John Dewey and the Buddhist Philosophy of the Middle Way1

This paper argues that the central philosophical movement in the complex history of Buddhism that originated with Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha and carried on by Nāgārjuna (among other later Buddhist philosophers) shares some common themes with the pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey. These themes are the rejection of traditional metaphysics as definitive of philosophy, a return to the correct understanding of the nature of experience, and a particular view about the conduct and nature of philosophy. Dewey is used to illuminate such controversial problems in the Buddhist tradition as why the Buddha is silent about metaphysical questions, what it means to say that everything is anitya, and how we are to understand Nāgārjuna's key concepts of pratītyasamutpāda and ?únyatá.     

Age-related susceptibility to the Müller-Lyer and the horizontal-vertical illusions

Participants between the ages of 3 and 20 years adjusted the Müller-Lyer illusion and the inverted-T form of the Horizontal-Vertical illusion. Perceptual error was quantified using signal detection and nonparametric measures of sensitivity and responsivity. Significant changes in sensitivity and responsivity were found for each illusion across participants' ages. No effect of sex of participant was found. Sensitivity and responsivity were largely asymptotic between the ages of 13 to 15 years for the Müller-Lyer illusion and between the ages of 11 to 15 years for the Horizontal-Vertical illusion.     

The absent professor: why we don't teach research ethics and what to do about it

Research ethics education in the biosciences has not historically been a priority for research universities despite the fact that funding agencies, government regulators, and the parties involved in the research enterprise agree that it ought to be. The confluence of a number of factors, including scrutiny and regulation due to increased public awareness of the impact of basic research on society, increased public and private funding, increased diversity and collaboration among researchers, the impressive success and speed of research advances, and high-profile cases of misconduct, have made it necessary to reexamine how the bioscience research community at all levels provides ethics education to its own. We discuss the need to and reasons for making ethics integral to the education of bioscientists, approaches to achieving this goal, challenges this goal presents, and responses to those challenges.     

Representing spatial location and layout from sparse kinesthetic contacts

Participants' fingers were guided to 2 locations on a table for 3 s, then back to the start. They reported distances and angles between the locations by (a) replacing 1 or 2 fingers, (b) translating the contacted configuration, or (c) estimating distance or angle alone. Distance error increased across these conditions. Angular error increased when the angular reference axis was rotated before the response. Replacing 1 finger was impaired by a change in posture from exposure to test. The results suggest a kinesthetic representation is used to replace the fingers, but to estimate distance and angle at new locations, a configural representation is computed. This presentation is oriented within an extrinsic reference frame and maintains shape more accurately than scale.     

Neuropsychological screening for cognitive impairment using computer-assisted tasks

The aim of this study was to validate a computer-assisted screening battery for classifying patients into two groups, those with and without cognitive impairment. Participants were all patients referred to the neuropsychology clinics at four VA medical centers during a 1-year period. Patients meeting the study inclusionary criteria (N = 252) were administered the Neurobehavioral Evaluation System-3 (NES3) computer-assisted battery. A detailed neuropsychological examination was carried out by an experienced neuropsychologist, who diagnosed the patient as cognitively impaired or not impaired. The neuropsychologist's diagnosis was the gold standard. Recursive partitioning analyses yielded several classification procedures using the NES3 data to predict the gold standard These procedures produced a set of six NES3 tasks that provide good sensitivity and specificity in predicting di- agnosis. Sensitivity and specificity for the least random classification procedure were 0.87 and 0.67, respectively. The results suggest that computer-assisted screening methods are a promising means of triaging patients.     

Cognitive strategy and ability in endurance activities

The purpose of this study was to ascertain whether elite athletes utilize associative strategies and, on the other hand, if nonelite athletes prefer to use dissociative strategies. 60 athletes were interviewed and the Schomer's 1986 method of measurement was used to measure association and dissociation. Analysis showed no significant differences in the total associative and dissociative scores among the three different abilities. However, a significant difference was found concerning the use of dissociative strategy between men and women.     

Relationships of coping styles with type of sport

The purpose of this study was to ascertain whether the type of sport is associated with coping styles. 80 athletes (weightlifters, runners, swimmers, and triathletes) were administered the Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations. Analysis showed weightlifters had a lower mean score on Avoidance coping than the other groups of athletes. Differences concerning sex and ability were found as well.     

Illusory hand ownership in a patient with personal neglect for the upper limb,but no somatoparaphenia

The symptoms of patients with left personal neglect are characterized by inattention towards contralesional (left) body parts while at the same time explicitly ascertaining ownership for the neglected hemibody. It is currently unknown if personal neglect is associated with more subtle or implicit disturbances of own body perception and body ownership as measured with the rubber hand illusion. In this study, we report data from a patient with a right hemispheric lesion and personal neglect, without associated somatosensory deficits. We administered to the patient (and to 12 age‐matched controls) the rubber hand illusion paradigm to the right and left hands, to elicit illusory ownership for a fake hand, before and after recovery from personal neglect for the left arm. In a first session, run when the patient showed personal neglect affecting the left arm, he experienced a significantly enhanced subjective illusion of embodiment for the left fake hand as compared to the right hand (as assessed through a standard questionnaire). After recovery from personal neglect for the left arm (second session), the results of the left and right rubber hand illusion experiments were comparable, with no modulation of hand ownership. We argue that personal neglect may consist not only in an inattentional disorder, but also in a deficit of multisensory body representation characterized by a high sensitivity to experimental manipulations of subjective aspects of body ownership.     

Considering Development in Developmental Disorders

Various theorists have argued for the importance of a developmental approach to studying typical development (Karmiloff-Smith, 1998; Lerner, 1996; Lerner & Hood, 1986; Masten & Cicchetti, 2010; Overton, 2014; Overton & Lerner, 2012, 2014), and there are reasons to believe that this issue is even more critical to the study of atypical development (Thomas, 2016; Thomas et al., 2009). In this article, we bring together perspectives from a variety of theorists to outline the importance of conceptualizing both typical and atypical development as a not-necessarily-linear, interconnected, and multifaceted set of individual trajectories embedded in real-world contexts (Karmiloff-Smith, 1998; Masten & Cicchetti, 2010; Overton & Lerner, 2012). Using examples from studies of atypical brain and behavior, we describe 6 lenses that can be applied to developmental research.     

Cultivating Resilience in Families Who Foster: Understanding How Families Cope and Adapt Over Time

Families who foster offer essential care for children and youth when their own parents are unable to provide for their safety and well‐being. Foster caregivers face many challenges including increased workload, emotional distress, and the difficulties associated with health and mental health problems that are more common in children in foster care. Despite these stressors, many families are able to sustain fostering while maintaining or enhancing functioning of their unit. This qualitative study applied an adaptational process model of family resilience that emerged in previous studies to examine narratives of persistent, long‐term, and multiple fostering experiences. Data corroborated previous research in two ways. Family resilience was again described as a transactional process of coping and adaptation that evolves over time. This process was cultivated through the activation of 10 family strengths that are important in different ways, during varied phases.