2～3.5岁儿童执行功能发展特点及其言语能力的影响

2~3.5岁是婴儿成长到幼儿的重要发展转折期,也是儿童执行功能及言语能力的发展萌芽期。研究通过测查北京市81名2~3.5岁儿童在固定盒子任务、搭积木任务、A非B任务和皮博迪图片词汇测验上的表现,探究了该年龄段儿童执行功能的发展特点、各成分间的内部关系、以及言语能力对执行功能的影响。结果发现:(1)在2~3.5岁期间,除认知灵活性外,儿童的工作记忆与抑制控制均快速发展,其中,2.5岁前后是工作记忆与抑制控制的重要发展时期;(2)在2~3岁期间,认知灵活性与工作记忆之间相关密切,在3~3.5岁期间,认知灵活性与抑制控制的相关密切,3岁是儿童执行功能内部成分关系的重要发展转折期;(3)在2~3.5岁期间,儿童言语能力呈现快速发展,并且言语能力对该年龄段执行功能各成分间关系产生一定的影响,但不同言语能力的儿童在执行功能各成分的表现并没有显著差异。     

The Evolution of Darwin to a “Unique Christian Species” in Modernist-Apologetic Arab-Islamic Thought

Darwin's theory of evolution has been the cause of great distress and the subject of intense and constant debates among Jews, Christians and Muslims. The article analyzes why and how Sunni Muslim-Arab modernist-apologetic scholars, whose approach emphasizes the compatibility of Islam with empirical sciences, shifted from reluctantly reconciling the theory of evolution with the Qur'an in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to rejecting Darwin as a fabricator and describing his theory as a Christian aberration in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Through a comparative survey that focuses on the works of ?usayn al-Jisr (d. 1909), Mu?ammad Rashīd Ri?ā (d. 1935), Mu?ammad al-Ghazālī (d. 1996), Yūsuf al-Qara?āwī (b. 1926) and Mu?ammad ?Imāra (b. 1931), the article suggests that this shift corresponded with changes in the American anti-evolutionist discourse, and that, while contemporary modernist-apologetic literature casts Darwin as illegitimate, it does not close the door to a future acceptance of the theory of evolution.     

Engineering Values Into Genetic Engineering: A Proposed Analytic Framework for Scientific Social Responsibility

Recent experiments have been used to “edit” genomes of various plant, animal and other species, including humans, with unprecedented precision. Furthermore, editing the Cas9 endonuclease gene with a gene encoding the desired guide RNA into an organism, adjacent to an altered gene, could create a “gene drive” that could spread a trait through an entire population of organisms. These experiments represent advances along a spectrum of technological abilities that genetic engineers have been working on since the advent of recombinant DNA techniques. The scientific and bioethics communities have built substantial literatures about the ethical and policy implications of genetic engineering, especially in the age of bioterrorism. However, recent CRISPr/Cas experiments have triggered a rehashing of previous policy discussions, suggesting that the scientific community requires guidance on how to think about social responsibility. We propose a framework to enable analysis of social responsibility, using two examples of genetic engineering experiments.     

Comparative analysis of the risk-handling procedures for gene technology applications in medical and plant science

In this paper we analyse how the risks associated with research on transgenic plants are regulated in Sweden. The paper outlines the way in which pilot projects in the plant sciences are overseen in Sweden, and discusses the international and national background to the current regulatory system. The historical, and hitherto unexplored, reasons for the evolution of current administrative and legislative procedures in plant science are of particular interest. Specifically, we discuss similarities and differences in the regulation of medicine and plant science, and we examine the tendency towards dichotomizing risk — focusing on social/ethical risks in medicine and biological risks in plant science. The context of this article is the Synpraxia research project, an inter-disciplinary program combining expertise in sciences and the humanities.     

