Maternal soothing and infant stress responses: soothing, crying and adrenocortical activity during inoculation

The relation between maternal soothing and infant stress response during inoculation was examined in a sample of 37 mothers and their 3-month-old infants. The mothers' soothing and the infants' cry vocalizations and the mothers' and the infants' salivary cortisol level pre- and post-injection were analysed. There was a positive relation between infants' cry vocalization post-injection and maternal soothing pre- and post-injection. The sample was divided in two sub-groups depending on whether the mothers evidenced most soothing of the infants in the period before (Preparatory group; n=20) or after (Contingent group; n=17) the syringe injection. In the Preparatory group, the duration of infant cry vocalizations was related to amount of maternal soothing before and after the injection, while cry vocalizations in the Contingent group was related to amount of maternal soothing after the injection. The Contingent infants responded to the injection with a significant increase in cortisol, while there was no increase in the Preparatory infants. The Preparatory infants evidenced significantly longer duration of looking at the target stimuli in a visual marking task, suggesting greater difficulties in disengaging attention. These findings indicate that 3-month-olds' stress responses and their mothers' situational behaviour are mutually regulated.     

Emotional modulation of attention orienting: A classical conditioning study

Emotional modulation of attention shifting was investigated in Posner's (1980) spatial orienting task by conditioning the attention cue to an aversive white noise. Prior to the attention task, the Conditioning group received a 90dB white noise unconditioned stimulus (UCS) contingent upon the frame-lit rectangle attention cue, while the Control group received non-contingent presentations. The Conditioning group evidenced greater skin conductance responses to the frame-lit rectangle in the conditioning phase, reflecting an electrodermal conditioned response. In the attention phase, the frame-lit rectangle served as the attention cue in the spatial orienting task. The Conditioning group showed equally fast reaction times (RTs) to targets presented outside the location of the cue as to targets at the same location as the cue, reflecting elimination of the cognitive cost usually involved in shifting attention. The Control group evidenced the regular cost of shifting attention away from the location of the cue. The Conditioning group also evidenced a larger N1-component with a parietal distribution of the event-related brain potentials to the cue and a larger N1-component at the frontal regions to targets presented outside the cued location. This suggests that both visual orienting to the cue and attention shifting from cue to target on invalid trials were amplified by the emotional salience attached to the cue through the classical conditioning procedure.     

Sequential learning in non-human primates

Sequential learning plays a role in a variety of common tasks, such as human language processing, animal communication, and the learning of action sequences. In this article, we investigate sequential learning in non-human primates from a comparative perspective, focusing on three areas: the learning of arbitrary, fixed sequences; statistical learning; and the learning of hierarchical structure. Although primates exhibit many similarities to humans in their performance on sequence learning tasks, there are also important differences. Crucially, non-human primates appear to be limited in their ability to learn and represent the hierarchical structure of sequences. We consider the evolutionary implications of these differences and suggest that limitations in sequential learning may help explain why non-human primates lack human-like language.     

Principles Behind Definitions of Diseases – a Criticism of the Principle of Disease Mechanism and the Development of a Pragmatic Alternative

Many philosophers and medical scientists assume thatdisease categories or entities used to classify concrete cases ofdisease, are often defined by disease mechanisms or causalprocesses. Others suggest that diseases should always be definedin this manner. This paper discusses these standpoints criticallyand concludes that they are untenable, not only when `diseasemechanism' refers to an objective mechanism, but also when`mechanism' refers to a pragmatically demarcated part of thetotal ``objective' causal structure of diseases. As an alternativeto principles that use the concept of disease mechanism oranalogous concepts, a pragmatic approach is suggested anddescribed. This approach has been suggested before, but inproblematic or inadequate versions. This paper proposes a versioncompiled of two ``pragmatic principles' and shows that they aremuch more adequate than the principle of disease mechanism. Withreference to a case study of a still ongoing internationaldiscussion of various candidates for a classification system formalignant lymphomas, including REAL (Revised European–AmericanClassification of Lymphoid Neoplasms) in which the concept ofdisease mechanism or analogous concepts plays a very small part,it is shown just how pivotal these two pragmatic principles canbe in actual discussions of definitions of diseases. Finally, itis pointed out that with regard to modern philosophy of languageit may, at least in some cases, be problematic to distinguishbetween the two pragmatic principles as they stand.     

Experience and sentence processing: statistical learning and relative clause comprehension

Many explanations of the difficulties associated with interpreting object relative clauses appeal to the demands that object relatives make on working memory. MacDonald and Christiansen [MacDonald, M. C., & Christiansen, M. H. (2002). Reassessing working memory: Comment on Just and Carpenter (1992) and Waters and Caplan (1996). Psychological Review, 109, 35-54] pointed to variations in reading experience as a source of differences, arguing that the unique word order of object relatives makes their processing more difficult and more sensitive to the effects of previous experience than the processing of subject relatives. This hypothesis was tested in a large-scale study manipulating reading experiences of adults over several weeks. The group receiving relative clause experience increased reading speeds for object relatives more than for subject relatives, whereas a control experience group did not. The reading time data were compared to performance of a computational model given different amounts of experience. The results support claims for experience-based individual differences and an important role for statistical learning in sentence comprehension processes.     

Deaf hearing: Implicit discrimination of auditory content in a patient with mixed hearing loss

We describe a patient LS, profoundly deaf in both ears from birth, with underdeveloped superior temporal gyri. Without hearing aids, LS displays no ability to detect sounds below a fixed threshold of 60 dBs, which classifies him as clinically deaf. Under these no-hearing-aid conditions, when presented with a forced-choice paradigm in which he is asked to consciously respond, he is unable to make above-chance judgments about the presence or location of sounds. However, he is able to make above-chance judgments about the content of sounds presented to him under forced-choice conditions. We demonstrated that LS has faint sensations from auditory stimuli, but questionable awareness of auditory content. LS thus has a form of type-2 deaf hearing with respect to auditory content. As in the case of a subject with acquired deafness and deaf hearing reported on a previous occasion, LS’s condition of deaf hearing is akin in some respects to type-2 blindsight. As for the case of type 2 blindsight the case indicates that a form of conscious hearing can arise in the absence of a fully developed auditory cortex.     

Drone Killings in Principle and in Practice

It is a widely accepted claim that whether a given technology is being justly used in the real world is a separate question from moral issues intrinsic to technology. We should not blame the technology itself for immoral ways it happens to be used. There is obviously some truth to that. But I want to argue that what we see in the real world cases of drone killings is not merely an accidental or contingent use of drone technology. The real life use reflects to a large extent features that are inherent of the dominant drone systems that have been developed to date. What is being imagined "in principle" is thus to a large extent drone killings in dreamland. I use an historic example as a point of reference and departure: the debate over the lawfulness of nuclear weapons.