Interactional Styles of Bullies and Victims Observed in a Competitive and a Cooperative Setting

Observational data were used to examine the interactional styles of bullies and victims while they participated in 2 different games: 1 cooperative and 1 competitive. Participants included 17 bullies, 18 victims, and 35 controls (all aged 8–11 years) selected through a peer nomination questionnaire. Bullies and victims were observed 4 times in total: twice during the cooperative game and twice during the competitive game, each time paired with a partner of opposite status or control status. Results indicated that when bullies and victims interacted together, bullies showed a dominant style in the dyad, often regulating and opposing victims' initiatives. Victims, on the other hand, complied with bullies' requests and presented a submissive style of interaction. However, interactions involving control partners indicated that (a) bullies opposed those partners' initiatives less frequently and (b) victims tended to affirm themselves by asking for help and explanations. These data provide evidence for an interactional model in explaining the dynamics between bullies and victims.     

Action across emptiness

This paper examines how autism may affect the processing and containing of emotions and sensations. At the beginning of life we can hypothesise that the baby develops two means of processing experience: containment that involves a sensory and mimetic trace of relational experience (proto-containment) and containment which, through the α function and projective and introjective functions translates feelings into meaning (♀/♂). Both these means of processing emotional experience remain active throughout life but oscillate the one with the other. The main hypothesis of this work is that the autistic child is not able to oscillate between real containment (♀/♂) and a primitive form of proto-containment. The author aims to explore, through clinical material, the factors which may promote this oscillation. Autistic children often use non-verbal communication. The author examines how a particular type of action can cross the relational void in the therapeutic relationship through a process that can transform feelings of great distress in the analyst via acts that can be described as an Act of Faith, as described by Bion. This form of action that can cross the void is like an artistic performance.     

Adjective Semantics, World Knowledge and Visual Context: Comprehension of Size Terms by 2- to 7-Year-Old Dutch-Speaking Children

The interpretation of size terms involves constructing contextually-relevant reference points by combining visual cues with knowledge of typical object sizes. This study aims to establish at what age children learn to integrate these two sources of information in the interpretation process and tests comprehension of the Dutch adjectives groot ‘big’ and klein ‘small’ by 2- to 7-year-old children. The results demonstrate that there is a gradual increase in the ability to inhibit visual cues and to use world knowledge for interpreting size terms. 2- and 3-year-old children only used the extremes of the perceptual range as reference points. From age four onwards children, like adults, used a cut-off point in the mid-zone of a series. From age five on, children were able to integrate world knowledge and perceptual context. Although 7-year-olds could make subtle distinctions between sizes of various object classes, their performance on incongruent items was not yet adult-like.     

In the shadow of giants: The work of mario pieri in the foundations of mathematics

A discussion is given of the research in the foundations of mathematics of Mario Pieri (1860-1913) and how it compares with the works of Christian von Staudt (1798-1867), Giuseppe Peano (1858-1932), David Hubert (1862-1943), and Alfred Tarski (1902-1983). The author demonstrates that the acceptance of Pieri’s results was overshadowed by the research of these four scholars, and argues that Pieri’s work merits a more significant place in the history of mathematics than it currently enjoys     

The use of child drawings to explore the dual↔group analytic field in child analysis

Awareness that the child is part of a complex relational system has ensured that all child analysts agree on the necessity of establishing a therapeutic alliance with the parents. Unconscious conflictual dynamics involve the child analyst and include him, from the time of the initial consultation, in an analytic field that is closer to that of a group than to the bi‐personal set‐up of therapy with adults. Through a clinical example, the author hypothesizes that the child’s drawings and play can be viewed as tools capable of mapping the unconscious emotions present in an analytic field that extends beyond the analyst–child couple. Play and drawings can be used in the relationship with the parents not in an explanatory sense, but as a probe with which to explore the universe of unconscious emotions present in the group field. The images or the story of the play used with this particular modality prove to be an attractive pathway that is effective in facilitating the alpha function of each of the members of the group. Furthermore, in this sense, they create the conditions for an occasion through which the parents can become more aware of their own unconscious emotions that have been entrusted to the child and expressed through his symptomatology. The possibility for the little group of subjects involved in a child analysis for oscillation in a dual–group field permits not only a shared experience of knowledge, but also a shared creativity aimed at knowledge of emotional truth (O).     

