Possible primitive notions for geometry of spine spaces

New systems of notions specific to the geometry of spine spaces, are introduced. In particular parallelism turns out to be a sufficient primitive notion to express the geometry of a spine space, and we show that structures related to projective closure are definitionally equivalent to spine spaces.     

Larval antlions show a cognitive ability/hunting efficiency trade-off connected with the level of behavioural asymmetry

Recently, antlion larvae with greater behavioural asymmetry were shown to have improved learning abilities. However, a major evolutionary question that remained unanswered was why this asymmetry does not increase in all individuals during development. Here, we show that a trade-off exists between learning ability of larvae and their hunting efficiency. Larvae with greater asymmetry learn better than those with less, but the latter are better able to sense vibrational signals used to detect prey and can capture prey more quickly. Both traits, learning ability and hunting efficiency, present obvious fitness advantages; the trade-off between them may explain why behavioural asymmetry, which presumably stems from brain lateralization, is relatively rare in natural antlion populations.     

Help-Seeking Comfort and Receiving Social Support: The Role of Ethnicity and Context of Need

Examined help-seeking comfort and receiving social support among Latinos, African Americans, and European Americans across two contexts: in a communitywide emergency (Hurricane Andrew) and 2 years later in a nonemergency situation. In general, help-seeking comfort was a strong predictor of received support. Notwithstanding many similarities between the groups, the effects of ethnicity differed according to the context. In emergency, all groups reported similarly high levels of help-seeking comfort and received support. In nonemergency, help-seeking comfort declined for blacks and whites but not for Latinos. Although all ethnic groups reported receiving less social support in nonemergency, the decline in received support across contexts was most dramatic for Latinos. Situational, cultural, and differential resource loss explanations are offered to account for the findings.     

Information functions with applications

In the first place, we present the definition and fundamental properties of information functions — functions which establish a correspondence between sets of formulas and the information contained in them. The intuitions for the notion of information stem from the conception of Bar-Hillel and Carnap in [3]. In § 2 we will briefly show how those notions can be applied to the logic of theory change. In § 3 we will use them for proving two theorems about the lattices of classical subtheories and their content.     

Two Maximality Results for the Lattice of Extensions of $$\vdash _{\mathbf {RM}}$$

Studia Logica - We use an algebraic argument to prove that there are exactly two premaximal extensions of $$\mathbf {RM}$$ ’s consequence. We also show that one of these extensions is the...     

Determinants of hand attractiveness--a study involving digitally manipulated stimuli

Although attractiveness of the human hand is of significance in the social and mating context, thus far it has attracted little scientific interest. In this study, young women and men were presented with pairs of digitally manipulated images of opposite-sex hands and asked to indicate the hand perceived to be the more attractive in each pair. The hands within a pair differed from one another by a single feature: shape averageness, femininity, finger length, second-to-fourth-digit ratio, or skin smoothness. All these features, with the exception of the digit ratio, were shown to increase hand attractiveness in each sex in both dorsal and ventral views. Skin smoothness was preferred more strongly in female than in male hands. Women also tended to prefer medium degrees of shape femininity and skin smoothness in male hands compared to both high and low levels. Adaptive and non-adaptive (related to perceptual bias) mechanisms underlying these preferences are discussed.     

The nature of inhibition in a working memory search task

Inhibition is one of the key processes that regulate working memory (WM) activity. The main research question concerned the nature of inhibition of highlighted information in WM. The study was designed to examine two competing hypotheses. The first assumed that inhibition is carried out by deletion of irrelevant information from the focus of attention (cognitive inhibition account). An alternative hypothesis assumed that it is the response to a correctly recognised stimulus that is inhibited (effortful response inhibition account). Two experiments with a spatial modification of the WM serial search task were conducted wherein two factors were manipulated: serial order of the items, and distance from the central fixation point. In both experiments, higher response time was correlated with a smaller distance from the fixation point. The inhibited items were recognised equally efficiently or better than the uninhibited items. The results support the effortful response inhibition account over the cognitive inhibition account.     

Injury shortens life expectancy in ants and affects some risk-related decisions of workers

Animal Cognition - The Formica cinerea ants are known to be highly territorial and aggressively defend their nest and foraging areas against other ants. During the foraging, workers engage in...