Embedded Cognition and Mental Causation: Setting Empirical Bounds on Metaphysics

In this paper, we challenge Jaegwon Kim’s version of neural reductionism according to which the causal powers of mental properties are pre-empted by those of neural properties. Using empirical and theoretical developments from the field of embedded cognition, we articulate and defend a notion of process externalism that extends Clark and Chalmers’ notion of an extended mind. We argue that process externalism undermines one of Kim’s key premises leading to the alternative conclusion that mental causation cannot be reduced to neural causation. Instead, mental properties have their own new causal powers just like other scientifically established macroproperties.     

Pulling the plug on clinical equipoise: a critique of Miller and Weijer

As clinicians, researchers, bioethicists, and members of society, we face a number of moral dilemmas concerning randomized clinical trials. How we manage the starting and stopping of such trials--how we conceptualize what evidence is sufficient for these decisions--has implications for both our obligations to trial participants and for the nature and security of the resultant medical knowledge. One view of how this is to be done, "clinical equipoise," recently has been given an extended defense by Paul Miller and Charles Weijer in their article "Rehabilitating Equipoise." The present paper critiques this position and Miller and Weijer's defense of it. I argue that their attempted rehabilitation fails. Their analysis suffers from a number of confusions, as well as a failure to make crucial distinctions, adequately to clarify key concepts, or to think through exactly what needs to be established to justify their claim. We are left with little reason to uphold the clinical equipoise criterion.     

Impairments in monkey and human face recognition in 2-year-old toddlers with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Developmental Delay

Face recognition impairments are well documented in older children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD); however, the developmental course of the deficit is not clear. This study investigates the progressive specialization of face recognition skills in children with and without ASD. Experiment 1 examines human and monkey face recognition in 2-year-old children with ASD, matched for nonverbal mental age (NVMA) with developmentally delayed (DD) children, and typically developing children (TD), using the Visual Paired Comparison (VPC) paradigm. Results indicate that, consistent with the other-species effect, TD controls show enhanced recognition of human but not monkey faces; however, neither the ASD nor the DD group show evidence of face recognition regardless of the species. Experiment 2 examines the same question in a group of older 3- to 4-year-old developmentally disabled (ASD and DD) children as well as in typical controls. In this experiment, both human and monkey faces are recognized by all three groups. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 suggest that difficulties in face processing, as measured by the VPC paradigm, are common in toddlers with ASD as well as DD, but that these deficits tend to disappear by early preschool age. In addition, the experiments show that higher efficacy of incidental encoding and recognition of facial identity in a context of passive exposure is positively related to nonverbal cognitive skills and age, but not to overall social interaction skills or greater attention to faces exhibited in naturalistic contexts.     

Perception of novel faces: the parts have it!

It has been suggested that, as a result of expertise, configural information plays a predominant role in face processing. We investigated this idea using novel and learned faces. In experiment 1, sixteen participants matched two subsequently presented blurred or scrambled faces, which could be either upright or inverted, in a sequential same -different matching task. By means of blurring, featural information is hampered, whilst scrambling disrupts configural information. Each face was unfamiliar to the participants and was presented for 1000 ms. An ANOVA on the d' values revealed a significant advantage for scrambled faces. In experiment 2, fourteen participants were tested with the same design, except that the second face was always intact. Again, the ANOVA on the d' values revealed a significant advantage for scrambled faces. In experiment 3 half of the faces were learned in a familiarisation block prior to the experiment. The ANOVA of these d' values revealed a significant interaction of familiarity and condition, showing that blurred stimuli were better recognised when the faces were familiar. These results suggest that recognition of novel faces, compared to learned faces, relies relatively more on the processing of featural information. In the course of familiarisation the importance of configural information increases.     

Amygdala and hippocampal activity during acquisition and extinction of human fear conditioning

Previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have characterized brain systems involved in conditional response acquisition during Pavlovian fear conditioning. However, the functional neuroanatomy underlying the extinction of human conditional fear remains largely undetermined. The present study used fMRI to examine brain activity during acquisition and extinction of fear conditioning. During the acquisition phase, participants were either exposed to light (CS) presentations that signaled a brief electrical stimulation (paired group) or received light presentations that did not serve as a warning signal (control group). During the extinction phase, half of the paired group subjects continued to receive the same treatment, whereas the remainder received light alone. Control subjects also received light alone during the extinction phase. Changes in metabolic activity within the amygdala and hippocampus support the involvement of these regions in each of the procedural phases of fear conditioning. Hippocampal activity developed during acquisition of the fear response. Amygdala activity increased whenever experimental contingencies were altered, suggesting that this region is involved in processing changes in environmental relationships. The present data show learning-related amygdala and hippocampal activity during human Pavlovian fear conditioning and suggest that the amygdala is particularly important for forming new associations as relationships between stimuli change.     

A cross-culturally standardized set of pictures for younger and older adults: American and Chinese norms for name agreement,concept agreement,and familiarity

The present study presents normative measures for 260 line drawings of everyday objects, found in Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980), viewed by individuals in China and the United States. Within each cultural group, name agreement, concept agreement, and familiarity measures were obtained separately for younger adults and older adults. For a subset of 57 pictures (22%), there was equivalence in both name agreement and concept agreement, and for an additional subset of 29 pictures (11%), there was nonequivalent name agreement but equivalent concept agreement, across all culture-by-age groups. The data indicate substantial differences across culture-by-age groups in name agreement percentages and number of distinct name responses provided. We discovered significant differences between older and younger American adults in both name agreement percentages (67 pictures, or 26%) and concept agreement percentages (44 pictures, or 17%). Written naming responses collected for the entire set of Snodgrass and Vanderwart pictures showed shifts in both naming and concept agreement percentages over the intervening decades: Although correlations in name agreement were strong (r = .71,p < .001) between our younger American samples and those of Snodgrass and Vanderwart, name agreement percentages have changed for a substantial proportion (33%) of the 260 pictures; moreover, 63% of the stimuli for which Snodgrass and Vanderwart reported concept agreement now appear to differ. We provide comprehensive comparison statistics and tests for both the present study and prior ones, finding differences across numerous item-level measures. The corpus of data suggests that substantial differences in all measures can be found across age as well as culture, so that unequivocal conclusions with respect to cross-cultural or age-related differences in cognition can be made only when appropriate stimuli are selected for studies. Data for all 260 pictures, for each of the four groups, and all supporting materials and tests are freely archived athttp://agingmind.cns.uiuc.edu/Pict Norms. The full set of these norms may be downloaded fromwwwpsychonomic.org/archive/.     

Countertransference in defense enactments

A clinical term is introduced to capture a defense that develops with the patient's deepening but fleeting awareness of painful transference feelings. The analyst's attention to countertransference in such situations is central to the analysis of these defenses. An attempt is made to distinguish defense enactments from other types of defenses, and to differentiate the analyst's countertransference reaction to this type of defense from countertransference reactions that might appear similar. The reasons for this dynamic in the interpersonal space are explored, and a clinical example that describes this phenomenon in the analytic moment is given.