Studying the Practice of Cooperation and Collaboration Within an International Research Project on the Everyday Lives of Families

The aim of this paper is to analyse the sociocultural dynamics underlying collaborative research. The article is based on an international collaborative project on the everyday lives of working families in Italy, Sweden and the USA. The aim of this paper is to show that collaborative research does not necessarily produce collaboration: this is possible only with very strong rules between partners. It proposes a distinction between collaboration and cooperation, and uses this distinction to examine intergroup and intragroup joint activity. Through the analysis of the communicative exchanges occurring between researchers, the paper highlights conditions in which cooperation can become fruitful collaboration.

Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Embodied Language

ABSTRACT— Mirror neurons are a class of neurons first discovered in the monkey premotor cortex that activate both when the monkey executes an action and when it observes the same action made by another individual. These neurons enable individuals to understand actions performed by others. Two subcategories of mirror neurons in monkeys activate when they listen to action sounds and when they observe communicative gestures made by others, respectively. The properties of mirror neurons could constitute a substrate from which more sophisticated forms of communication evolved; this would make sense, given the anatomical and functional homology between part of the monkey premotor cortex and Broca's area (the "speech" area of the brain) in humans. We hypothesize that several components of human language, including some aspects of phonology and syntax, could be embedded in the organizational properties of the motor system and that a deeper knowledge of this system could shed light on how language evolved.     

Expanding Quasi-MV Algebras by a Quantum Operator

We investigate an expansion of quasi-MV algebras ([10]) by a genuine quantum unary operator. The variety of such quasi-MV algebras has a subquasivariety whose members—called cartesian—can be obtained in an appropriate way out of MV algebras. After showing that cartesian . quasi-MV algebras generate ,we prove a standard completeness theorem for w.r.t. an algebra over the complex numbers. Presented by Heinrich Wansing     

Sight or smell: which senses do scavenging raptors use to find food?

Animal Cognition - Raptors are usually considered to be mainly visually dependent, and the use of other sensory modalities has rarely been studied in these birds. Here, we investigated...     

Analysis and decomposition in Peirce

Synthese - Peirce seems to maintain two incompatible theses: that a sentence is multiply analyzable into subject and predicate, and that a sentence is uniquely analyzable as a combination of...     

Working memory training in older adults: evidence of transfer and maintenance effects

Few studies have examined working memory (WM) training-related gains and their transfer and maintenance effects in older adults. This present research investigates the efficacy of a verbal WM training program in adults aged 65-75 years, considering specific training gains on a verbal WM (criterion) task as well as transfer effects on measures of visuospatial WM, short-term memory, inhibition, processing speed, and fluid intelligence. Maintenance of training benefits was evaluated at 8-month follow-up. Trained older adults showed higher performance than did controls on the criterion task and maintained this benefit after 8 months. Substantial general transfer effects were found for the trained group, but not for the control one. Transfer maintenance gains were found at follow-up, but only for fluid intelligence and processing speed tasks. The results are discussed in terms of cognitive plasticity in older adults.     

Reacquisition of heroin and cocaine place preference involves a memory consolidation process sensitive to systemic and intra-ventral tegmental area naloxone

To investigate the effect of naloxone on a putative memory consolidation process underlying reacquisition of heroin and cocaine conditioned place preference, four studies were conducted in male Sprague–Dawley rats using a common procedure involving: place conditioning (0.3 or 1 mg/kg heroin or 20 mg/kg cocaine; ×4 sessions), extinction (vehicle × 4 sessions), and reconditioning (0 or 1 mg/kg heroin or 20 mg/kg cocaine; ×1 session). Systemic naloxone injections (0, 1 and 3 mg/kg) or bilateral intra-ventral tegmental area (VTA) naloxone methiodide infusions (2 nmol in 0.5 μl × side) were administered at different times following reconditioning. Post-reconditioning administration of naloxone dose-dependently blocked, attenuated and had no effect on reacquisition of heroin CPP when administered immediately, 1 h and 6 h after reconditioning, respectively. The highest dose of naloxone also blocked reacquisition of cocaine CPP, and did not produce a conditioned place aversion in heroin-naïve and heroin pre-treated animals. Post-reconditioning infusions in the VTA, but not in adjacent structures, blocked reacquisition of heroin CPP when administered immediately, but not 6 h, after reconditioning. These data suggest that reacquisition of drug-cues associations involves a memory consolidation process sensitive to manipulations of the endogenous opioid system, and indicate that opioid receptors in the VTA may be critically involved in the re-emergence of drug seeking behavior.     

A modified mark test for own-body recognition in pig-tailed macaques (Macaca nemestrina)

Classic mirror self-recognition mark tests involve familiarizing the subject with its mirror image, surreptitiously applying a mark on the subject’s eyebrow, nose, or ear, and measuring self-directed behaviors toward the mark. For many non-human primate species, however, direct gaze at the face constitutes an aggressive and threatening signal. It is therefore possible that monkeys fail the mark test because they do not closely inspect their faces in a mirror and hence they have no expectations about their physical appearance. In the current study, we prevented two pig-tailed macaques (Macaca nemestrina) from seeing their own faces in a mirror, and we adopted a modified version of the classic mark test in which monkeys were marked on the chest, a body region to which they normally have direct visual access but that in the current study was visible only via a mirror. Neither monkey tried to touch the mark on its chest, possibly due to a failure to understand the mirror as a reflective surface. To further the monkeys’ understanding of the mirror image, we trained them to reach for food using the mirror as the only source of information. After both monkeys had learned mirror-mediated reaching, we replicated the mark test. In this latter phase of the study, only one monkey scratched the red dye on the chest once. The results are consistent with other findings suggesting that monkeys are not capable of passing a mark test and imply that face and body recognition rely on the same cognitive abilities.     

Consume More,Work Longer,and Be Unhappy: Possible Social Roots of Economic Crisis?

Applied Research in Quality of Life - According to the Negative Endogenous Growth (NEG) model, economic systems are susceptible to economic crises because they produce wealth from the erosion of...     

Guilt and focusing in decision-making

In this paper we examined the impact of a specific emotion, guilt, on focusing in decision-making. Through the focusing mechanism, when making decisions, individuals tend to restrict their thoughts to what is explicitly represented in the decisional task, disregarding alternatives. In this paper, three experiments are performed to investigate whether an emotional state of guilt can critically guide individuals' focusing, and even prevailing over the focusing mechanism. Guilty emotional state was induced by asking participants to write about a guilty related life event. The emotional state was thus neither generated by nor related to the tasks used in the experiments. Results of the first two studies show that guilt affects focusing in decision-making in the case of only one explicitly specified option (a positive or a negative one). Guilty participants, when presented with a stated option that has predominantly positive characteristics, prefer other, unspecified options over the positive one. Guilty participants faced with a stated option that has predominantly negative features tend to prefer it to other, unspecified, options, instead. Finally, experiment 3 shows that guilty participants presented with two different options (a negative vs. a positive one) having different degrees of explicitness (i.e. they are not equally represented in the decision frame), focus on the negative option, even though the latter was not explicitly represented but only hinted at the end of the text. Overall, these results suggest that guilt emotion state can play a crucial role in either strengthening or reducing the focusing mechanism. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.