Who is doing what to whom? Young infants' developing sense of social causality in animated displays

In two different experiments a visual habituation/dishabituation procedure was used to test groups of 3-10-month-old infants for their ability to discriminate the role reversal of two abstract figures (discs of different colors) chasing each other on a computer screen. Results of the first experiment point to a reliable age effect. Only 8-10-month-old infants tended to dishabituate to a role reversal between chaser and chasee. A second experiment shows that in dishabituating to the role reversal, 8-10-month-olds do base this discrimination on relational information between the two discs and not merely on the contrast between their respective vitality or discrete dynamic. By the age of 8-10 months, infants demonstrate sensitivity to information specifying what one disc does to the other, at a distance. These findings point to important changes in perceptual-cognitive development and are discussed in the context of a well described key transition in social-cognitive development occurring at around 9 months of age.     

Theoretical and methodological elements for integrating ethics as a foundation into the education of professional and design disciplines

The paper addresses the integration of ethics into professional education related to the disciplines responsible for the conception and creation of the artificial (artefactual or technology). The ontological-epistemological paradigm of those disciplines is understood within the frame of the sciences of the artificial as established by Herbert Simon (1969). According to that paradigm, those sciences include disciplines not only related to the production of artefacts (technology), such as engineering, architecture, industrial design, etc, but also disciplines related to devised courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones, like medicine, law, education, etc. They are centered on intentional action and at their core is the activity of design, which is their common foundation and attitude, or their common culture. The science of design becomes the broader foundational discipline for any professions engaged in the intentional transformation of the world. The main distinction between design disciplines and scientific ones rests on the object-project dichotomy. Indeed, contrary to Science that sees the world as an object to be observed, Design sees the world as a project and acts upon the world through projects, which are grounded in intentions, ends, and values. Design disciplines are meant to transform the world, or part of it, and are teleological. Being so, they are embodied in an act that is ethical and their ontology-epistemology must be addressed also through practical reason to resituate all professional disciplines according to their involved nature. The paper introduces theoretical, methodological, and ethical elements to establish a model that integrates ethics into the education of the professional disciplines, design-based disciplines, responsible for the creation of the artificial, artefactual or technological, world. The model is articulated around the notions of ethical engagement and responsibility through the act of design understood as action with intention situated in a project, common in all professional disciplines. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the “Ethics and Social Responsibility in Engineering and Technology” meeting, New Orleans, 2003.     

Can Competition Ever be Fair? Challenging the Standard Prejudice

In this paper, we challenge the usual argument which says that competition is a fair mechanism because it ranks individuals according to their relative preferences between effort and leisure. This argument, we claim, is very insufficient as a justification of fairness in competition, and we show that it does not stand up to scrutiny once various dynamic aspects of competition are taken into account. Once the sequential unfolding of competition is taken into account, competition turns out to be unfair even if the usual fairness argument is upheld. We distinguish between two notions of fairness, which we call U-fairness, where U stands for the usual fairness notion, and S-fairness, where S stands for the sequential aspect of competition. The sequential unfairness of competition, we argue, comprises two usually neglected aspects connected with losses of freedom: first of all, there is an eclipse of preferences in the sense that even perfectly calculating competitors do not carry out a trade-off between effort and ranking; and second, competitive dynamics leads to single-mindedness because the constraints on the competitors choices always operate in the sense of increased competitiveness and, therefore, in the direction of an increased effort requirements. We argue (1) that competition is S-unfair even if it is U-fair, (2) that as S-unfairness increases, the ethical relevance of U-fairness itself vanishes, so that (3) by focusing as they usually do on U-fairness alone, economists neglect a deeper aspect of unfairness.     

Using "Bubbles" with babies: a new technique for investigating the informational basis of infant perception

The 'Bubbles' technique (Gosselin, F. & Schyns, P.G. (2001). Bubbles: A technique to reveal the use of information in recognition tasks. Vision Research, 41, 2261-2271) has been widely used to reveal the information adults use to make perceptual categorizations. We present, for the first time, an adapted form of Bubbles, suitable for use with young infants.     

