顶叶在特征捆绑中的作用--对一例典型双侧顶叶损伤病人的研究

本实验以一例典型双侧顶叶损伤患者为研究对象,以数字和几何形状为材料,采用形状和颜色特征识别任务,主要考察了顶叶及空间信息是否影响视觉特征捆绑。结果显示,患者在特征捆绑任务上操作成绩较差,错觉性结合错误远远多于特征错误,且正确反应及错觉性结合受刺激间的距离及呈现方式的影响,表现出距离和位置效应。这些结果表明,顶叶在视觉特征捆绑中起重要作用,这种影响作用很可能与空间注意有关。本研究进一步为特征整合理论提供了神经心理学的证据。     

第二语言获得关键期研究进展

语言获得的关键期是发展心理学的一个重要且有争议的问题。近二十多年来．国外学者对第二语言获得年龄与第二语言的学习速度,第二语言的获得年龄与最后达到水平,第二语言的获得年龄与第二语言的大脑皮质表征和加工的关系等问题进行探讨,得到了复杂的结果。该领域的研究有待进一步控制与年龄相关的变量和认知变量,并将行为和脑功能的研究结合起来．更深入地探讨这一问题。     

双语脑的研究:不同的语言是否有不同的皮层机制?

随着认知神经科学技术的发展,研究者对“不同语言是否有不同的大脑皮层机制?”这个问题的研究也进一步深入。一系列的神经心理学和脑成像研究表明,语言获得的时问、流利程度、获得方式等都可能成为影响语言的皮层机制的因素。     

语言经验对大脑激活的影响：来自第二语言初学者的证据

研究采用功能磁共振成像技术考察语言经验在塑造大脑激活模式中的作用。12名只有很少英语学习经验因而熟练程度很低的小学儿童参与了实验。结果发现,在视觉呈现的押韵判断任务中,英文任务和中文任务共同激活了左侧额下回负责语音加工的脑区。更重要的是,虽然英文任务更难,也更多地激活了双侧的顶叶区域,但是它在额叶诱发的激活强度显著低于中文。这个结果进一步说明第二语言的语音皮层表征是随着学习经验的增加而逐渐发展起来的。     

From Biology to Consciousness to Morality

Abstract. Social animals are provisioned with prosocial orientations that operate to transcend self‐interest. Morality, as used here, describes human versions of such orientations. We explore the evolutionary antecedents of morality in the context of emergentism, giving considerable attention to the biological traits that undergird awareness and our emergent human forms of mind. We suggest that our moral frames of mind emerge from our primate prosocial capacities, transfigured and valenced by our symbolic languages, cultures, and religions.     

Transzendentalpragmatik und Diskursethik. Elemente und Perspektiven der Apelschen Diskursphilosophie

