Modulation of long-term memory by arousal in alexithymia: The role of interpretation

Moderate physiological or emotional arousal induced after learning modulates memory consolidation, helping to distinguish important memories from trivial ones. Yet, the contribution of subjective awareness or interpretation of arousal to this effect is uncertain. Alexithymia, which is an inability to describe or identify one’s emotional and arousal states even though physiological responses to arousal are intact, provides a tool to evaluate the role of arousal interpretation. Participants scoring high and low on alexithymia (N = 30 each) learned a list of 30 words, followed by immediate recall. Participants then saw either an arousing (oral surgery) or neutral video (tooth brushing). Memory was tested 24-h later. Physiological response to arousal was comparable between groups, but subjective response to arousal was impaired in high alexithymia. Yet, delayed word recognition was enhanced by arousal regardless of alexithymia status. Thus, subjective response to arousal, i.e., cognitive appraisal, was not necessary for memory modulation to occur.     

Thinking About Me: How Social Awareness Evolved

ABSTRACT— Humans seem unique in their consideration of others' goals, motivations, intentions, and needs. But the human form of social awareness did not spring from nowhere; certain mechanisms shared across primates formed the foundation from which these processes derived. A review of recent nonhuman primate research points to particular ancestral mechanisms, including an interest in images moving in synchrony with self, a mirror neuron system that responds in the same way to actions made by the self and by others, and inherited social tolerance that provided the bases for social thinking. Still there is a gap in tracking social awareness from these basic beginnings to the ability to think about self and other with respect to intentions and goals. Comparative and clinical work will fill in this gap and will map brain processes onto social thinking.     

Naming problems do not reflect a second independent core deficit in dyslexia: Double deficits explored

The double deficit hypothesis states that naming speed problems represent a second core deficit in dyslexia independent from a phonological deficit. The current study investigated the main assumptions of this hypothesis in a large sample of well-diagnosed dyslexics. The three main findings were that (a) naming speed was consistently related only to reading speed; (b) phonological processing speed and naming speed loaded on the same factor, and this factor contributed strongly to reading speed; and (c) although general processing speed was involved in speeded naming of visual items, it did not explain the relationship between naming speed and reading speed. The results do not provide support for the existence of a second independent core naming deficit in dyslexia and indicate that speeded naming tasks are mainly phonological processing speed tasks with an important addition: fast cross-modal matching of visual symbols and phonological codes.     

Exploring the impact of phonological awareness, visual–spatial working memory, and preschool quantity–number competencies on mathematics achievement in elementary school: Findings from a 3-year longitudinal study

This longitudinal study explored the importance of kindergarten measures of phonological awareness, working memory, and quantity–number competencies (QNC) for predicting mathematical school achievement in third graders (mean age 8 years 8 months). It was found that the impact of phonological awareness and visual–spatial working memory, assessed at 5 years of age, was mediated by early QNC, which predicted math achievement in third grade. Importantly, and confirming our isolated number words hypothesis, phonological awareness had no impact on higher numerical competencies (i.e., when number words needed to be linked with quantities [QNC Level II and above]) but predicted basic numerical competencies (i.e., when number words were isolated from quantities [QNC Level I]), explaining the moderate relationship between early literacy development and the development of mathematical competencies.     

