Aggression and school social dynamics: The good, the bad, and the ordinary

A social dynamics perspective of aggression in school is presented. This framework focuses on the role of natural social processes in the establishment and maintenance of aggressive behavior in the school context. The five articles in this special issue are briefly reviewed and a synthesis of their contributions for understanding the social dynamics of aggression in school is underscored. Future research and intervention implications are also discussed. The need for examining the role of school social dynamics in conducting social skills interventions, functional behavioral assessments, and the development of positive behavioral support plans is emphasized.     

Developmental shifts in fMRI activations during visuospatial relational reasoning

To investigate maturational plasticity of fluid cognition systems, functional brain imaging was undertaken in healthy 8-19 year old participants while completing visuospatial relational reasoning problems similar to Raven's matrices and current elementary grade math textbooks. Analyses revealed that visuospatial relational reasoning across this developmental age range recruited activations in the superior parietal cortices most prominently, the dorsolateral prefrontal, occipital-temporal, and premotor/supplementary cortices, the basal ganglia, and insula. There were comparable activity volumes in left and right hemispheres for nearly all of these regions. Regression analyses indicated increasing activity predominantly in the superior parietal lobes with developmental age. In contrast, multiple anterior neural systems showed significantly less activity with age, including dorsolateral and ventrolateral prefrontal, paracentral, and insula cortices bilaterally, basal ganglia, and particularly large clusters in the midline anterior cingulate/medial frontal cortex, left middle cingulate/supplementary motor cortex, left insula-putamen, and left caudate. Findings suggest that neuromaturational changes associated with visuospatial relational reasoning shift from a more widespread fronto-cingulate-striatal pattern in childhood to predominant parieto-frontal activation pattern in late adolescence.     

Critical thinking in North America: A new theory of knowledge,learning, and literacy

The pace of change in the world is accelerating, yet educational institutions have not kept pace. Indeed, schools have historically been the most static of social institutions, uncritically passing down from generation to generation outmoded didactic, lecture-and-drill-based, models of instruction. Predictable results follow. Students, on the whole, do not learn how to work by, or think for, themselves. They do not learn how to gather, analyze, synthesize and assess information. They do not learn how to analyze the diverse logic of the questions and problems they face and hence how to adjust their thinking to those problems. They do not learn how to enter sympathetically into the thinking of others, nor how to deal rationally with conflicting points of view. They do not learn to become critical readers, writers, speakers and listeners. They do not learn how to use their native languages clearly, precisely, or persuasively. They do not, therefore, become literate, in the proper sense of the word. Neither do they gain much in the way of genuine knowledge since, for the most part, they could not explain the basis for what they believe. They would be hard pressed to explain, for example, which of their beliefs were based on rational assent and which on simple conformity to what they have been told. They have little sense as to how they might critically analyze their own experience, or identify national or group bias in their own thinking. They are much more apt to learn on the basis of irrational than rational modes of thought. They lack the traits of mind of a genuinely educated person: intellectual humility, courage, integrity, perseverance, and faith in reason.Happily, there is a movement in education today striving to address these problems in a global way, with strategies and materials for the modification of instruction at all levels of education. At its foundation is an emerging new theory of knowledge, learning, and literacy, one which recognizes the centrality of independent critical thinking to all substantial learning, one which recognizes that higher-order, multilogical thinking is as important to childhood as to adult learning, and as important to foundational learning in monological as in multilogical disciplines. This educational reform movement is not proposing an educational miracle cure, for its leading proponents recognize that many social and historical forces must come together before the ideals of the critical thinking movement will become a full academic reality. Schools do not exist in a social vacuum. To the extent that the broader society is uncritical so, on the whole, will be society's schools. Nevertheless, the social conditions necessary for fundamental changes in schooling are increasingly apparent. The pressure for fundamental change is growing. Whether and to what extent these needed basic changes will be delayed or side-tracked, thus requiring new periodic resurgences of this movement, with new, more elaborate articulations of its ideals, goals, and methods — only time will tell.     

