The Analogical Argument for Animal Pain

Philosophical defenders of animal liberation believe that we have direct duties to animals. Typically a presumption of that belief is that animals have the capacity to experience pain and suffering. Notoriously, however, a strand of Western scientific and philosophical thought has held animals to be incapable of experiencing pain, and even today one frequently encounters in discussions of animal liberation expressions of scepticism about whether animals really experience pain.
The Analogical Argument for Animal Pain responds to this scepticism by claiming that it is just as reasonable for me to believe that animals feel pain, given my only evidence for this is shared behaviour and physiology, as it is for me to believe that other humans feel pain on the basis of similar evidence. In this paper I expound and defend this Argument.     

Unlike a Fool, He Is Not Defiled: Ascetic Purity and Ethics in the Samnyāsa Upanisads

The authors of the Samnyāsa Upanisads, manuals of ascetic lifestyle and practice, recommend that wanderers renounce behavioral standards of their formerly Brahmin householder life, including ritual purity and familial duties. Patrick Olivelle argues that these ascetics are thereafter considered impure and corpse– or ghoul–like, clearly lacking in dharma. However, these Upanisads counsel pursuing mental purity and moral behavior, and modeling oneself after the perfection of the Absolute. This essay investigates ascetic notions of purity and identity, and virtues such as non–violence and kindness cultivated in forest isolation. Is ascetic dharma universal in intent, and is it conceptually opposed to householder dharma? What type of ethics is admired by the authors, what type deprecated? Olivelle’s position is reevaluated, as is Jeffrey Kripal’s notion that monistic mysticism does not support ethics adequately.     

Context dependent latent inhibition in adult humans

Learning the association between one stimulus (a condition stimulus, CS) and another (unconditioned stimulus, US) can be impaired by prior exposure to the CS alone—latent inhibition (LI). Current theories attempting to elucidate the cognitive deficit in schizophrenia have used the abolition of LI in schizophrenia as an indicator of attentional dysfunction. However, it has always been unclear if human and animal LI are measuring the same psychological processes. It is obviously important to clarify this relationship so that theoretical and experimental developments in the rat do not mislead the investigation of brain-behaviour relationships in schizophrenia. LI in the rat is strongly dependent upon context. Our aim was to examine the context specificity of LI in humans and specifically to: (1) investigate whether participants' belief that they are in a different context is sufficient to abolish LI, even though there is no physical change in the environment; (2) produce a context manipulation that is immune to alternative interpretation in terms of stimulus generalization decrement; and (3) investigate whether a "tonic" change of context reduces or abolishes human LI, thus complementing previous reports using a "phasic" change of context. In two experiments we manipulated context in either the real world or a virtual world, and showed that LI is abolished by a change of context in adult humans.     

Highs and Lows in Motor Control Development

Abstract

Motor control is classically described as relying on two components: anticipatory control (feedforward processing) and online control (feedback processing). Here we aimed to unveil the developmental steps of both feedback and feedforward control in 5–10 years old children, using a simple and ecological task. We manipulated object’s weight in a reach-to-displace paradigm. When the weight was known before lifting it, anticipatory processes were quantifiable during the reaching phase. Conversely, an unknown weight triggered online corrections during the displacing phase. Movement kinematics revealed that children anticipate this objet property as young as 5 y-o. This anticipation becomes adequate around 7 y-o and is paralleled by poor online corrections. This simple yet relevant paradigm should allow quantifying deviations from neurotypical patterns in disorders of motor control.     

Global Dominance Outside the Focus of Attention

Identification of the local aspect of a relevant compound stimulus has been found to be delayed by the presence of target-set members at the global aspect of an irrelevant compound stimulus, whereas identification of the global aspect is unaffected by the presence of local target-set members within the irrelevant object (Paquet & Merikle, 1988). This effect has been termed the global category effect , and it suggests that global dominance occurs for objects located outside the attentional focus, as well as within an attended hierarchical object. In the present experiments, attention was directed to the relevant one of two compound stimuli by using either shape information (Experiments 1 and 2) or a 100-msec peripheral rapid onset precue (Experiment 3). Results revealed a global category effect even when the physical features of the displays containing global target-set members within the irrelevant object were closely matched with those of the control displays. Critically, the magnitude of the global category effect was affected by how well attention could be focused on the relevant compound stimulus. These findings suggest (a) that the analysis of global information for irrelevant objects is more elaborate than the simple detection of features; and (b) that both perceptual and attentional mechanisms are involved in global dominance.