A Meadian account of social understanding: Taking a non-mentalistic approach to infant and verbal false belief understanding

Performance on false belief tasks has long been considered a key indicator of the development of social understanding in young children. We consider the enabling conditions for performing non-verbal and verbal false belief tasks as well as a typical developmental path toward false belief understanding. We argue that, in early ontogenesis, children anticipate the coordination of activity with others rather than read, probe, or reflectively engage with the psychological states of others. As linguistically mediated reflective thought emerges, children gradually become able to parse and isolate the myriad of incipient somatic, affective, and intentional responses that arise in any given moment. With reflective thought, children also begin to develop distinct and temporally coherent understandings about the minds of self and other. We provide an account of how the reflective thought that facilitates false belief understanding emerges. Our account focuses on a gradually developing refinement of social coordination and the shared perspectival understandings inherent in social coordination.     

A New VNS Metaheuristic Using MADS as a Local Optimizer

We propose a new hybrid metaheuristic VNSMADS that is an implementation of the Variable Neighbourhood Search (VNS) algorithm with the Mesh Adaptive Direct Search (MADS) as the local search. Because MADS is a Derivative‐Free Optimization method, the targeted problems may be non‐smooth on black box functions possessing several local optima. Constraints other than bounds on the variables are not considered. VNSMADS is applied on a real‐world problem from Finance: the portfolio selection problem using the investor preferences. Numerical results show the efficiency of our approach. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Psychological impact of colorectal cancer screening.

This article examines the psychological impact of participating in sigmoidoscopy screening for colorectal cancer prevention. The 1st study examined psychological well-being at 3 months, in relation to screening outcome, in 4,153 individuals. The 2nd study used longitudinal data to examine changes in psychological functioning from before to after screening in relation both to screening outcome and baseline indicators of vulnerability. There were few psychological differences between those who had received negative results or had polyps detected. These findings were confirmed in the longitudinal study, which also found no evidence for vulnerability to adverse effects among those who were initially most anxious or who perceived their risk of cancer to be higher. The longitudinal data suggested that screening might produce transient positive effects.     

Fleshier Than Even Rubens' Palette

Poems and Commentaries by Amit Majmudar, Kelly Sievers, Bonnie Salomon, David Watts, Paul Boor, and Beth Lown. Jack Coulehan, Editor