On the signals underlying conscious awareness of action

To investigate whether conscious judgments of movement onset are based solely on pre-movement signals (i.e., premotor or efference copy signals) or whether sensory feedback (i.e., reafferent) signals also play a role, participants judged the onset of finger and toe movements that were either active (i.e., self initiated) or passive (i.e., initiated by the experimenter). Conscious judgments were made by reporting the position of a rotating clock hand presented on a computer screen and were then compared to the actual measured time of movement onset. In line with previous studies, judgment errors were found to be anticipatory for both finger and toe movements. There was a significant difference between judgment errors for active and passive movements, with judgments of active movements being more anticipatory than judgments of passive movements. This is consistent with a pre-movement (from here on referred to as an “efferent”) account of action awareness because premotor and efference copy signals are only present in active movements, whereas the main source of movement information in passive movements is sensory feedback which is subject to time delays of conduction (and hence predicts later judgment times for passive movements). However, judgments of active toe movement onset time were less anticipatory than judgments of active finger movement onset time. This pattern of results is not consistent with a pure efferent account of conscious awareness of action onset - as this account predicts more anticipatory judgments for toe movements compared to finger movements. Instead, the data support the idea that conscious judgments of movement onset are based on efferent (i.e., premotor, efference copy) and reafferent (i.e., feedback from the movement) components.     

21世纪新发传染病--非典型肺炎

传染性非典型肺炎 (SARS)是全球人类健康非常严重的威胁 ,是由一种新病毒———SARS冠状病毒引起的新发传染病。具有全球大流行的潜在可能。面对一种新发传染病做好宣传教育工作 ,动员全社会参与尤为重要 ,信息发布要选择合适的途径、合适的对象、合适的信息和合适的时间。即使暴发过去了 ,详细的流行病学及环境调查分析 ,会丰富我们的认识 ,并可防止疫情的蔓延和再次暴发。控制新发传染病不是局部问题 ,是超越地域及政府界限的 ,需要全球支持 ,国际合作与协调 ,共同努力把疾病控制在萌芽之中。     

A theory of consciousness

Consciousness is the subjective awareness of momentary experience interpreted in the context of personal memory and present state. I propose that two brain systems converge to create consciousness. The exogenous system sends information about multimodal external stimuli to basal dendrites in widely dispersed pyramidal cell ensembles in the cortex of the brain; this system produces synchronized fragments of sensations. The endogenous system distributes readout of representations of memories, activated in systems established by associative learning, diffusely to apical dendrites. Convergence of exogenous and endogenous inputs enhances cellular excitability, and fragmented sensations are thereby converted to fragments of perception. Local field potentials periodically modulate all cortical membrane potentials and facilitate synchronous discharge of these excited elements. Feedback between the cortex and the thalamus results in a cortico-thalamo-cortical reverberation, binding the fragments into a unified global percept. Sustained reverberation produces a resonating electromagnetic field of synchronized elements. The momentary content of information in the brain is this distributed coherence, which is negative entropy. Consciousness is a physical property of this field, producing the subjective awareness of this information.     

论儒家全球伦理金律

“儒家全球伦理金律”是儒家思想内所包含的或从中发展出的能够作为全人类共同遵守奉行的基本的伦理原则、价值观和行为规范。它可初步归纳为“十大金律”,其特点为普适性、基础性、悠久性、系统性、针对性、智慧性和简洁性,它的本质是人道主义、合理主义与和平主义。全球伦理的构建不能缺少儒家伦理,儒家全球伦理是中华民族文化对人类文明作出的独特贡献。     

The Prospect of a Global Ethic on HIV/AIDS: The Religions and the Science–and–Religion Dialogue

This article introduces essays from a 2001 symposium on a global ethic and the issue of the spread of HIV/AIDS. The symposium began with the assumption that we can determine the possibility for such a global ethic if we both explore the potential of an interreligious dialogue and do so in the context of a science–and–religion dialogue. I argue that while the possibilities for a global ethic, in particular addressing the issue of HIV/AIDS, may be debated, the results of this symposium suggest that the dialogue ought to be continued and that there is significant potential in the interfaith dialogue for creating models for both an ethic and specific strategies for action.     

Leibniz Filters Revisited

Leibniz filters play a prominent role in the theory of protoalgebraic logics. In [3] the problem of the definability of Leibniz filters is considered. Here we study the definability of Leibniz filters with parameters. The main result of the paper says that a protoalgebraic logic S has its strong version weakly algebraizable iff it has its Leibniz filters explicitly definable with parameters.