Selective reaching in macaques: evidence for action-centred attention

Animal Cognition - When a monkey selects a piece of food lying on the ground from among other viable objects in the near vicinity, only the desired item governs the particular pattern and direction...     

The discursive construction of community identity

The aim of this article is to illustrate how a discourse‐oriented approach would open new theoretical and methodological perspectives to the study of community identity. Here outlined is the idea that community identity is discursively constructed by members in order to lend meaning to experience. An analysis of how community identity is constructed in subjects' discourse with reference to the local context is presented. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Depression, Anxiety and Anger in Subtypes of Irritable Bowel Syndrome Patients

The present study aimed to elucidate the differences in depression, anxiety, anger, and quality of life in a sample of non-psychiatric IBS patients, starting from the hypothesis that IBS subtypes may have different symptomatic expressions of negative emotions with different outcomes on quality of life measures. Forty-two constipation-predominant IBS (C-IBS) subjects and 44 diarrhea-predominant IBS (D-IBS) subjects, after an examination by a gastroenterologist and a total colonoscopy, underwent a clinical interview and psychometric examination for the assessment of depression, anxiety, anger and quality of life. IBS subtypes showed different symptomatic profiles in depression, anxiety and anger, with C-IBS patients more psychologically distressed than D-IBS subjects. Affective and emotional symptoms should be considered as specific and integral to the syndrome, and recognizing the differences between IBS subtypes may have relevant implications for treatment options and clinical outcome.     

Both your intention and mine are reflected in the kinematics of my reach-to-grasp movement

The aim of the present study is to ascertain whether in a social context the kinematic parameters are influenced by the stance of the participants. In particular, we consider two basic modes of social cognition, namely cooperation and competition. Na?ve subjects were asked either to cooperate or to compete with a partner (a professional female actor), whose attitude could be either congruent or incongruent with the task instructions. Thus, on congruent conditions, subjects cooperated or competed with a partner showing a congruent cooperative or competitive attitude. On incongruent trials, the partner assumed an attitude that was manifestly in contrast with the instruction: competitive for the cooperative task, cooperative for the competitive task. We hypothesized that this mismatch between partner's attitude and instruction would produce a sort of unexpected social situation, affecting the kinematics of reach-to-grasp movement performed by the agents. If cooperative and competitive kinematic patterns are sensitive to the partner's attitude, then we should expect that an incongruent attitude have the potency to determine a reversal in kinematic patterning. Results revealed that for the incongruent trials the specific kinematic patterns for cooperation and competition found for the congruent conditions where modified according to the incongruent attitude assumed by the model actor. We suggest that this 'attitude' contagion is part of a sophisticated system that allows us to infer about the intention to act in a social context.     

Interpreting visual preferences in the visual paired-comparison task

Performance on the visual paired-comparison (VPC) task has typically been interpreted with E. Sokolov's (1963) comparator model of the orienting response; novelty preferences are interpreted as evidence of retention, whereas null preferences are interpreted as evidence of forgetting. Here the authors capitalized on the verbal nature of human adults to clarify the interpretation of visual preferences in VPC performance. In 2 experiments, adults were tested on either the VPC task or a forced-choice recognition task after delays of 3 min to 12 months. In Experiment 1, adults tested on the VPC task exhibited novelty preferences after short delays, null preferences after intermediate delays, and familiarity preferences after long delays. In Experiment 2, adults tested on the forced-choice recognition task exhibited high levels of accuracy irrespective of delay, but the latency with which they recognized the stimuli increased systematically over the retention interval. These data are inconsistent with a simple Sokolovian interpretation of VPC performance and instead suggest that memory may be expressed as a novelty preference, null preference, or familiarity preference depending on the accessibility of the representation.     

Time-courses of Fos expression in rat hippocampus and neocortex following acquisition and recall of a socially transmitted food preference

The present study examined expression of the immediate-early gene, c-Fos, following acquisition, 48-h (recent) recall, and 1-week (remote) recall of a socially transmitted food preference (STFP) in multiple brain regions implicated in learning and memory. In comparisons with controls, trained Long-Evans rats had increased Fos immunoreactivity in the ventral hippocampus following acquisition and recent recall. In the parahippocampal cortices, Fos was increased in the lateral entorhinal cortex after acquisition. In the orbitofrontal cortex, increased Fos immunoreactivity was observed in the lateral orbital cortex following both recent and remote recall and in the ventral orbital cortex following remote recall, indicating a role for the orbitofrontal cortex in the remote recall of STFP memory. In contrast, in the medial prefrontal cortex, increased Fos-ir was found following acquisition in the prelimbic cortex and following recent recall in the prelimbic and infralimbic cortices. No differences in Fos expression were found between trained rats and controls in the dorsal hippocampus, posterior parietal cortex, or amygdala. The present findings support a time-limited role of the hippocampus in the acquisition and recall of STFP memory and implicate neocortical regions involved in STFP acquisition, recent, and remote recall.     

Does the intention to communicate affect action kinematics?

The aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of communicative intention on action. In Experiment 1 participants were requested to reach towards an object, grasp it, and either simply lift it (individual condition) or lift it with the intent to communicate a meaning to a partner (communicative condition). Movement kinematics were recorded using a three-dimensional motion analysis system. The results indicate that kinematics was sensitive to communicative intention. Although the to-be-grasped object remained the same, movements performed for the ‘communicative’ condition were characterized by a kinematic pattern which differed from those obtained for the ‘individual’ condition. These findings were confirmed in a subsequent experiment in which the communicative condition was compared to a control condition, in which the communicative exchange was prevented. Results are discussed in terms of cognitive pragmatics and current knowledge on how social behavior shapes action kinematics.     

Serial learning with wild card items by monkeys (Cebus apella): implications for knowledge of ordinal position

We investigated monkeys' knowledge of the ordinal positions of stimuli that formed a 5-item serial list, ABCDE, by means of wild card items (W) that could substitute for items in the original series. In Experiment 1, training with wild cards was given on 3-, 4-, and 5-item series. In the last of these series, the wild card substitutions created five wild card sequences, WBCDE through ABCDW. During the final 10 sessions of training with each of two different wild cards (Items x and Y), the 3 subjects were able to successfully complete almost 60% of the wild card sequences. In Experiment 2, the two wild cards were presented on the same trial in 10 different double wild card sequences (e.g., AXCDY). The 2 monkey subjects correctly completed about 59% of the double wild card sequences during the final two training sessions. The performance levels achieved on single and on double wild card sequences, although well below that observed on the baseline sequence ABCDE (90% or better), support the view that the monkeys possessed some knowledge regarding the ordinal position of each baseline item. Consequently, an associative chain interpretation, which does not provide for knowledge of ordinal position, falls short as a complete account of the monkey's capacity for serial learning.     

Form categorization in 10-month-olds

In five experiments, 10-month-olds were habituated to exemplars of a form category and tested for categorization in paired-comparison trials involving in-category versus out-of-category stimuli. Across these experiments, color was systematically manipulated during habituation and/or test trials. Infants categorized form when color was either held constant or varied during habituation, but failed to categorize form when exposed to color-constant stimuli during habituation and tested for categorization with novel-color form exemplars. Two subsequent experiments traced this failure to the narrow experience of exposure to color-constant exemplars during habituation. These results suggest that (a) infants' internal representation for a category will not include a stimulus dimension not varied in the exemplars from which the category was derived, but (b) if variation in that dimension is experienced, exemplars constructed of novel instances of that dimension will still be regarded as belonging to the category.