人工肝支持系统治疗肝衰竭的研究进展

目前肝衰竭发病率和病死率仍然较高,肝衰竭成为威胁患者生命的严重疾病。基于肝脏具有强大再生能力,人工肝支持系统作为一种“过渡”措施,为肝衰竭患者的肝功能恢复赢得时间。人工肝支持系统根据性质不同分为非生物型人工肝、生物型人工肝和混合型人工肝。目前非生物型人工肝已在肝病治疗领域被广泛应用,但生物型及混合型人工肝的临床应用还存在很多问题需要进一步研究和解决。因此本文对人工肝的作用、临床应用现状、存在问题及研究进展进行综述。     

从人类共情走向智能体共情

随着机器人在人类生活中重要性的增强,人们开始关注其传统智能以外的其它能力,如共情。基于共情的经典理论,本文以新兴的智能体共情（artificial empathy）为主题,同时结合人工智能领域的最新研究,系统地阐述了现有与智能体共情有关的理论模型和实证研究,并结合文献计量学分析,对该领域研究宏观现状进行可视化呈现。指出在未来研究中,借鉴心理学、认知神经科学和计算机科学等学科的研究成果,注重机器人理论模型的建构和研究方法的创新,对机器人共情系统的建构有着重要作用,而其间涉及到的伦理问题同样不容忽视。     

Biological sex determines whether faces look real

Judging whether a face is real or artificial can be done relatively rapidly and accurately, even when visual information is substantially impoverished. The perception of animacy in the face also has several interesting properties that may reflect both the underlying “tuning” of face space to preferentially represent real face appearance and the diagnosticity of individual features for categorizing faces as animate or inanimate. In the current study, we examined how sex categories interact with animacy perception by separately characterizing animacy judgements as a function of stimulus sex. We find that stimulus sex affects subjective ratings of animacy and sex categorization of real and artificial faces. Specifically, female faces look more artificial and artificial faces look more female. We discuss our results in terms of the ecology of real and artificial faces and the possible role of visual experience with artificial female faces, and the objectification of female faces.     

Visual information and rubber hand embodiment differentially affect reach-to-grasp actions

During the “rubber hand illusion” (RHI) participants feel touch originating from an artificial hand, which is felt to belong to the own body. The perceived location of the real hand is shifted towards the location of the artificial hand. However, evidence as to whether the RHI is accompanied by alterations of hand action is mixed. We found that the perceived size of one's own hand was affected by the size of the artificial hand that was used to elicit the illusion. Moreover, we tested a possible transfer of the RHI to a reach-to-grasp action. We observed that hand transport (i.e., reach) errors after RHI induction were independent of artificial hand size, showing that the parameter which is important for these reaching errors is the hand's perceived location. Results thus show that the RHI affects not only perceptual, but also action processing. In contrast, grip aperture was affected by artificial hand size independent of the RHI, suggesting that visual information about hand size affects grasping independent of embodiment of the artificial hand. Grip size increased with artificial hand size; this effect is explained by a higher reliance on proprioceptive information during blind reaching after receiving distorted visual information.     

Toward ethical cognitive architectures for the development of artificial moral agents

New technologies based on artificial agents promise to change the next generation of autonomous systems and therefore our interaction with them. Systems based on artificial agents such as self-driving cars and social robots are examples of this technology that is seeking to improve the quality of people’s life. Cognitive architectures aim to create some of the most challenging artificial agents commonly known as bio-inspired cognitive agents. This type of artificial agent seeks to embody human-like intelligence in order to operate and solve problems in the real world as humans do. Moreover, some cognitive architectures such as Soar, LIDA, ACT-R, and iCub try to be fundamental architectures for the Artificial General Intelligence model of human cognition. Therefore, researchers in the machine ethics field face ethical questions related to what mechanisms an artificial agent must have for making moral decisions in order to ensure that their actions are always ethically right. This paper aims to identify some challenges that researchers need to solve in order to create ethical cognitive architectures. These cognitive architectures are characterized by the capacity to endow artificial agents with appropriate mechanisms to exhibit explicit ethical behavior. Additionally, we offer some reasons to develop ethical cognitive architectures. We hope that this study can be useful to guide future research on ethical cognitive architectures.     

