Exclusion performance and learning by exclusion in dogs

Responding by exclusion is a type of emergent repertoire in which an individual chooses an alternative by the apparent exclusion of other available alternatives. In this case it is possible to respond appropriately to an undefined stimulus (one that has not previously acquired discriminative functions) by excluding the defined alternatives. There is evidence of exclusion in humans and nonhuman animals, although learning as an outcome of exclusion does not always occur. This study aimed to investigate exclusion in visual simple discriminations and learning of new simple discriminations resulting from exclusion in four border collies. Subjects were trained to perform simple simultaneous discriminations between pairs of tridimensional objects, and were then tested for exclusion, novelty control and learning of new simple discriminations. All dogs successfully responded by exclusion, choosing an undefined stimulus displayed with an S‐. For three dogs, it was possible to conclude that these previously undefined stimuli acquired S+ functions, documenting learning of new simple discriminations. However, this required up to four exposures to exclusion trials with each pair of stimuli.     

Event-mapping tasks: investigating the effects of prior information and event complexity on performance

Infants younger than 11.5 months typically fail in event-mapping tasks with complex event sequences, yet succeed when the event sequences are made very simple and brief. The present research explored whether younger infants might succeed at mapping complex event sequences if infants were given information to help them organize and structure the event. Three experiments were conducted with 7.5-month-olds. In all of the experiments, the infants were shown a two-phase test event. In the first phase, infants saw a box–ball occlusion sequence in which the objects emerged at least once to each side of the screen, reversing direction each time to return behind the screen. In the second phase, infants saw a one-ball display. Prior to the test trials, infants were shown an “outline” of the test event that contained the basic components of the event. The experiments varied in (a) the kind of information included in the event outline and (b) the complexity of the box–ball test sequence (i.e., the number of object reversals). The results revealed that the 7.5-month-olds benefitted from viewing an event outline, although the performance of the males was more robust than the females. These results add to a growing body of research indicating that young infants can succeed on event-mapping tasks under more supportive conditions and provide insight into why event mapping is such a difficult task for young infants.     

Inferential reasoning by exclusion in pigeons, dogs, and humans

The ability to reason by exclusion (which is defined as the selection of the correct alternative by logically excluding other potential alternatives; Call in Anim Cogn 9:393–403 2006) is well established in humans. Several studies have found it to be present in some nonhuman species as well, whereas it seems to be somewhat limited or even absent in others. As inconsistent methodology might have contributed to the revealed inter-species differences, we examined reasoning by exclusion in pigeons (n = 6), dogs (n = 6), students (n = 6), and children (n = 8) under almost equal experimental conditions. After being trained in a computer-controlled two-choice procedure to discriminate between four positive (S+) and four negative (S−) photographs, the subjects were tested with displays consisting of one S− and one of four novel stimuli (S′). One pigeon, half of the dogs and almost all humans preferred S′ over S−, thereby choosing either by novelty, or by avoiding S− without acquiring any knowledge about S′, or by inferring positive class membership of S′ by excluding S−. To decide among these strategies the subjects that showed a preference for S′ were then tested with displays consisting of one of the S′ and one of four novel stimuli (S′′). Although the pigeon preferentially chose the S′′ and by novelty, dogs and humans maintained their preference for S′, thereby showing evidence of reasoning by exclusion. Taken together, the results of the present study suggest that none of the pigeons, but half of the dogs and almost all humans inferred positive class membership of S′ by logically excluding S−. Electronic supplementary material  The online version of this article (doi:) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Controlling relations in conditional discrimination and matching by exclusion.

Normally capable adults learned two-choice identity matching of three-digit numerals and arbitrary matching of physically dissimilar nonsense syllables. The stimuli were displayed on a computer terminal, and responses consisted of typing on the terminal's keyboard. In Experiment 1, every trial displayed a sample numeral, a comparison numeral, and three equal signs (= = =). The comparison stimulus was to be selected if it was identical with the sample; otherwise the equal sign was to be selected. This "single comparison" method was then used to show that arbitrary matching could be based upon either sample-S+ or sample-S- relations. In Experiment 2, a series of probe trials displayed a novel sample, a comparison stimulus from the arbitrary matching baseline, and = = =. Subjects typically selected = = =; they apparently were excluding the baseline comparison stimulus. Experiments 3 through 5 investigated which variables in training would lead to the selection of baseline comparison stimuli in response to novel samples. Behavior was usually unchanged when baseline training included relating comparison stimuli to as many as four different samples. Punishment contingencies were effective, but performance did not generalize unless those contingencies were applied in relation to more than one baseline comparison stimulus.     

