Early Huntington's disease affects movements in transformed sensorimotor mappings

This study examined the effect of transformed visual feedback on movement control in Huntington's disease (HD). Patients in the early stages of HD and controls performed aiming movements towards peripheral targets on a digitizing tablet and emphasizing precision. In a baseline condition, HD patients were slower but showed few precision problems in aiming. When visual feedback was inverted in both vertical and horizontal axes, patients showed problems in initial and terminal phases of movement where feedback is most critical. When visual feedback was inverted along a single axis as in a mirror-inversion, HD patients showed large deviations and over-corrections before adaptation. Adaptation was similar in both groups. These results suggest that HD impairs on-line error correction in novel movements.     

Deontic Reasoning With Emotional Content: Evolutionary Psychology or Decision Theory?

Three experiments investigated the contrasting predictions of the evolutionary and decision-theoretic approaches to deontic reasoning. Two experiments embedded a hazard management (HM) rule in a social contract scenario that should lead to competition between innate modules. A 3rd experiment used a pure HM task. Threatening material was also introduced into the antecedent, p, of a deontic rule, if p then must q. According to the evolutionary approach, more HM responses (Cosmides & Tooby, 2000) are predicted when p is threatening, whereas decision theory predicts fewer. All 3 experiments were consistent with decision theory. Other theories are discussed, and it is concluded that they cannot account for the behavior observed in these experiments.     

Neural representations of motor plans, desired trajectories, and controlled objects

Traditional theories of motor control view it as a serial process of planning and execution situated at the end of a larger serial process of perceptual representation and cognitive decision-making. Here, I examine the assumption that planning and execution are distinct processes separated by a neural representation of a desired trajectory. I propose that neural data do not support the existence of a desired trajectory or of any pre-generated plan other than a crude representation of the intended motion of a controlled object. That representation appears to be more strongly involved in decision-making processes than in the control of a specific movement, and it does not appear to be converted into a detailed motor command until after the movement begins, even in well-trained tasks. Thus, one is led to question whether the traditional distinction between decision-making, planning, and motor execution is a useful foundation for interpreting neural data and generating computational theories of motor control.     

Discrimination of polysyllabic sequences by one- to four-month-old infants

The goal of this research was to ascertain the effects of suprasegmental parameters (fundamental frequency, amplitude, and duration) on discrimination of polysyllabic sequences by 1- to 4-month-old infants. A high-amplitude sucking procedure, with synthesized female speech, was used. Results indicate that young infants can discriminate the three-syllable sequences [marana] versus [malana] when suprasegmental characteristics typical of infant-directed speech emphasize the middle syllable. However, infants failed to demonstrate discrimination when adult-directed suprasegmentals were used and in several other experimental conditions in which prosodic parameters were manipulated. The pattern of results obtained in the six experiments suggests that the exaggerated suprasegmentals of infant-directed speech may function as a perceptual catalyst, facilitating discrimination by focusing the infant's attention on a distinctive syllable within polysyllabic sequences.     

Bio-inspired task-rule retrieval model with auditory sorting test

Cognitive architectures (CAs) are currently used to bring the behavior of computer systems closer to human behavior. One of the main capacities of humans is the ability to plan and make decisions. Thus, part of the human behavior is based on rules associated with the relevant environmental stimuli. Rule management can be divided into six needed processes: rule learning, rule retrieving, rule coding, rule updating, rule reinforcement, and rule changing. A key aspect of rule processing is retrieval, which involves the use of information extracted from memory. This work deals with how rules are stored in coded form in the brain, retrieved and used as the need arises. The proposed model takes inspiration mainly from the processes in the VLPFC and MTL brain areas to extract rules from memory and create a rule-set that is sent to the DLPFC. The DLPFC and VLPFC prefrontal area operations are also described, and a process is proposed to select the appropriate rule and give a response. The experimentation of the implementation of our proposal with different configuration parameters gives rise to different approaches to human behavior in rule retrieval. Our conclusion is that after a virtual entity is endowed with this proposal, it computes in a way similar to human behavior.     

