Intentions and interactive transformations of decision problems

In this paper I study two ways of transforming decision problems on the basis of previously adopted intentions, ruling out incompatible options and imposing a standard of relevance, with a particular focus on situations of strategic interaction. I show that in such situations problems arise which do not appear in the single-agent case, namely that transformation of decision problems can leave the agents with no option compatible with what they intend. I characterize conditions on the agents’ intentions which avoid such problematic scenarios, in a way that requires each agent to take account of the intentions of others.     

The Origins of Face Processing in Humans: Phylogeny and Ontogeny

ABSTRACT— Faces are crucial for nonverbal communication in humans and related species. From the first moments of life, newborn infants prefer to look at human faces over almost any other form of stimuli. Since this finding was first observed, there has been much debate regarding the "special" nature of face processing. Researchers have put forward numerous developmental models that attempt to account for this early preference and subsequent maturation of the face processing system. In this article, we review these models and their supporting evidence drawing on literature from developmental, evolutionary, and comparative psychology. We conclude that converging data from these fields strongly suggests that face processing is conducted by a dedicated and complex neural system, is not human specific, and is unlikely to have emerged recently in evolutionary history.     

Metrics on spaces of finite trees

With the increasing popularity of hierarchical clustering methods in behavioral science, there is a need for ways of quantitatively comparing different tree structures on the same set of items. We employ lattice-theoretic methods to construct a variety of metrics on spaces of trees and to analyze their properties. Certain of these metrics are applied to data from Fillenbaum and Rapoport (1971) on the semantic structure of common English kin terms. This application shows that tree metrics can be used to select a componential analysis which is maximally consistent with an empirically derived set of trees.     

Confirming the three-factor structure of the quality of relationships inventory within couples

The current study further validates the Quality of Relationships Inventory (QRI; G. R. Pierce, I. G. Sarason, & B. R. Sarason, 1991) by evaluating its factor structure in a sample of 572 partners from 286 couples. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to compare 3 different models of the QRI and to investigate the invariance of the factor structure of the QRI across gender and across relationship satisfaction. Analyses revealed that a 3-factor solution--consisting of 3 different but interrelated factors (a 7-item support factor, a 12-item conflict factor, and a 6-item depth factor)--best accounted for the data. The authors' findings suggest that full metric invariance holds across gender and across relationship satisfaction in the female subsample, whereas only partial metric invariance could be established for relationship satisfaction in the male subsample.     

Relationships between dual-task related changes in stride velocity and stride time variability in healthy older adults

Dual-task related gait changes have been previously reported for healthy older adults, suggesting that gait control requires attention. Compared to balance control, the involvement of attention in the control of the rhythmic stepping mechanism, as reflected by stride time variability, is not well known. In particular, under dual-task, the relative contributions of a second, attention-demanding task and changes in walking speed remain unclear. Thus, the aims of this study were (1) to assess whether walking with a slow-selected speed or walking while performing an attention-demanding task affected stride time variability in a sample of healthy older participants, and (2) to establish whether stride time variability under dual-task conditions is related either to the decrease of walking speed or the simultaneous attention-demanding task, or to both. Forty-five healthy older participants performed four experimental conditions: (1) walking at a normal self-selected speed, (2) walking at a slow self-selected speed, (3) performing a verbal fluency task when sitting on a chair, and (4) performing the verbal fluency task while walking at self-selected walking speed. Gait parameters were recorded across 15 meters, using Physilog. Results showed a significant dual-task related decrease in mean values of stride velocity, as well as a significant increase in mean values and coefficients of variation of stride time. These dual-task related changes in stride time were explained by the simultaneous performance of the verbal fluency task, the decrease of gait speed and the variability between participants. Although a relationship exists between decreased walking speed and increased stride time variability, the dual-task related increase of stride time variability was also significantly associated with the attention-demanding task, suggesting some attentional control for the rhythmic stepping mechanism of walking in healthy older adults.     

Memory for contextual details: effects of emotion and aging

When individuals are confronted with a complex visual scene that includes some emotional element, memory for the emotional component often is enhanced, whereas memory for peripheral (nonemotional) details is reduced. The present study examined the effects of age and encoding instructions on this effect. With incidental encoding instructions, young and older adults showed this pattern of results, indicating that both groups focused attention on the emotional aspects of the scene. With intentional encoding instructions, young adults no longer showed the effect: They were just as likely to remember peripheral details of negative images as of neutral images. The older adults, in contrast, did not overcome the attentional bias: They continued to show reduced memory for the peripheral elements of the emotional compared with the neutral scenes, even with the intentional encoding instructions.     

CANTAB explicit memory is less impaired in addicted schizophrenia patients

It has been suggested that in order to sustain the lifestyle of substance abuse, addicted schizophrenia patients would have less negative symptoms, better social skills, and less cognitive impairments. Mounting evidence supports the first two assumptions, but data lack regarding cognition in dual diagnosis schizophrenia. Seventy-six schizophrenia outpatients (DSM-IV) were divided into two groups: with (n = 44) and without (n = 32) a substance use disorder. Motor speed and visuo-spatial explicit memory were investigated using CANTAB. As expected, dual diagnosis patients showed a better cognitive performance. Our results suggest either that substance abuse relieves the cognitive deficits of schizophrenia or that the patients with less cognitive deficits are more prone to substance abuse.     

Three-month-olds, but not newborns, prefer own-race faces

Adults are sensitive to the physical differences that define ethnic groups. However, the age at which we become sensitive to ethnic differences is currently unclear. Our study aimed to clarify this by testing newborns and young infants for sensitivity to ethnicity using a visual preference (VP) paradigm. While newborn infants demonstrated no spontaneous preference for faces from either their own- or other-ethnic groups, 3-month-old infants demonstrated a significant preference for faces from their own-ethnic group. These results suggest that preferential selectivity based on ethnic differences is not present in the first days of life, but is learned within the first 3 months of life. The findings imply that adults' perceptions of ethnic differences are learned and derived from differences in exposure to own- versus other-race faces during early development.     

Language-specific effects on number computation in toddlers

A fundamental question in developmental science is how brains with and without language compute numbers. Measuring young children's verbal reactions in France (Paris) and in England (Oxford), here we show that, although there is a general arithmetic ability for small numbers that is shared by monkeys and preverbal infants, the development of such initial knowledge in humans follows specific performance patterns, depending on what language the children speak.     

The reactive theory of emotions

Evaluative theories of emotions purport to shed light on the nature of emotions by appealing to values. Three kinds of evaluative theories of emotions dominate the recent literature: the judgment theory equates emotions with value judgments; the perceptual theory equates emotions with perceptions of values, and the attitudinal theory equates emotions with evaluative attitudes. This paper defends a fourth kind of evaluative theory of emotions, mostly neglected so far: the reactive theory. Reactive theories claim that emotions are attitudes which arise in reaction to perceptions of value.