Moral Agency and the Paradox of Self-Interested Concern for the Future in Vasubandhu’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Abhidharmakośabhāṣya</Emphasis>

It is a common view in modern scholarship on Buddhist ethics that attachment to the self constitutes a hindrance to ethics, whereas rejecting this type of attachment is a necessary condition for acting morally. The present article argues that in Vasubandhu’s theory of agency, as formulated in the Abhidharmako?abhā?ya (Treasury of Metaphysics with Self-Commentary), a cognitive and psychological identification with a conventional, persisting self is a requisite for exercising moral agency. As such, this identification is essential for embracing the ethics of Buddhism and its way of life. The article delineates the method that Vasubandhu employs to account for the notion of a selfless moral agent, with particular emphasis on his strategies for dealing with one central aspect of agency, self-interested concern for the future.     

Spatio-temporal organization during group formation in rats

In the present study, the dynamic process of group formation in eight unfamiliar rats was followed in order to reveal how the group becomes oriented together in time and space, in light of the complexity that accompanies grouping. The focus was on who, where, and when joined together. We found that rats preferred to be in companionship over remaining alone, with all the rats gradually shifting to share the same location as a resting place. Group formation can be viewed as a tri-phasic process, with some rats gradually becoming more social than others, and thus playing a key role in group formation. Starting with seemingly independent traveling, the rats gradually converged to share the same location as a terminal (home base) for roundtrips in the arena. Because such a terminal is considered as the organizer of an individual’s spatial behavior, the shared home-base location may be viewed as the organizer of spatial behavior of the entire group. Despite huddling together, the rats continued to travel alone or in duos throughout the 3 h of testing. We suggest that resting together and traveling alone or in duos enabled the maintenance of communal relationship while reducing the complexity involved in traveling in relatively large groups. Taken together, the present results demonstrate the dynamic process during which unfamiliar rats shift from independent to group spatial behavior.     

Pathological laughter as a symptom of midbrain infarction

Pathological laughter is an uncommon symptom usually caused by bilateral, diffuse cerebral lesions. It has rarely been reported in association with isolated cerebral lesions. Midbrain involvement causing pathological laughter is extremely unusual. We describe three patients who developed pathological laughter after midbrain and pontine-midbrain infarction. In two patients a small infarction in the left paramedian midbrain was detected, whereas the third one sustained a massive bilateral pontine infarction extending to the midbrain. Laughter heralded stroke by one day in one patient and occurred as a delayed phenomenon three months after stroke in another. Pathological laughter ceased within a few days in two patients and was still present at a two year follow-up in the patient with delayed-onset laughter. Pathological laughter can herald midbrain infarction or follow stroke either shortly after onset of symptoms or as a delayed phenomenon. Furthermore, small unilateral midbrain infarctions can cause this rare complication.     

Ageing effects on the attention demands of walking

Attention demands of walking were determined in six male and six female young adults (mean 26.3 yr) and 12 gender-matched healthy, active older adults (mean 71.1 yr) using a dual task procedure with a reaction time (RT) secondary task. In three conditions an auditory stimulus, a visual stimulus and both stimuli (auditory/visual) were presented. Relative to no-walking baselines, increased RT was found in all conditions revealing an attentional cost of normal walking. When participants traversed the laboratory walkway and also positioned one of their feet within a target area on the ground, attention demands were greater than in unconstrained walking. In the targeting task, RTs to the visual stimulus were longer than for the auditory stimulus due to the interference associated with viewing both the stimulus monitor and the foot-target. Older participants' RTs in the visual and auditory/visual conditions, but not in the auditory condition, were significantly longer than for the young group in both walking tasks but RTs for young and older adults were not different in no-walking baseline trials. Inspection of mean RT functions at time intervals following gait initiation (0-3000 ms from the first step) suggested a fluctuating attentional cost of walking with increased demands associated with contingencies requiring step length regulation. The findings have applied significance in demonstrating the possibility of increased falls and pedestrian accident risk in older individuals in dual task situations such as road crossing.     

Integrating the Automatic and the Controlled: Strategies in Semantic Priming in an Attractor Network With Latching Dynamics

Semantic priming has long been recognized to reflect, along with automatic semantic mechanisms, the contribution of controlled strategies. However, previous theories of controlled priming were mostly qualitative, lacking common grounds with modern mathematical models of automatic priming based on neural networks. Recently, we introduced a novel attractor network model of automatic semantic priming with latching dynamics. Here, we extend this work to show how the same model can also account for important findings regarding controlled processes. Assuming the rate of semantic transitions in the network can be adapted using simple reinforcement learning, we show how basic findings attributed to controlled processes in priming can be achieved, including their dependency on stimulus onset asynchrony and relatedness proportion and their unique effect on associative, category‐exemplar, mediated and backward prime‐target relations. We discuss how our mechanism relates to the classic expectancy theory and how it can be further extended in future developments of the model.