Pollock on token physicalism,agent materialism and strong artificial intelligence

An examination of John Pollock's theory of artificial intelligence and philosophy of mind raises difficulties for his mechanist concept of person. Token physicalism, agent materialism, and strong artificial intelligence are so related that if the first two propositions are not well‐established, then there is no justification for believing that an artificial consciousness can be designed and built. Pollock's arguments are shown to be inconclusive in upholding a functionalist theory of persons as supervenient but purely physical entities. In part this is the result of Pollock's thin definition of the concept of supervenience, according to which any complex supervenes on its proper parts. The limitations of this account are apparent when contrasted with richer conceptions of supervenience, such as Joseph Margolis’. But on Margolis’ theory, the mind and its expressions supervene on or rise above their material embodiments in the sense that they cannot be fully explained in physical terms, which contradicts Pollock's token physicalism and agent materialism. The consequence for Pollock's project to explain the mind as mechanical, and to manufacture artificial persons, is that these systems can at best aspire to impressive innovations in weak artificial intelligence, but realistically cannot aspire to strong or mentalistic artificial intelligence.     

Artificial Life and Ethics

Reports of the successful creation of artificial life usually garner considerable interest from philosophers. This paper argues that the worries philosophers have about artificial life do not, for the most part, depend on the artificiality of a given organism. In particular advances in synthetic biology will make the distinction between artificial and natural life a difficult and fluid one. Philosophers should hence refrain from making their arguments depend on a distinction between artificial and natural life.     

Artificial life and Piaget

Artificial life provides important theoretical and methodological tools for the investigation of Piaget's developmental theory. This new method uses artificial neural networks to simulate living phenomena in a computer. A recent study by Parisi and Schlesinger suggests that artificial life might reinvigorate the Piagetian framework. We contrast artificial life with traditional cognitivist approaches, discuss the role of innateness in development, and examine the relation between physiological and psychological explanations of intelligent behaviour.     

人工颈椎间盘置换术能否取代ACDF

目前颈椎病的治疗主要采用切除病变椎间盘和椎体间融合的手术方法,而人工颈椎间盘置换术的临床应用预示着脊柱外科治疗学新纪元的开始。简要介绍了Byran人工颈椎间盘置换术,对其临床效果进行了随访和分析,总结了人工颈椎间盘置换术的治疗优势和临床应用中的问题。客观评价了人工颈椎间盘技术,为临床决策提供了实践依据。     

Photorealism aftereffect

This study reports a novel visual aftereffect for photorealism judgments. Participants observed image sequences where a photograph was gradually transformed into an artificial image (a painting or a sketch). Their task was to choose the image that was the category boundary between the photograph and the artificial image among the frames of each image sequence. This task was performed before and after observing photographs or artificial images for 1 min. The chosen images were less photorealistic after the observation of artificial images, suggesting an aftereffect for photorealism judgments. However, observation of photographs did not induce an aftereffect. It is known that the observation of the norms for perceptual judgments (e.g., the prototypical face for facial judgments) does not induce aftereffects. Thus, these results suggest that photorealistic images serve as the norm for the perceptual judgment of photorealism. The human visual system may represent the photorealism of artificial images as a deviation from photorealistic images.     

创伤截肢后的假肢康复

5·12汶川地震使当地许多伤员肢体残缺,对伤者的生理和心理产生了重大的影响。帮助这些伤员尽快走出阴影,使他们在灾后能够最大程度的身心康复,重新回归社会,假肢的装配和使用是目前最有效的方法。为了使假肢能够更好地替代残缺肢体的功能,应当从截肢前着手,包括患者截肢平面的选择、残端的正确处理。术后早期对患者进行功能锻炼指导,防止畸形发生,尽可能早地根据患者自身情况选配合适的假肢,并指导患者正确使用和维护假肢,使其能够成功地回归社会,增强截肢者生活的信心。     

人工生殖技术伦理的多学科渊源及启示

随着人工生殖技术的飞速发展,其导致的伦理和法律问题层出不穷。目前迫切需要制定一套能够适应中国现实和发展的人工生殖技术伦理原则,以指导立法、引导社会舆论,并最终促进该技术的健康发展。通过人工生殖技术伦理的哲学、历史传统、宗教、社会制度等多学科渊源的考察,给正确、有效的伦理原则的确立提供启示。     

Learnability of embedded syntactic structures depends on prosodic cues

The ability to process center-embedded structures has been claimed to represent a core function of the language faculty. Recently, several studies have investigated the learning of center-embedded dependencies in artificial grammar settings. Yet some of the results seem to question the learnability of these structures in artificial grammar tasks. Here, we tested under which exposure conditions learning of center-embedded structures in an artificial grammar is possible. We used naturally spoken syllable sequences and varied the presence of prosodic cues. The results suggest that mere distributional information does not suffice for successful learning. Prosodic cues marking the boundaries of the major relevant units, however, can lead to learning success. Thus, our data are consistent with the hypothesis that center-embedded syntactic structures can be learned in artificial grammar tasks if language-like acoustic cues are provided.     