Atypical central auditory speech-sound discrimination in children who stutter as indexed by the mismatch negativity

PurposeRecent theoretical conceptualizations suggest that disfluencies in stuttering may arise from several factors, one of them being atypical auditory processing. The main purpose of the present study was to investigate whether speech sound encoding and central auditory discrimination, are affected in children who stutter (CWS).MethodsParticipants were 10 CWS, and 12 typically developing children with fluent speech (TDC). Event-related potentials (ERPs) for syllables and syllable changes [consonant, vowel, vowel-duration, frequency (F0), and intensity changes], critical in speech perception and language development of CWS were compared to those of TDC.ResultsThere were no significant group differences in the amplitudes or latencies of the P1 or N2 responses elicited by the standard stimuli. However, the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) amplitude was significantly smaller in CWS than in TDC. For TDC all deviants of the linguistic multifeature paradigm elicited significant MMN amplitudes, comparable with the results found earlier with the same paradigm in 6-year-old children. In contrast, only the duration change elicited a significant MMN in CWS.ConclusionsThe results showed that central auditory speech-sound processing was typical at the level of sound encoding in CWS. In contrast, central speech-sound discrimination, as indexed by the MMN for multiple sound features (both phonetic and prosodic), was atypical in the group of CWS. Findings were linked to existing conceptualizations on stuttering etiology.Educational objectives: The reader will be able (a) to describe recent findings on central auditory speech-sound processing in individuals who stutter, (b) to describe the measurement of auditory reception and central auditory speech-sound discrimination, (c) to describe the findings of central auditory speech-sound discrimination, as indexed by the mismatch negativity (MMN), in children who stutter.     

Towards a theory of the rough ground: merging the policy and ethnographic frames of religion in the Kyrgyz Republic

Discussions of Islam present two analytical problems, one of interpretation and another of theory. Regarding interpretation, different frames – policy or ethnographic – for viewing religion influence our bias/understanding of religion and give us different senses of what ‘knowing’ the religion of a particular community means. The related issue is one of theory and connects to the problem of theorising movement: how people navigate their religious lives is not linear but much more random, related to events, and at times reified by (though always engaging with) the assumptions of policy agendas and the ethnographic imagination. Exploring implications that the policy and ethnographic frames have for Muslims in the Kyrgyz Republic, I argue that in synthesising the impact of different frames of analysis, a ‘theory of the rough ground’, while anything but neat, better portrays life as it is experienced locally.     

Religiosity and Soviet ‘modernisation’ in Central Asia: locating religious traditions and rituals in recollections of antireligious policies in Uzbekistan

The main argument of this article is that religious policies implemented during the Soviet era and adaptations of the public to them produced a new understanding of religiosity and religious life among the population in Uzbekistan. The Soviet administration promoted the rejection of religion as an official policy and utilised a vast range of opportunities to criticise religion and promote secular education. However, there were other policies the public remembers as initially shocking to indigenous society but eventually accepted as positive because they assisted in the process of modernisation. These policies are exemplified by the hujum (unveiling) campaign to institutionalise safeguards against under-age and forced marriage, introduce conventional education and promote the wider integration of non-religious Soviet men and women into public life. An analysis of the manner in which people have come to terms with their past and their recollections of antireligious campaigns helps us understand how life under the Soviet government not only resulted in changes in lifestyles but also redrew the ‘boundaries’ of ‘proper’/‘modernised’ religious life and of what are now considered to be the religious remnants of the past.     

From intentions via planning and behavior to physical exercise habits

ObjectivesIndividuals who enact a health behavior effortlessly with minimal conscious deliberation can be assumed to have formed a healthy habit. This can be reflected by increases in self-reported habit strength of a behavior. We examined whether physical exercise intentions facilitate changes in exercise habit strength by increasing the use of action planning and exercise.DesignTwo field studies investigated the effect of behavioral intentions on changes in habit strength through a sequential path from action planning to exercise.MethodExercise intentions, action planning, habit strength, and exercise were assessed at two measurement points in time in 231 university students (Study 1), and at four points in time in 134 rehabilitation patients (Study 2).ResultsIn multiple-step mediation models in both samples, there were indirect effects of intentions on habit strength through action planning and behavior.ConclusionAction planning and behavior operated as sequential mediators to bridge the gap between intentions and habit strength. Exercise habit strength may increase as a result of conscious action planning and frequent behavior enactment. Including these constructs jointly into behavior change models may improve the understanding of the mechanisms involved in behavior maintenance.