Social and ethical dimensions of nanoscale science and engineering research

Continuing advances in human ability to manipulate matter at the atomic and molecular levels (i.e. nanoscale science and engineering) offer many previously unimagined possibilities for scientific discovery and technological development. Paralleling these advances in the various science and engineering subdisciplines is the increasing realization that a number of associated social, ethical, environmental, economic and legal dimensions also need to be explored. An important component of such exploration entails the identification and analysis of the ways in which current and prospective researchers in these fields conceptualize these dimensions of their work. Within the context of a National Science Foundation funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program in nanomaterials processing and characterization at the University of Central Florida (2002–2004), here I present for discussion (i) details of a “nanotechnology ethics” seminar series developed specifically for students participating in the program, and (ii) an analysis of students’ and participating research faculty’s perspectives concerning social and ethical issues associated with nanotechnology research. I conclude with a brief discussion of implications presented by these issues for general scientific literacy and public science education policy.     

Functional explanation and the function of explanation

Teleological explanations (TEs) account for the existence or properties of an entity in terms of a function: we have hearts because they pump blood, and telephones for communication. While many teleological explanations seem appropriate, others are clearly not warranted--for example, that rain exists for plants to grow. Five experiments explore the theoretical commitments that underlie teleological explanations. With the analysis of [Wright, L. (1976). Teleological Explanations. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press] from philosophy as a point of departure, we examine in Experiment 1 whether teleological explanations are interpreted causally, and confirm that TEs are only accepted when the function invoked in the explanation played a causal role in bringing about what is being explained. However, we also find that playing a causal role is not sufficient for all participants to accept TEs. Experiment 2 shows that this is not because participants fail to appreciate the causal structure of the scenarios used as stimuli. In Experiments 3-5 we show that the additional requirement for TE acceptance is that the process by which the function played a causal role must be general in the sense of conforming to a predictable pattern. These findings motivate a proposal, Explanation for Export, which suggests that a psychological function of explanation is to highlight information likely to subserve future prediction and intervention. We relate our proposal to normative accounts of explanation from philosophy of science, as well as to claims from psychology and artificial intelligence.     

Religion is natural, atheism is not: On why everybody is both right and wrong

After discussing evidence of irreligion and the rise of the so called “New Atheism”, the authors refute the claim that this poses a problem for the cognitive science of religion and its hypothesis that religion is natural. The “naturalness hypothesis” is not deterministic but probabilistic and thus leaves room for atheism. This, the authors maintain, is true of both the by-product and adaptationist stances within the cognitive science of religion. In this context the authors also discuss the memetic or “unnaturalness” hypothesis, i.e. that religion is a “virus of the mind”. The authors criticize accounts of atheism offered by cognitive scientists of religion as being based on unfounded assumptions about the psychology of atheists, and object to the notion that the natural aspects of religion by corollary make atheism unnatural. By considering human cognition in a semiotic framework and emphasizing its natural ability to take part in semiotic systems of signs, atheism emerges as a natural, cognitive strategy. The authors argue that to reach a fuller account of religion, the cognitive (naturalness) and memetic (unnaturalness) hypotheses of religion must be merged. Finally, a preliminary analysis of the “New Atheism” is offered in terms of semiotic and cognitive dynamics.     

大学生对心理健康必备能力的认知

本研究以200名大学生为被试,以访谈及问卷的方式对大学生心理健康必备能力的认知进行了调查研究,并建立了大学生心理健康必备能力认知结构模型,结果表明:大学生所认知的自己心理健康必备能力由自我调控、社会应对、学习和人际交往这四个方面的能力组成,它们彼此独立,但又相互关联。     

幼儿元认知"乐观主义现象"研究述评

儿童元认知发展是当代发展心理学研究的热点领域之一,其中儿童对自身能力的认识与评估又是研究者很感兴趣的课题。大量研究表明,与年长儿童和成人相比,年幼儿童特别是学龄前儿童往往对自己的能力和在各种任务中的成绩作出不切实际的高估,这种高估具有跨领域的一致性,并且具有内在固执性,即通常不受过去失败经验的影响。这就是所谓幼儿元认知“乐观主义现象”。本文对这一领域的相关研究进行整体回顾与分析,并在此基础上尝试对这一现象产生的原因及影响因素作出解释和说明。