Inferences about the location of food in the great apes (Pan paniscus, Pan troglodytes, Gorilla gorilla, and Pongo pygmaeus)

Bonobos (Pan paniscus; n = 4), chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes; n = 12), gorillas (Gorilla gorilla; n = 8), and orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus; n = 6) were presented with 2 cups (1 baited) and given visual or auditory information about their contents. Visual information consisted of letting subjects look inside the cups. Auditory information consisted of shaking the cup so that the baited cup produced a rattling sound. Subjects correctly selected the baited cup both when they saw or heard the food. Nine individuals were above chance in both visual and auditory conditions. More important, subjects as a group selected the baited cup when only the empty cup was either shown or shaken, which means that subjects chose correctly without having seen or heard the food (i.e., inference by exclusion). Control tests showed that subjects were not more attracted to noisy cups, avoided shaken noiseless cups, or learned to use auditory information as a cue during the study. It is concluded that subjects understood that the food caused the noise, not simply that the noise was associated with the food.     

Creativity and Aging: Personal Journals and the Creation of Self

This article considers the writing of personal journals as a process through which an individual constructs a linguistic representation of one's self, with the self constituting a narrative. Rather than a fixed narrative, one's life exists as a narrative subject to revision and reinterpretation. Through journal writing, then, one constructs and reconstructs his or her identity. Berman finds the value in personal journals not only in the themes that surface but also in the creative process they reveal. In this article, he examines passages from five journalists that demonstrate this process of creating and revising meaning in one's life.     

Social exclusion affects aggressive driving behaviour: The mediating effect of prosocial tendencies and driving anger

Social exclusion—being rejected or ignored by individuals or groups—is a common and adverse experience in social life. As a social activity, driving behaviour can be influenced by many factors. Whether social exclusion is one of these factors is an open question. Therefore, the aim of this study is to explore the impact of the social exclusion experience on individuals and their driving behaviours and the mediating effect of prosocial tendencies and driving anger. A total of 240 (104 males and 136 females) participants from China completed a questionnaire including the Ostracism Experiences Scale (OES), the prosocial tendencies measure (PTM), the Driving Anger Scale (DAS) and the Driver Behaviour Questionnaire (DBQ). The hierarchical multiple regression analysis and pathway analysis results showed that social exclusion experience and driving anger positively predicted aberrant driving behaviours (including aggressive violations, ordinary violations, lapses and errors), while prosocial tendencies had a negative impact on aberrant driving behaviour. Moreover, prosocial tendencies and driving anger mediated the relationship between social exclusion and driver behaviour, accounting for 11.18% and 46.71% of the total effect, respectively. The chain-mediated effect of prosocial tendencies and driving anger was also significant, accounting for 5.26% of the total effect of social exclusion on driver behaviour. This study examines the mechanisms underlying social exclusion experiences that positively predict individuals' unsafe driving behaviours, thereby filling a gap in social exclusion research and suggesting new avenues of exploration into the personal and social influences that affect driving behaviours.     

Biomedical research and mining of the poor: The need for their exclusion

Almost all ethical guidelines and legislative policies concerning biomedical research involving human subjects contain provisions about relevance of research for the participating populations, informed consent, adequate care for research induced injuries and several other safeguards but the poor continue to suffer. Globalization has further aggravated poor people’s vulnerability by exposing them to international markets. Since the developing countries are abode of higher population of the poor they have become the unholy mines of this human ore for researchers. In this paper I examine various dimensions of poverty and analyze the international ethical responses in the area of biomedical research involving human subjects in order to determine their adequacy to protect the poor against exploitation and misuse and conclude that in view of the poor’s inherent and extreme vulnerability and the failure of ethical pronouncements to protect them from misuse and exploitation, they should be excluded from being enrolled as research subjects This paper was presented at the 6th International Bioethics Conference on the subject of ‘The Responsible Conduct of Basic and Clinical Research’, held in Warsaw, Poland, 3–4 June 2005.     

