Natural concepts in a juvenile gorilla (gorilla gorilla gorilla) at three levels of abstraction

The extent to which nonhumans are able to form conceptual versus perceptual discriminations remains a matter of debate. Among the great apes, only chimpanzees have been tested for conceptual understanding, defined as the ability to form discriminations not based solely on simple perceptual features of stimuli, and to transfer this learning to novel stimuli. In the present investigation, a young captive female gorilla was trained at three levels of abstraction (concrete, intermediate, and abstract) involving sets of photographs representing natural categories (e.g., orangutans vs. humans, primates vs. nonprimate animals, animals vs. foods). Within each level of abstraction, when the gorilla had learned to discriminate positive from negative exemplars in one set of photographs, a novel set was introduced. Transfer was defined in terms of high accuracy during the first two sessions with the new stimuli. The gorilla acquired discriminations at all three levels of abstraction but showed unambiguous transfer only with the concrete and abstract stimulus sets. Detailed analyses of response patterns revealed little evidence of control by simple stimulus features. Acquisition and transfer involving abstract stimulus sets suggest a conceptual basis for gorilla categorization. The gorilla's relatively poor performance with intermediate-level discriminations parallels findings with pigeons, and suggests a need to reconsider the role of perceptual information in discriminations thought to indicate conceptual behavior in nonhumans.     

Effects of response disparity on stimulus and reinforcer control in human detection tasks

In two detection experiments, university students reported whether the second of two sequentially presented tones was longer or shorter than the first by responding to stimuli presented on a touch screen. Stimulus disparity and response disparity were manipulated to compare their effects on measures of discrimination and response bias when the reinforcement ratio for correct responses was asymmetric. Choice stimuli consisted of squares filled with different pixel densities. Response disparity was manipulated by varying the difference in density between the two choice stimuli. In both experiments, decreasing stimulus disparity reduced discrimination but had no consistent effect on bias. Decreasing response disparity also reduced discrimination in both experiments, and often reduced estimates of bias. The effects of response disparity on bias were most clear in Experiment 2, in which a greater overall level of response disparity was arranged. The data show that, like corresponding research with pigeons, detection performance of human subjects can be conceptualized as discriminated operants.     

Attitudes and uptake of a screening test: The moderating role of ambivalence

This study examined the extent to which ambivalence moderates the relationship between attitudes and screening behaviour in a clinical setting using an objective measure of behaviour. For this study 979 pregnant women eligible for prenatal Down syndrome screening completed questionnaire measures of attitudes, ambivalence and intentions towards undergoing the test. Screening behaviour, assessed by test uptake, was determined from medical records. Attitudes predicted intentions to undergo the test and screening behaviour. The correlations between attitudes and intentions and between attitudes and behaviour were greater in women with lower levels of ambivalence (r?=?0.85 and r?=?0.58, respectively) than in those with higher levels of ambivalence (r?=?0.50 and r?=?0.27, respectively). Regression analyses revealed that ambivalence moderated the relationships between attitudes and intention and between attitude and behaviour. In addition, a three-way interaction was found between ambivalence, attitudes and intention when predicting behaviour. Given that behaving consistently with attitudes is central to making an informed choice, ambivalence appears to undermine the making of such choices.     

Randomised controlled pilot trial of mindfulness training for stress reduction during pregnancy

This randomised controlled pilot trial tested a six-week mindfulness-based intervention in a sample of pregnant women experiencing high levels of perceived stress and pregnancy anxiety. Forty-seven women enrolled between 10 and 25 weeks gestation were randomly assigned to either a series of weekly Mindful Awareness Practices classes (n = 24) with home practice or to a reading control condition (n = 23). Hierarchical linear models of between-group differences in change over time demonstrated that participants in the mindfulness intervention experienced larger decreases from pre-to post-intervention in pregnancy-specific anxiety and pregnancy-related anxiety (PRA) than participants in the reading control condition. However, these effects were not sustained through follow-up at six weeks post-intervention. Participants in both groups experienced increased mindfulness, as well as decreased perceived stress and state anxiety over the course of the intervention and follow-up periods. This study is one of the first randomised controlled pilot trials of a mindfulness meditation intervention during pregnancy and provides some evidence that mindfulness training during pregnancy may effectively reduce PRA and worry. We discuss some of the dilemmas in pursuing this translational strategy and offer suggestions for researchers interested in conducting mind-body interventions during pregnancy.     

Imposing Genetic Diversity

The idea that a world in which everyone was born “perfect” would be a world in which something valuable was missing often comes up in debates about the ethics of technologies of prenatal testing and preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). This thought plays an important role in the “disability critique” of prenatal testing. However, the idea that human genetic variation is an important good with significant benefits for society at large is also embraced by a wide range of figures writing in the bioethics literature, including some who are notoriously hostile to the idea that we should not select against disability. By developing a number of thought experiments wherein we are to contemplate increasing genetic diversity from a lower baseline in order to secure this value, I argue that this powerful intuition is more problematic than is generally recognized, especially where the price of diversity is the well-being of particular individuals.     

