Carbon Sink Conservation and Global Justice: Benefitting,Free Riding and Non-compliance

It is often assumed that in order to avoid the most severe consequences of global anthropogenic climate change we have to preserve our existing carbon sinks, such as for instance tropical forests. Global carbon sink conservation raises a host of normative issues, though, since it is debatable who should pay the costs of carbon sink conservation, who has the duty to protect which sinks, and how far the duty to conserve one’s carbon sinks actually extends, especially if it conflicts with other duties one might have. According to some, forested states like Ecuador have a duty to preserve their tropical forests while the rich states of the global North have a duty of fairness to compensate states like Ecuador for the costs they incur. My aim in this paper is to critically analyse this standard line of argument and to criticise its validity both internally (i.e. with regard to its normative conclusion based on its premises) and externally (i.e. with regard to the argument’s underlying assumptions and its lack of contextualisation). As I will argue, the duty to conserve one’s forests is only a particular instantiation of a wider, more general duty to contribute towards global climate justice for which the context in which one operates (e.g. whether other agents are complying with their duties of global climate justice or not) matters significantly.     

Testosterone-to-oestradiol ratio is associated with female facial attractiveness

The relationship between facial shape and attractiveness has been extensively studied, yet few studies have investigated the underlying biological factors of an attractive face. Many researchers have proposed a link between female attractiveness and sex hormones, but there is little empirical evidence in support of this assumption. In the present study we investigated the relationship between circulating sex hormones and attractiveness. We created prototypes by separately averaging photographs of 15 women with high and low levels of testosterone, oestradiol, and testosterone-to-oestradiol ratio levels, respectively. An independent set of facial images was then shape transformed toward these prototypes. We paired the resulting images in such a way that one face depicted a female with high hormone level and the other one with a low hormone level. Fifty participants were asked to choose the more attractive face of each pair. We found that low testosterone-to-oestradiol ratio and low testosterone were positively associated with female facial attractiveness. There was no preference for faces with high oestradiol levels. In an additional experiment with 36 participants we confirmed that a low testosterone-to-oestradiol ratio plays a larger role than low testosterone alone. These results provide empirical evidence that an attractive female face is shaped by interacting effects of testosterone and oestradiol.     

The Role of Mental Powers in Panpsychism

Topoi - Constitutive Russellian panpsychism seems to combine the strengths of its rivals, physicalism and dualism, while avoiding their weaknesses: by acknowledging the irreducibility of phenomenal...     

A category-overshadowing effect in pigeons: support for the Common Elements Model of object categorization learning

A model proposing error-driven learning of associations between representations of stimulus properties and responses can account for many findings in the literature on object categorization by nonhuman animals. Furthermore, the model generates predictions that have been confirmed in both pigeons and people, suggesting that these learning processes are widespread across distantly related species. The present work reports evidence of a category-overshadowing effect in pigeons' categorization of natural objects, a novel behavioral phenomenon predicted by the model. Object categorization learning was impaired when a second category of objects provided redundant information about correct responses. The same impairment was not observed when single objects provided redundant information, but the category to which they belonged was uninformative, suggesting that this effect is different from simple overshadowing, arising from competition among stimulus categories rather than individual stimuli during learning.     

Using hippocampal-striatal loops for spatial navigation and goal-directed decision-making

The hippocampus plays a central role in spatial representation, declarative and episodic memory. In this area, so-called place cells possess high spatial selectivity, firing preferentially when the individual is within a small area of the environment. Interestingly, it has been found in rats that these cells can be active also when the animal is outside the location or context of their corresponding place field producing so-called “forward sweeps”. These typically occur at decision points during task execution and seem to be utilized, among other things, for the evaluation of potential alternative paths. Anticipatory firing is also found in the ventral striatum, a brain area that is strongly interconnected with the hippocampus and is known to encode value and reward. In this paper, we describe a biologically based computational model of the hippocampal-ventral striatum circuit that implements a goal-directed mechanism of choice, with the hippocampus primarily involved in the mental simulation of possible navigation paths and the ventral striatum involved in the evaluation of the associated reward expectancies. The model is validated in a navigation task in which a rat is placed in a complex maze with multiple rewarding sites. We show that the rat mentally activates place cells to simulate paths, estimate their value, and make decisions, implementing two essential processes of model-based reinforcement learning algorithms of choice: look-ahead prediction and the evaluation of predicted states.     

Nonautomated Pre-Performance Routine in Tennis: An Intervention Study

The effect of a nonautomated pre-performance routine (PPR) on performance in a high-pressure situation was investigated. Twenty-nine tennis players served in a low- and high-pressure condition in a pre- and posttest design. The intervention group learned a nonautomated PPR for 4 weeks. Increases in subjective but not objective (i.e., cortisol) levels of stress were detected in the high-pressure conditions. The intervention group showed a significant decrease in performance in the high-pressure condition in the pretest (p =.005) but not posttest (p =.161). Using a nonautomated PPR may benefit athletes who experience a drop in performance in high-pressure situations.