Trouble articulating the right words: Evidence for a response‐exclusion account of distraction during semantic fluency

It is widely held that single‐word lexical access is a competitive process, a view based largely on the observation that naming a picture is slowed in the presence of a distractor‐word. However, problematic for this view is that a low‐frequency distractor‐word slows the naming of a picture more than does a high‐frequency word. This supports an alternative, response‐exclusion, account in which a distractor‐word interferes because it must be excluded from an articulatory output buffer before the right word can be articulated (the picture name): A high, compared to low, frequency word accesses the buffer more quickly and, as such, can also be excluded more quickly. Here we studied the respective roles of competition and response‐exclusion for the first time in the context of semantic verbal fluency, a setting requiring the accessing of, and production of, multiple words from long‐term memory in response to a single semantic cue. We show that disruption to semantic fluency by a sequence of to‐be‐ignored spoken distractors is also greater when those distractors are low in frequency, thereby extending the explanatory compass of the response‐exclusion account to a multiple‐word production setting and casting further doubt on the lexical‐selection‐by‐competition view. The results can be understood as reflecting the contribution of speech output processes to semantic fluency.     

Inferences about the location of food in lemurs (Eulemur macaco and Eulemur fulvus): a comparison with apes and monkeys

The ability of black and brown lemurs (Eulemur macaco and Eulemur fulvus) to make inferences about hidden food was tested using the same paradigm as in Call’s (J Comp Psycol 118:232–241, 2004) cup task experiment. When provided with either visual or auditory information about the content of two boxes (one empty, one baited), lemurs performed better in the auditory condition than in the visual one. When provided with visual or auditory information only about the empty box, one subject out of four was above chance in the auditory condition, implying inferential reasoning. No subject was successful in the visual condition. This study reveals that (1) lemurs are capable of inferential reasoning by exclusion and (2) lemurs make better use of auditory than visual information. The results are compared with the performances recorded in apes and monkeys under the same paradigm.     

The Opposite of Human Enhancement: Nanotechnology and the Blind Chicken Problem

Nanotechnologies that have been linked to the possibility of enhancing cognitive capabilities of human beings might also be deployed to reduce or eliminate such capabilities in non-human vertebrate animals. A surprisingly large literature on the ethics of such disenhancement has been developed in response to the suggestion that it would be an ethically defensible response to animal suffering both in medical experimentation and in industrial livestock production. However, review of this literature illustrates the difficulty of formulating a coherent ethical debate. Well structured arguments for disenhancement can be made on the basis of mainstream views on the basis of ethical obligations to animals, but these arguments have not been persuasive against the moral intuition that disenhancements are unethical. At the same time, attempts to ground these intuitions in a coherent philosophical doctrine have been plagued by logical fallacies and question begging assertions. As such, the debate over animal disenhancement forecasts an enduring conundrum with respect to the core question of transforming the nature of sentient beings, and this conundrum is logically independent of claims that relate either to the distinctive of human beings or to issues deriving from the emphasis on enhancement.     

Problem solving in great apes (Pan paniscus, Pan troglodytes, Gorilla gorilla, and Pongo abelii): the effect of visual feedback

What kind of information animals use when solving problems is a controversial topic. Previous research suggests that, in some situations, great apes prefer to use causally relevant cues over arbitrary ones. To further examine to what extent great apes are able to use information about causal relations, we presented three different puzzle box problems to the four nonhuman great ape species. Of primary interest here was a comparison between one group of apes that received visual access to the functional mechanisms of the puzzle boxes and one group that did not. Apes' performance in the first two, less complex puzzle boxes revealed that they are able to solve such problems by means of trial-and-error learning, requiring no information about the causal structure of the problem. However, visual inspection of the functional mechanisms of the puzzle boxes reduced the amount of time needed to solve the problems. In the case of the most complex problem, which required the use of a crank, visual feedback about what happened when the handle of the crank was turned was necessary for the apes to solve the task. Once the solution was acquired, however, visual feedback was no longer required. We conclude that visual feedback about the consequences of their actions helps great apes to solve complex problems. As the crank task matches the basic requirements of vertical string pulling in birds, the present results are discussed in light of recent findings with corvids.     

Representing the ‘other’: a discursive analysis of prejudice and moral exclusion in talk about Romanies

This article investigates the particulars of prejudiced and moral exclusion discourse about ethnic minorities in a Romanian socio‐cultural context. It examines in detail the discourse of middle‐class Romanian professionals taking up different ideological positions on the issue of the fairness of extremist politics towards ethnic minorities. A comparison is made between participants ‘supporting’ extremist politics and those ‘opposing’ this kind of politics to see whether there are differences in the way participants from both categories talk about the Romanies. It is suggested that a very similar expression of moral exclusion discourse is to be found across both positions, a very similar use of various discursive and rhetorical strategies to blame the Romanies and ‘naturalize’ their characteristics, position them beyond the moral order, nationhood and difference. The analysis, inspired by a critical discursive approach will focus on the construction of ideological representations of Romanies. In examining prejudiced and moral exclusion discourse against Romanies, this article constitutes an attempt to understand the situated dynamics of prejudice and some of the ways in which particular ways of talking delegitimize and, sometimes, dehumanize the ‘other’. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Korean transracial and international adoptees: Ethnic identity and sense of belonging and exclusion in relation to birth and adoptive groups