The effects of operating a touch screen smartphone and other common activities performed while bicycling on cycling behaviour

Although it has been shown that making phone calls or sending text messages while riding a bicycle can have a negative impact on bicyclist’s behaviour, in countries such as the Netherlands the operation of a mobile phone while cycling on a bicycle is not illegal and is actually quite common. In recent years conventional mobile phones with a physical keypad are increasingly being replaced by smartphones with a touch screen. The operation of a touch screen phone ironically cannot be done purely ‘by touch’ due to the lack of tactile feedback, and instead requires fixations on a relatively small screen. The question therefore can be asked whether the operation of touch screen telephones deteriorates cycling behaviour more than operation of a conventional mobile phone.Twenty-four participants completed a track on their own bicycle while sending a text message from a conventional and a touch screen mobile phone. In addition the effects of other common activities that can accompany bicycling were studied, including texting at the same time as listening to music, talking on a mobile phone or cycling next to someone and speaking with this companion, and playing a game on a touch screen phone while bicycling. The impacts of all the above conditions on cycling performance and visual detection performance were compared with control conditions in which participants cycled with either one or two hands on the handlebars and were not required to perform any secondary tasks.Bicycle speed was reduced in all telephone conditions and in the condition when cycling next to someone. Lateral position variation increased in all telephone conditions. Use of the touch screen led to a more central position in the cycle lane and resulted in worse visual detection performance compared with the operation of a conventional mobile phone. The main effect of listening to music was that an auditory signal to stop cycling was missed by 83% of the participants. In conclusion, while all investigated types of phone deteriorated cycling performance, the use of a touch phone has a larger negative effect on cycling performance than a conventional mobile phone. With touch screen smartphones taking the place of conventional mobile phones and being used for other purposes than verbal communication, these effects on cycling performance pose a threat to traffic safety.     

Cognitive,emotional and social development in adolescents born to substance using women

The aim of this article is to investigate the long‐term developmental consequences of being born to a substance‐using mother, focusing on cognitive functions, attention, emotional and social development. The longitudinal sample comprised 48 adolescents aged 12–16 at the time of follow‐up assessments, which included the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children‐III, the Test of Everyday Attention for Children, The Tower of London test and the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. The adolescents scored significantly lower than the norms on Wechsler's subtests and Full‐Scale IQ, and on The Everyday Attention test. There were few differences on the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. The girls reported significantly more hyperactivity than the British norms, and the teachers reported higher impact scores in boys, compared to the British norms. Thus, the results on cognitive consequences of maternal substance use appear to be very substantial while the emotional and social consequences do not. The results suggest serious negative effects of substance exposure in utero on attention and cognitive functioning in general.     

2D:4D in men is related to aggressive dominance but not to sociable dominance

It has been shown that a smaller ratio between the length of the second and fourth digit (2D:4D) is an indicator of the exposure to prenatal testosterone (T). This study measured the 2D:4D of men and assessed dominance as a personality trait to investigate indirectly if the exposure to prenatal T is related to a dominant personality later in life. Results showed that men had a more aggressive dominant personality when having a more masculine (lower) 2D:4D, while there was no relationship between sociable dominance and 2D:4D. Findings from this study indicate that it is important to distinguish different forms of dominance since other studies failed to find relationships between dominance and 2D:4D.     

Prenatal auditory experience and its sequelae

Towards the end of the second trimester of gestation, a human fetus is able to register environmental sounds. This in utero auditory experience is characterized by comprising strongly low-pass-filtered versions of sounds from the external world. Here, we present computational tests of the hypothesis that this early exposure to severely degraded auditory inputs serves an adaptive purpose—it may induce the neural development of extended temporal integration. Such integration can facilitate the detection of information carried by low-frequency variations in the auditory signal, including emotional or other prosodic content. To test this prediction, we characterized the impact of several training regimens, biomimetic and otherwise, on a computational model system trained and tested on the task of emotion recognition. We find that training with an auditory trajectory recapitulating that of a neurotypical infant in the pre-to-postnatal period results in temporally extended receptive field structures and yields the best subsequent accuracy and generalization performance on the task of emotion recognition. This strongly suggests that the progression from low-pass-filtered to full-frequency inputs is likely to be an adaptive feature of our development, conferring significant benefits to later auditory processing abilities relying on temporally extended analyses. Additionally, this finding can help explain some of the auditory impairments associated with preterm births, suggests guidelines for the design of auditory environments in neonatal care units, and points to enhanced training procedures for computational models.