Pointing gestures modulate domestic dogs’ search behavior for hidden objects in a spatial rotation problem

In the spatial domain, domestic dogs are highly inclined to search at the last location where they saw an object disappear and cannot infer that a hidden object has moved imperceptibly from one location to another. In the current study, we examined whether exposure to human social cues modulates dogs’ search behavior for hidden objects. In Experiment 1, twenty dogs were first trained to find an object they saw disappear inside a stationary container in the presence (social group) or absence (non-social group) of pointing gestures. In tests, the containers were rotated 180° around a central axis. The dogs in the non-social group systematically searched at the initial (now incorrect) hiding location, whereas the dogs in the social group chose correctly significantly above chance. In Experiment 2, we tested whether pre-exposure to human pointing has an impact on dogs’ use of gestures. No gestures were given during training and both the social and non-social conditions were administered to each of the ten dogs. In contrast to Experiment 1, the performance of dogs in the social condition dropped significantly and varied substantially from one dog to another. Overall, this study suggests that dogs’ tendency to use human signals is so strong that it even outweighs their spatial bias to search where they saw an object disappear; however, this penchant to use human gestures appears to be dependent on the degree of familiarity of the dog with these signals.     

Positive and negative appraisals of the consequences of activated states uniquely relate to symptoms of hypomania and depression

Individuals may appraise internal states positively or negatively. Positive appraisals involve desiring or pursuing the state or experience, while negative appraisals involve dreading or avoiding the experience. The extent to which individuals make extreme positive or negative appraisals of high, activated, energetic states might determine whether they experience symptoms of high or low mood. This study extends the existing literature by considering the role of opposing appraisals and beliefs about the same internal states and by controlling for the potential correlation between depression and activation symptoms. Extreme, positive and negative appraisals of activated mood states related distinctly to experiences of activation and depression symptoms respectively, in an analogue sample (n=323). Positive appraisals of activated internal states were uniquely associated with elevated activation and hypomania symptoms. Negative appraisals of the same states were uniquely associated with elevated depression symptoms. Opposing appraisals of internal states may underlie mood swing symptoms.     

Internal Realism and the Problem of Religious Diversity

This article applies Hilary Putnam’s theory of internal realism to the issue of religious plurality. The result of this application – ‘internalist pluralism’ – constitutes a paradigm shift within the Philosophy of Religion. Moreover, internalist pluralism succeeds in avoiding the major difficulties faced by John Hick’s famous theory of religious pluralism, which views God, or ‘the Real,’ as the noumenon lying behind diverse religious phenomena. In side-stepping the difficulties besetting Hick’s revolutionary Kantian approach, without succumbing to William Alston’s critique of conceptual-scheme dependence, internalist pluralism provides a solution to significant theoretical problems, while doing so in a manner that is respectful of cultural diversity and religious sensitivities.

On the Logic of Classes as Many

The notion of a "class as many" was central to Bertrand Russell's early form of logicism in his 1903 Principles of Mathematics. There is no empty class in this sense, and the singleton of an urelement (or atom in our reconstruction) is identical with that urelement. Also, classes with more than one member are merely pluralities — or what are sometimes called "plural objects" — and cannot as such be themselves members of classes. Russell did not formally develop this notion of a class but used it only informally. In what follows, we give a formal, logical reconstruction of the logic of classes as many as pluralities (or plural objects) within a fragment of the framework of conceptual realism. We also take groups to be classes as many with two or more members and show how groups provide a semantics for plural quantifier phrases.     

Daimonic elements in early trauma

This paper explores some of the 'daimonic' elements of unconscious mentation that emerge both in dreams and in the transference/countertransference field with early-trauma patients and illustrates these with an extended clinical example. An archaic and typical (archetypal) 'trauma complex' is articulated (with diagram) as a bi-polar structure consisting of divine child protected and/or persecuted by an inner 'guardian angel'. Sources of this structure and its mythological inner objects are traced to trauma at the stage of what Winnicott calls 'unintegration' and to flooding by disintegration anxiety at a time before nascent ego-structure has formed. In an extended case example, the author shows how the patient's traumatized innocence and desire for a new start, thwarted by self-attacking defences, pulls him into playing the inflated role of her guardian angel, leading to re-traumatization in the transference. Working through is seen as the necessary disillusionment and humanization of these daimonic structures as they are projected, suffered, and transmuted by the analytic partners in the stormy process of psychotherapy.     

A GENERALIZED CONCEPTION OF TEXT APPLIED TO BOTH SCIENTIFIC AND RELIGIOUS OBJECTS

Abstract. The idea of a text is reviewed and reconstructed to facilitate the application of concepts of interpretation to the objects analyzed in the natural sciences, as well as to objects analyzed in religion and literature. Four criteria—-readability, formality, material transcendence, and retrievability—-are proposed as the basis for a generalized conception of text. Objects in both religion and science, not previously thought to be texts, are shown to be included in the new definition and therefore to be potential subjects of developing methods of interpretation.     

Function, goals and intention: children's teleological reasoning about objects

A fundamental aspect of adult thought is the 'teleological' tendency to assume that objects exist for a purpose. When seeing an unfamiliar artifact or strange anatomical part on an animal, the first question an adult will usually ask is 'what's that for?' - a query that assumes that the object can be teleologically explained in terms of its function. Current debate focuses on the origin and scope of teleological thought, and its role in children's emerging theories of the biological world. The bias to view objects as 'designed for a purpose' probably derives from children's privileged understanding of intentional behavior and artifacts. This makes children prone to a 'promiscuous teleology' in which artifacts and natural objects of all types are viewed as existing for a function. Because of this, I argue that we should be cautious about taking the existence of an early teleological bias as evidence that there is biological understanding that exists independently of a psychological construal of living things.     

Simple structure in component analysis techniques for mixtures of qualitative and quantitative variables

Several methods have been developed for the analysis of a mixture of qualitative and quantitative variables, and one, called PCAMIX, includes ordinary principal component analysis (PCA) and multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) as special cases. The present paper proposes several techniques for simple structure rotation of a PCAMIX solution based on the rotation of component scores and indicates how these can be viewed as generalizations of the simple structure methods for PCA. In addition, a recently developed technique for the analysis of mixtures of qualitative and quantitative variables, called INDOMIX, is shown to construct component scores (without rotational freedom) maximizing the quartimax criterion over all possible sets of component scores. A numerical example is used to illustrate the implication that when used for qualitative variables, INDOMIX provides axes that discriminate between the observation units better than do those generated from MCA.The Netherlands organization for scientific research (NWO) is gratefully acknowledged for funding this project. This research was conducted while the author was supported by a PSYCHON-grant (560-267-011) from this organization. The author is obliged to Jos ten Berge for his comments on an earlier version.