

This paper reports the greater bias found in the output sequence of VMPC, a modified RC4 stream cipher proposed in 2004. Using the bias with approximately 2 output bytes allows us to distinguish VMPC from truly random sequence. Distinguishing attack can also break RC4A, an algorihm based on RC4, more efficiently than any existing attacks. With about 2 output bytes, distinguishing attack makes i...

“Go ahead, do it. It’ll feel good.” “Stop—remember what happened last time, and all the other times.” The contending parties in the perennial debate between temptation and willpower are two brain systems, according to a theory put forward by Dr. Antoine Bechara of the University of Southern California. Dr. Bechara suggests that, whether the lure is an attractive sex object, a luxury, or heroin,...

Making judgments about the retrievability of information is a critical part of the metamemory processes engaged during remembering. A recent study of patients with frontal lesions suggests that ventral medial prefrontal cortex (VMPC) plays a critical role in such judgments [Schnyer, D. M., Verfaellie, M., Alexander, M. P., Lafleche, G., Nicholls, L., & Kaszniak, A. W. A role for right medial pr...

We found a statistical weakness in the Spritz algorithm designed by Ronald L. Rivest and Jacob C. N. Schuldt. For N = 8: Prob(output(x) = output(x + 2)) = 1/N + 0.000498. The bias becomes statistically significant (for N = 8) after observing about 2 outputs. Analogous bias occurs for N = 16. We propose an algorithm (VMPC-R) which for N = 8 produced 2 (31 million times more) outputs which remain...

Tail-MAC, A predecessor to the VMPC-MAC, algorithm for computing Message Authentication Codes for stream ciphers is described along with the analysis of its security. The proposed algorithm was designed to employ some of the data already computed by the underlying stream cipher in the purpose of minimizing the computational cost of the operations required by the MAC algorithm. The performed ana...

Conversational partners tend to converge (become more similar) on various speech and discourse characteristics, enhancing social affiliation. We examined convergence in the discourse of eight participants with bilateral ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC) damage and eight healthy comparison participants (NC) each interacting with a clinician. Changes in total words, words/turn, and backchanne...

Studies of normal individuals reveal an asymmetry in the folk concept of intentional action: an action is more likely to be thought of as intentional when it is morally bad than when it is morally good. One interpretation of these results comes from the hypothesis that emotion plays a critical mediating role in the relationship between an action’s moral status and its intentional status. Accord...