Social contacts and production of 50-kHz short ultrasonic calls in adult rats

The goal of the study was to provide evidence that the production of 50-kHz calls by adult rats is driven by potential or direct social contacts. The calls have been studied during daily visits to a cage by single or paired rats. Repeated exposure of rats to the cage frequently visited by other rats or direct contact between rats significantly increased the number of 50-kHz calls. The increase in production of 50-kHz calls was reduced by 78% after intrapreoptic-anterior hypothalamic injection of MK-801, an N-methyl-D-aspartate-type glutamate receptor antagonist. Calls emitted in all situations had a similar acoustic profile. It was found that 50-kHz calls were produced in anticipation of, and/or during, direct social contacts among adult rats and were predominantly initiated by olfactory stimuli. The calls seem to express an appetitive behavioral state in which the central glutamatergic mechanism is implicated.     

How Not to Read Philosophical Investigations: McDowell and Goldfarb on Wittgenstein on Understanding

In a recent article, John McDowell has criticised Warren Goldfarb for attributing an anti‐realist conception of linguistic understanding to Wittgenstein. 1 I argue that McDowell is right to reject Goldfarb's anti‐ realism, but does so for the wrong reasons. I show that both Goldfarb's and McDowell's interpretations are vitiated by the fact that they do not pay attention to Wittgenstein's positive claims about understanding, in particular his claim that understanding is a kind of ability. The cause of this oversight lies in their endorsement of an excessively anti‐systematic or “therapeutic” reading of Wittgenstein.     

I might ease your pain,but only if you’re sad: The impact of the empathized emotion in the empathy-helping association

Ample research demonstrated that empathizing with someone in need promotes helping that person. Two studies examined whether this effect of empathy on helping behavior holds across different emotional reactions expressed by a target in need. Results of Study 1 indicate that perspective taking with a sad needy target increased empathic concern which, in turn, fostered helping the individual. This relation was not found for participants taking the perspective of angry or disgusted needy targets. Study 2 provides further support for the underlying mechanism of the results of Study 1. Perspective taking with a sad needy target increased empathizers’ empathic concern because perception of target neediness was increased. Again, this pattern was not found for perspective taking with an angry needy target. The findings correspond to theorizing on the role of emotions in person perception. Hence, the current research provides insights regarding the boundary conditions of the empathy-helping association.     

Temporal distance and ease of retrieval

Construal Level Theory (CLT; Trope & Liberman, 2003) proposes that pro-arguments (pros) constitute high-level construals and counter-arguments (cons) low-level construals. Therefore, pros are more salient for distant-future actions than are cons and the reverse holds for near-future actions (Eyal, Liberman, Trope, & Walther, 2004). We further predicted and results from one experiment show that participants found it easier to generate pros if an action pertained to the distant rather than the near future. For cons the effect was reversed: participants found it more difficult to generate cons if the action pertained to the distant rather than the near future. Consequently, people were more in favor of the action if it pertained to the distant rather than the near future. Ease of retrieval mediated the effect of temporal distance on attitudes. The mutual relevance of the CLT framework and research on ease of retrieval is discussed.     

Aggravation of DSS-induced colitis after chronic subordinate colony (CSC) housing is partially mediated by adrenal mechanisms

Chronic subordinate colony housing (CSC) is a relevant chronic psycho-social stressor for male mice. Here, we investigated effects of CSC on the severity of dextran sulphate sodium (DSS)-induced colitis and the involvement of adrenal mechanisms. After 19 days of CSC, male C57BL/6 mice were treated with 1% DSS (8 days). After 8 days, inflammatory shortening of the colon and the histological inflammation score were increased in CSC mice. Additionally, the increased secretion of pro-inflammatory cytokines by mesenteric lymph node cells found on day 2 and 4 of DSS treatment was down-regulated in CSC mice on day 8 of DSS treatment, paralleled by an increase in plasma corticosterone. In contrast, in unstressed controls, elevation of cytokine secretion was delayed and only found on day 8 of DSS treatment, associated with a prompt rise in plasma corticosterone. To reveal adrenal mechanisms in CSC-induced effects on colitis, mice were adrenalectomized, exposed to CSC and treated with DSS (8 days). In adrenalectomized CSC mice, the severity of DSS-induced colitis was reduced, as body weight loss, shortening of colon, histological damage score, and cytokine secretion from mesenteric lymph node cells were diminished compared with sham-operated CSC mice. In conclusion, exposure to chronic psycho-social stress increases the severity of acute DSS colitis, an effect which is, at least partly, mediated by adrenal mechanisms.     

Syntactic gender processing in the human brain: a review and a model

Despite the increasing number of neuroimaging studies of syntactic gender processing no model is currently available that includes data from visual and auditory language comprehension and language production. This paper provides a systematic review of the neural correlates of syntactic gender processing. Based on anatomical information from cytoarchitectonic probability maps it is argued that the left BA 44 plays a central role for the active use of gender information, e.g., for explicit decisions as well as for subsequent morphological encoding. The left BA 45 is involved in the strategic generation of morphological cues that facilitate gender processing. Model implications for aphasic patients with lesions including or excluding parts of Broca's speech region are discussed.     

Representation facilitates reasoning: what natural frequencies are and what they are not

A good representation can be crucial for finding the solution to a problem. Gigerenzer and Hoffrage (Psychol. Rev. 102 (1995) 684; Psychol. Rev. 106 (1999) 425) have shown that representations in terms of natural frequencies, rather than conditional probabilities, facilitate the computation of a cause's probability (or frequency) given an effect--a problem that is usually referred to as Bayesian reasoning. They also have shown that normalized frequencies--which are not natural frequencies--do not lead to computational facilitation, and consequently, do not enhance people's performance. Here, we correct two misconceptions propagated in recent work (Cognition 77 (2000) 197; Cognition 78 (2001) 247; Psychol. Rev. 106 (1999) 62; Organ. Behav. Hum. Decision Process. 82 (2000) 217): normalized frequencies have been mistaken for natural frequencies and, as a consequence, "nested sets" and the "subset principle" have been proposed as new explanations. These new terms, however, are nothing more than vague labels for the basic properties of natural frequencies.     

The P600 as an indicator of syntactic ambiguity

In a study using event-related brain potentials, we show that the current characterization of the P600 component as an indicator of revision processes (reanalysis and repair) in sentence comprehension must be extended to include the recognition of syntactic ambiguity. By comparing the processing of ambiguous and unambiguous sentence constituents in German, we show that the P600 is elicited when our language processing system has syntactic alternatives at a certain item given in the input string. That the P600 is sensitive to syntactic ambiguity adds crucial evidence to current debates in psycholinguistic modelling, as the results clearly favour parallel models of syntactic processing which assume that ambiguity is recognized and costly.     

The neural regions sustaining episodic encoding and recognition of objects

In this functional MRI experiment, encoding of objects was associated with activation in left ventrolateral prefrontal/insular and right dorsolateral prefrontal and fusiform regions as well as in the left putamen. By contrast, correct recognition of previously learned objects (R judgments) produced activation in left superior frontal, bilateral inferior frontal, and right cerebellar regions, whereas correct rejection of distractor objects (N judgments) was associated with activation in bilateral prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortices, in right parietal and cerebellar regions, in the left putamen, and in the right caudate nucleus. The R minus N comparison showed activation in the left lateral prefrontal cortex and in bilateral cingulate cortices and precunei, while the N minus R comparison did not reveal any positive signal change. These results support the view that similar regions of the frontal lobe are involved in episodic encoding and retrieval processes, and that the successful episodic retrieval of newly learned objects is mainly based on a frontoparietal network.