Modularity and spatial reorientation in a simple mind: encoding of geometric and nongeometric properties of a spatial environment by fish

When disoriented in environments with distinctive geometry, such as a closed rectangular arena, human infants and adult rats reorient in accord with the large-scale shape of the environment, but not in accord with nongeometric properties such as the colour of a wall. Human adults, however, conjoined geometric and nongeometric information to reorient themselves, which has led to the suggestion that spatial processing tends to become more flexible over development and evolution. We here show that fish tested in the same tasks perform like human adults and surpass rats and human infants. These findings suggest that the ability to make use of geometry for spatial reorientation is an ancient evolutionary tract and that flexibility and accessibility to multiple sources of information to reorient in space is more a matter of ecological adaptations than phylogenetic distance from humans.     

Effectiveness of an ACT‐based rehabilitation program for the treatment of chronic fatigue: Results from a 12‐months longitudinal study

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is potentially effective for treating chronic fatigue. Given the paucity of studies on this topic, we aimed to assess long‐term trajectories of primary (fatigue, quality of life and functional abilities) and secondary outcomes (anxious and depressive symptoms) of an ACT‐based rehabilitation program for patients with chronic fatigue. Further, we examined if changes in potential process variables (psychological inflexibility, metacognitive beliefs, and cognitive and behavioral responses to symptoms) during ACT predicted change in all outcomes across follow‐up. One‐hundred ninety‐five workers on sick leave (mean age: 43.61 ± 9.33 years; 80.5% females) with a diagnosis of chronic fatigue were enrolled in a manualized, 3.5‐week intensive return‐to‐work rehabilitation program based on ACT. All completed a battery of questionnaires at pre‐, post‐treatment, 6 and 12 months follow‐up. We found significant longitudinal changes in most primary and secondary outcomes from pre‐ up to 12 months follow‐up. All process variables significantly decreased from pre‐ up to 12 months follow‐up, and pre‐to‐post changes in fear avoidance beliefs were most often associated with a greater change in outcomes across follow‐up. Depressive symptomatology showed a similar trajectory of change to fatigue, meaning that scores were correlated at each time point and tended to converge over time. This suggests that both symptoms influence each other substantially over a year following the treatment. Concluding, results lend support to the effectiveness of an ACT‐based rehabilitation program for patients with chronic fatigue and provide preliminary evidence for the role of process variables and depressive symptomatology on subsequent change in outcomes.     

The Epistemic Value of Emotions in Politics

In this paper, I consider emotional reactions in response to political facts, and I investigate how they may provide relevant knowledge about those facts. I assess the value of such knowledge, both from an epistemic and a political perspective. Concerning the epistemic part, I argue that, although emotions are not in themselves sufficient to ground evaluative knowledge about political facts, they can do so within a network of further coherent epistemic attitudes about those facts. With regards to the political part, I argue that the contribution of emotions to evaluative knowledge about political facts, is indeed politically valuable. To develop my argument, I show first that an evaluative kind of knowledge is relevant for reaching a sophisticated level of political cognition, and second that emotions contribute distinctively to this kind of knowledge. I conclude that, when emotional experiences towards political events are coupled with an adequate factual knowledge about those events, they can ground a distinctive evaluative knowledge about those events, and such knowledge is relevant both from an epistemic and a political perspective.     

Forgiveness and religious practice: a study on a sample of Italian preadolescents

Abstract

In this study we examined the gender differences in self-reported forgiving behaviours in a sample of Italian preadolescents (aged 11 to 14 years), who were either involved or not involved in religious practises. Were asked 289 Catholic, Italian preadolescent students were asked about their involvement in the religious practises. They also completed measures of forgiveness, avoidance and revenge motivations. The results showed that forgiveness was negatively correlated to avoidance and revenge, as expected, given that these constructs represent two different forms of non-forgiveness. Avoidance and revenge motivations were positively inter-correlated, highlighting how these forms of non-forgiveness are two distinct, but related pathways, leading away from forgiveness. Regarding age, younger participants reported higher degrees of forgiveness than their older counterparts. Lastly, regarding the association between involvement in one’s faith and gender as predictors of forgiving behaviours, only girls actively practising their faith emerged as significantly more forgiving than the other participants.     

Early visual experience influences behavioral lateralization in the guppy

Individual differences in lateralization of cognitive functions characterize both humans and non-human species. Genetic factors can account for only a fraction of the variance observed and the source of individual variation in laterality remains in large part elusive. Various environmental factors have been suggested to modulate the development of lateralization, including asymmetrical stimulation of the sensory system during ontogeny. In this study, we raised newborn guppies in an asymmetric environment to test the hypothesis that early left–right asymmetries in visual input may affect the development of cerebral asymmetries. Each fish was raised in an impoverished environment but could voluntarily observe a complex scene in a nearby compartment containing a group of conspecifics. Using asymmetric structures, we allowed some subjects to observe the complex scene with the right eye, others with the left eye, and control fish with both eyes. Among asymmetrically stimulated fish, the mirror test revealed eye dominance congruent with the direction of asymmetric stimulation, while controls showed no left–right laterality bias. Interestingly, asymmetric exposure to social stimuli also affected another aspect of visual lateralization—eye preference for scrutinizing a potential predator—but did not influence a measure of motor asymmetry. As the natural environment of guppies is fundamentally asymmetrical, we suggest that unequal left–right stimulation is a common occurrence in developing guppies and may represent a primary source of individual variation in lateralization as well as an efficient mechanism for producing laterality phenotypes that are adapted to local environmental conditions.     

