Adaptability in organisms and artifacts: A multi level perspective on adaptive processes

Adaptability to changing circumstances is a key feature of living creatures. Understanding such adaptive processes is central to developing successful autonomous artifacts. In this paper two perspectives are brought to bear on the issue of adaptability. The first is a short term perspective which looks at adaptability in terms of the interactions between the agent and the environment. The second perspective involves a hierarchical evolutionary model which seeks to identify higher-order forms of adaptability based on the concept of adaptive meta-constructs.Task orientated and agent-centered models of adaptive processes in artifacts are considered from these two perspectives. The former is represented by the fitness function approach found in evolutionary learning, and the latter in terms of the concepts of empowerment and homeokinesis found in models derived from the self-organizing systems approach. A meta-construct approach to adaptability based on the identification of higher level meta-metrics is also outlined.     

Local Dialogue Heard Around the World

The authors of this article examine deliberative democracy and the value of dialogue in promoting the engagement of communities in deliberation and involvement in public issues. Focusing on the Texas Forum (TF), a member of the National Issues Forum (NIF), the authors discuss how diverse individuals are brought together with the purpose of cultivating public dialogue and discourse about significant policy issues, with a focus on the public's participation in the democratic process. The article addresses changes in civic engagement, dialogue, and the use of technology to mediate civic discourse and create virtual civic communities. The TF and NIF provide practical examples of the work needed in promoting deliberative democracy and civic engagement.     

The emergence of emotions and religious sentiments during the September 11 disaster

Analyzing emotional states under duress or during heightened, life-and-death situations is extremely difficult, especially given the inability of laboratory experiments to replicate the environment and given the inherent biases of post event surveys. This is where natural experiments, such as the pager communications from September 11th can provide the kind of natural experiment emotion researchers have been seeking. We demonstrate that positive and pro-social communications are the first to emerge followed by the slower and lower negative communications. Religious sentiment is the last to emerge, as individual attempt to make sense of event. Additionally we provide a methodological discussion about the preparation and analysis of such natural experiments (the pager message content) and show the importance of using multiple methods to extract the broadest possible understanding.     

Multimodal Rehabilitation: A Mind-Body Family-Based Intervention for Children and Adolescents Impaired by Medically Unexplained Symptoms. Part 2: Case Studies and Outcomes

In Part 2, we describe three cases implementing our mind-body, family-based, multimodal rehabilitation approach for treating children and adolescents presenting with medically unexplained symptoms. For each child and family, treatment interventions were selected and implemented, simultaneously or sequentially. In a cohort of 100 consecutively referred children, 56 suffered from, and were treated for, significant physical or chronic school absenteeism. Thirty-five of these children (63%) recovered fully, 10 (18%) had a relapsing course, 7 (12.5%) had chronic symptoms, and 4 (7%) were lost to follow-up. These outcomes suggest that mind-body multimodal rehabilitation is a successful, cost-effective model of treatment.     

Environmental stimulation, parental nurturance and cognitive development in humans

The effects of environmental stimulation and parental nurturance on brain development have been studied extensively in animals. Much less is known about the relations between childhood experience and cognitive development in humans. Using a longitudinally collected data set with ecologically valid in-home measures of childhood experience and later in-laboratory behavioral measures of cognitive ability, we were able to test hypotheses concerning the effects of environmental stimulation and parental nurturance. A double dissociation was found: On the one hand, there was a selective relation between parental nurturance and memory development, consistent with the animal literature on maternal buffering of stress hormone effects on hippocampal development. On the other hand, there was a selective relation between environmental stimulation and language development. The relevance of these findings to socioeconomic gradients in cognitive ability is discussed.     

Memory profiling in mild cognitive impairment: Can we determine risk for Alzheimer's disease?

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is considered a transitional stage between normal ageing and Alzheimer's disease (AD), but not all MCI cases progress to AD and there has been limited focus on how to identify who will progress. Given claims for a characteristic kind of memory impairment in AD involving deficits in encoding and consolidation of information, we propose that ‘memory profiling’ of individuals with MCI may help identify which individuals will progress. We initially set out to establish whether the same characteristic memory profile was present prior to the onset of AD (preAD). Very few studies provided data that allowed us to examine this, but results tentatively supported an encoding/consolidation profile in preAD. A single study tested the clinically important contrast of preAD versus non‐preAD MCI cases and found no difference under any condition or in memory profiles, but interpretation of the findings is limited by short duration of follow‐up, ceiling effects, and task limitations in assessing more complex and qualitative aspects of memory. Although existing data lead to equivocal conclusions, we believe that memory profiling is an endeavour worth pursuing, particularly given the increasing number of people with MCI presenting for clinical assessment. We propose that tests designed specifically to measure memory processes should be sensitive to preAD and are required in prospective longitudinal designs to identify these clinically crucial MCI cases.     

The Differential Outcomes Procedure Can Interfere or Enhance Operant Rule Learning

The differential outcomes effect--the enhancement of learning and memory performance by correlating distinct reinforcers with to-be-remembered events (sample stimuli)--has been stated to be one of the most robust phenomena in learning psychology. However, in this paper we demonstrate that the correlation between unique samples and unique reinforcers can either interfere with or enhance learning a spatial matching-rule, dependent on whether these two processes are trained concurrently or sequentially. If the Pavlovian conditioning (unique sample-reward pairings) occurs before the matching rule is learned (sequentially), the conditioned expectations of unique rewards will enhance the acquisition of the spatial matching-rule in rats (the differential outcomes effect will be observed). However, if rats are required to learn the Pavlovian associations and the matching-rule concurrently, they are impaired in acquiring the spatial matching-rule. Thus, employing the differential outcomes procedure can either enhance or detract from learning and remembering the task rule-dependent on the nature of the task and order of training. These data suggest that under some circumstances learning Pavlovian associations can compete with the formation of instrumental behavior.     

Association of the DAT1 genotype with inattentive behavior is mediated by reading ability in a general population sample

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and reading disability (RD) frequently co-occur in the child population and therefore raise the possibility of shared genetic etiology. We used a quantitative trait loci (QTL) approach to assess the involvement of the dopamine transporter (DAT1) gene polymorphism in mediating reading disability and poor attention in a general population sample of primary school children aged 6-11 years in the UK. The potential confounding effects of IQ and chronological age were also investigated. We found an independent association between the homozygous DAT1 10/10 repeat genotype and RD that was not accounted for by the level of ADHD symptoms. This finding suggests that the DAT1 gene polymorphism may influence a common neural mechanism underlying both reading acquisition and ADHD symptoms.