Transcendental Pragmatics and Discourse Ethics. Elements and Perspectives of Apel's Discourse-Philosophy. The author follows Apel's intellectual biography and shows the conception of a critique of meaning qua ‘reflection upon the discourse within the discourse’ to be the centre of Apel's language-pragmatic ‘Transformation of Philosophy’ (Frankfurt a.M. 1973). Beginning with an explication of the situation of a speaker/thinker, especially of the situation of a philosophising speaker/thinker, Apel reconstructs a two fold apriori of communication: Every thought is situated within the context of a particular, historically evolved, community of language and interaction. At the same time, however, the validity-claims of thoughts transcend the context of their origin towards an unlimited community of argumentation. On the basis of the first apriori Apel criticises the methodical solipsism as well as the objectivism of modern philosophy and theory of science. Drawing upon the second apriori he develops a universalist critique of meaning of relativism and contextualism. In the sixties and seventies Apel worked out a differentiated theory of the – more or less – communicatively cognizing humanities and set it apart from the theory of the causal-explanatory natural sciences, thus challenging the objectivism of a Theory of Unified Science. Building upon this work Transcendental Pragmatics, as developed by Apel and others, sets philosophy primarily two tasks: firstly, a (fallible) internal reconstruction of argumentative discourse as the (logical) situation of speech and thought which seeks to elucidate the conditions of the meaningfulness, i. e. the presuppositions, of discourse. These presuppositions comprise, thus Apel with Habermas, the four validity-claims to intelligibility, sincerety/credibility, truth and normative rightness/legitimacy. Their moral content consists, thus Apel, not only in the recognition of the equality of all beings capable of discursive reasoning but also in their recognition of a co-responsibility for the realizability of discourses and of responsibility. The author argues that the existence of a co-responsibility of this kind is indisputable because the discursive claims to validity are intertwined with a set of ‘primordial promises of dialogue’. Only with the elucidation and explication of these promises can the reconstruction of the internal conditions of discourse be completed.The second task of a pragmatics of argumentation isthe strict resp. actual reflection of the thinker upon the presuppositions of the discourse in which he currently engages. This reflection has a Socratic character and can only be done in the form of discussion and debate (‘Auseinandersetzungen’, Apel, Frankfurt a.M. 1998) with critics of the reconstruction. In this context, the author proposes a method of Socratic reflection upon the presuppositions of dialogue which suspends the usual, theoretically oriented, attitude of the scientist and the philosopher in favour of an actual reflective attitude. Within a dialogue with a sceptic who doubts one of the results of the internal reconstruction of dialogical presuppositions, say X, it is tested whether his doubt as to the unrestricted validity of X can be understood as a sincere contribution to the current dialogue or whether this particular sceptical thesis does not make sense, because it is incompatible with the role of a sincere participant of argumentation which, after all, the sceptic cannot refuse to claim for himself.Finally the author explains Apel's characterization of the tension between “Discourse and Responsibility” (Frankfurt a.M. 1988). In the course of discussions with Max Weber, Lawrence Kohlberg, Hans Jonas et al., Apel formulates and justifies an ethics of responsibility and gives an affirmative answer to the crucial question of whether the fulfilment of the moral obligations connected with the recognition of co-responsibility can be demanded within the non-dialogical circumstances of social reality. Apel's answer employs the idea of counter-strategies which are morally legitimate in virtue of their being worthy of argumentative consensus. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Must we measure what we mean?

This paper excavates a debate concerning the claims of ordinary language philosophers that took place during the middle of the last century. The debate centers on the status of statements about ‘what we say’. On one side of the debate, critics of ordinary language philosophy argued that statements about ‘what we say’ should be evaluated as empirical observations about how people do in fact speak, on a par with claims made in the language sciences. By that standard, ordinary language philosophers were not entitled to the claims that they made about what we would say about various topics. On the other side of the debate, defenders of the methods of ordinary language philosophy sought to explain how philosophers can be entitled to statements about what we would say without engaging in extensive observations of how people do in fact use language. In this paper, I defend the idea that entitlement to claims about what we say can be had in a way that doesn’t require empirical observation, and I argue that ordinary language philosophers are (at least sometimes) engaged in a different project than linguists or empirically minded philosophers of language, which is subject to different conditions of success.     

Teaching complex verbal operants to children with autism and establishing generalization using the peak curriculum

The present study evaluated the feasibility of the PEAK Relational Training System's Generalization Module (Dixon, 2014b) to teach and establish generalization of autoclitic mands, distorted tacts, and creative path finding in three children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Using a multiple‐baseline design across behaviors, each participant was provided with differential reinforcement and a least‐to‐most prompting hierarchy for correct responses to a subset of stimuli, and responses to other similar stimulus sets were probed for emergent generalization. Following training, each participant successfully acquired the directly trained behaviors and demonstrated generalization to the nonreinforced test exemplars. These data support the utility of Skinner's (1957) analysis to teach complex forms of verbal operants, and suggest that a manualized curriculum such as PEAK may have utility for promoting skill development and generalization for front line staff and caregivers of children with autism.     

Motor Planning Influences the Perceived Timing of Vibrotactile Stimuli in an Amplitude-Dependent Manner

The authors characterized how motor planning influences temporal order judgment (TOJ) tasks. They examined this by applying vibrotactile stimulation during the planning stages of a bimanual arm movement that would bring the arms into a crossed configuration. The authors have previously shown that planning to cross the arms induces a subjective reversal of spatially defined temporal order judgments that evolves over the course of the planning period. It was unclear, however, whether this effect is modulated by the extent to which the arms would be crossed after movement. The authors examined this issue by having participants plan to move to 4 different targets that would leave the arms in crossed configurations of varying extents. The results demonstrate that even though cutaneous stimuli were applied before the movements, if participants were planning to move into a more crossed configuration, performance on the TOJ task worsened depending on where they were in the planning process. This data suggest the brain uses planning signals to predict sensations from impending movements in a context-dependent manner.