Auditory and proprioceptive spatial impairments in blind children and adults

It is not clear what role visual information plays in the development of space perception. It has previously been shown that in absence of vision, both the ability to judge orientation in the haptic modality and bisect intervals in the auditory modality are severely compromised (Gori, Sandini, Martinoli & Burr, 2010; Gori, Sandini, Martinoli & Burr, 2014). Here we report for the first time also a strong deficit in proprioceptive reproduction and audio distance evaluation in early blind children and adults. Interestingly, the deficit is not present in a small group of adults with acquired visual disability. Our results support the idea that in absence of vision the audio and proprioceptive spatial representations may be delayed or drastically weakened due to the lack of visual calibration over the auditory and haptic modalities during the critical period of development.     

Sex differences in discrimination reversal learning in the guppy

In several mammalian and avian species, females show a higher performance than males in tasks requiring cognitive flexibility such as the discrimination reversal learning. A recent study showed that female guppies are twice as efficient as males in a reversal learning task involving yellow–red discrimination, suggesting a higher cognitive flexibility in female guppies. However, the possibility exists that the superior performance exhibited by females does not reflect a general sex difference in cognitive abilities, but instead, is confined to colour discrimination tasks. To address this issue, we compared male and female guppies in two different discrimination reversal learning tasks and we performed a meta-analysis of these experiments and the previous one involving colour discrimination. In the first experiment of this study, guppies were tested in a task requiring them to learn to select the correct arm of a T-maze in order to rejoin a group of conspecifics. In experiment 2, guppies were observed in a numerical task requiring them to discriminate between 5 and 10 dots in order to obtain a food reward. Although females outperformed males in one condition of the T-maze, we did not find any clear evidence of females’ greater reversal learning performance in either experiment. However, the meta-analysis of the three experiments supported the hypothesis of females’ greater reversal learning ability. Our data do not completely exclude the idea that female guppies have a generally higher cognitive flexibility than males; however, they suggest that the size of this sex difference might depend on the task.     

A beluga whale socialized with bottlenose dolphins imitates their whistles

The research on imitation in the animal kingdom has more than a century-long history. A specific kind of imitation, auditory–vocal imitation, is well known in birds, especially among songbirds and parrots, but data for mammals are limited to elephants, marine mammals, and humans. Cetaceans are reported to imitate various signals, including species–specific calls, artificial sounds, and even vocalizations from other species if they share the same habitat. Here we describe the changes in the vocal repertoire of a beluga whale that was housed with a group of bottlenose dolphins. Two months after the beluga’s introduction into a new facility, we found that it began to imitate whistles of the dolphins, whereas one type of its own calls seemed to disappear. The case reported here may be considered as an interesting phenomenon of vocal accommodation to new social companions and cross-species socialization in cetaceans.     

Do domestic dogs (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Canis lupus familiaris</Emphasis>) perceive the Delboeuf illusion?

In the last decade, visual illusions have been repeatedly used as a tool to compare visual perception among species. Several studies have investigated whether non-human primates perceive visual illusions in a human-like fashion, but little attention has been paid to other mammals, and sensitivity to visual illusions has been never investigated in the dog. Here, we studied whether domestic dogs perceive the Delboeuf illusion. In human and non-human primates, this illusion creates a misperception of item size as a function of its surrounding context. To examine this effect in dogs, we adapted the spontaneous preference paradigm recently used with chimpanzees. Subjects were presented with two plates containing food. In control trials, two different amounts of food were presented in two identical plates. In this circumstance, dogs were expected to select the larger amount. In test trials, equal food portion sizes were presented in two plates differing in size: if dogs perceived the illusion as primates do, they were expected to select the amount of food presented in the smaller plate. Dogs significantly discriminated the two alternatives in control trials, whereas their performance did not differ from chance in test trials with the illusory pattern. The fact that dogs do not seem to be susceptible to the Delboeuf illusion suggests a potential discontinuity in the perceptual biases affecting size judgments between primates and dogs.