THE EXPLORATION OF ECOSPACE: EXTENDING OR SUPPLEMENTING THE NEO‐DARWINIAN PARADIGM?

The neo‐Darwinian paradigm, focusing on natural selection of genes responsible for differential adaption, provides the foundation for explaining evolutionary processes. The modern synthesis is broader, however, focusing on organisms rather than on gene transmissions per se. Yet, strands of current biology argue for further supplementation of Darwinian theory, pointing to nonbiotic drivers of evolutionary development, for example, self‐organization of physical structures, and the interaction between individual organisms, groups of organisms, and their nonbiotic environments. According to niche construction theory, when organisms and groups develop, they not only adapt to their environments but modify their environments, creating new habitats for later generations. Insofar as ecological niches persist beyond the lifecycle of individual organisms, an ecological inheritance system exists alongside genetic inheritance. Such ecological structures may even facilitate the development of a cultural inheritance system, as we see in humans. The article discusses theological perspectives of such new developments within holistic biology.     

A repetition-suppression account of between-trial effects in a modified Stroop paradigm

Theories that postulate cognitive inhibition are very common in psychology and cognitive neuroscience [e.g., Hasher, L., Lustig, C., & Zacks, R. T. (2007). Inhibitory mechanisms and the control of attention. In A. Conway, C. Jarrold, M. Kane, A. Miyake, A. Towse, & J. Towse (Eds.), Variation in working memory (pp. 227-249). New York, NY: Oxford, University Press], although they have recently been severely criticized [e.g., MacLeod, C. M., Dodd, M. D., Sheard, E. D., Wilson, D. E., & Bibi, U. (2003). In opposition to inhibition. In H. Ross (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 43, pp. 163-214). Elsevier Science]. This paper poses and attempts to answer the question whether a research program with cognitive inhibition as its main theoretical assumption is still worth pursuing. We present a set of empirical data from a modified Stroop paradigm that replicates previously reported findings. These findings refer to between-trial effects previously described in the literature on Stroop, negative priming, and inhibition-of-return. Existing theoretical accounts fail to explain all these effects in an integrated way. A repetition-suppression mechanism is proposed in order to account for these data. This mechanism is instantiated as a computational cognitive model. The theoretical implications of this model are discussed.     

Recognition of affective prosody in brain-damaged patients and healthy controls: A neurophysiological study using EEG and whole-head MEG

A passive oddball experiment was used in which stimuli were emotional exclamations differing in their affective tone. In both electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG), deviants elicited an N300 component, sometimes accompanied by a slow wave. Both components had a symmetrical distribution, but the former was more posterior than the latter. The same responses to prosodic stimuli were significant in 6 of 27 patients with severe disorders of consciousness (persistent vegetative state and minimally conscious state) and in all 3 of the examined locked-in patients, indicating that the procedure can be applied for testing neurological patients. The occurrence of significant responses depended on the presence or absence of a lesion to the right temporal lobe. Obviously, the N300 depends on the activity of the right temporal cortex but does not originate there. We suggest that the component is related not to the recognition of affective prosody as such, but to the following detection of affective mismatch due to violations of emotional context of stimulation.     

Grammatical and Phonological Influences on Word Order

ABSTRACT— During the grammatical encoding of spoken multiword utterances, various kinds of information must be used to determine the order of words. For example, whereas in adjective-noun utterances like "red car," word order can be determined on the basis of the word's grammatical class information, in noun-noun utterances like "… by car, bus, or …," word order cannot be determined on the basis of a word's grammatical class information. We investigated whether a word's phonological properties play a role in grammatical encoding. In four experiments, participants produced multiword utterances in which the words' onset phonology was manipulated. Phonological-onset relatedness yielded inhibitory effects in noun-noun utterances, no effects in noun-adjective utterances, and facilitatory effects in adjective-noun, noun-verb, and adjective-adjective-noun utterances. These results cannot be explained by differences in the stimulus displays used to elicit the utterances and suggest that grammatical encoding is sensitive to the phonological properties of words.     

