(I can’t get no) antisatisfaction

Synthese - Substructural approaches to paradoxes have attracted much attention from the philosophical community in the last decade. In this paper we focus on two substructural logics, named...     

Morpheme-based reading aloud: evidence from dyslexic and skilled Italian readers

The role of morphology in reading aloud was examined measuring naming latencies to pseudowords and words composed of morphemes (roots and derivational suffixes) and corresponding simple pseudowords and words. Three groups of Italian children of different ages and reading abilities, including dyslexic children, as well as one group of adult readers participated in the study. All four groups read faster and more accurately pseudowords composed of root and suffix than simple pseudowords (Experiment 1). Unlike skilled young and adult readers, both dyslexics and younger children benefited from morphological structure also in reading aloud words (Experiment 2). It is proposed that the morpheme is a unit of intermediate grain size that proves useful in processing all linguistic stimuli, including words, in individuals with limited reading ability (dyslexics and younger readers) who did not fully develop mastering of whole-word processing. For skilled readers, morphemic parsing is useful for reading those stimuli (i.e., pseudowords made up of morphemes), for which a whole-word lexical unit does not exist; where such whole-word lexical units do exist, skilled readers do not need to rely on morphological parsing because they can rely on a lexical (whole-word) reading unit that is larger than the morpheme.     

Working conditions,well-being,and job-related attitudes among call centre agents

A comparison of 234 call centre agents with 572 workers in traditional jobs with long lasting training revealed lower job control and task complexity/variety and higher uncertainty among call agents. However, time pressure, concentration demands, and work interruptions were lower in call agents. Within the call agent sample, controlling for negative affectivity and other working conditions, job control predicted intention to quit, and job complexity/variety predicted job satisfaction and affective commitment. Social stressors and task-related stressors predicted uniquely indicators of well-being and job-related attitudes. Furthermore, data confirm the role of emotional dissonance as a stressor in its own right, as it explained variance in irritated reactions and psychosomatic complaints beyond other working conditions. Results indicate that strong division of labour may be a rather general phenomenon in call centres. Therefore, working conditions of call agents require a redesign by means of job enrichment or—better—organization development. Moreover, measures of social stressors and emotional dissonance should be integrated routinely into stress-related job analyses in service jobs.     

Place and summation coding for canonical and non-canonical finger numeral representations

Fingers can be used to express numerical magnitudes, and cultural habits about the fixed order in which fingers are raised determine which configurations become canonical and which non-canonical. Although both types of configuration carry magnitude information, it has been shown that the canonical ones are recognized faster and directly linked to number semantics. Here we tested whether this difference is a consequence of differences in the qualitative way of processing the two types of configurations. When participants named Arabic digits (Experiment 1) or verbal numerals (Experiment 2) primed by canonical and non-canonical finger configurations, qualitatively different priming patterns were observed for the two types of configurations. Canonical configurations activated a place coding representation, with priming spreading to close smaller and larger magnitudes as a function of the prime–target distance. Conversely, non-canonical configurations activated a summation coding representation priming smaller and equal magnitudes independently of the prime–target distance, and larger targets depending on this distance.     

Making our ends meet: shared intention,goal adoption and the third-person perspective

Mind reading (i.e. the ability to infer the mental state of another agent) is taken to be the main cognitive ability required to share an intention and to collaborate. In this paper, I argue that another cognitive ability is also necessary to collaborate: representing others’ and ones’ own goals from a third-person perspective (other-centred or allocentric representation of goals). I argue that allocentric mind reading enables the cognitive ability of goal adoption, i.e. having the goal that another agent’s achieve p because and as long as another agent has that goal that p. Having clarified the relevance of mutual goal adoption for acting jointly, I argue that when an intention is shared between several agents, each individual has an intention in favour of the joint action and one in favour of a joint mode of reasoning. This mode of reasoning is allocentric reasoning. Finally, I elaborate on the consequences of this view for the scientific study of human collaboration.     