Male and female guppies differ in speed but not in accuracy in visual discrimination learning

In many species, males and females have different reproductive roles and/or differ in their ecological niche. Since in these cases the two sexes often face different cognitive challenges, selection may promote some degree of cognitive differentiation, an issue that has received relatively little attention so far. We investigated the existence of sex differences in visual discrimination learning in the guppy, Poecilia reticulata, a fish species in which females show complex mate choice based on male colour pattern. We tested males and females for their ability to learn a discrimination between two different shapes (experiment 1) and between two identical figures with a different orientation (experiment 2). In experiment 3, guppies were required to select an object of the odd colour in a group of five objects. Colours changed daily, and therefore, the solution for this task was facilitated by concept learning. We found males’ and females’ accuracy practically overlapped in the three experiments, suggesting that the two sexes have similar discrimination learning abilities. Yet, males showed faster decision time than females without any evident speed–accuracy trade-off. This result indicates the existence of consistent between-sex differences in decision speed perhaps due to impulsivity rather than speed in information processing. Our results align with previous literature, indicating that sex differences in cognitive abilities are the exception rather than the rule, while sex differences in cognitive style, i.e. the way in which an individual faces a cognitive task, are much more common.     

Negative priming 1985 to 2015: a measure of inhibition,the emergence of alternative accounts,and the multiple process challenge

In this article, three generations of authors describe the background to the original article; the subsequent emergence of vigorous debates concerning what negative priming actually reflects, where radically different accounts based on memory retrieval were proposed; and a re-casting of the conceptual issues underlying studies of negative priming. What started as a simple observation (slowed reaction times) and mechanism (distractor inhibition) appears now to be best explained by a multiple mechanism account involving both episodic binding and retrieval processes as well as an inhibitory process. Emerging evidence from converging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and especially electroencephalography (EEG), is beginning to identify these different processes. The past 30 years of negative priming experiments has revealed the dynamic and complex cognitive processes that mediate what appear to be apparently simple behavioural effects.     

Short-term consolidation of individual identities leads to Lag-1 sparing

A rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) technique was used to investigate the role of the nature of processing carried out on targets in the Lag-1 sparing phenomenon. Lag-1 sparing refers to a higher accuracy in the task associated with the 2nd target when the 2 targets are immediately successive in the RSVP stream relative to when there are 1 or 2 intervening items between the targets. In 5 experiments, 0, 1, or 2 digits were embedded with equal probability in RSVP streams of letter distractors. In 4 of the experiments, subjects identified the digits in some blocks of trials, and they counted the number of presented digits in other blocks. In a 5th experiment, the counting task was replaced with a digit-sum task. The most interesting results were those from trials with 2 digits. Lag-1 sparing was always evident when the task involved the explicit identification of the digits. In addition, Lag-1 sparing was evident when subjects were required to sum 2 digits or to count digits of a prespecified parity subclass (e.g., count only even digits). In striking contrast, Lag-1 sparing was absent when subjects were required to count the digits independent of their parity subclass. These results suggest that the occurrence of Lag-1 sparing depends on the type of mental representation that must be generated on the basis of target information.     

Quantity discrimination in female mosquitofish

The ability in animals to count and represent different numbers of objects has received a great deal of attention in the past few decades. Cumulative evidence from comparative studies on number discriminations report obvious analogies among human babies, non-human primates and birds and are consistent with the hypothesis of two distinct and widespread mechanisms, one for counting small numbers (<4) precisely, and one for quantifying large numbers approximately. We investigated the ability to discriminate among different numerosities, in a distantly related species, the mosquitofish, by using the spontaneous choice of a gravid female to join large groups of females as protection from a sexually harassing male. In one experiment, we found that females were able to discriminate between two shoals with a 1:2 numerosity ratio (2 vs. 4, 4 vs. 8 and 8 vs. 16 fish) but failed to discriminate a 2:3 ratio (8 vs. 12 fish). In the second experiment, we studied the ability to discriminate between shoals that differed by one element; females were able to select the larger shoal when the paired numbers were 2 vs. 3 or 3 vs. 4 but not 4 vs. 5 or 5 vs. 6. Our study indicates that numerical abilities in fish are comparable with those of other non-verbal creatures studied; results are in agreement with the hypothesis of the existence of two distinct systems for quantity discrimination in vertebrates.