Human Enhancement and the Anthropology of the “Entire Human Being”

About one and a half decades ago, two prominent reports were published in the United States (US) which strongly influenced subsequent international discussions on the topic of human enhancement: a 2002 report on “converging technologies for improving human performance”, based on a workshop which was organised by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Department of Commerce in December 2001, and the first report of US President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics (PCBE), published in October 2003 with the title Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness. The 2002 report included a wide variety of contributions from academics in various fields of research, from representatives of US institutions, and from companies. Due primarily to the influence of the two NSF staff editing the report, it can be regarded as the first major instance of the influence of transhumanism, a techno-futurist ideology and movement, on the US technology and innovation discourse. The PCBE report, on the other hand, is a prime example of a conservative critique of the transhumanist notion of human enhancement. In this invited contribution, these two crucial publications are analysed mainly in order to point out the relevance of philosophical anthropology as developed since the 1920s by Helmuth Plessner and others. This remarkable school of thought is experiencing a revival in countries such as Germany and the Netherlands, and, to some extent, in the English-speaking world. In this article, it is argued that philosophical anthropology provides us with an important alternative to both anthropological essentialism and scientism, two approaches that are still highly relevant in current discourse on human enhancement.     

Action‐semantic and syntactic deficits in subjects at risk for Huntington's disease

Frontostriatal networks play critical roles in grounding action semantics and syntactic skills. Indeed, their atrophy distinctively disrupts both domains, as observed in patients with Huntington's disease (HD) and Parkinson's disease, even during early disease stages. However, frontostriatal degeneration in these conditions may begin up to 15 years before the onset of clinical symptoms, opening avenues for pre‐clinical detection via sensitive tasks. Such a mission is particularly critical in HD, given that patients’ children have 50% chances of inheriting the disease. Against this background, we assessed whether deficits in the above‐mentioned domains emerge in subjects at risk to develop HD. We administered tasks tapping action semantics, object semantics, and two forms of syntactic processing to 18 patients with HD, 19 asymptomatic first‐degree relatives, and sociodemographically matched controls for each group. The patients evinced significant deficits in all tasks, but only those in the two target domains were independent of overall cognitive state. More crucially, relative to controls, the asymptomatic relatives were selectively impaired in action semantics and in the more complex syntactic task, with both patterns emerging irrespective of the subjects’ overall cognitive state. Our findings highlight the relevance of these dysfunctions as potential prodromal biomarkers of HD. Moreover, they offer theoretical insights into the differential contributions of frontostriatal hubs to both domains while paving the way for innovations in diagnostic procedures.     

Conscious Control Is Associated With Freezing of Mechanical Degrees of Freedom During Motor Learning

This study investigated whether conscious control is associated with freezing of mechanical degrees of freedom during motor learning. Participants practiced a throwing task using either error-strewn or error-reduced practice protocols, which encourage high or low levels of conscious control, respectively. After 24 hr, participants engaged in a series of delayed retention and transfer tests. Furthermore, propensity for conscious control was assessed using participants' ratings and freezing was gauged through movement variability of the throwing arm. Performance was defined by mean radial error. In the error-strewn group, propensity for conscious control was positively associated with both freezing and performance. In the error-reduced group, propensity for conscious control was negatively associated with performance, but not with freezing. These results suggest that conscious control is associated with freezing of mechanical degrees of freedom during motor learning.     

Prosodic awareness and punctuation ability in adult readers

We examined the relationship between two metalinguistic tasks: prosodic awareness and punctuation ability. Specifically, we investigated whether adults' ability to punctuate was related to the degree to which they are aware of and able to manipulate prosody in spoken language. English-speaking adult readers (n = 115) were administered a receptive and a productive measure of prosodic awareness, a measure of their baseline knowledge of punctuation, and a productive measure of punctuation ability, in addition to control measures. Prosodic awareness emerged as a robust predictor of adults' ability to punctuate, over and above the influence of their punctuation knowledge, reading comprehension, and working memory.     

Fostering learning from instructional video in a second language

This study investigated the most effective way to present an instructional video that contains words in the students' second language. Korean‐speaking university students received a 16‐min video lesson on Antarctica that included English narration (video + narration group), English text subtitles (video + text group), or English narration with simultaneous text subtitles (video + narration + text group). On a comprehension test, the video + text group scored higher than each of the other two groups, in contrast to the modality effect; and the video + narration + text group outscored the video + narration group, in contrast to the redundancy effect. Each of the lessons that included text was rated as less difficult than the lesson with narration only. The narration + text group reported lower effort than each of the other groups. Results highlight boundary conditions for two principles of multimedia instructional design that apply for college students who are learning in a second language. Theoretical implications are discussed.     

Activating attachment representations impact how we retrieve autobiographical memories

Although much research indicates that proximity to attachment figures confers many psychological benefits, there is little evidence pertaining to how attachment activation may impact autobiographical memory retrieval. Following a negative mood induction to elicit overgeneral autobiographical retrieval, participants (N?=?70) were administered an induction in which they imagined a person who is a strong attachment figure or an acquaintance. Participants then completed an autobiographical memory task to retrieve memories in response to neutral and negative cue words. Attachment priming resulted in less distress, increased retrieval of specific memories, and reduced retrieval of categoric memories. These findings indicate that activation of mental representations of attachment figures can impact on the specificity of autobiographical memory retrieval, and extends prevailing models of autobiographical memory by integrating them with attachment theory.     

Item frequency in probe-recognition memory search: Converging evidence for a role of item-response learning

In short-term probe-recognition tasks, observers make speeded old–new recognition judgments for items that are members of short lists. However, long-term memory (LTM) for items from previous lists influences current-list performance. The current experiment pursued the nature of these long-term influences—in particular, whether they emerged from item-familiarity or item-response-learning mechanisms. Subjects engaged in varied-mapping (VM) and consistent-mapping (CM) short-term probe-recognition tasks (e.g., Schneider & Shiffrin, Psychological Review, 84, 1–66, 1977). The key manipulation was to vary the frequency with which individual items were presented across trials. We observed a striking dissociation: Whereas increased presentation frequency led to benefits in performance for both old and new test probes in CM search, it resulted in interference effects for both old and new test probes in VM search. Formal modeling suggested that a form of item-response learning took place in both conditions: Each presentation of a test probe led to the storage of that test probe—along with its associated “old” or “new” response—as an exemplar in LTM. These item-response pairs were retrieved along with current-list items in driving observers’ old-– recognition judgments. We conclude that item-response learning is a core component of the LTM mechanisms that influence CM and VM memory search.