A Religious Diversity Tale: A Multi-Faith Case Study

This article examines the creation of a network of diverse religious leadership in a Midwest suburb where the intersection of religion and national pride fomented a community-wide conflict. Activated during a heated controversy over displaying a Christmas tree in a public school, the Network became a laboratory for testing viable strategies for community healing. The case of a Jewish student suspended for fighting when taunted for not singing Christmas Carols became a catalyst for debating what is religious, what is secular, and what is culturally American. The interaction of the key players is noted; educators, religious leaders, students and their families, particularly the mothers who regularly interacted across religious boundaries. The article describes the Network's experiment with deploying resources that accommodated diverse experiences of religion and patriotism, historically and culturally, within an American context.     

Evolutionary perspectives on imitation: is a comparative psychology of social learning possible?

Studies of imitation in animals have become numerous in recent times, but do they contribute to a comparative psychology of social learning? We review this burgeoning field to identify the problems and prospects for such a goal. Difficulties of two main kinds are identified. First, researchers have tackled questions about social learning from at least three very different theoretical perspectives, the "phylogenetic", "animal model", and "adaptational". We examine the conflicts between them and consider the scope for integration. A second difficulty arises in the methodological approaches used in the discipline. In relation to one of these - survey reviews of published studies - we tabulate and compare the contrasting conclusions of nine articles that together review 36 studies. The basis for authors' disagreements, including the matters of perceptual opacity, novelty, sequential structure, and goal representation, are examined. In relation to the other key method, comparative experimentation, we identify 12 studies that have explicitly compared species' imitative ability on similar tasks. We examine the principal problems of comparing like with like in these studies and consider solutions, the most powerful of which we propose to be the use of a systematic range of task designs, rather than any single "gold standard" task.     

Bimanual coordination and interhemispheric interaction

Bimanual coordination of skilled finger movements requires intense functional coupling of the motor areas of both cerebral hemispheres. This coupling can be measured non-invasively in humans with task-related coherence analysis of multi-channel surface electroencephalography. Since bimanual coordination is a high-level capability that virtually always requires training, this review is focused on changes of interhemispheric coupling associated with different stages of bimanual learning. Evidence is provided that the interaction between hemispheres is of particular importance in the early phase of command integration during acquisition of a novel bimanual task. It is proposed that the dynamic changes in interhemispheric interaction reflect the establishment of efficient bimanual ‘motor routines'. The effects of callosal damage on bimanual coordination and learning are reviewed as well as functional imaging studies related to bimanual movement. There is evidence for an extended cortical network involved in bimanual motor activities which comprises the bilateral primary sensorimotor cortex (SM1), supplementary motor area, cingulate motor area, dorsal premotor cortex and posterior parietal cortex. Current concepts about the functions of these structures in bimanual motor behavior are reviewed.     

The structure of pigeon multiple-class same-different learning

Three experiments examined the structure of the decision framework used by pigeons in learning a multiple-class same-different task. Using a same-different choice task requiring the discrimination of odd-item different displays (one or more of the display's component elements differed) from same displays (all display components identical), pigeons were concurrently trained with sets of four discriminable display types. In each experiment, the consistent group was tested such that the same and different displays of four display types were consistently mapped onto their choice alternatives. The inconsistent group received a conflicting mapping of the same and different displays and the choice alternatives that differed across the four display types but were consistent within a display type. Experiment 1 tested experienced pigeons, and Experiment 2 tested naive pigeons. In both experiments, the consistent group learned their discrimination faster and to a higher level of choice accuracy than did the inconsistent group, which performed poorly in general. Only in the consistent group was the discrimination transferred to novel stimuli, indicative of concept formation in that group. A third experiment documented that the different display classes were discriminable from one another. These results suggest that pigeons attempt to generate a single discriminative rule when learning this type of task, and that this general rule can cover a large variety of stimulus elements and organizations, consistent with previous evidence suggesting that pigeons may be capable of learning relatively unbounded relational same-different concepts.     

Navigation in the Morris swim task as a baseline for drug discrimination: a demonstration with morphine

A morphine versus saline discrimination was demonstrated using the Morris swim task as the behavioral baseline. The apparatus was a large circular pool filled with water made opaque by floating polypropylene pellets. Rats were placed in the tank in randomly selected locations (12 trials per session) and could escape by swimming to a platform submerged 2 cm below the surface. Morphine (5.6 mg/kg) or saline was injected prior to training sessions. The position of the platform in a given session depended on the drug condition, thus forming the basis for discriminative responding. Three of the 4 rats acquired the discrimination, as evidenced by direct swims to the condition-appropriate platform. Generalization probe sessions were conducted following acquisition. Probe sessions were preceded by injections of morphine (0, 1.0, 3.0, 5.6, or 10.0 mg/kg) and involved placing the rat in the pool for 1 min without a platform. Swim patterns revealed a gradient, with probe swimming more concentrated in the area of the morphine platform position after higher morphine doses. In addition, dose-dependent increases in the likelihood of swimming first to the morphine-associated platform location were obtained. These results illustrate the generality of drug discrimination across different behavioral procedures, and of particular interest with respect to spatial learning, demonstrate interoceptive stimulus control of navigation.     

Learning phonotactic constraints from brief auditory experience

Three experiments asked whether phonotactic regularities not present in English could be acquired by adult English speakers from brief listening experience. Subjects listened to consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) syllables displaying restrictions on consonant position. Responses in a later speeded repetition task revealed rapid learning of (a) first-order regularities in which consonants were restricted to particular positions (e.g. [baep] not *[paeb]), and (b) second-order regularities in which consonant position depended on the adjacent vowel (e.g. [baep] or [pIb], not *[paeb] or *[bIp]). No evidence of learning was found for second-order regularities in which consonant position depended on speaker's voice. These results demonstrated that phonotactic constraints are rapidly learned from listening experience and that some types of contingencies (consonant-vowel) are more easily learned than others (consonant-voice).     

What's different in second-language processing? Evidence from event-related brain potentials

German sentences which were either correct, contained a selectional restriction violation, or a word category violation were presented auditorily to 16 native speakers of German (L1 group) and to 16 native speakers of Russian, who had learned German after the age of 10 (L2 group). Semantic violations elicited an N400 effect for both groups, but with a reduced amplitude and a longer peak latency in the L2 group. Compared to correct sentences, sentences with a phrase structure violation elicited an early anterior negativity followed by a broad centro-parietal positivity in native speakers. By contrast, there was no differential modulation of the early anterior negativity in the L2 group. A late positivity was also elicited in the second language learners, but it was slightly delayed compared to that shown by native speakers. This pattern is discussed in terms of different degrees of automaticity with respect to the subprocesses involved in sentence comprehension.