Middle ground on liability for costs?

Philosophical Studies - On the strict liability view, excusably ignorant agents must cover all the wrongful costs they have inadvertently brought onto others, although it is undisputed that they...     

Learning in honey bees with brain lesions: how partial mushroom-body ablations affect sucrose responsiveness and tactile antennal learning

Honey bees are ideal organisms for studying associative learning, because they can rapidly learn different sensory cues, even under laboratory conditions. Classical olfactory learning experiments have shown that the mushroom bodies (MBs), a prominent neuropil of the central nervous system of the bee, are involved in olfactory learning and memory formation. We tested whether the MBs are also involved in tactile antennal learning. As in olfactory learning, bees use the antennae during tactile learning to sense tactile cues. We produced specific MB ablations by applying the mitotic blocker hydroxyurea (HU). In Drosophila, HU-induced brain lesions of the MBs strongly impaired olfactory memory formation. As treatment with HU might also interfere with the processing of the reward stimulus, sucrose, we measured the responsiveness to sucrose stimuli in these bees. Treatment with HU led to partial ablations of the median MB sub-units on one or both sides of the brain. We analysed side-specific effects in double-blind tests, testing sucrose responsiveness separately for each antenna, and conditioning first one antenna and then the other in a reversal learning assay. HU-treated bees without detectable ablations were less responsive to sucrose and had a poorer learning performance than untreated controls. Partial MB ablation did not additionally affect responsiveness to sucrose or tactile antennal learning. Interestingly, bees with bilateral MB ablations did not differ from untreated controls in their learning performance during the first learning phase. During reversal learning, acquisition in these bees was significantly lower than that in untreated controls. It is concluded that HU treatment affects sucrose responsiveness and tactile learning even without detectable ablation of neuropils. The effects of MB ablations on tactile learning are not side-specific and not correlated with the volume of the ablated neuropil. Accepted after revision: 15 January 2001 ❚ Electronic Publication     

Modality Effects Examined by Means of an Online Sentence-Picture Comparison Task

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research - Are oral sentences accompanied by pictures easier to understand than written sentences accompanied by the same pictures? This question—intensely...     

Motivation and Performance Following Failure: The Effortful Pursuit of Self-defining Goals

In this paper, I summarise theory and research, highlighting the role of self-defining goals in how individuals react to and try to cope with failure outcomes. I propose that three factors are fundamental to the understanding of whether failure stimulates or impairs motivated behaviour: the relevance of failure to a self-definition, the substitutability of tasks in the service of striving for a self-definition, and a person's commitment to pursuing the respective self-definition. Focusing on students' occupationally directed self-definitions, I first review research showing how the interplay among these factors is reflected in varied measures of achievement behaviour and then discuss practical implications of the theory.     

Intentional fixation of behavioural learning,or how R-O learning blocks S-R learning

Four experiments deal with the acquisition of knowledge for the control of voluntary behaviour. Subjects had to accomplish a computer-controlled learning task that required them to learn which one of four actions (R) had to be performed in order to attain a certain one of four outcomes (O) in the presence of one of four situational contexts (S). Reinforcements were assigned to actions according to two schedules: In the S-R condition each of the four actions was consistently reinforced in the presence of a certain situation, whereas in the R-O condition each of the actions was either always (Experiments 1-3) or mostly (Experiment 4) reinforced if a certain outcome was required. Furthermore, the type of feedback was varied. In Experiment 1, only positive or negative reinforcements were fed back, whereas in Experiments 2-4 the actions resulted in outcomes that had to be compared with the required outcomes in order to determine successes and failures. The results indicate a preference for learning R-O contingencies over learning S-R contingencies. Most subjects were so fixated on learning R-O relations that they remained completely blind to the consistent reinforcement of S-R mappings. The data suggest that, in line with the ideomotor principle, the acquisition of behavioural competence is based primarily on the formation of bidirectional action-outcome relations. Specifications of the underlying learning mechanisms are discussed.     

Acquisition of Effector-Specific and Effector-Independent Components of Sequencing Skill

In a serial reaction time task, participants practiced a repeating sequence with 1 hand. In interleaved blocks, they responded to random sequences with the other hand. Experiment 1 was composed of 5 sessions, each consisting of 30 blocks. Intermanual transfer, reflecting a hand-independent component of sequence knowledge, increased across session. A smaller but significant, nontransferable, and hand-specific component was evident in each session and did not increase with practice. Experiment 2 comprised only 1 session. Uninterrupted practice (no interleaved random blocks) improved hand-independent sequence learning in comparison with interrupted practice (as implemented in Experiment 1), whereas hand-specific sequence learning was unaffected by this between-subjects manipulation. These findings suggest separate mechanisms for effector-independent sequence learning and effector-specific acquisition of optimized response coarticulation.     

Verlorenes Objekt, Trennung und Anerkennung

Zusammenfassung. Die Verarbeitung von Trennungserfahrungen ist für die Psychoanalyse ein zentrales Anliegen. Trennungserfahrungen spielen in verschiedenen analytischen Konzepten eine Rolle. Zun?chst mu? daher gekl?rt werden, welche verschiedenen Dimensionen des Themas „Trennung” in der psychoanalytischen Theorie ausgearbeitet worden sind. Da? Trennungen verarbeitet werden k?nnen, ist an bestimmte Voraussetzungen geknüpft. Die Folgen von Trennungserfahrungen sind v.a. aus einer intrapsychischen Perspektive beschrieben worden. Diese Betrachtungsweise mu? durch eine intersubjektive erg?nzt werden. Klinische Konzepte früher Trennungspathologien und die neuere S?uglingsforschung weisen auf die Bedeutung der intersubjektiven Perspektive für die Psychoanalyse hin. Intrapsychische und intersubjektive Perspektive schlie?en einander nicht aus, sondern verschr?nken sich miteinander. Wesentlich für dieses Wechselspiel ist der Begriff der Anerkennung, der in Anlehnung an Benjamin eingeführt wird. Er ist hilfreich, um die ethischen Implikationen der psychoanalytischen Trennungsmodelle zu bedenken.

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The lost object, separation and recognition. About the foundation of psychoanalytic therapy and psychoanalytic ethics concerning the experience of separation

Summary. There exists not only one psychoanalytic concept of ”separation”. Instead, it covers a wide range of psychoanalytic constructs, such as separation in Mahler’s terms, object loss, castration, the Lacanian model of psychic representation and so forth. The first aim of the present paper is to clarify the various concepts. As will be shown, most psychoanalytic concepts focus on the intrapsychic dimension of separation processes. Nevertheless, the working through of separation experiences is bound to intersubjective experiences as can be shown in reference to the clinical concepts on very early interpersonal pathology and to the contemporary research on infantile development. The intersubjective and intrapsychic perspectives do not contradict, but supplement each other. J. Benjamin has introduced the term ”recognition” into the psychoanalytic debate. Recognition is a major link between the two perspectives. It is helpful to outline the ethical consequences that can be drawn from the psychoanalytic concepts on ”separations”.