Encoding the goal of an object-directed but uncompleted reaching action in 6- and 9-month-old infants

Infants start to interpret completed human actions as goal-directed in the second half of the first year of life. In a series of three studies, the understanding of a goal-directed but uncompleted action was investigated in 6- and 9-month-old infants using a preferential looking paradigm. Infants saw the video of an actor's reaching movement towards one of two objects. This reaching movement was only presented until the hand passed the midpoint between the starting position and the position of the target object. Subsequently, two final states of the reaching movement were presented simultaneously. In the plausible final state, the hand grasped the object to which the reaching movement was geared; in the implausible final state, the hand grasped the other object. In Studies 1 and 3, infants watched the actor from an allocentric perspective, and in Studies 2 and 3 from an egocentric perspective. Results indicate a discrimination of the two final states if the scene was presented from an allocentric perspective: both 6- and 9-month-olds looked longer at the implausible final state. This was not the case if infants saw the action from an egocentric perspective. The presented findings show that using this paradigm, 6-month-olds are already able to infer the goal of an uncompleted action without seeing the achievement of the goal itself. However, they encoded the goal of the reaching action only when it was presented from an allocentric perspective but not from an egocentric perspective.     

Frobenius Quantales,Serre Quantales and the Riemann–Roch Theorem

Studia Logica - The Riemann–Roch theorem for algebraic curves is derived from a theorem for Girard quantales. Serre duality is shown to be a quantalic phenomenon. An example provides a Girard...     

Affektverarbeitung und Beziehungsgestaltung bei somatoformen Störungen

Somatoform disorders are usually associated with disturbances in affective processing and consequently with relational disorders. The effect of psychotherapy on the emotional regulation and the relational behaviour in the course of treatment of a patient with somatoform autonomous dysfunction and dysthymia has been examined. Pre-post comparisons of inpatient treatment have been performed by means of standardized questionnaire data; the course of therapy has been evaluated by the analysis of the dependence of the leading symptom of hypogastric pain on mood parameters with the help of multivariate time-series analyses. One effect of psychotherapy was the initiation of an intrapsychic discourse, which led to an improved ability of affect regulation as well as to a better functioning in relationships. This was accompanied by a reduction of somatization. The interrelations between somatization, affect- and relationship-regulation are discussed.     

Deriving auditory features from triadic comparisons

A feature-based representation of auditory stimuli is proposed and tested experimentally. Within a measurement-theoretical framework, it is possible to decide whether a representation of subjective judgments with a set of auditory features is possible and how unique such a representation is. Furthermore, the method avoids confounding listeners' perceptual and verbal abilities, in that it strictly separates the process of identifying auditory features from labeling them. The approach was applied to simple synthetic sounds with well-defined physical properties (narrow-band noises and complex tones). For each stimulus triad, listeners had to judge whether the first two sounds displayed a common feature that was not shared by the third, by responding with a simple "yes" or "no." Because of the high degree of consistency in the responses, feature structures could be obtained for most of the subjects. In summary, the proposed procedure constitutes a supplement to the arsenal of psychometric methods with the main focus of identifying the type of sensation itself, rather than of measuring its threshold or magnitude.     

Gandhi,secularism and social capital in modern India

The partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 was witness to Hindu Muslim conflict at its peak. In the 1990s, ethnic conflict was used by right wing ideologues to change the fabric of secular India. Using interview data and within a social representational framework the study demonstrates the processes whereby out-groups/in-groups are formed. Further, it is argued that religious tolerance as envisaged in Gandhian philosophy, needs to be an integral part of the debate on role of religion in the public sphere.     

Inferring the size of a goal object from an actor's grasping movement in 6‐ and 9‐month‐old infants

The present study applied a preferential looking paradigm to test whether 6‐ and 9‐month old infants are able to infer the size of a goal object from an actor's grasping movement. The target object was a cup with the handle rotated either towards or away from the actor. In two experiments, infants saw the video of an actor's grasping movement towards an occluded target object. The aperture size of the actor's hand was varied as between‐subjects factor. Subsequently, two final states of the grasping movement were presented simultaneously with the occluder being removed. In Experiment 1, the expected final state showed the actor's hand holding a cup in a way that would be expected after the performed grasping movement. In the unexpected final state, the actor's hand held the cup at the side which would be unexpected after the performed grasping movement. Results show that 6‐ as well as 9‐month‐olds looked longer at the unexpected than at the expected final state. Experiment 2 excluded an alternative explanation of these findings, namely that the discrimination of the final states was due to geometrical familiarity or novelty of the final states. These findings provide evidence that infants are able to infer the size of a goal object from the aperture size of the actor's hand during the grasp.     

Laterality in metaphor processing: lack of evidence from functional magnetic resonance imaging for the right hemisphere theory

We investigated processing of metaphoric sentences using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Seventeen healthy subjects (6 female, 11 male) read 60 novel short German sentence pairs with either metaphoric or literal meaning and performed two different tasks: judging the metaphoric content and judging whether the sentence has a positive or negative connotation. Laterality indices for 8 regions of interest were calculated: Inferior frontal gyrus (opercular part and triangular part), superior, middle, and inferior temporal gyrus, precuneus, temporal pole, and hippocampus. A left lateralised network was activated with no significant differences in laterality between the two tasks. The lowest degree of laterality was found in the temporal pole. Other factors than metaphoricity per se might trigger right hemisphere recruitment. Results are discussed in the context of lesion and hemifield studies.     

Recalibration of phonetic categories by lipread speech versus lexical information

Listeners hearing an ambiguous phoneme flexibly adjust their phonetic categories in accordance with information telling what the phoneme should be (i.e., recalibration). Here the authors compared recalibration induced by lipread versus lexical information. Listeners were exposed to an ambiguous phoneme halfway between /t/ and /p/ dubbed onto a face articulating /t/ or /p/ or embedded in a Dutch word ending in /t/ (e.g., groot [big]) or /p/ (knoop [button]). In a posttest, participants then categorized auditory tokens as /t/ or /p/. Lipread and lexical aftereffects were comparable in size (Experiment 1), dissipated about equally fast (Experiment 2), were enhanced by exposure to a contrast phoneme (Experiment 3), and were not affected by a 3-min silence interval (Experiment 4). Exposing participants to 1 instead of both phoneme categories did not make the phenomenon more robust (Experiment 5). Despite the difference in nature (bottom-up vs. top-down information), lipread and lexical information thus appear to serve a similar role in phonetic adjustments.     

The I: A dimensional account

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - I have a clear idea of what it means that I have experiences in the past or future, and it does not seem to mean that experiences take place that possess...