Schizotypy, taxometrics, and disconfirming theories in soft science: Comment on

Among the most consistently replicated findings in literature addressing the latent structure of psychopathology is evidence for a discrete latent class of individuals who are vulnerable to schizophrenia (schizotypes). Rawlings, Williams, Haslam, and Claridge (2008) challenge these findings by subjecting schizotypy scale scores to taxometric analysis, using a data simulation technique to accommodate variable skew. The authors conclude that schizotypy reflects a latent dimension, and that evidence for discrete latent structure from previous studies is likely an artifact of skewed variables. In this comment, we discuss (a) the philosophical implications of disconfirming well replicated findings in soft science with a single study, (b) important considerations when defining the schizotypy construct, (c) intricacies in executing and interpreting a taxometric analysis, and (d) problems with drawing strong conclusions from null results. Considerable evidence suggests that schizotypy is a discrete latent class, a conclusion that is unlikely the result of skewed variables.     

Social Welfare and the Psychology of Food Sharing: Short‐Term Hunger Increases Support for Social Welfare

Do politically irrelevant events influence important policy opinions? Previous research on social welfare attitudes has emphasized the role of political factors such as economic self‐interest and ideology. Here, we demonstrate that attitudes to social welfare are also influenced by short‐term fluctuations in hunger. Using theories in evolutionary psychology, we predict that hungry individuals will be greedier and take more resources from others while also attempting to induce others to share by signaling cooperative intentions and expressing support for sharing, including evolutionarily novel forms of sharing such as social welfare. We test these predictions using self‐reported hunger data as well as comparisons of subjects who participated in relevant online studies before and after eating lunch. Across four studies collected in two different welfare regimes—the United Kingdom and Denmark—we consistently find that hungry individuals act in a greedier manner but describe themselves as more cooperative and express greater support for social welfare.     

Cur deus caro: Jesus and the Cosmos Story

Abstract

There seems to be a vast gulf between the grand-scale story of the world of creation, cosmic in scope and pitiless in its operations, and the small-scale story of Jesus as embodying divine empathy. The concept of deep incarnation offers a bridge by arguing that God's own Logos or Wisdom, when assuming the particular life story of Jesus, also conjoins the material conditions of God's world of creation at large (“all flesh”), shares the fate of all biological life forms (“grass and lilies”), and experiences the pains of all sentient creatures (“sparrows and foxes”). Incarnation is thus the story of God's reach into the very tissue of material and biological existence. In the embodied Logos, the “flesh” of Jesus Christ is co-extensive with his divinity. Otherwise, the incarnation would be skin deep, confined to a historical figure of the past, or merely an external appendix to divine life.     

The corona crisis unmasks prevailing social ideologies

This essay contrasts two visions of selfhood: the buffered, autonomous self, and the flexible, resonant self. The autonomous self, while robustly assertive and active, seeks to insulate itself from threats, thereby robbing it of vital connections to other selves and to nature. The resonant self, in contrast, risks more by standing in fluid relationships of resonance and dissonance with its social and natural environments. While the two stand in tension, a baptismal theology entails both elements of a sheltered self and a resonant self that remains flexible and responsive to the ups and downs of human experience. Conversely, even a secular-minded person will have access to important zones of resonance.     

Effects of syllable frequency in speech production

In the speech production model proposed by [Levelt, W. J. M., Roelofs, A., Meyer, A. S. (1999). A theory of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, pp. 1-75.], syllables play a crucial role at the interface of phonological and phonetic encoding. At this interface, abstract phonological syllables are translated into phonetic syllables. It is assumed that this translation process is mediated by a so-called Mental Syllabary. Rather than constructing the motor programs for each syllable on-line, the mental syllabary is hypothesized to provide pre-compiled gestural scores for the articulators. In order to find evidence for such a repository, we investigated syllable-frequency effects: If the mental syllabary consists of retrievable representations corresponding to syllables, then the retrieval process should be sensitive to frequency differences. In a series of experiments using a symbol-position association learning task, we tested whether high-frequency syllables are retrieved and produced faster compared to low-frequency syllables. We found significant syllable frequency effects with monosyllabic pseudo-words and disyllabic pseudo-words in which the first syllable bore the frequency manipulation; no effect was found when the frequency manipulation was on the second syllable. The implications of these results for the theory of word form encoding at the interface of phonological and phonetic encoding; especially with respect to the access mechanisms to the mental syllabary in the speech production model by (Levelt et al.) are discussed.