Cognitive enhancement, human evolution and bioethics

The goal of this article are three-fold. The first is to explore the relations between the properties designated by the terms "human", "post-human," "Transhuman", and to clarify the corresponding "isms". The second is to scrutinize the current techniques for cognitive enhancement in order to assess their relations with the three categories just mentioned, and, with the specific ethical issues that they are raising. The third is to examine whether general ethical principles could be invoked either in favor of or against, the normative proposals of post- and trans-humanism, and to consider how compatible the types of enhancement presently developed are with respect to these principles.     

Stress and emotional memory: a matter of timing

Stressful events activate the amygdala and a network of associated brain regions. Studies in both humans and rodents indicate that noradrenaline has a prominent role in this activation. Noradrenaline induces a hypervigilant state that helps to remember the event. This mnemonic effect is enhanced when the situation is so stressful that substantial amounts of corticosteroids are released and reach the amygdala. The combination of the two hormones leads to optimal strengthening of contacts and thus memory. Yet, rises in corticosteroid levels that are not precisely synchronized with noradrenaline release do not act synergistically but rather prevent or suppress the effect of noradrenaline. This dynamic interaction illustrates the adaptive and potentially protective capacity of corticosteroids regarding traumatic memories.     

Rehabilitation of reading in older individuals with macular degeneration: a review of effective training programs

Macular degeneration (MD) is the most common cause of visual impairment among older adults. It severely affects reading performance. People with MD have to rely on peripheral vision for reading. In this review, we considered several training programs that aim to improve peripheral reading, with a focus on eccentric viewing, oculomotor control, or perceptual learning. There was no strong support in favor of one particular training method for rehabilitation of reading in MD, but there is evidence that older individuals with MD can be trained to improve reading performance, even within limited time.     

Hursthouse’s Virtue Ethics and Abortion: Abortion Ethics without Metaphysics?

This essay explicates and evaluates the roles that fetal metaphysics and moral status play in Rosalind Hursthouse’s abortion ethics. It is motivated by Hursthouse’s puzzling claim in her widely anthologized paper “Virtue Ethics and Abortion” that fetal moral status and (by implication) its underlying metaphysics are “in a way, fundamentally irrelevant” to her position. The essay clarifies the roles that fetal ontology and moral status do in fact play in her abortion ethics. To this end, it presents and then develops her fetal metaphysics of the potential and actual human being, which she merely adumbrates in her more extensive treatment of abortion ethics in her book Beginning Lives. The essay then evaluates her fetal ontology in light of relevant research on fetal neural and psychological development. It concludes that her implied view that the late-stage fetus is an actual human being is defensible. The essay then turns to the analysis of late-stage abortions in her paper and argues that it is importantly incomplete.     

Portuguese-Canadian Emigrant Descendents in Multicultural Canada: Ambiguous Identity in a Sure-Footed Nation or Cultural Awareness in an Uncertain Country?

This paper examines the ways the descendents of Portuguese-Canadian immigrants contemplate and formulate their identities. Through qualitative, open-ended interviews, the research demonstrates how these individuals contest ideas of ‘being Portuguese’ and ‘being Canadian’ within the frameworks of the Canadian multicultural policy. Refusing to be positioned outside the nation and Anglo/Francophone conformity, these individuals produce their own meanings of identity by working through their own personally identified multiethnic bodies to the national body politic, where some of them see their own selves as intrinsically ‘multicultural’ and contributors to the very definition of a Canadian identity. Challenging the tropes of the Canadian multicultural narrative, these descendents, thus, develop nuanced models of cultural citizenship, illustrating that national identities are formed and transformed in relation to representation. Through the process of narrative analysis, my endeavour of this article are twofold: on one hand, to illuminate the role of these individuals who, as active actors, are shaped by the social worlds they delve in and, on the other, to explicate how the roles played out by these actors can contribute to the construction of ‘a Canadian identity’.     

Speaking to the trained ear: musical expertise enhances the recognition of emotions in speech prosody

Language and music are closely related in our minds. Does musical expertise enhance the recognition of emotions in speech prosody? Forty highly trained musicians were compared with 40 musically untrained adults (controls) in the recognition of emotional prosody. For purposes of generalization, the participants were from two age groups, young (18-30 years) and middle adulthood (40-60 years). They were presented with short sentences expressing six emotions-anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise-and neutrality, by prosody alone. In each trial, they performed a forced-choice identification of the expressed emotion (reaction times, RTs, were collected) and an intensity judgment. General intelligence, cognitive control, and personality traits were also assessed. A robust effect of expertise was found: musicians were more accurate than controls, similarly across emotions and age groups. This effect cannot be attributed to socioeducational background, general cognitive or personality characteristics, because these did not differ between musicians and controls; perceived intensity and RTs were also similar in both groups. Furthermore, basic acoustic properties of the stimuli like fundamental frequency and duration were predictive of the participants' responses, and musicians and controls were similarly efficient in using them. Musical expertise was thus associated with cross-domain benefits to emotional prosody. These results indicate that emotional processing in music and in language engages shared resources.     

Identification with community‐based HIV agencies as a correlate of turnover intentions and general self‐efficacy

Research (e.g. French, Power, & Mitchell, 2000 ; Harris, 2006 ; Harris & Alderson, 2006 , 2007 ; Roy & Cain, 2001 ) has highlighted important benefits for people living with HIV/AIDS to become connected with HIV community‐based (CB) agencies (e.g. reduction of isolation, educational opportunities, empowerment). However, CB HIV organizations sometimes experience challenges in recruiting and retaining people living with HIV/AIDS. In a sample of 68 respondents associated with a Canadian HIV/AIDS CB agency, facets of agency identification were examined as correlates of (a) turnover intentions with the agency and (b) aspects of psychological adjustment (hope and general self‐efficacy). Results indicated one dimension of social identification, in‐group affect, as a significant correlate of turnover intentions (such that members with more positive agency‐derived feelings were more likely to say they would stay at the agency), and another emotionally‐relevant aspect of identification, in‐group ties, as a significant correlate of general self‐efficacy. Hope was unrelated to social identification. Several implications for HIV CB agencies are discussed. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Contemporary theories of 1/f noise in motor control

1/f noise has been discovered in a number of time series collected in psychological and behavioral experiments. This ubiquitous phenomenon has been ignored for a long time and classical models were not designed for accounting for these long-range correlations. The aim of this paper is to present and discuss contrasted theoretical perspectives on 1/f noise, in order to provide a comprehensive overview of current debates in this domain. In a first part, we propose a formal definition of the phenomenon of 1/f noise, and we present some commonly used methods for measuring long-range correlations in time series. In a second part, we develop a theoretical position that considers 1/f noise as the hallmark of system complexity. From this point of view, 1/f noise emerges from the coordination of the many elements that compose the system. In a third part, we present a theoretical counterpoint suggesting that 1/f noise could emerge from localized sources within the system. In conclusion, we try to draw some lines of reasoning for going beyond the opposition between these two approaches.