Movement kinematics affect action prediction: comparing human to non-human point-light actions

The influence of movement kinematics on the accuracy of predicting the time course of another individual's actions was studied. A human point-light shape was animated with human movement (natural condition) and with artificial movement that was more uniform regarding velocity profiles and trajectories (artificial condition). During brief occlusions, the participants predicted the actions in order to judge after occlusion whether the actions were continued coherently in time or shifted to an earlier or later frame. Error rates and reaction times were increased in the artificial compared to the natural condition. The findings suggest a perceptual advantage for movement with a human velocity profile, corresponding to the notion of a close interaction between observed and executed movement. The results are discussed in the framework of the simulation account and alternative interpretations are provided on the basis of correlations between the velocity profiles of natural and artificial movements with prediction performance.     

Impacts of artificial intelligence on organizational decision making

Of all of the new technologies emerging in the late 20th century, the production of artificial intelligence may provide the most profound impacts on organizational decision making. Because the development of artificial intelligence technologies and models has largely been based on psychological models of human cognition, the effects of their implementation in complex social settings have not been thoroughly examined. This paper is an attempt to generate research which will develop a comprehensive understanding of the impacts of artificial intelligence and its role in complex organizations. A set of 11 hypotheses has been developed which examine the relationships between artificial intelligence technologies and the dimensions of organizational decision making. It is argued here that the implementation of expert systems will lead to less complex and political decision processes, while the implementation of natural language systems will lead to more complex and political decision processes.     

Artificial neural networks in Neurosciences

This article shows that artificial neural networks are used for confirming the relationships between physiological and cognitive changes. Specifically, we explore the influence of a decrease of neurotransmitters on the behaviour of old people in recognition tasks. This artificial neural network recognizes learned patterns. When we change the threshold of activation in some units, the artificial neural network simulates the experimental results of old people in recognition tasks. However, the main contributions of this paper are the design of an artificial neural network and its operation inspired by the nervous system and the way the inputs are coded and the process of orthogonalization of patterns.     

Semantics boosts syntax in artificial grammar learning tasks with recursion

Center-embedded recursion (CER) in natural language is exemplified by sentences such as "The malt that the rat ate lay in the house." Parsing center-embedded structures is in the focus of attention because this could be one of the cognitive capacities that make humans distinct from all other animals. The ability to parse CER is usually tested by means of artificial grammar learning (AGL) tasks, during which participants have to infer the rule from a set of artificial sentences. One of the surprising results of previous AGL experiments is that learning CER is not as easy as had been thought. We hypothesized that because artificial sentences lack semantic content, semantics could help humans learn the syntax of center-embedded sentences. To test this, we composed sentences from 4 vocabularies of different degrees of semantic content due to 3 factors (familiarity, meaning of words, and semantic relationship between words). According to our results, these factors have no effect one by one but they make learning significantly faster when combined. This leads to the assumption that there were different mechanisms at work when CER was parsed in natural and in artificial languages. This finding questions the suitability of AGL tasks with artificial vocabularies for studying the learning and processing of linguistic CER.     

An artificial eye for evaluating videobased eye recording systems

Videobased corneal-reflection-to-pupil-center systems are widely used in eye movement research. In this paper, an artificial eye drawn on a computer screen is presented. The artificial eye provides a way to simulate measurements of eye position in human subjects. The method allows testing videobased systems on the level of the signal and on the level of the calibration algorithm used to map the eye position parameters to stimulus space. In addition, the artificial eye can be used to evaluate specific hypotheses concerning the functioning or malfunctioning of the eye recorder and as a help in developing data analysis programs.     

Artificial life: organization, adaptation and complexity from the bottom up

Artificial life attempts to understand the essential general properties of living systems by synthesizing life-like behavior in software, hardware and biochemicals. As many of the essential abstract properties of living systems (e.g. autonomous adaptive and intelligent behavior) are also studied by cognitive science, artificial life and cognitive science have an essential overlap. This review highlights the state of the art in artificial life with respect to dynamical hierarchies, molecular self-organization, evolutionary robotics, the evolution of complexity and language, and other practical applications. It also speculates about future connections between artificial life and cognitive science.     

Sentence processing in an artificial language: Learning and using combinatorial constraints

A study combining artificial grammar and sentence comprehension methods investigated the learning and online use of probabilistic, nonadjacent combinatorial constraints. Participants learned a small artificial language describing cartoon monsters acting on objects. Self-paced reading of sentences in the artificial language revealed comprehenders’ sensitivity to nonadjacent combinatorial constraints, without explicit awareness of the probabilities embedded in the language. These results show that even newly-learned constraints have an identifiable effect on online sentence processing. The rapidity of learning in this paradigm relative to others has implications for theories of implicit learning and its role in language acquisition.