Comparison of hemispheric activation during mental word and rhyme generation using transcranial Doppler sonography

The Wada test is at present the method of choice for preoperative assessment of patients who require surgery close to cortical language areas. It is, however, an invasive test with an attached morbidity risk. By now, an alternative to the Wada test is to combine a lexical word generation paradigm with non-invasive imaging techniques. However, results of this approach are still not in complete agreement with the findings of the Wada test (r = .92; Knecht, Deppe, Ebner et al., 1998). We attempted to obtain a more distinct language lateralization with the development of a phonological rhyme generation paradigm based on pseudoword stimuli. To examine the predictive value of both paradigms we performed simultaneous bilateral functional transcranial Doppler ultrasonography on 19 right-handed male native German subjects. The rhyme generation condition produced a significantly stronger lateralization to the supposed hemisphere of language dominance than the classical word generation condition. The observed differences suggest that the rhyme generation paradigm is more robust in detecting hemispheric language dominance than other neuropsychological paradigms and might be most valuable for preoperative assessment of cortical language areas.     

Generative models, brain function and neuroimaging

The representational capacity and inherent function of any neuron, neuronal population or cortical area in the brain is dynamic and context-sensitive. Functional integration, or interactions among brain systems, that employ driving (bottom up) and backward (top-down) connections, mediate this adaptive and contextual specialisation. A critical consequence is that neuronal responses, in any given cortical area, can represent different things at different times. This can have fundamental implications for the design of brain imaging experiments and the interpretation of their results. Our arguments are developed under generative models of brain function, where higher-level systems provide a prediction of the inputs to lower-level regions. Conflict between the two is resolved by changes in the higher-level representations, which are driven by the ensuing error in lower regions, until the mismatch is "cancelled". From this perspective the specialisation of any region is determined both by bottom-up driving inputs and by top-down predictions. Specialisation is therefore not an intrinsic property of any region but depends on both forward and backward connections with other areas. Because the latter have access to the context in which the inputs are generated they are in a position to modulate the selectivity or specialisation of lower areas. The implications for classical models (e.g., classical receptive fields in electrophysiology, classical specialisation in neuroimaging and connectionism in cognitive models) are severe and suggest these models may provide incomplete accounts of real brain architectures. Here we focus on the implications for cognitive neuroscience in the context of neuroimaging.     

Functional integration and the mind

Different cognitive functions recruit a number of different, often overlapping, areas of the brain. Theories in cognitive and computational neuroscience are beginning to take this kind of functional integration into account. The contributions to this special issue consider what functional integration tells us about various aspects of the mind such as perception, language, volition, agency, and reward. Here, I consider how and why functional integration may matter for the mind; I discuss a general theoretical framework, based on generative models, that may unify many of the debates surrounding functional integration and the mind; and I briefly introduce each of the contributions.     

Hemispheric asymmetries in visual word-form processing: progress, conflict, and evaluating theories

The ubiquitous left-hemisphere advantage in visual word processing can be accounted for in different ways. Competing theories have been tested recently using cAsE-aLtErNaTiNg words to investigate boundary conditions for the typical effect. We briefly summarize this research and examine the disagreements and commonalities across the theoretical perspectives. This work may provide a good example why a multi-level, multi-method, and multi-paradigm approach holds the greatest promise for rapid theoretical progress.     

Functions and Health at the Interface of Biology and Technology

Synthetic biology promises to eliminate the distinction between biology and engineering by delivering a philosophically interesting new kind of entity: a biological organism that is wholly designed and constructed by humans. The possibility of such organisms raises interesting questions in three domains: the analysis of (1) biological functions, (2) engineering functions, and (3) health and disease. This paper identifies and systematically answers these questions. This does not only establish how we should think about functions and health and disease in synthetic biological organisms, but it also reveals insights that are of broader relevance: (1) aetiological accounts of biological function need to omit or reinterpret reference to natural selection. This results in complete continuity between aetiological analyses of function in engineering and philosophy; (2) considering synthetic biology prompts interesting further questions about heritability, ancestry, and biological individuals; and (3) accounts of disease as biological dysfunction do not straightforwardly map onto our intuitive health and disease judgments regarding non-human animals. In response to the latter point I examine three possible avenues, and tentatively defend one on behalf of the ‘disease as dysfunction’ theorist.