Measured and predicted mechanical internal work in human locomotion

Predictive methods estimating mechanical internal work (W_int, i.e., work to accelerate limbs with respect to BCOM during locomotion) are needed in absence of experimental measurements. A previously proposed model equation predicts such a parameter based upon velocity, stride frequency, duty factor, and a compound critical term (q) accounting for limb geometry and inertial properties. That first predicted W_int estimate (PW_int) has been validated only for young males and for a limited number of horses. The present study aimed to extend the comparison between model predictions and experimentally measured W_int (MW_int) data on humans with varying gender, age, gait, velocity, and gradient. Seventy healthy subjects (males and females; 7 age groups: 6-65 years) carried out level walking and running on treadmill, at different velocities. Moreover, one of the subject groups (25-35 years) walked and ran also at several uphill/downhill gradients. Reference values of q represent the main important results: (a) males and females have similar q values; (b) q is independent on velocity and gradient. Also, different data filtering depth was found to affect MW_int and, indirectly, PW_int, thus also the reference q values here obtained (0.08 in level, 0.10 in gradient) suffer a - 20% underestimation with respect to the previous predicting model. Despite of this effect, the close match between MW_int and PW_int trends indicates that the model equation could be satisfactorily applied, in various locomotion conditions.     

An iterative procedure for extracting skill maps from data

The methodologies for the construction of a knowledge structure mainly refer to the query to experts, the skill maps, and the data-driven approaches. This last method is of growing interest in recent literature. In this paper, an iterative procedure for building a skill map from a set of data is introduced. This procedure is based on the minimization of the distance between the knowledge structure delineated by a given skill map and the data. The accuracy of the proposed method is tested through a number of simulation studies where the amount of noise in the data is manipulated as well as the kind of structure to be reconstructed. Results show that the procedure is accurate and that its performance tends to be sufficiently stable even with high error rates. The procedure is compared to two already-existing methodologies to derive knowledge structures from a set of data. The use of the corrected Akaike Information Criterion (AICc) as a stopping criterion of the iterative reconstruction procedure is tested against the app criterion introduced by Schrepp. Moreover, two empirical applications on clinical data are reported, and their results show the applicability of the procedure.     

Substance P antagonists: meet the new drugs,same as the old drugs? Insights from transgenic animal models

Antidepressants that primarily target the reuptake of monoamines have been highly successful treatments. However, therapies with these drugs still have several drawbacks, namely severe side effects, delays in the onset of action, and a significant percentage of non-responders. Recently, non-peptidic antagonists of the neurokinin 1 receptor, or substance P antagonists, have emerged as a novel class of drugs with antidepressant efficacy that is comparable to current drugs, but a potentially reduced side effect profile. This review summarizes the pre-clinical evidence derived from pharmacological and transgenic animal studies that suggests an important role for the substance P/neurokinin 1 system in anxiety and depression. Also, potential mechanisms by which substance P antagonists may produce their therapeutic effects are discussed.     

Deeper attentional masking by lateral objects in children with autism

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is often associated with a detail-oriented perception and overselective attention in visual tasks, such as visual search and crowding. These results were obtained manipulating exclusively the spatial properties of the stimuli: few is known about the spatio-temporal dynamics of visual processing in ASD. In this study we employed an attentional masking (AM) paradigm comparing children with ASD and IQ-matched typically developing (TD) controls. The AM effect refers to an impaired identification of a target followed by a competitive masking object at different proximities in space and time. We found that ASD and TD groups did not differ in the AM effect provoked by the competitive object displayed in the same position of the target. In contrast, children with ASD showed a deeper and prolonged interference than the TD group when the masking object was displayed in the lateral position. These psychophysical results suggest that the inefficient attentional selection in ASD depends on the spatio-temporal interaction between competitive visual objects. These evidence are discussed in the light of the ASD altered neural connectivity hypothesis and the reentrant theory of perception.     

Belief attribution in deaf and hearing infants

Based on anticipatory looking and reactions to violations of expected events, infants have been credited with 'theory of mind' (ToM) knowledge that a person's search behaviour for an object will be guided by true or false beliefs about the object's location. However, little is known about the preconditions for looking patterns consistent with belief attribution in infants. In this study, we compared the performance of 17- to 26-month-olds on anticipatory looking in ToM tasks. The infants were either hearing or were deaf from hearing families and thus delayed in communicative experience gained from access to language and conversational input. Hearing infants significantly outperformed their deaf counterparts in anticipating the search actions of a cartoon character that held a false belief about a target-object location. By contrast, the performance of the two groups in a true belief condition did not differ significantly. These findings suggest for the first time that access to language and conversational input contributes to early ToM reasoning.