Show me the features! Understanding recognition from the use of visual information

We propose an approach that allows a rigorous understanding of the visual categorization and recognition process without asking direct questions about unobservable memory representations. Our approach builds on the selective use of visual information in recognition and a new method (Bubbles) to depict and measure what this information is. We examine three face–recognition tasks (identity, gender, expressive or not) and establish the componential and holistic information responsible for recognition performance. On the basis of this information, we derive task–specific gradients of probability for the allocation of attention to the different regions of the face.     

Temporal stability of the transcendent actualization inventory

This paper describes a study of the temporal stability of a new inventory, the Transcendent Actualization Inventory, which aims to estimate actualization of psychospiritual potential. For 200 subjects, the test-retest reliability was .84 for Time 1 vs Time 2. Cronbach coefficient alpha was .81 at Times 1 and 2, as previously reported (N=478).     

The neural correlates of implicit and explicit sequence learning: Interacting networks revealed by the process dissociation procedure

In two H2(15)O PET scan experiments, we investigated the cerebral correlates of explicit and implicit knowledge in a serial reaction time (SRT) task. To do so, we used a novel application of the Process Dissociation Procedure, a behavioral paradigm that makes it possible to separately assess conscious and unconscious contributions to performance during a subsequent sequence generation task. To manipulate the extent to which the repeating sequential pattern was learned explicitly, we varied the pace of the choice reaction time task-a variable that is known to have differential effects on the extent to which sensitivity to sequence structure involves implicit or explicit knowledge. Results showed that activity in the striatum subtends the implicit component of performance during recollection of a learned sequence, whereas the anterior cingulate/mesial prefrontal cortex (ACC/MPFC) supports the explicit component. Most importantly, we found that the ACC/MPFC exerts control on the activity of the striatum during retrieval of the sequence after explicit learning, whereas the activity of these regions is uncoupled when learning had been essentially implicit. These data suggest that implicit learning processes can be successfully controlled by conscious knowledge when learning is essentially explicit. They also supply further evidence for a partial dissociation between the neural substrates supporting conscious and nonconscious components of performance during recollection of a learned sequence.     

Mate choice and friendship in twins: evidence for genetic similarity

This study examined the genetic and environmental contribution to people's preference for spouses and friends to be similar to themselves. In their responses to 130 personality, attitude, and demographic questions, 174 pairs of monozygotic (MZ) twins resembled each other (r= .53) more than did 148 pairs of dizygotic (DZ) twins (r= .32), 322 pairs of spouses (r= .32), and 563 pairs of best friends (r= .20). It was not previously recognized that spouses and friends are as similar as DZ twins. MZ twins also chose spouses and best friends more similar to their co-twins' friends and spouses than did DZ twins (mean rs = .22 vs. .14). The twins' preference for spouses and friends similar to themselves was about 34% due to the twins' genes, 12% due to the twins' common environment, and 54% due to the twins' unique (nonshared) environment. Similarity to partners was more pronounced on the more heritable items than the less heritable items. It is concluded that people are genetically inclined to choose as social partners those who resemble themselves at a genetic level.     

Transmitting and decoding facial expressions

This article examines the human face as a transmitter of expression signals and the brain as a decoder of these expression signals. If the face has evolved to optimize transmission of such signals, the basic facial expressions should have minimal overlap in their information. If the brain has evolved to optimize categorization of expressions, it should be efficient with the information available from the transmitter for the task. In this article, we characterize the information underlying the recognition of the six basic facial expression signals and evaluate how efficiently each expression is decoded by the underlying brain structures.     

Temporal references in dreams and autobiographical memory

In an attempt to determine whether temporal references identified in dreams follow the same temporal distributions as those documented for autobiographical memories, 28 younger women (18-35 years of age) and 30 older women (60-77 years of age) kept a home dream diary for 1 week and then slept 1 night in the laboratory for rapid eye movement sleep dream collection. The following morning, they identified temporal references in their dreams and produced a sample of autobiographical memories using the semantic cuing method. For both groups, there was a linear decrease in temporal references identified in dreams and autobiographical memories with increased remoteness for the last 30 years. As predicted, for the older group, there were similar cubic trends reflecting a disproportionately higher number of both temporal references identified in dreams and autobiographical memories from adolescence/early adulthood compared with adulthood and childhood. The results support the notion of continuity between waking and dreaming memory processes.