Past quantitative ethnic identity research on transracial and international adoptees (TRIAs) has focused on their birth culture. Given that adoptees may also identify with their adoptive family’s culture, we examined Korean and White European American ethnic identities in Korean American adoptees. Identity exploration and commitment were significantly positively correlated within each referent group. Results also indicated relatively higher levels of birth group identity exploration and higher adoptive group identity commitment. In addition, we used cluster analysis to create ethnic identity profiles and investigated the relations between identity profiles and sense of belonging and exclusion. Our findings signal a need to support TRIAs to develop inclusive flexible ethnic identities and suggest future research should examine multiple referent groups and the intersection of these identities.     

The association between valuing popularity and relational aggression: the moderating effects of actual popularity and physiological reactivity to exclusion

The association between having a reputation for valuing popularity and relational aggression was assessed in a sample of 126 female children and adolescents (mean age = 12.43 years) at a 54-day residential summer camp for girls. Having a reputation for valuing popularity was positively related to relational aggression. This association was moderated by both popularity and physiological reactivity to social exclusion (i.e., respiratory sinus arrhythmia reactivity [RSAR] and heart rate reactivity [HRR]). Popular girls with a reputation for valuing popularity were at greater risk for engaging in relational aggression when they also exhibited blunted reactivity to social exclusion. Conversely, girls who had a reputation for valuing popularity but were not popular (i.e., the “wannabes”) were at risk for engaging in relational aggression when they exhibited heightened reactivity to exclusion.     

Discrete quantity judgments in the great apes (Pan paniscus, Pan troglodytes, Gorilla gorilla, Pongo pygmaeus): the effect of presenting whole sets versus item-by-item

The authors examined quantity-based judgments for up to 10 items for simultaneous and sequential whole sets as well as for sequentially dropped items in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), gorillas (Gorilla gorilla), bonobos (Pan paniscus), and orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus). In Experiment 1, subjects had to choose the larger of 2 quantities presented in 2 separate dishes either simultaneously or 1 dish after the other. Representatives of all species were capable of selecting the larger of 2 quantities in both conditions, even when the quantities were large and the numerical distance between them was small. In Experiment 2, subjects had to select between the same food quantities sequentially dropped into 2 opaque cups so that none of the quantities were ever viewed as a whole. The authors found some evidence (albeit weaker) that subjects were able to select the larger quantity of items. Furthermore, the authors found no performance breakdown with the inclusion of certain quantities. Instead, the ratio between quantities was the best performance predictor. The authors conclude that quantity-based judgments rely on an analogical system, not a discrete object file model or perceptual estimation mechanism, such as subitizing.     

When good evidence goes bad: the weak evidence effect in judgment and decision-making

An indispensable principle of rational thought is that positive evidence should increase belief. In this paper, we demonstrate that people routinely violate this principle when predicting an outcome from a weak cause. In Experiment 1 participants given weak positive evidence judged outcomes of public policy initiatives to be less likely than participants given no evidence, even though the evidence was separately judged to be supportive. Experiment 2 ruled out a pragmatic explanation of the result, that the weak evidence implies the absence of stronger evidence. In Experiment 3, weak positive evidence made people less likely to gamble on the outcome of the 2010 United States mid-term Congressional election. Experiments 4 and 5 replicated these findings with everyday causal scenarios. We argue that this “weak evidence effect” arises because people focus disproportionately on the mentioned weak cause and fail to think about alternative causes.     

A formalisation of violation, error recovery, and enforcement in the bit transmission problem

The design of complex multi-agent systems is increasingly having to confront the possibility that agents may not behave as they are supposed to. In addition to analysing the properties that hold if protocols are followed correctly, it is also necessary to predict, test, and verify the properties that would hold if these protocols were to be violated. We illustrate how the formal machinery of deontic interpreted systems can be applied to the analysis of such problems by considering three variations of the bit transmission problem. The first, an example in which an agent may fail to do something it is supposed to do, shows how we deal with violations of protocols and specifications generally. The second, an example in which an agent may do something it is not supposed to do, shows how it is possible to specify and analyse remedial or error-recovery procedures. The third combines both kinds of faults and introduces a new component into the system, a controller, whose role is to enforce compliance with the protocol. In each case the formal analysis is used to test whether critical properties of the system are compromised, in this example, the reliable communication of information from one agent to the other.