On the assessment of genetic technology: Reaching ethical judgments in the light of modern technology

The “Model for Reaching Ethical Judgments in the context of Modern Technologies — the Case of Genetic Technology”, which is presented here, has arisen from the project “Ethical Criteria bearing upon Decisions taken in the field of Biotechnology”. This project has been pursued since 1991 in the Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Technikforschung (ZIT) of the Technical University of Darmstadt, with the purpose of examining decision-making in selected activities involving the production of transgenic plants that have a useful application. The model is the basis of an outline for interviews to investigate how far decisions concerning the development of such plants with genetic techniques take ethical criteria into account. It was necessary to design this new model because other models for reaching judgments of this kind were not conceptually suited for concrete application. This model represents a problem related approach and combines methodological with substantive typology. In this it differs from comparable models for reaching ethical judgments.     

Catamnestic studies of patients with writer's cramp following inpatient psychotherapy

The paper gives the results of a follow-up study of 58 patients after psychotherapeutic treatment as in-patients for writer's cramp. Where as immediately after discharge 74.1% of the patients felt an improvement in their condition, at the time of the follow-up study only 17.2% were demonstrably improved, with 37.9% subjectively feeling an improvement over their state before treatment as in-patients. These results suggest that the customary psychotherapeutic methods employed have less effect on the evidently multifactorial extrapyramidal-motor basic complaint but rather have the effect of improving the patient's ability to cope with this in daily life.     

Average group behavior does not represent individual behavior in classical conditioning of the honeybee

Conditioned behavior as observed during classical conditioning in a group of identically treated animals provides insights into the physiological process of learning and memory formation. However, several studies in vertebrates found a remarkable difference between the group-average behavioral performance and the behavioral characteristics of individual animals. Here, we analyzed a large number of data (1640 animals) on olfactory conditioning in the honeybee (Apis mellifera). The data acquired during absolute and differential classical conditioning differed with respect to the number of conditioning trials, the conditioned odors, the intertrial intervals, and the time of retention tests. We further investigated data in which animals were tested for spontaneous recovery from extinction. In all data sets we found that the gradually increasing group-average learning curve did not adequately represent the behavior of individual animals. Individual behavior was characterized by a rapid and stable acquisition of the conditioned response (CR), as well as by a rapid and stable cessation of the CR following unrewarded stimuli. In addition, we present and evaluate different model hypotheses on how honeybees form associations during classical conditioning by implementing a gradual learning process on the one hand and an all-or-none learning process on the other hand. In summary, our findings advise that individual behavior should be recognized as a meaningful predictor for the internal state of a honeybee--irrespective of the group-average behavioral performance.     

Gender recognition from point-light walkers

Point-light displays of human gait provide information sufficient to recognize the gender of a walker and are taken as evidence of the exquisite tuning of the visual system to biological motion. The authors revisit this topic with the goals of quantifying human efficiency at gender recognition. To achieve this, the authors first derive an ideal observer for gender recognition on the basis of center of moment (J. E. Cutting, D. R. Proffitt, & L. T. Kozlowski, 1978) and, with the use of anthropometric data from various populations, show optimal recognition of approximately 79% correct. Next, they perform a meta-analysis of 21 experiments examining gender recognition, obtaining accuracies of 66% correct for a side view and 71% for other views. Finally, results of the meta-analysis and the ideal observer are combined to obtain estimates of human efficiency at gender recognition of 26% for the side view and 47% for other views.     

Iatrogenic damage to the nervous system]

A survey is given of the most important findings in respect of iatrogenic damage to the nervous system on the basis of published reports and the author's own findings, taking special account of lumbar puncture and suboccipital puncture, myelography, contrast-medium encephalography, ventriculography and cerebral angiography. The possibility of damage such as the danger of embolism in diagnostic and therapeutic vascular puncture is referred to. Among the lesions caused in the course of therapy, the side-effects of treatment with drugs, effects of radiation, effects resulting from anesthesia, sequelae of neural therapy and of manual manipulations, sequelae of operations, and postvaccinal encephalopathies are discussed. The necessity of systematic morphological examinations for exact assessment of ioatrogenic lesions is stressed. Iatrogenic damage due to neglect of diagnostic and therapeutic measures is also considered.     

Independent feature processing in the visual system

Summary A recognition experiment with a set of simple visual patterns was performed. The patterns were composed of three binary features: Lines, angles and curve segments. The pattern sets differed with respect to the distance between components and the symmetry of the arrangement. The empirical confusion matrices were analysed assuming two different models: A model assuming independent feature analysis and a model that assumes that one of the features is analysed independently of the other two. The main result was that quite a large distance between features was necessary to achieve independent processing of the features. Moreover, in the asymmetric pattern set the predictions of the independence model were better than in the symmetric pattern set.     

Stimulus information and processing time in pitch perception

Summary The assumption of Massaro, that the preperceptual auditory image is processed at the same rate as the stimulus information, was tested for pitch recognition, using a recognition masking paradigm. The data clearly show that the preperceptual image is processed with a much lower rate.