Aggressive behaviors of the japanese brown bear

Film analysis and direct observation suggest that 2 very different types of intra-specific fights occur among Japanese brown bears maintained in large stable colonies. Disputes arising over food are short, and involve such activities as threatening, muzzling, chasing, and flight. Weapon use during feeding fights primarily involves slashing blows to the back or head areas of the opponent. In contrast, “spontaneous” fights are longer, and consist almost exclusively of wrestling, with bites and forepaw blows directed at the opponent's ruff area. These spontaneous fights occur primarily among the larger and higher-ranked male bears, especially among animals with closely adjacent rankings. It is suggested that such fights facilitate the establishment of dominance relationships by providing an opportunity for mutual assessment of strength and stamina without serious risk of injury.     

Parietal control of attentional guidance: the significance of sensory, motivational and motor factors

The lateral intraparietal area (LIP), a portion of monkey posterior parietal cortex, has been implicated in spatial attention. We review recent evidence showing that LIP encodes a priority map of the external environment that specifies the momentary locus of attention and is activated in a variety of behavioral tasks. The priority map in LIP is shaped by task-specific motor, cognitive and motivational variables, the functional significance of which is not entirely understood. We suggest that these modulations represent teaching signals by which the brain learns to identify attentional priority of various stimuli based on the task-specific associations between these stimuli, the required action and expected outcome.     

The Effect of Interpersonal Touch During Childhood on Adult Attachment and Depression: A Neglected Area of Family and Developmental Psychology?

Interpersonal touch has been little studied empirically as an indicator of parent- and peer-child intimacy. Undergraduate students (n = 390) were studied using a questionnaire survey regarding the frequencies of interpersonal touch by father, mother, same-sex peers, and opposite-sex peers during preschool ages, grades 1–3, grades 4–6, and grades 7–9, as well as their current attachment style to a romantic partner and current depression. A path model indicated that current depression was influenced significantly by poorer self- and other-images as well as by fewer parental interpersonal touches throughout childhood. Other-image was influenced by early (up to grade 3) parental interpersonal touch. Our findings suggest that a lower frequency of parental touching during childhood influences the development of depression and contributes to a poorer image of an individual’s romantic partner during later adolescence and early adulthood.     

The Cardinal Principles of the National Entity of Japan: A Rhetoric of Ideological Pronouncement

One manifestation of argumentation is in critical discussions where people genuinely strive cooperatively to achieve critical decisions. Hence, argumentation can be recognized as the process of advancing, supporting, modifying, and criticizing claims so that appropriate decision makers may grant or deny adherence. This audience-centered definition holds the assumption that the participants must willingly engage in public debate and discussion, and their arguments must function to open a critical space and keep it open. This essay investigates `ideological pronouncement,' a kind of rhetoric that undermines and limits the possibility of critical discussion among target audiences, as an enemy of sound argumentation. First, the essential characteristics of sound argumentation are explained. Next, the typical characteristics of ideological rhetoric are described. At the same time, the Cardinal Principles of the National Entity of Japan, a Japanese wartime moral education textbook, is examined as a paradigm case of ideological rhetoric. Third, three key pronouncements of the Cardinal Principles are outlined and discussed. Finally, implications from the critical discussion are drawn.     

Geometrical haptic illusions revisited: Haptic illusions compared with visual illusions

Révész (1934) reported that haptic illusions were observed in almost all of the geometrical optical illusion figures. The present study reexamined seven geometrical illusions in both haptic and visual modes. In the Müller-Lyer, Ponzo, and vertical-horizontal figures, haptic illusions equivalent to the visual illusions were observed. In the Oppel-Kundt figure, a haptic illusion similar to the visual one was obtained. In the haptic Delboeuf stimuli, the size illusion of the outer circle occurred, whereas that of the inner circle did not. No haptic illusion was obtained in the Poggendorff figure. In the Zöllner figure, a haptic illusion directionally opposite to the visual one was obtained. These results show that haptic illusions do not occur in all of the geometrical illusion figures. They also suggest that haptic illusions are not necessarily mediated by visualization and that haptic processing of the figures often occurs in a manner different from vision.     

Kripke Frame with Graded Accessibility and Fuzzy Possible World Semantics

A possible world structure consist of a set W of possible worlds and an accessibility relation R. We take a partial function r(·,·) to the unit interval [0, 1] instead of R and obtain a Kripke frame with graded accessibility r Intuitively, r(x, y) can be regarded as the reliability factor of y from x We deal with multimodal logics corresponding to Kripke frames with graded accessibility in a fairly general setting. This setting provides us with a framework for fuzzy possible world semantics. The basic propositional multimodal logic gK (grated K) is defined syntactically. We prove that gK is sound and complete with respect to this semantics. We discuss some extensions of gK including logics of similarity relations and of fuzzy orderings. We present a modified filtration method and prove that gK and its extensions introduced here are decidable.     

Stimulus control of spatial behavior on the eight-arm maze in rats

Rats were trained on an eight-arm, elevated radial maze in a large cylindrical chamber where extramaze stimuli could be manipulated. The first experiment indicated that rats could use extramaze stimuli to locate the arms if such stimuli were available, whereas they performed less effectively and tended to employ response chaining if these stimuli were not available. The second experiment demonstrated that maze performance was disrupted by transposition of the stimuli but was relatively unaffected by rotation of the same stimuli. The third experiment suggested that the disruptive effect of stimulus transposition might be due to a “resetting” process elicited by the alteration in the configuration of the stimuli after stimulus transposition. These results suggest that when extramaze stimuli are available, rats tend to use such stimuli in a configurational manner to locate the arms rather than as a list of items processed independently of their spatial relationships to each other.